She now felt bad about giving Smallwood and Vitello shit for calling her out on the traffic stop. If they had not done that, she might not have cruised the neighborhood at the right time and run into Jack Kersey. Things felt as though they had aligned for her somehow, and now she was a step closer to the Midnight Men.
She screwed the access plate back into place and then headed back to her car. She wanted to drive south and check the streetlights outside the homes of the first two victims.
15
The streetlights were all now burning brightly on the streets where the first two Midnight Men attacks had occurred. Ballard did, however, get a direct example of the eclectic nature of the city’s streetlighting program. The two streets carried different styles of globes and posts, including ornate iron posts and double-globed lights on one street and simple acorns on the other. Ballard was annoyed at herself that she was a detective who worked the midnight shift but had never noticed the difference in streetlights from neighborhood to neighborhood. It served as a reminder to always be observant, to look for the details that made a difference.
She was pulled to the side of the road, looking up an address for the Bureau of Street Lighting, when she got another callout for the night detective. She needed to respond to a death scene under the Gower Street overpass. She noted the address of the nearest BSL office — there were actually many — and started the drive to Gower. She knew she was headed to one of the most crowded, ugliest homeless communities in Hollywood. During the pandemic it had grown from a few tents to a full community of tents, lean-tos, and other ragtag structures — some built with amazing ingenuity — belonging to a homeless community that numbered at least one hundred people. In the past ten months Ballard had twice been called out to death scenes in Gower Grim, as the homeless zone had been termed by officers in the division. One of these deaths had been attributed to Covid-19, the other to an opioid overdose.
She came up from Hollywood Boulevard, the terrain gently rising toward Beachwood Canyon, the hillside community east of the Dell. She could see the flashers from two patrol cars, which told her a patrol sergeant was on the scene. She parked behind one of the patrol cars and saw the huddle of two P2s and Sergeant Spellman outside a small cubicle with sides made from shipping pallets. On the concrete wall that supported the freeway overpass someone had spray-painted the slogan “No Mask, No Vax, No Problem.”
Ballard pulled up her mask, got out, and joined the group of fellow officers.
“Ballard,” Spellman said. “Need you to sign off on this one. It’s another OD. Looks like fentanyl.”
Ballard was there to determine whether to call out the homicide team or write this one off as an accidental death, or “death by misadventure” — the phrase the Medical Examiner’s Office liked to use. Her decision would determine whether the whole machinery of homicide investigation would be cranked up, with detectives and forensic units being called out in the middle of the night.
The P2s were La Castro and Vernon, both young men fresh off their probation year and newly assigned to Hollywood from the quiet Devonshire Division in the Valley. They had not yet experienced the open and hostile environment that would return to Hollywood once the pandemic was over.
Ballard snapped on gloves and pulled out her mini-light.
“Let’s take a look,” she said.
A piece of blue plastic tarp used as a door had been flipped up over the top of the makeshift shack. There was not enough room for anyone other than Ballard to enter. The space was smaller than a cell at the old county jail. There was a dirty mattress on the ground and on it the body of a fully dressed man with unkempt hair and a straggly beard. Ballard estimated that he was in his twenties even though he looked like he was in his thirties, his body aged by drug use and living on the streets. He was on his back, his eyes open in rictus and cast upward. There was no roof. Twenty-five feet above them was the steel underside of the freeway. It rumbled every time a car crossed it, and even at midnight the traffic up there was constant.
Ballard squatted and moved the light in closer to the body. The lips were bluish purple, the mouth slightly open. She could see dried, yellowish vomit on the lips, in the beard, and on the mattress next to the dead man’s right ear. She moved the light down the body and noted that the fingers of both hands were curled tightly toward the palms.
A truck rumbled heavily by overhead, causing the pallets to shudder. Ballard moved the light about and saw that the dead man had insulated his home with collapsed cardboard boxes nailed to the pallets. She saw that one box had contained a flat-screen television, the depiction of which was positioned so the man could look at it from his dirty mattress.