“Good point. But drive down to the end, see what we can see.”
Ballard drove along the fence line until they could see a third side of the building. There was an emergency exit here by a trash dumpster.
“Okay,” Ballard said. “What’s next?”
Bosch had brought his printouts and had mapped out the order in which they should conduct the skee. Their next stop was nearby Glendale. They drove by a shopping plaza on Brand Boulevard, where Carlos Esquivel had a family dentistry practice. It was on the second level of the plaza and reachable by an outdoor escalator, which had been turned off for the holiday weekend.
“Looks like a nice practice he’s got here,” Ballard said.
“Let’s drive around behind,” Bosch said. “See what the parking situation looks like.”
Ballard followed his instruction and found an alley that ran behind the plaza and where there was reserved parking for building employees. They saw Esquivel’s name on a placard reserving one spot. Right next to it was a spot reserved for a Dr. Mark Pellegrino.
“Looks like he has a partner,” Bosch said.
Next stop was Esquivel’s home in the hills above Glendale: a multimillion-dollar contemporary with white walls, hard lines, black window frames, and a gated driveway.
“Not bad,” Bosch said.
“He’s doing all right,” Ballard said. “I guess drillin’ teeth is drillin’ for gold.”
“But can you imagine that life? No one’s ever happy to see you.”
“You’re the guy who’s going to stick your fingers and metal instruments in my mouth.”
“Sucks.”
“Not that different from being a cop. These days, people don’t want to see us either.”
And so it went. They next traversed the Valley, checking out Dennis Hoyle’s office and home. DMV records showed that he had previously lived in Malibu, but his current residence was in the hills off Coldwater Canyon. It was a gated property with a view of the whole San Fernando Valley. Next they dropped down through the Sepulveda Pass to the Westwood location, where Jason Abbott practiced dentistry, and then over to the other side of the freeway in Brentwood, where he lived.
They headed south for the final drive-by — the places the late John William James worked, lived, and died. But before they got there, Ballard took an unexpected turn in Venice. Bosch thought she was making a driving mistake.
“This is not it,” he said.
“I know,” Ballard said. “I just want to make a little detour. One of my Midnight Men victims — the latest one — has an ex that lives down here. And I thought, since we’re on skee patrol, that I’d just take a run by and scope it out.”
“No problem. You think he’s one of the Midnight Men?”
“No, it’s not that. But there’s something there. They divorced two years ago but she seems afraid of him. I hit him up last night on a pretext call to see what his reaction would be and he sounded like an asshole. He’s in the tech-investment field.”
“They’re all assholes. What address are we looking for?”
“Number five Spinnaker.”
They were on a narrow street a block from the beach. The homes were all modern, multilevel, and expensive. Reginald Carpenter was apparently doing better financially than his ex-wife. They found his home two houses off the beach. It was three levels sitting on top of a three-car garage with just enough space between the very similar houses on either side to store trash cans.
“I hope he has an elevator,” Bosch said.
There was a door to the right of the garage with a no soliciting sign on it. Ballard leaned toward her window so she could look up the facade of the home. She could see the tip of a surfboard leaning over the railing of a balcony.
“I wonder if I knew this guy from when I used to stay out here,” she said.
Bosch didn’t answer. Ballard turned the car around and headed back to Pacific Avenue.
Pacific ran alongside the Ballona Lagoon, which separated Venice from Marina del Rey. They took it to Via Marina and then were cruising by homes valued even higher than those in overpriced Venice. They cruised by the condo complex where James had lived and then went out to Lincoln Boulevard, where his dental practice was located in a shopping plaza that backed up to the vast complex of docks and boats that made up the area’s namesake marina. Here, the skeeing paid off. The James family dentistry practice was still in business seven years after his unsolved murder. The name listed on the door was Jennifer James, DDS.