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“You know, I haven’t seen you the past few sessions at the Beanery.”
“Oh, yeah, well, been kind of busy. But I’ll be back.”
“Good. Us girls need to stick together.”
“You got that right.”
Goring opened her door and got out. Ballard watched her go back up the front walk and through the open door of the house.
She pulled her phone and called Anders Persson.
“Renée? Please tell me they’ve made an arrest.”
“No, not yet. They’re just starting. What are you doing right now, Anders?”
“Now? Not much. I mean, I can’t believe this, you know? She called me last night and told me you were angry about the password.”
“Never mind that now. You know Colleen’s cell number, right?”
“Sure, but—”
“I want you to see if you can get into her account. I want to know what calls she received and what calls she made in the last forty-eight hours.”
“Uh… isn’t that the kind of thing you—”
“I know I told you no hacking, but we both know you didn’t listen. And this is different, Anders. This is Colleen. Her phone is missing and it will take the investigators on the case a week to get a search warrant and get the carrier to come across with the account records. I don’t want to waste that much time. Can you do it?”
“Uh, sure, I can do that, but… you know…”
“If you don’t want to do it, just tell me, Anders. You and Colleen were close. I thought you’d want to help get whoever the sick fuck is who did this.”
“No, I do. I do. I can do this. I’m on it. No worries.”
“Okay, Anders, thanks. Talk only to me about it and don’t leave a trail. You got that? No trail.”
“Got it.”
She disconnected and started the engine. She knew she was crossing a line with the request to Persson. She had a feeling there were going to be other lines to cross as well. But she told herself essentially the same thing she had just told Anders:This was Colleen. One of us. And we will cross every line we have to.
53
THE UNBREAKABLE RULEthat 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 discoveredand 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 ineiggaMeitaK,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 orcaught 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 titledPillowcase24and saw nothing in it that she didn’t already know. There was a file within this file titledPoI,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.
