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53

THE UNbrEAKABLE RULE that command staff had put in place during the formation of the volunteer cold-case squad was that the volunteers could not take murder books, police reports, or any official documentation or evidence home or even out of the Open-Unsolved Unit. To make sure this rule was not violated through digital means, the volunteers were all furnished with desktop computers at their stations. All work was to be performed on the in-house, password-protected computers, which would be randomly monitored and audited by the department's tech unit to confirm that the rule had not been broken. This had all come about because the command staff was concerned that volunteers on the squad might have ulterior motives behind their volunteerism. For example, they might be secret screenwriters or television producers looking for content to pitch at the next studio meeting. Content was king in Hollywood, and its purveyors went to great lengths to get what nobody else had.

Though Ballard had not uncovered such a scheme in vetting any of her volunteers, the rule was one reason Colleen Hatteras had spent so much time in the office at Ahmanson. Her work for the unit was entirely online. She could not transfer her IGG work from her office desktop to her home computer without the risk of being discovered and dismissed from the unit she so loved. So she spent many more hours than any other volunteer at her station in the office.

Still in a fog of confusion, grief, and guilt, Ballard entered the empty Open-Unsolved Unit and went directly to Colleen's workstation and desktop. Six months earlier Hatteras had taken a week off to drive one of her daughters to school. While she was gone, Ballard had needed to print out a genealogical tree that was part of a charging package she was submitting to Carol Plovc at the DA's office. The only way to get the document was to get into Hatteras's computer. Ballard had called Hatteras, who had revealed her password without hesitation: the names of her two daughters spelled backward.

Ballard now had to hope that Hatteras had not changed it upon her return or in the months since. She opened the password portal on her desktop and typed in eiggaMeitaK, hoping she remembered it correctly.

The password went through and Ballard was in.

The last thing Colleen had said to Ballard before leaving the office yesterday was that she would finish an email, send it, then go. Ballard wanted to know what that email had been and if there were any other messages to or from her that could have a bearing on her murder.

Once in Hatteras's email account, Ballard pulled up the Sent folder and saw that the last message sent from Colleen's office desktop was to Colleen's personal email account. Ballard opened the message and found an almost word-for-word transcript of the beginning of Ballard's phone conversation with Victor Best in Hawaii. Ballard realized that when she had heard typing during the phone call, it was Colleen typing what she was hearing from Ballard's pod.

Ballard leaned back in the chair and thought about this, then almost immediately leaned forward again and checked both the incoming and outgoing emails on the account. She knew it would not be long before Goring and Dubose arrived.

Nothing else in the email account drew Ballard's suspicion or caught her interest. She then moved to the files Hatteras had kept on her desktop. Most of these were labeled with the names of victims that were on the unit's active list of investigations. Most contained genetic family trees that she had been filling out over time as members of families responded to her attempts to contact them. She opened the file folder titled Pillowcase24 and saw nothing in it that she didn't already know. There was a file within this file titled PoI, which Ballard took to mean "persons of interest." She opened it and found a list of the four St. Vincent's alums—Best, Bennett, Weeks, and Van Ness—the unit had been tracking.

Hatteras had added details on the four men as information came in. Birth dates, addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, marital and employment status—everything she and the other members of the team had gathered, here in one neat file. She had included the photo of Andrew Bennett standing in front of the SOLD sign. Ballard stared at Bennett's eyes, and it suddenly became clear to her what Colleen Hatteras had done that might have gotten her killed.

Her cell phone buzzed and she saw it was Carol Plovc again. She had forgotten to return the call.

"Sorry, Carol, I was going to call you back."

"I'm leaving early today and I just wanted to make sure you heard that O'Fallon declined again."

"What the fuck?"

"I know, I know. I would have signed off on this but he won't. He called the ear identification you got junk science."

"He's junk science. This is just political bullshit."

"I'm not disagreeing."

"So is there anything else we can do?"

"Outside of finding a signed confession from Thawyer in his files, probably not."

"Yeah, right."

"Please tell Officer Bosch I'm sorry. I think you guys have it nailed. But my hands are tied."

"I understand."

Plovc's voice dropped down to a whisper: "You know there's a recall effort starting, right?" she said.

"Yeah, I heard," Ballard said.

"Well, if it works and we get a new DA, you bring this to me again."

"But when will that be, in a year? Elyse Ford's sister is in her eighties. She's waited all her life to know who took her sister. And now thanks to the politics of this town, she may die waiting."

"I'm sorry. I hope you or Officer Bosch can tell her that it might not be officially closed, but that you consider the case solved."

Ballard was silent as she remembered that it was Hatteras who had been dealing directly with the Ford family. She looked at a photo pinned to the workstation's privacy wall. It was Colleen and her two teenage daughters sitting at a table behind a birthday cake with lit candles. Ballard knew those girls had just gotten or were about to get news that would permanently alter their lives.

"All right, well, I'm in the middle of something here, Carol," she said. "Thanks for fighting the good fight on this."

"Anytime," Plovc said. "I'm here when you need me."

They disconnected. Ballard reached over and unpinned the photo of Colleen and her daughters. She got up and went to her workstation, pinned the snapshot to her own privacy wall, and stared at it for a long moment.

She knew she needed to call Maddie Bosch and tell her the bad news about the Thawyer case, but that could wait. She opened the email Hatteras had sent her with the details from Andrew Bennett's DMV record. She typed his Laguna Hills address into her phone's GPS and saw that the estimated drive time was ninety-three minutes. If she waited until rush hour, that number would balloon and possibly even double.

She wanted to get on the road but had to wait. She wondered if Goring and Dubose had been held up at the crime scene by Captain Gandle. Though she had put Persson on Hatteras's phone records only an hour before, she called him.

"Anders, you got anything yet?"

