The first thing Ballard did after she and Bosch got back in her city car was call Paul Masser on his cell.
“Paul, I need you to come in,” she said.
“Really?” he said. “It’s Sunday—what’s going on?”
“I need a search warrant and I want it to be ironclad. It can never come back on us in court.”
“And you need this today?”
“I need it ten minutes ago. Can you come in? I’ll have it roughed out for you. I promise, you’ll be in and out.”
“Can’t you just email it to me? I can go over it on my phone?”
“No, I want you at the pod so we can do it together.”
“Uh, okay. Give me an hour and I’ll be there.”
“Thank you. And, Paul, don’t tell anyone on the team that you’re rolling in to work. No one.”
She disconnected before he could ask her what was going on. She started driving down the hill to Sunset.
“You don’t need me for that, right?” Bosch said. “You and Paul will write it up.”
Ballard looked over at him.
“I guess,” she said. “But you’ve written more search warrants than Paul and me combined. Where do you have to go?”
“I was thinking I’d get my car and go sit on Rawls,” Bosch said. “If I can find him.”
Ballard nodded. It was the right move.
“Good idea,” she said. “I can get his home address out of my team files. He also has an office above one of his stores, the first one he opened in Santa Monica. It’s the flagship and he runs all the others from there. You can look that address up. It’s called DGP Mailboxes and More.”
“Got it,” Bosch said. “DGP?”
“I once heard him tell the others in the pod that it stood for Don’t Go Postal, but nobody’s supposed to know that.”
“Nice. Thoughtful. What about his car?”
“I have copies of all the paperwork he filled out when he joined the team, including a description of car and plate number for security at Ahmanson.”
“Good, get that to me, too. Let me out on Sunset and I’ll grab a Lyft back to my place. Save you some driving.”
“You sure?”
“My car’s in the opposite direction of Ahmanson. You need to get there and start writing.”
Ballard had a green light and made the turn from Sunset Plaza onto Sunset Boulevard. She pulled to the curb in front of a real estate office. Bosch paused before getting out as he looked at the glass facade of the business.
“What?” Ballard asked.
“Nothing,” Bosch said. “I worked a case that involved that place when it was a high-end jewelry store. Two brothers were murdered in the back room.”
“Oh, I remember that.”
“That one ended up being about bent cops, too.”
Bosch got out of the city car and looked back in at Ballard before closing the door.
“I’ll call you when I get eyes on Rawls.”
“Roger—I mean, sounds good.”
“That was close.”
“Caught myself.”
“Good luck with the warrant.”
He closed the door, and Ballard pulled back into traffic, drawing a horn from a driver who thought she had cut him off. She checked her rearview and saw Bosch standing on the sidewalk looking at his phone. He was summoning a ride.
An hour later, Ballard was at her workstation at Ahmanson. She was putting the finishing touches on the probable cause statement that would be included in an application for a search warrant allowing her to take a DNA swab from the mouth of Ted Rawls.
Paul Masser arrived. He was wearing shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt.
“Oh, shit, I pulled you off the golf course?” Ballard said.
“Not a big deal,” Masser said. “I was on the seventeenth green at Wilshire when you called. I would have had to walk in from there. So I just played the last hole, took a quick shower, and came directly here.”
He gestured to the golfing outfit he was wearing.
“I got these in the golf shop because I didn’t have anything in my locker to change into.”
“Well, I have the PC statement. I’ll print it and you can start.”
A search warrant was all about the probable cause statement. It had to convince a judge that there was enough legal cause to allow for a search and seizure of a citizen’s property or person. Everything else in a search warrant was largely boilerplate. The judge it was submitted to would likely skip over all of that and go directly to the PC.
“Who’s up today?” Masser asked. “Did you check yet?”
“No,” Ballard asked. “Why don’t you do that while I get this from the printer.”
Masser was inquiring about which judge from the criminal courts division was up on rotation to handle after-hours search warrant requests. This was a key question because judges had particular viewpoints and practices that became known to the trade—the lawyers who appeared before them and the police officers who went to them for search warrant approval. Some judges were fierce defenders of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Others were fierce law-and-order judges who never saw a search warrant application they didn’t like. In addition, they were elected to the bench. While they were charged with wielding their power without personal or political bias, it was a rare judge who didn’t occasionally peek out from under the blindfold at the possible electoral ramifications of a ruling—like whether to allow the state to take a DNA sample from an ex-cop suspected of being a killer.
Ballard came back from the printer and handed Masser the two-page PC statement just as he was hanging up his desk phone.
“Judge Canterbury is up,” he said. “And that is not good. He’s very strict on search and seizure.”
“I’ve heard,” Ballard said. “I might have another way to go.”
Most detectives worked on establishing a relationship with a go-to judge whom they could count on to be sympathetic when it came to questions of probable cause. It was a form of judge shopping, but it was practiced widely. Ballard, from her years on the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, had woken more than a few judges up in the middle of the night to get a search warrant signed. She had a few names on her contact list that she could call if she and Masser didn’t want to go to Judge Canterbury.
Ballard pointed to the document now in Masser’s hands.
“You’re going to be upset by what you read,” she said. “And I don’t want you repeating any of it to anybody. Clear?”
“Yes, clear,” Masser said. “Now I can’t wait.”
She left him at his workstation and went back to hers. While Masser was going through the PC document, she opened one of the original murder books from the Pearlman case and started leafing through the transcripts from the interviews conducted by the original detectives. Her memory was correct. There were apparently no interviews with Nelson Hastings or Ted Rawls. And this carried through to the original lab reports. Neither one of them had ever had their palm print compared to that found on the windowsill in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom.
