4

4

BACK AT HER desk, Ballard pulled up one of the crime reports she had reviewed earlier. This one was for a car burglary that had occurred at the Topanga break a few months ago. What drew her back to it was the officer's note in the summary that there had been a fruit vendor in the parking lot where the theft occurred. The vendor said he had seen nothing, but the officer had taken down his name and phone number for follow-up. Ballard copied the information about the fruit vendor and the victim of the theft into a small notebook. The victim was named Seth Dawson. He reported that in addition to his brand-new iPhone 15, a Breitling watch worth three thousand dollars, a gift from his father, had been taken. Those two items pushed the crime beyond petty theft and well into felony territory.

As she was putting the notebook back in her jacket pocket, Colleen poked her head up over the partition wall again.

"Did you forget something today?" she asked.

Ballard immediately thought about the staff meeting and wondered what she had possibly missed covering. "I don't think so," she said. "Like what?"

Colleen lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Like your badge, for example."

Ballard dropped her hand to her right hip as if to feel for the badge on her belt.

"Shit, you're right," she said. "It's in my car under the seat. I'll get it when I go out. Thanks for noticing, Colleen."

"Anytime," Hatteras said.

One of the two lines on Ballard's desk phone started flashing. "Can you get that?" she asked Colleen.

"Sure," Hatteras said.

She dropped from sight and answered the phone. Then she spoke to Ballard without poking her head over the partition. "It's Darcy Troy on line one," she said. "She said it's important."

Ballard punched the button and picked up the phone.

"Darcy, let me guess. Shaquilla Washington?"

"Shaquilla Wa—? No, it's about something else. We just got a hot shot on the Pillowcase Rapist."

Ballard said nothing as a cold finger slid down her spine.

"Renée?"

"Yeah, sorry, I'm here. Where do they have him?"

"They don't have him. It was a hit on the familial search you put in last year."

"Tell me about it."

"A guy was arrested by West Valley Division on a felony domestic. His swab was taken and we sent it up to DOJ. It came back as a familial match in the Abby Sinclair case."

It was one of the first cases Ballard had submitted for comparative genetic analysis after restarting the unit two years ago. The Pillowcase Rapist had terrorized the city for five years beginning at the turn of the century. Dozens of women were assaulted in their homes. Each had been sleeping and woke up as a pillowcase was pulled over her head, blinding her to her attacker. After the rape, he choked each victim into unconsciousness, hog-tied her with plastic snap ties, and escaped.

A task force was formed but no arrests were ever made. The reign of terror culminated in the murder of Abby Sinclair, the last known victim, in 2005. He went too far with Sinclair, choking her to death after the sexual assault. Following that, the attacks stopped, and the Pillowcase Rapist went dark.

"So it was a familial match," Ballard said. "How close?"

"Very," Troy said. "This guy who was arrested, he's likely the Pillowcase Rapist's son."

Ballard nodded. She could feel her heart rate rising as adrenaline ticked into her blood. "How long ago was the arrest on the domestic?"

"Nine weeks ago."

"Wow."

"That's how long it takes to process the arrest swabs and put them into the DOJ bank. These don't get priority like DNA from crime scenes. Thank God you had that familial search in place."

Ballard had joined the department and was in the academy and later in uniform patrol during the years that the Pillowcase Rapist had terrorized the city. She and her partner had been first on scene on the murder of Abby Sinclair. It was the first murder scene Ballard had ever been to, and although many followed, the image of Abby Sinclair's naked body in her bed, the pillowcase pulled over her head, had stuck with her. It was the first case she'd pulled off the shelf in the library of lost souls—the murder-book archive.

"Okay, Darcy," she said. "Give me what you've got on the domestic."

Ballard wrote the information down, thanked Troy for the call, and hung up. She stood to see who was left on the raft. While the Monday-morning staff meetings were mandatory, the investigators were required to work only one day a week, and they often cleared out after the meeting, choosing to fulfill their commitment on other days. Ballard saw only Hatteras and Persson. She knew Aghzafi liked to work Thursdays or Fridays, and Masser had probably left to meet with the prosecutor and defense attorney on the Maxine Russell case. Laffont was nowhere to be seen, but Ballard hoped he had just stepped out for coffee or to go to the restroom, because she was going to need him.

