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It took her fifteen minutes to cross the airport on Sepulveda and make it to Mariposa Avenue in El Segundo. She pulled into the driveway of a small ranch house with pale yellow walls and rust-colored shutters. She had never been to Colleen’s home before and there was something intriguing about seeing how one of her unit’s members lived.
There was a double-wide garage with the door up. Colleen’s Prius was in there. The other space was filled with storage boxes, bicycles, and a lawn mower. Ballard could see that the door leading from the garage into the house appeared to be ajar. Her curiosity turned to alarm.
Ballard got out of her car and approached the garage. She pulled her phone and called Colleen once more. She did not hear a ringtone coming from inside the house. The call again went immediately to voicemail.
She entered the garage, and as she approached the door to the house, she called out loudly, “Colleen? It’s Renée. Are you home?”
No answer.
Ballard opened the door all the way. She saw that it led into the kitchen. She called out once again:
“Colleen Hatteras, are you home?”
Ballard entered the house. The kitchen was neat, the counters clear, with only a rinsed plate and fork in the sink. There was a door to Ballard’s left that led to a dining room, and a doorway straight ahead past the refrigerator that led to what looked like a TV room. Ballard went in that direction, scooping her right hand under her jacket and unsnapping the safety strap on her holster. She gripped her gun without pulling it free.
She entered the TV room and found it neat and orderly as well. A flat-screen on the wall was off. On the coffee table, two remotes were lined up next to each other. At the end of the room were doorways on the right and left. Ballard looked through the left opening and saw anempty living room that connected through an archway to the dining room. To the right, the doorway led to a corridor.
“Colleen? It’s Renée.”
No answer. There was a closed door on her left, and on the right were several open doors to what were presumably bedrooms, closets, and bathrooms. She checked the room to her left first, opening the door and finding what had been a bedroom converted to an office.
She entered and saw a large computer screen that matched what Hatteras had at Ahmanson. It was set up on a desk that was part of a built-in shelving and cabinet system entirely covering two walls. Ballard recognized the room even though she had never been to this house. She had seen the workstation in Facebook videos when she was vetting Hatteras’s application to be part of the unit. Colleen had been involved in online sleuthing long before volunteering for the Open-Unsolved Unit. She had even been an integral part of a group that identified a previously unknown serial killer by connecting aspects of murders committed in seven different states. Her work on that case had been the clincher and Ballard had offered Hatteras a position as her volunteer IGG expert.
Closed cabinet doors lined the lower sections of the built-in, with shelving above. The shelves were stocked with books, manuals, DVDs, framed photos of her daughters, and other family keepsakes and knickknacks. On a third wall next to the only window was a framed poster of a Matt Damon movie calledHereafter.The fourth wall was dominated by the closed louvered doors of a closet.
Ballard stepped over to the built-in workstation and saw an outline of dust delineating the space where a desktop computer had been.
She turned to the closet. Ballard was now on high alert and looked at the embedded finger pulls of the sliding doors. She wanted to open the closet but was thinking about fingerprints. She turned back to the desk and took a pencil out of a clay mug obviously made by a child. Sloppily painted on it wasWorld’s Best Mom. She turned to the closetagain, pushed the pencil between two of the louvered slats, and slid the door open.
The body of Colleen Hatteras was slumped on the floor of the closet. An electric cord connected to a computer mouse was tied tightly around her neck. Her eyes were open and bulging. She was wearing a long sleep shirt with a faded design on it. There was lividity discoloration on her legs, and Ballard could tell she had been dead for hours.
Ballard dropped to her knees.
“Colleen, no, no, no,”she whispered.
Ballard tried to compose herself. She knew she needed to clear the rest of the house. She stood up, pulled her weapon free, left the room, and proceeded quickly down the hallway door by door until she confirmed the house was empty and that whoever had killed Colleen was gone.
In the hall, Ballard holstered her weapon, pulled her phone, and called the LAPD comm center; she identified herself and requested that a homicide team from West Bureau meet her at the address in El Segundo. She then disconnected and opened her text app. There was a text chain she used for sending messages to everyone on the Open-Unsolved team at once. She typed out an urgent message to all of them.
I am sorry to tell you this by text but Colleen has been murdered.
Take all measures to secure yourself and family.
She put away the phone, took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, and reentered the home office. Keeping her back to the closet, she started looking for anything that might tell her what had drawn death to Colleen Hatteras’s door.
52
THE TWO DETECTIVESfrom West Bureau assigned to the murder of Colleen Hatteras were Charlotte Goring and Winston Dubose. Ballard knew Goring slightly from a loosely affiliated group of the department’s female homicide cops that met irregularly at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, usually when one had just had a major misogynistic encounter with the patriarchy and needed a therapeutic sharing session or legal advice. Ballard and Goring had both been in that spot and shared but had never worked a case together. The fact was that Ballard had no idea whether Goring or Dubose, whom she didn’t know at all, were good at their jobs.
Ballard sat in her Defender outside the house while the detectives took their first survey of the crime scene with the criminalists and the coroner’s investigators. As she waited, she took calls from every member of her unit, all of them stunned by the news and asking questions Ballard could not yet answer. Who killed Colleen and why? Most of them said they wanted to come to the scene, but Ballard dissuaded them, saying it would only complicate things. She did tell each to expect a call from the investigators, who would likely be looking for any possible reason for Colleen’s murder and would surely want to question her colleagues.
The last to call was Maddie Bosch, and after that conversation, Ballard was left to wait with dark thoughts crashing in on her about her own possible culpability. Hatteras had been a volunteer who gave her all to the unit. Had Ballard not trained her well enough? Had Colleen made a mistake that Ballard missed and that had cost her her life? Had Ballard, through her own actions, somehow caused this?
Ballard knew that the death of a volunteer in Open-Unsolved guaranteed an internal review of the entire unit and the department’s decision two years earlier to follow the law enforcement trend of using non-cop volunteers in cold-case squads. The conclusion would obviously be that it had been a mistake. Ballard knew that the whole operation could be shut down because of this. But those thoughts were secondary to the pitiful image of Colleen slumped in the closet. She could not get it out of her head.
Her phone buzzed and she saw that the call was from Captain Gandle.
“Captain.”