"I just got the call records, yes."

"Good, give me the last calls. Give me the time and length."

"The last two were to her daughters. Do you want them?"

"How do you know they were calls to the daughters?"

"They are on her family plan."

"Got it. What time did she make those calls, and how long was she on?"

"She called the first number at seven last night and it was only one minute. She probably left a message. Then the last call was one minute later, and she talked for nine minutes."

Ballard wrote the information down on a fresh page in her notebook.

"What was the call before that?" she asked.

"That was to me," he said. "She said you were mad about the password. I am very—"

"We can skip that one for now. Go to the one before that."

Persson gave her a number with a 714 area code and told her the call lasted twenty-nine minutes.

"When was the call made?"

"It began at four thirty-three and lasted until five oh-two."

Ballard wrote it all down, then flipped back to her previous notes. She found the page where she had written down the information Hatteras gave her about Andrew Bennett. The number Persson had just given her matched the number Bennett listed below his bio on the real estate website.

"Does it say whether this was an outgoing or incoming call?" she asked.

"Outgoing," Persson said. "These are all outgoing calls."

Hatteras had called Bennett and they had talked for almost half an hour.

"Okay, previous to that?" Ballard said. "Any other calls yesterday?"

"She made a call yesterday morning at nine twenty," Persson said. "That was to me too."

"And what was that about?"

Ballard heard the door on the other side of the murder archive shelves open and then a pair of shoes walking on the linoleum.

"One of us called the other every day," Persson said. "You know, just to check in and see what was going on. She called me yest—"

"Uh, Anders, I have to go," Ballard interrupted. "I'll call you back if I need to, but for now you can stand down on that."

"Do you want me to send this to you?"

Ballard saw Goring come out of the aisle that ran along the murder library.

"No, that's fine," Ballard said. "I'll be in touch."

She disconnected the call and greeted Goring. "Where's your partner?"

"I left him in the neighborhood. He was knocking on doors and collecting video."

Ballard nodded. The collecting of video from neighborhood Ring cameras and the like was often more important than finding witnesses. Cameras didn't have memory issues and biases.

"Did you get anything good yet?" Ballard asked.

"The guy came into the neighborhood on foot," Goring said. "Head down, wearing a hoodie. So far, no angles that would give us an ID. He was good. That sound like any of your persons of interest?"

"Sounds like it could be anyone. He broke in? What time?"

"We're piecing together video—that's why Winston is still out there and I need to get back. But we have the guy entering the house at twelve thirty a.m. and leaving just before one. He was quick and it looked like he had a tool that opened the door."

"What kind of tool?"

"You know what a fireman's friend is?"

"Hmm, no."

"You can google it. It's like a T-shaped blade that slides into a doorjamb and pops the lock. Supposedly a guy on the LAFD invented it for getting into burning houses—hence the name."

"Wow."

"When the killer left, he had her computer and the extra hard drive under his arm." Goring looked at the desks on the raft. "Which spot was the victim's?"

Hearing Colleen referred to as "the victim" hit Ballard like a punch to the heart. She stood up and walked Goring over to Hatteras's workstation.

"This is hers," she said. "Was."

Goring sat down and tapped the space bar on the keyboard. The screen lit up, and the password portal appeared.

"You think anybody on the squad would know her password?" she asked.

"Probably not," Ballard said. "But I could check."

"Don't bother. I'll take it down to the tech unit."

"The guy there who set these up for us is named Chuck Pell."

"Okay, I'll take it to him."

Goring tried the file drawer that was built into the workstation. It was locked. "How about a key for this?" she asked.

"I have one."

Ballard went to her desk and opened the middle drawer. There was a ring of keys that opened the file drawers of every station on the raft. They were marked by number. She handed the ring to Goring.

"Number nine," she said.

Ballard watched Goring open the file drawer, wishing she had thought to check it out earlier. The drawer contained several files with the names of victims written on the tabs. Ballard bent down so she could read some of them.

"Those look like closed cases," Ballard said. "I think when we closed a case, she printed out all the IGG stuff and put it in a file. The active stuff was on the computer. She'd been working on what she called heritage patterns for several active cases."

"‘Heritage patterns'?"

"Like a genetic family tree."

"Got it."

Goring closed the file drawer.

"I should get back over there," she said. "I'm going to take the computer and drop it by the tech shop."

"Fine by me," Ballard said. "At some point I'll need to get that stuff back. We have another guy on the squad who can continue Colleen's work."

"I'll return it to you as soon as we're finished with it." Goring reached under the desk to unplug the CPU and detach it from Colleen's oversize monitor.

Persson would inherit that screen, Ballard thought, unless she found another IGG specialist to take Colleen's place. That thought led to another.

"Have you told Colleen's daughters?" she asked.

"Not yet," Goring said. "Too busy running with the case."

Ballard nodded. "You want me to make the notification?" she asked. "I met them once when she brought them here."

"There is nothing I would like better than to take a pass on that job," Goring said. "But I need to interview them, see when they last talked and all of that. So I'll do it."

"They should know soon."

"Don't worry, I'll get to them today."

Ballard nodded.

Goring successfully detached the CPU and slid it out from beneath the workstation. She lifted it, testing its weight.

"You want me to get a dolly to roll it out to your car?" Ballard asked.

"No, I'm strong," Goring said.

She hefted the computer so she could get her hands under it and turned toward the aisle.

"In more ways than one," she added.

Ballard took it as a reference to experiences that had led her to the Beanery meetings.

"Remember, if you think of anything, give me a call," Goring said.

"Will do," Ballard said.

Goring headed to the exit. She seemed to slow her walk and focus on the murder-book archive as she passed.

"All these cases," she said. "Waiting to be solved."

Ballard just nodded and watched her go.