"Okay, Anders, Colleen, listen up," she said. "We've got a hot shot here I want to go full-court press on."

She referred to her notes before continuing.

"I want you to run down a Nicholas Purcell, DOB January twenty-nine, 2000. He was arrested on a felony domestic about nine weeks ago in West Valley. I want to know everything about him: where he lives, where he works, the domestic, everything."

"What's the case?" Persson asked.

"About twenty years ago, there was a serial offender called the Pillowcase Rapist," Ballard said. "He assaulted several women over a five-year run. I'm talking dozens of victims. He finally killed one and then dropped out of sight. He was never caught. That murder—that's our case."

"But wait," Hatteras said. "If Nicholas Purcell was born in 2000, then he—"

"Can't be our guy," Ballard said. "That's right, he's not. It's his father. We got a familial match. Purcell's father is the Pillowcase Rapist. Through his son, we find him, get his DNA, and go from there."

"Groovy," Persson said.

Ballard looked at him for a moment, not sure what part of this the Swede thought was groovy. She chalked it up to English being his second language. She nodded and then started toward the archives, listening as she went to Hatteras and Persson discussing the division of labor on their assignment.

The cases in the archives were organized first by year and then alphabetically by the victims' last names. Ballard had to crank the shelves open to access the 2005 cases. The Abby Sinclair murder book was actually a murder box. It contained records of the murder investigation and the forty-six sexual assaults that had begun in 2000. It was a cardboard box with handles. Ballard pulled it off the shelf and lugged it back to her desk.

Hatteras and Persson were both turned in their seats and waiting for her when she came out of the archives. Ballard could not yet read Persson as well as she could Hatteras after two years of working together. And her read of Hatteras now was that something was wrong.

"What?" she asked.

"Well, we found Nicholas Purcell," Hatteras said. "We also think we have his father."

"That was quick. What's the issue?"

"Take a look." Hatteras stood up to give Ballard access to her screen. Ballard put the murder box down on the seat and leaned on it to look at the screen. It was a photo on Nick Purcell's Facebook page of a family gathered around a birthday cake.

"I scrolled back three years to find this," Hatteras said.

"Okay, what am I looking at?" Ballard said.

"Read the caption," Hatteras said. "This is Nick's twenty-first birthday. That's his father on the right."

Ballard studied the father. She was hit with a slight glint of recognition, but she didn't know where she would have known him from. He looked to be a fit fifty with a ruddy face and a full head of dark hair. He wore a striped golf shirt with sleeves stretched tight around his biceps.

"Who is he?" Ballard said.

"He's a judge," Persson blurted out, beating Hatteras to the punch.

"He's the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court," Hatteras said. "The Honorable Jonathan Purcell."

Now Ballard realized how she knew him.

"Did you pull up the report on the domestic?" she asked.

"Have it right here," Persson said. "But I must tell you now, it was never filed."

"Declined by the DA's office," Hatteras said. "Maybe the judge got to them."

Ballard gave her a look that warned that things like that were dangerous to say.

She stepped over to Persson's desk and leaned down to read his screen. Persson got up and she sat down to scroll through the summary written by the arresting officer. She was looking for the details of the alleged assault and what had bumped it up to a felony. The victim was identified as twenty-one-year-old Sara Santana, who said her boyfriend Nicholas Purcell got angry and choked her into unconsciousness when she was late coming home from work. Ballard scrolled farther down to see what evidence, if any, had been collected. It said the officer had taken photos of the victim's neck and of her left hand because she said she'd broken two fingernails while struggling to pry Purcell's hands off her neck.

"The photos are not in the report?" she asked.

"No photos," Persson said.

"Should they be in there?" Hatteras asked.

"If the officer took them with his phone, they should be attached," Ballard said. "It's part of the protocol on domestic calls."

"I wonder if he did and if the DA saw them," Hatteras said.