This was a serious flaw in the original investigation. Hastings and Rawls were close friends of Jake Pearlman’s and were acquainted with his sister. They should have been interviewed and printed—as Kramer had been. The fact that they weren’t interviewed contradicted what had appeared to Ballard to be a tight and thorough investigation. Since the ODs on the case were no longer available, Ballard felt there was only one person she could talk to for clarification of this issue.
She called Nelson Hastings.
“Did you arrest him?” he asked immediately.
“No, and we’re not there yet,” Ballard said. “We are proceeding carefully.”
“Then, what do you need from me?” Hastings asked.
“I’m reviewing interview transcripts from the original investigation. There is no interview with you or Ted Rawls. I don’t understand that. You were Jake’s friends and I assume you both knew Sarah. Do you remember this? Why didn’t they interview you?”
“I was out of town with my parents when the murder happened,” Hastings said. “They talked to my parents and confirmed it, so they never talked to me. And Ted wasn’t around then.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he was around, but he wasn’t as tight as Jake, Kramer, and I were. He was sort of the new guy. It was our senior year and we were all about to graduate. We had gotten our college acceptance letters and the three of us got into UCLA. Then that summer, we heard Ted got in, too, so we kind of started including him in stuff. We took him under our wing because we’d be going to college together. Only that didn’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, I changed my mind, joined the army, and never went to UCLA. And neither did Ted. Something happened and he ended up going to Santa Monica Community College, and then he joined the cops out there.”
“Could it have been a lie about getting into UCLA? He only said he got in so he could get close to you guys?”
“I don’t know, maybe. You mean like he glommed on to us so he’d hear stuff about Sarah and the investigation? That’s sick.”
“It’s possible. But at the time of the murder, he wasn’t close enough to Jake that the detectives would want to talk to him?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Did he know Sarah?”
“He could have. She went to an all-girls school, so she’d come to our dances and events to meet boys. Jake would bring her. So Ted could have known her, or at least known who she was, from that.”
Ballard noticed that Masser was now standing next to her. She saw that he had red-lined her probable cause statement. She held a finger up, indicating she was almost finished with her call.
“I have one more question,” Ballard said. “In ’05, Rawls was a cop in Santa Monica. He wasn’t part of the Pearlman campaign, was he?”
There was another silence before Hastings answered.
“You’re thinking about the campaign button,” Hastings said. “The answer is yes. He was a volunteer. Kramer recruited him. He’d work his shift for Santa Monica and then come meet us at Greenblatt’s, where we would gather all the volunteers before going out to canvass. He did that several times. Knocked on doors.”
“So he could conceivably have knocked on Laura Wilson’s door and given her the button,” Ballard said.
It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” Hastings said.
“Thanks for your time,” Ballard said. “I’ll be in touch.”
She disconnected and held out her hand to Masser for the document.
“You don’t have it, Renée,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She looked at the printout. He had drawn a red box around the statement of facts in support of the search.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.
“It’s weak,” Masser said. “The DNA collected in the Wilson case indicated kidney disease. Rawls got a kidney from Hastings because he had kidney disease, but there is no linkage between Rawls and Wilson. Her having a campaign button from Pearlman is nothing. It could be happenstance. There were probably thousands of those buttons. And I’m afraid that’s how Canterbury or any other judge will look at this. You’re asking for a swab of his DNA, to search his home, his car, even his desk here. You want the moon, Renée. And I’m sorry, but if I was still a D.D.A., I wouldn’t let you go with this to a judge.”
“Well, that’s what you’re here for.”
“Let’s just look at the DNA. Have you thought about surreptitious collection?”
“He’s a cop and he already knows we did that with Hastings. He’ll be too careful now. I mean, go look at his desk. It’s so clean it looks like nobody sits there. He probably came in here yesterday and cleaned it after he figured out what we were doing with Hastings.”
“Well, this is all hard for me to wrap my head around. Are you sure you’re looking at the right person?”
“We’re sure he’s a suspect, but that’s what we need the search warrant for. To gather evidence that either proves or disproves the suspicion.”
“We?”
“Harry Bosch is working this with me. He should be watching Rawls right now. So…what if…”
She didn’t finish because she was still thinking it out.
“What?” Masser said.
“That was Hastings I was just talking to,” Ballard said. “He confirmed that Rawls was a volunteer with the campaign back in ’05. He knocked on doors and handed out those pins.”
“Did Hastings say he knocked on Laura Wilson’s door or was even in her building? Anything that directly connects Rawls to Wilson?”
“No, nothing that close. He did join Jake Pearlman’s social circle almost immediately after his sister’s murder.”
Masser shook his head.
“These are pluses to the document,” he said. “But it’s not enough to get it by Canterbury. Do you have a go-to judge you could take it to? My go-to retired two years ago.”
Ballard thought for a moment before answering. She had a judge in mind, but it was complicated. Judge Charles Rowan was often more interested in Ballard as a woman than as a detective. Going to his house to get a search warrant signed would require a dance that she wasn’t keen on or proud of. Prior to Rowan, she’d had a female go-to with whom no dance was required. But Carolyn Wickwire had lost reelection when a popular ex-prosecutor ran against her, claiming she was weak on crime.
“I have a judge I could go to, I think,” Ballard finally said.
“Well, let’s add in what you got from Hastings and pad this a little bit,” Masser said. “And we’ll see what happens.”