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Fourth on the list was Nathan Hyatt, the former student who had been arrested for indecent exposure a year after graduation. He was living in Venice, according to the DMV. He had no criminal record since that arrest but was an obvious choice for scrutiny, as the indecent exposure could have been a precursor to more serious sexually motivated crimes. Most serial offenders follow an escalating path of sex crimes, Ballard knew. Her only hesitation about Hyatt was that he had most likely been interviewed by the original Pillowcase Rapist task force. She would have to pull the records, but she knew that the task force had thrown out a wide net and interviewed almost all known sex offenders living in the county then.
“Maddie, how much time you got before you go in today?” Ballard asked.
“A few hours,” Maddie said. “I have roll call at six.”
“Let’s go talk to Jacqueline Todd,” Ballard said.
“Sounds good,” Maddie said.
They took separate cars so Maddie could peel off and go to work if the interview went long or was delayed. Ballard took the lead, working her way to the 405 freeway and then heading north toward the Valley. Jacqueline Todd, according to the DMV, lived in Sherman Oaks.
Ballard’s GPS app said it was a thirty-eight-minute drive. She decided to use the time to make phone calls. The first was to Gordon Olmstead at the FBI, but it went straight to voicemail. She assumed Olmstead was avoiding her after the earlier call and left a message: “It’s Ballard. Just looking for an update on whether you shut down the leak. Call me back, please.”
She knew he wouldn’t. She thought about how aggressive she had been with Olmstead earlier and what Dr. Elingburg had said about her short temper. She called Olmstead back and left another message: “Gordon, me again. Sorry about being so testy last time wetalked. A lot of stuff is going on and I overreacted. Call me when you can.”
She disconnected and drove for a bit, thinking about the interview she hoped to conduct with Jacqueline Todd. She knew the apartment complex she and Maddie were headed to because she had been there on prior cases. It made her think about her mother, so she made her next call to Dan Farley in Maui. It was a holiday but he had told her that MINT members were not taking any holidays off, other than Christmas, because of the urgency of identifying the dead from the fires and informing their families.
Farley took the call and Ballard could tell he was in a car.
“Hello, Renée.”
“Dan, did I catch you at a bad time? I thought you’d be working today.”
“I am. On my way down to Wailea to make a notification. Members of the family are staying at the Four Seasons.”
“Oh, man, that’s tough. Not the Four Seasons, the notification.”
“Yeah, but I find it’s better face-to-face than over the phone. I’ve done a lot of those and they seem so impersonal. This one’s a twenty-two-year-old son. He was bumming around the islands and went to Lahaina. Wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Yeah.”
There was a beat of silence before Farley spoke.
“If I had any news for you, I would have called, Renée.”
“I know. I was just thinking about her today. My mother. Whenever I talk to you, it sort of calms me. I don’t know why.”
“I understand. You know you can call me anytime. I deal with a lot of families waiting to hear something, whether it’s good or bad. But we haven’t found her among the dead so far, and that’s a good sign, right?”
“I guess so.”
“I think that when we find Makani, she’s going to be alive.”
With all the cases he was working and all the families he was dealing with, the fact that Farley remembered her mother’s name comforted Ballard.
“I hope so,” she said. “Thanks, Dan.”
“Call anytime,” Farley said again.
The freeway took her over the Santa Monica Mountains through the Sepulveda Pass, and on the downgrade Ballard transitioned to the 101 and then immediately exited at Van Nuys Boulevard. Jacqueline Todd lived in an apartment complex on Magnolia called the Horace Heidt Estates. It was a very large complex with a distinctive Hawaiian-village feel, with tiki bars and facilities with names like the Aloha Room. Horace Heidt had been a radio bandleader in the 1940s and ’50s and had built the apartments so members of his band could live and practice together. There were three pools and an executive golf course. There was also a mini-museum of Hollywood memorabilia that Ballard had toured with Heidt’s son, who now ran the place. It was largely photos, costumes, and other keepsakes Horace Heidt had collected during his time as a bandleader.
Ballard drove through the complex and found the building where Jacqueline Todd lived. As she parked, Maddie pulled in next to her. Before getting out, Ballard looked up Jacqueline Todd on IMDb and found her writing credits. Over the past ten years she had written and produced several episodes of various television series. Most of them were crime shows. Her latest credits were on a streaming series calledApex,about a squad of LAPD detectives who went after the “biggest predators out there.” The unit had a logo that showed a cartoonish great white shark’s gaping mouth and double rows of teeth. Ballard noted that the writer went by the name Jackie Todd professionally.
She got out with her leather laptop bag, though she had left the computer at the office.
“Let me do the talking,” she said to Maddie. “If I give you the nod, you take it from there.”
The knock on the door of apartment 241 was answered by a woman wearing baggy sweatpants and a T-shirt with the same shark logo Ballard had just seen on IMDb. She had short-clipped hair like the lead actress on a show Ballard liked,Criminal Record.