"That's the question," Ballard said. She got up, went to the murder box, lifted it, and headed to her desk. "So, listen to me," she said. "Neither of you talk about this case outside of this room. No one else knows about the case or the judge or any of it. Understand?"

Hatteras and Persson nodded somberly.

"Good," Ballard said. "Anders, send me that report."

She put the box down on her desk and lifted the top off. It contained six plastic binders, placed in the box spine up, with the dates marked and in order. She remembered from her first look at the box two years ago that the first five binders were task force reports on the series of assaults attributed to the Pillowcase Rapist. The sixth binder was dedicated to the last case, the killing of Abby Sinclair. She pulled this binder out of the box and sat down to get reacquainted with the murder investigation.

But before she opened the binder, she opened the contacts list on her cell and called Laffont.

"What's up, Renée?"

"Did you leave?"

"Yeah, I thought we were done. Meeting a friend for lunch. I was planning to come back when I hear from Darcy on my case. I'll get my hours in after that."

"I need you back here after your lunch. We just got a hot shot that I want to move on today."

"Uh, sure. I could also come back now. I'm only ten minutes away. I stopped to shoot the shit with Captain LaBrava. He saw me in the parking lot and asked about our door alarm this morning."

LaBrava was the commander of operations at the Ahmanson Center. That put him in charge of the building but not of the Open-Unsolved Unit, which fell under the command of the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown.

"Jesus, this guy and that back door," Ballard said. "Doesn't he have more important things to worry about?"

"He should," Laffont said. "But I think I smoothed it over. I said we had a lizard in the archives we were trying to save by getting it outside the quickest way we could."

"A lizard? And he bought it?"

"I don't know, but it gave him a reason to drop it. I don't think he'll bring it up again."

"We'll see."

"So, what's the hot shot?"

Ballard told him that one of the first cases she, as head of the unit, had sent to the lab for familial DNA comparison had just produced a hit. And that hit led to the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Laffont whistled, loud enough that Ballard had to pull her cell away from her ear.

"Did you ever appear before Purcell?" he asked.

"Not that I remember," Ballard said. "I think he was mostly in civil. And now he's the chief judge, but that's primarily an administrative position."

"Too bad he's not in court. I'd like to get a look at him."

"Well, you will. I want to get some DNA off him as soon as possible."

"Surreptitiously?"

"Unless you know another way. I don't think going to the courthouse, knocking on the door of his chambers, and saying, ‘Hey, Judge, mind if we take a swab?' is going to work."

"Nah, I don't think so either. So what are you thinking?"

With a solid lead in a very big unsolved case, Ballard did not want to delay the investigation for a day, an hour, or even a minute. This was a case she had prioritized from the day she'd rebooted the unit. "Well, I haven't thought too much about it, but judges get to park in a garage under the CCB. I'm thinking we pick him up as he's coming out at the end of the day and go from there."

"Sounds like a plan. You sure I can keep my lunch date and come back after? We won't need to get downtown till four or so, right?"

"Yes, but I want you to be familiar with the case. I just pulled the box."

"I'll be back by two, how's that?"

"Good. I have a lunch scheduled too. See you this afternoon."

"We aren't going to do this by ourselves, are we?"

"No, I'll try to get Paul and Lilia to come back in."

"Good. See you at two."

"Right."

Ballard disconnected and checked her watch. She had a half hour before she had to leave for her appointment. She opened her laptop and went online to check recent purchases on the credit cards that had been in her wallet. She was hoping that at least one card had been used and she'd be able to track that purchase back to the thief, but there'd been no new activity on either.

She leaned back and thought about this. Usually stolen cards and their numbers were sold off quickly by thieves to a second tier of criminals who worked furiously in a race against time before the victim of the theft canceled the cards. That apparently had not happened yet. Disappointed, she considered the possible reasons for this and wondered whether she should cancel the cards or leave them live with the potential of generating a clue trail.

Hatteras popped her head up over the divider but didn't say anything.

"What is it, Colleen?"

"Just wondering if there's anything you need me to do."

"No, I'm going out for an appointment. You don't need to stay."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Okay, then."

Ballard looked back at the screen and started the procedure for reporting her credit cards stolen and requesting new ones.