The Night Fire: A Ballard and Bosch thriller (Harry Bosch 22) (23 page)

“No, is okay.”

“Digoberto, I don’t like you working out here at night by yourself. It’s dangerous working alone.”

“What about you? You alone.”

“It’s different.”

She lifted the flap on her jacket to show the gun holstered on her hip. Then she held up the rover.

“I call, my friends come running,” she said.

“The police, they protect me,” Digoberto said. “Like you.”

“We can’t be here all the time. I don’t want to get a call and find out you got robbed or hurt. If your son won’t help you, then find somebody who will. You really need to.”

“Okay, okay. Here you are.”

He handed her a paper plate through the counter window. Ballard’s tacos were on it, wrapped in foil. She handed a ten through the window and Digoberto held his hands up like he was under arrest.

“No, no, for you,” he said. “I like you. You bring other police here.”

“No, but you need to make a living. That’s not fair.”

She put the bill down on the counter and refused to take it back. She carried her plate over to a folding table where there were a variety of hot sauces and napkins. She grabbed napkins and a bottle of the mild sauce and went to the communal picnic table that was empty at the moment.

Ballard ate facing Sunset Boulevard and with her back to the taco truck. The tacos were delicious and she didn’t bother with the sauce on the second one. Before she was finished, Digoberto came out of the truck through the back door of the kitchen and brought her another taco.

“Mariscos,”
he said. “You try.”

“You’re going to make me
el gordo
,” she said.
“Pero gracias.”

She took a bite of the fish taco and found it to be just as good as the shrimp. But it was milder and she put on hot sauce. Her next bite was better but she never got a third. Her rover squawked and Washington sent her to a traffic stop on Cahuenga beneath the 101 freeway overpass. It was no more than five minutes away. Ballard asked Washington why a detective was needed and he simply said, “You’ll see.”

Since she had heard no call earlier from patrol or dispatch concerning that location, Ballard knew that whatever it was, they were keeping it off the radio. Plenty of media gypsies in the city listened to police frequencies and responded to anything that might produce a sellable video.

Ballard waved her thanks to Digoberto, who was back in his truck, tossed her plates into a trash can, and got in her car. She took Sunset to Cahuenga and headed north toward the 101. She saw a single patrol car with its roof lights flashing behind an old van that advertised twenty-four-hour rug cleaning on its side panels. Ballard didn’t have time to wonder about who would need rug cleaning in the middle of the night. One of the patrol officers who had stopped the van came toward her car, flashlight in hand. It was Rich Meyer, whom she had seen earlier at roll call.

Ballard killed the engine and exited the car.

“Rich, whaddaya got?”

“This guy in the van, he must’ve gotten off the freeway and pulled under here so that the women he had in the back could take care of business. Me and Shoo come passing through and there’s four women squatting on the sidewalk.”

“Squatting?”

“Urinating! It looks like human trafficking, but nobody’s got ID and nobody’s speaking English.”

Ballard started toward the van where Meyer’s partner, Shuman, was standing with a man and four women, all of them with hands bound behind their back with zip ties. The women wore short dresses and appeared disheveled. They all had dark hair and were clearly Latina. None looked older than twenty.

Ballard pulled her mini-light off her belt and first pointed the beam through the open rear doors of the van. There was a mattress and some ragged blankets strewn across it. A couple of plastic bags were filled with clothes. The van smelled of body odor and desperation.

She moved the light forward and saw a phone in a dashboard cradle. It had a GPS map glowing on it. Moving around the van to the driver’s door, she opened it, leaned in, and pulled the phone out of its holder. By tapping the screen she was able to determine the van’s intended destination: an address on Etiwanda Street in the Valley. She put the phone in her pocket and went over to where Meyer and Shuman were standing with the detainees.

“Who do we have working tonight that has Spanish?” Ballard asked.

“Uh, Perez is on—she’s in the U-boat,” Meyer said. “And Basinger is fluent.”

