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“He’s a judge,” Persson blurted out, beating Hatteras to the punch.
“He’s thepresidingjudge of the Los Angeles Superior Court,” Hatteras said. “The Honorable Jonathan Purcell.”
Now Ballard realized how she knew him.
“Did you pull up the report on the domestic?” she asked.
“Have it right here,” Persson said. “But I must tell you now, it was never filed.”
“Declined by the DA’s office,” Hatteras said. “Maybe the judge got to them.”
Ballard gave her a look that warned that things like that were dangerous to say.
She stepped over to Persson’s desk and leaned down to read his screen. Persson got up and she sat down to scroll through the summary written by the arresting officer. She was looking for the details of the alleged assault and what had bumped it up to a felony. The victim was identified as twenty-one-year-old Sara Santana, who said her boyfriend Nicholas Purcell got angry and choked her into unconsciousness when she was late coming home from work. Ballard scrolled farther down to see what evidence, if any, had been collected. It said the officer had taken photos of the victim’s neck and of her left hand because she said she’d broken two fingernails while struggling to pry Purcell’s hands off her neck.
“The photos are not in the report?” she asked.
“No photos,” Persson said.
“Should they be in there?” Hatteras asked.
“If the officer took them with his phone, they should be attached,” Ballard said. “It’s part of the protocol on domestic calls.”
“I wonder if he did and if the DA saw them,” Hatteras said.
“That’s the question,” Ballard said. She got up, went to the murder box, lifted it, and headed to her desk. “So, listen to me,” she said. “Neither of you talk about this case outside of this room. No one else knows about the case or the judge or any of it. Understand?”
Hatteras and Persson nodded somberly.
“Good,” Ballard said. “Anders, send me that report.”
She put the box down on her desk and lifted the top off. It contained six plastic binders, placed in the box spine up, with the dates marked and in order. She remembered from her first look at the box two years ago that the first five binders were task force reports on the series of assaults attributed to the Pillowcase Rapist. The sixth binderwas dedicated to the last case, the killing of Abby Sinclair. She pulled this binder out of the box and sat down to get reacquainted with the murder investigation.
But before she opened the binder, she opened the contacts list on her cell and called Laffont.
“What’s up, Renée?”
“Did you leave?”
“Yeah, I thought we were done. Meeting a friend for lunch. I was planning to come back when I hear from Darcy on my case. I’ll get my hours in after that.”
“I need you back here after your lunch. We just got a hot shot that I want to move on today.”
“Uh, sure. I could also come back now. I’m only ten minutes away. I stopped to shoot the shit with Captain LaBrava. He saw me in the parking lot and asked about our door alarm this morning.”
LaBrava was the commander of operations at the Ahmanson Center. That put him in charge of the building but not of the Open-Unsolved Unit, which fell under the command of the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown.
“Jesus, this guy and that back door,” Ballard said. “Doesn’t he have more important things to worry about?”
“He should,” Laffont said. “But I think I smoothed it over. I said we had a lizard in the archives we were trying to save by getting it outside the quickest way we could.”
“A lizard? And he bought it?”
“I don’t know, but it gave him a reason to drop it. I don’t think he’ll bring it up again.”
“We’ll see.”
“So, what’s the hot shot?”
