Davenport came on the line.
“It’s Ballard. Got a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Humberto Viera of Las Palmas, is he still around?”
Davenport chuckled.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘around,’ ” he said. “He’s been up in Pelican Bay for at least eight, ten years. And he isn’t coming back.”
“Your case?” Ballard asked.
“I was part of it, yeah. Got him on a couple of one-eight-sevens of White Fence guys. We flipped the getaway driver, and that was it for Humberto. Bye-bye on him.”
“Okay. Anyone else I could talk to about Javier Raffa buying his way out of the gang?”
“Hmm. I don’t think so. That goes pretty far back, as far as I remember. I mean, there are always OGs around, but they’re original gangsters because they toe the line. But for the most part, these gangs turn over membership every eight or ten years. Nobody’s going to talk to you about Raffa.”
“What about LP-three?”
There was a pause before Davenport answered. And it was clear that earlier, when he had claimed not to remember the snitch, he was lying.
“What do you think you’ll get out of her?”
“So it’s a woman?”
“I didn’t say that. What do you think you’ll get out of him?”
“I don’t know. I’m looking for a reason somebody put a bullet in Javier Raffa’s head.”
“Well, LP-three is long gone. That’s a dead end.”
“You’re sure now?”
“I’m sure.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. I’ll catch you later.”
Ballard put the phone in its cradle. It was clear to her from Davenport’s gaffe that LP3 was a woman and possibly still active as an informant. Otherwise he would not have been so clumsy in trying to cover up his slip of the tongue. Ballard didn’t know what it meant in terms of her case, considering that Raffa had apparently separated from the gang fourteen years earlier. But it was good to know that if the case turned toward the gang, the GED had an insider who could provide insight and information.
“What was that about?” Moore asked.
She was sitting across the aisle from Ballard.
“Gang Enforcement,” Ballard said. “They don’t want me talking to their Las Palmas CI.”
“Figures,” Moore said.
Ballard wasn’t sure what that meant but didn’t respond. She knew Moore was one and done on the late show. Her involvement in the case would end when the sun came up and her shift was over, the tactical alert was ended, and all officers returned to their normal schedules. Moore would be back on dayside, but Ballard would be left alone to work in the dark hours.
It was exactly the way she wanted it.
7
Ballard began putting together the murder book on the Raffa case. This effort started with the tedious job of writing out the incident report, which described the killing and identified the victim but also included many mundane details such as time of the initial call, names of responding patrol officers, ambient temperature, next-of-kin notification, and other details that were important in documenting but not solving the case. She then wrote summaries of the witness interviews she had conducted and collected from Lisa Moore, though Moore’s reports were short and perfunctory. A summary of the interview with Raffa’s youngest daughter had only one line: “This girl knows nothing and can contribute nothing to the investigation.”
All of this was put into a three-ring binder. Lastly, Ballard started a case chrono that recorded her movements by time and included mention of her discussion with Davenport. She then made copies of the documents in the GED file and put them in the binder as well. She got all of this done by 5 a.m. and then got up and approached Moore, who was looking at email on her phone. Their shift ended in an hour but that didn’t matter to Ballard.
“I’m going to go downtown to see what Forensics collected,” Ballard said. “You want to stay or go?”
“I think I’ll stay,” Moore said. “There’s no way you’ll be back by six.”
“Right. Then do you mind taking the GED file back up to Davenport?”
“Sure, I’ll take it. But why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Running with the case. It’s a homicide. You’re just going to turn it over to West Bureau as soon as everybody wakes up over there.”
“Maybe. But maybe they’ll let me work it.”