Ballard now remembered seeing both officers at roll call. She knew Perez pretty well, plus she thought a woman would be better for interviewing the four females. If she was working the U-boat, which is what they called a single-officer car that only took reports on minor crimes, calling her would not pull her off active patrol. She raised her rover and requested that Officer Perez roll to the scene. Perez came back with a roger and an ETA of eight minutes.

“We should just call ICE and be done with this,” Shuman said. Ballard shook her head.

“No, we’re not doing that,” she said.

“That’s the protocol,” Shuman insisted. “They’re obviously illegals—we call ICE.”

Ballard saw that Shuman had one bar on his uniform sleeve. Five years on the job. She looked at Meyer, who had four bars on his sleeve. He was standing slightly behind Shuman. He rolled his eyes so only Ballard would see. It was a sign that he wasn’t going to cause Ballard any grief on this.

“I’m the detective,” Ballard said. “I have control of this investigation. We’re not calling ICE. If you have a problem with that, Shuman, you can get back in your car and go back out on patrol. I’ll handle it from here.”

Shuman averted his eyes and shook his head.

“We call ICE, they get sent back and then they do it again,” Ballard said. “They go through all the rape and horrors they went through getting here the first time.”

“That’s not our concern,” Shuman said.

“Maybe it should be,” Ballard said.

“Hey, Shoo,” Meyer said. “I got this here. Why don’t you go back to the shop and start the incident report.”

The
shop
was the patrol car. Shuman walked off without another word and got in the passenger side of the patrol car. Ballard saw him roughly swing the MDT on its swivel toward him so he could start to type in his incident report.

“I hope he spells my name right,” Ballard said.

“I’m sure he will,” Meyer said.

Perez got there two minutes early. With her translating, Ballard first questioned the driver, who claimed to know only that he was paid to take the four young women to a party. He said he did not remember where he picked them up or who had paid him. Ballard had Meyer put him in the back of his patrol car and transport him to the Hollywood Station jail, where she would later file paperwork arresting him for human trafficking.

The four women found their voices after the driver was gone from the scene. Through Perez they one by one told stories that were sad and horrible, yet typical of such journeys made by desperate people. They had traveled from Oaxaca, Mexico, and were smuggled across the border in an avocado truck with a secret compartment, each forced to pay for the trip by having sex with several of the men involved. Once across in Calexico they were placed in the van, told they owed thousands of dollars more for the remaining trip, and driven north to Los Angeles. They did not know what awaited them at the address on Etiwanda in the Valley but Ballard did: sexual servitude in gang-operated brothels where they would never break even and would never be missed should they stop earning and their masters decide to bury them in the desert.

After calling for a police tow for the van, Ballard made a call to a battered-woman’s clinic in North Hollywood, where she had delivered women before. She spoke to her contact and explained the situation. The woman agreed to take in the four Mexican women and see that they were medically treated and given beds and fresh clothes. In the morning, they would be counseled on their options: returning home voluntarily or seeking asylum based on the threat that the group that procured them would seek to harm them should they go back to Mexico. Neither choice was good. Ballard knew that many hardships awaited the women.

After a flatbed from the police garage arrived to impound the van, Ballard and Perez each took two of the women in their cars to the shelter in North Hollywood.

Ballard did not get back to the station until five a.m. She wrote up the arrest report on the driver of the van, using the name Juan Doe because he still refused to identify himself. That was okay with Ballard. She knew his fingerprint would provide his ID if he had had any previous engagement with U.S. law enforcement. She thought the chances of that were good.

The department had a human trafficking task force operating out of the PAB. Ballard put together a package on the case and put it into the transit box to be delivered downtown first thing. It was one of the few times she didn’t mind passing on a case, as late-show protocol dictated. Human trafficking was one of the ugliest crimes she encountered as a detective and it left scars as well as drew up memories of her own past, when she’d been left alone on the streets of Honolulu as a fourteen-year-old.

She left the station at seven a.m. and headed toward her van. She knew she had to be in the Crenshaw District by noon at the latest to be on-site and ready to shadow the meeting between Elvin Kidd and Marcel Dupree. But at the moment she needed the beach. As tired as she was, she wasn’t planning to sleep. She needed to get her dog and get out on the water to push herself against the current. To dig deep with the paddle until she had exhausted her body and mind and nothing could get in to haunt her.

