Ronnie could hear the occasional rustle on the other end of the phone line as Selena Stubbs moved papers from one pile into another. Occasionally she heard her pick up a pile in both hands and shuffle it vertically so it hit the desk surface three times to make all the loose sheets neat. She said, “When James was fired from his job at the University of Indiana, his pay went to zero. When he got the job in California it went up again.”
“May I ask how much?”
“I think it doubled, approximately. I remember hearing him say something about how he was making twice as much, and so on, but it was a rough figure. We’re not talking about a whole lot of money here. Assistant professors don’t make much. But the money from the new job made a difference. We had to maintain the house in Bloomington, where the kids and I lived, and James’s apartment in LA, and cars and insurance in both places. And we had to spend a lot of money for James to travel back and forth across the country every week or two. We were already in serious debt from our eight years of student loans, the mortgage, and all the expense of his year of flying around for job interviews.”
“We need to get a sense of his situation after the divorce, when he was employed and living in Los Angeles. Do you think he could have been saving money at that point?”
“I don’t have to think about it,” said Selena Stubbs. “I know. I was still keeping track of our money until the divorce was final. At the end of the first year we had spent more than he made. The debts had grown, and a lot was on credit cards. We were paying plenty of interest.”
“How about the second year?”
“I wasn’t doing his bookkeeping at that point,” she said. “But I would have to guess it wasn’t a fast transformation. He was making progress, catching up on missed payments from some of the student loans, and trying to pay off credit cards. That didn’t leave much room for savings. And James was paying off the divorce lawyers and trying to pay the child support ordered by the court. We still hadn’t sold the house in Bloomington, so when the deficit got to be big enough he just signed the place over to me so I’d be stuck with selling it, and insisted that it took him off the hook.”
“You accepted that?”
“Yes. By then he was the new James. He had already realized that nobody was going to do anything to him if he stopped paying child support, so he was about to stop.”
“There are people whose job it is to—”
“It was an Indiana divorce decree, and the plaintiff had moved to Texas and the defendant to California. If I took him to court, he was ready to make a case that he couldn’t afford that much. There really wasn’t a lot of money to fight over. He still hadn’t paid off the debts. He had bought himself a nice car, but he was paying for it on time. By then I was here in Houston making good money in the oil business. It felt better to me to be free of any dependence or even expectations. That was what he wanted, so I gave it to him.”
“Is it possible that he was hiding money?”
“He lived in Los Angeles for three years after I last saw him. If he made a lot of money in secret, I don’t know what he did with it. When he died there was a bit over seventeen thousand dollars in his bank accounts, and that was about what I had expected.”
“How about the debts?”
“They were smaller than they had been, but by no means gone. I used all of his money and a bit of my own to pay the last of them off. I imagine between that and all the women, he didn’t have much left of his paychecks.”
“Would you know why he would be out searching for a house to buy?”
“With seventeen thousand dollars in Los Angeles? I don’t see any way that a bank would have approved him for a mortgage unless he came up with a big down payment. Maybe one of his lady friends was going to pay for it.”
“You mentioned his new car,” said Ronnie. “Do you happen to have any information about it? An old registration or anything?”
“I know I have that. I had to sell the car, so I’ve got the paperwork. I’ll scan it and send it on to you after we hang up.”
“Thanks,” Ronnie said. “And you just reminded me of another thing I wanted to ask you about. How did you go about compiling the list of women he dated? Did James tell you, or was there an address book or something?”
“I’m afraid that’s not a question I’m going to answer.”
“Would it be possible to tell me why?”
“I’m not going to talk about the subject at all.”
“All right,” said Ronnie.
“Here. I’ve found the papers for the car. It was a Lexus. And there’s a photograph of it too. I posted that online when I put it up for sale. Do you want the picture too?”
“That would be great, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. It’ll be in your e-mail. Anything else?”
“No. And thanks,” Ronnie said. “We’ll try not to bother you again.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not so worried about that anymore,” said Selena. “I really hope that you do find out what happened to him and make whoever did it sorry.”
Ronnie hung up and turned to Sid. “It’s definitely videos. Probably like the one he showed to Linda Bourget.”
“You could tell that?”
“Yes,” she said. “I could tell she watched at least some of them to be sure, and probably felt like killing herself, then and for a while after. She won’t say anything about it. And by the way, there was no money.”
“What about his car?”
“She sold it, but she had to pay off the loan he’d taken to buy it. Still no money.” She thought for a moment. “We should see if the police know anything about where the car has been.”
Detective Miguel Fuentes watched the image appear on his computer screen. “There it is,” he said. “Here are all the LPR hits on Ballantine’s Lexus’s license plate in the year before his murder.”
“Twenty-six. The database now has an average of twenty-two hits for every one of the seven million cars registered in Los Angeles County. Of course the information is still random. The readers on the patrol cars are on all the time, recording new plates while they scan for plates on the hot list, but there are plates that get lots of sightings, and some that get none.”
“His ex-wife says she sold his car after he died,” said Ronnie. “Do you know what sort of examination Detective Kapp gave it before he released it?”
“I haven’t seen a record of the search,” said Fuentes. “It wasn’t found at a crime scene or anything, and if something had turned up we’d know, but Kapp wasn’t a beginner. I’m sure he had the forensics people go to work on it before he let her sell it.”
Sid and Ronnie exchanged a glance. “Do you know who owns it now?”
“I’ll use the VIN number to track it.”
A moment later he said, “It’s in Nevada. Clark County.”
“A breakthrough,” said Ronnie. “When we die our cars go to Las Vegas for the afterlife.”
Sid said, “Can you print the new owner’s name and address and then go back to the Los Angeles map?”
“Sure,” said Fuentes. He printed the Nevada registration, and then the Los Angeles map reappeared on his screen.
“Did you see something?” Ronnie asked.
Sid said, “Can you print that too?”
Fuentes clicked Print and Sid reached to the tray and picked up the two printed pages. He handed Ronnie the map of Los Angeles County and pointed at a spot in the northern end of the San Fernando Valley.
“A license plate reader picked up the Lexus about a block from one of the housing developments last March, shortly before Ballantine died,” said Ronnie.
“What does that tell you?”
“Nothing conclusive,” Sid said. “But I think it strengthens our theory as to where the crime scene might be.”
Ronnie said, “It’s an opening in the ground that’s been gone for a year and paved over.”
“Thanks, Miguel,” said Sid. “We’ll be in touch.”
“Where are you going?” Fuentes asked.
“I think we’d like to take a look at some of the other places where license plate readers spotted Ballantine’s car.”
When they were outside, Ronnie said, “Are we really going to do that?”
“Not me,” said Sid. “But there’s no reason to tell him that the only lead we have right now is what he just gave us.”