It was Sunday night and calm out on the streets. No calls came in to interrupt Ballard. She got up once an hour for a few minutes to take her eyes off the computer screen and to get coffee or walk up and down the aisles of the detective bureau. At one point a patrol officer came in to find a desk to type up a report, and Ballard sent him to use a terminal on the other side of the room because he wasn’t wearing a mask.
Two hours into the search, she had reached the date of October 25, 2006, in the reports and had nothing to show for it. There had been no report with reference to Bonner that involved an arrest, investigation, or interaction with a member of the Las Palmas 13 gang. That in itself was a revelation, because it was hard for Ballard to believe that one could go a solid two years as a midnight-shift detective without a single interaction with a Las Palmas gangster in some form. It told her that Bonner had avoided gang cases, if not overtly looked the other way when it came to gang crimes.
It also told her that she needed to reframe her search. She didn’t see going through the next two years of records as the best use of her time. Instead she went back to the search engine and asked for records from 2000 to 2004, producing 3,113 reports with Bonner’s name on them.
These reports began with Bonner as a patrol officer in Hollywood Division. He then got a promotion to detective in early 2002 and was assigned to the third watch, which was considered an entry detective position at the time. It still was, but it had not been an entry position for Ballard. Her assignment to the dark hours had come as punishment for pushing back against one of the many ills of the department: sexual harassment. She had lost a departmental skirmish with her boss at the Robbery-Homicide Division and was banished to the night shift in Hollywood.
An hour later, Ballard found the needle in the digital haystack of reports: a report dated October 5, 2004, in which Bonner was listed as the late-show detective who responded to a call about a shooting into an occupied dwelling. The incident occurred at 3:20 a.m. at a home on Lemon Grove Avenue near Western Avenue. The summary stated that the occupants of the home were asleep when a drive-by shooting occurred, a gunman spraying automatic fire from a passing car. No one was hurt and the occupants might not have even called the police, but several neighbors did.
The report listed the occupants of the house as Humberto Viera and his girlfriend, Sofia Navarro. Ballard believed she now knew Darla’s real name.
A follow-up report written by Bonner, who at this point had been a detective for less than a year, described Viera and Navarro as uncooperative. The summary described Viera as a high-ranking member of the Las Palmas 13 street gang.
The summary also stated that information from GED indicated that Viera was suspected of having been involved in an abduction attempt of a rival gang member named Julio Sanz. According to the intel, Sanz was a member of the White Fence street gang, which operated out of Boyle Heights but was encroaching on Las Palmas turf. The abduction was an attempt to gain leverage in brokering an agreement between the gangs on the turf border.
Ballard tried one more shot at backgrounding Bonner. The Hollywood Division had always enjoyed the support of a local citizens group called Blue Hollywood. The group supplied equipment, paid for the Christmas party, and staged neighborhood meetings. It also welcomed new transfers and thanked those retiring, often with a story and photo on their website.
Ballard went to bluehollywood.net and put Bonner’s name into the search window. She was rewarded with a mention and photo in the monthly “Comings and Goings” column that ran seven years before. It was the formal photo that had been on the division’s organization chart outside the captain’s office when Bonner had served. Ballard enlarged the photo on her screen and studied it. Bonner had deep-set eyes and a shaved head. His neck was tight against the collar of his uniform. He was not smiling in the photo.
Ballard leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Dawn’s light was just beginning to come in through the casement windows that ran along the top of the walls of the detective bureau.
She had directly connected Bonner and Viera, which lent credence and confirmation to what Darla/Sofia had revealed: Viera had put Javier Raffa in touch with Bonner when Raffa needed a big sum of money. She had also found a visual on Bonner that was consistent with the description she had received from both Darla and Gabriel Raffa.
The next connection that had to be made was between Bonner and the dentists and their factoring operation. The money Bonner had arranged and delivered for Raffa came from somewhere, and most likely not from Bonner’s own bank account. But Ballard had no idea where the late-show detective and the daytime dentists had crossed paths.