Bosch had risen early to complete his assessment of the five investigative tracks abandoned in the Montgomery murder case. He wanted to finish before he needed to leave the house to back up Ballard at Dulan’s soul food restaurant.

The night before, after Ballard had left, he had reviewed the fourth branch of the investigation and found that it needed follow-up. It revolved around a ruling Judge Montgomery had made in a civil dispute. It started when a Sherman Oaks man named Larry Cassidy began marketing a lunch box that he claimed to have invented. The lunch box had insulated hot and cold compartments, but what made it stand out was its clear plastic window on the inside of the lid; a parent could slip a note or photo behind it for their child to see at school lunchtime.

Sales of the lunch box were moderate until Cassidy’s wife, Melanie, started appearing on the Home Shopping Network cable channel to hawk the boxes for $19.95 each. She was going to the HSN studios in Tampa, Florida, twice a month to sell the boxes and was moving thousands of them during each appearance. Cost of manufacture was low and after HSN’s cut, the couple were making almost $200,000 a month. That’s when Cassidy’s ex-wife, Maura Frederick, demanded a share for being the one who designed the box while still married to Cassidy and raising their son, Larry Jr.

Cassidy refused to share even a small percentage of the income generated by the so-called Love for Lunch box and Frederick sued him. He countersued, claiming her suit was a malicious money grab for something she had no right to.

At an evidentiary hearing, Judge Montgomery had both sides proffer their stories on the inspiration for the product’s invention. Cassidy provided original drawings dated well after his divorce from Frederick, as well as the patent application he had filed, and receipts from a plastic manufacturer that produced the first mock-ups of the colorful lunch boxes from the design sketches.

Frederick produced only a notarized statement from her son, Larry Jr., now seventeen years old, in which he said he remembered finding notes and cards and drawings from his mother in the Star Wars lunch box he carried to school as a young boy.

Montgomery dismissed Frederick’s lawsuit and held for Larry Sr., ruling that while Frederick’s actions of long ago certainly might have inspired the Love for Lunch invention, her involvement stopped there; she took on none of the risks or creative aspects in the manufacture and sales of the product. He likened it to someone who used to prop their phone against a book or other object for viewing the screen suing the manufacturer of phone attachments that prop the devices for viewing. Frederick could not be the only parent who ever put a note in a lunch box for their child.

It all seemed cut-and-dried and Bosch initially wondered why the case was included as a potential avenue of investigation in the Montgomery murder. But then he read a report stating that Larry Cassidy Sr. and his new wife, the public face of Love for Lunch, had been found murdered in Tampa, where they had gone to tape an HSN spot. The couple were found shot to death in a rental car in the empty parking lot of a country club, not far from a restaurant where they enjoyed dining while in town. Both had been shot in the back of the head by someone who had been in the back seat of the car. It was not a high-crime district and the assassinations remained unsolved as of the time Montgomery was murdered in Los Angeles. A copy of a probate filing in the case documents showed that Larry Jr. was the heir to his father and to the money earned by the Love for Lunch business. Larry Jr. still lived in the home of his mother, Maura Frederick.

LAPD detectives Gustafson and Reyes included the case in their list of potential avenues of investigation under the theory that if Frederick was involved in the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, her anger toward the couple might have also extended to the judge who ruled against her. They made initial efforts to interview Maura Frederick, but those efforts were blocked by an attorney representing Frederick and then dropped altogether when Herstadt was arrested and charged in the judge’s murder.

Bosch put the name
Maura Frederick
on his list beneath the name
Clayton Manley.
He thought she should be given a fuller look.

Now, with a mug of morning coffee on the table before him, Bosch took up the final strand of the original investigation. This was the third civil action that had caught the investigators’ attention. It again involved a lawsuit and a countersuit. This time the dispute was between a well-known Hollywood actor and his longtime agent. The actor accused the agent of embezzling millions of dollars over his career, and now that that career was on the wane, he wanted a full accounting and the return of everything that was stolen.