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“Let me make sure I understand the chain on this,” Blodget said. “Bosch saw Rawls put the box in the dumpster, but then you waited three days to go retrieve it? Why?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant, and I’m sorry if I’m confusing you,” Ballard said. “Bosch did not see him dump the box. It just came to him later that Rawls might have been in the process of dumping evidence when he saw Bosch and decided to make a run for it. So, in other words, he dumped the box, saw Bosch, then ran back to his car and took off.”
“But why did you wait three days to go back? See, that’s a problem. If he didn’t see Rawls dump the box, we’re going to have a difficult time linking it.”
“Well, who else could it be? The dumpster is literally sixty feet from the back door of a serial killer’s business. Bosch got banged up pretty good in what happened Sunday. He fucked up his knee and ribs in the crash, not to mention a bullet whizzing by his head and clipping his ear. It took him a couple days to put two and two together, and then we went dumpster diving.”
Blodget nodded as she wrote a short note on a legal pad.
“Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “Those three days. It could have been anybody who dumped the box. As you know, the shootout with Rawls hit the media in a very big way. Somebody could have seen the story and then gone down there to dump the box, hoping it would be found and linked to Rawls.”
The fog was burning away. Ballard stared at Blodget incredulously.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “What is going on here? This kid’s been in prison for thirteen years. I mean, he’s not even a kid anymore. He shouldn’t be there.”
“Are you a hundred percent sure about that?” Blodget asked.
“Yes, I am. Jorge Ochoa is innocent.”
“It was a DNA match.”
“Yeah, and she was his girlfriend. That was his defense: they had sex that night, he went home, and the killer came next. And now we know that’s what happened. It was Rawls, not Ochoa. The murder weapon was in the box. You have the autopsy report right there in front of you. Blunt force trauma, circular impacts to the skull, one inch in diameter. Those were hammer blows, Vickie. It’s obvious.”
“I know all of that, Renée. That’s not the point. We need linkage to Rawls. Were there any prints on the box? Anything that directly ties it or its contents to him?”
“No, I had it processed. No prints, no fibers, no DNA from Rawls. But remember, he was getting rid of the box. He would have made sure it was clean and not traceable to him. The only flaw in the plan was that we were onto him and Bosch was watching. He didn’t count on that until he saw Bosch and tried to flee.”
“There are just too many holes in it. I can’t take it across the street. Not yet. I need you to get more evidence.”
Blodget’s office was in the Hall of Justice, which was directly across Temple Street from the downtown criminal courthouse, where the elected D.A.’s office was located on the sixteenth floor.
“You said Bosch got into an argument with a resident there,” Blodget said. “Did you talk to this man? Did he see Rawls dump the box?”
“I doubt he had an angle on it,” Ballard said. “But no, we haven’t talked to him. I didn’t think it was necessary when the rest is so obvious.”
“And nothing in property or evidence storage from the case?”
“No. After Ochoa lost his last appeal, there was an evidence disposal order from the court. There is nothing but what you have right there. No crime scene to go back to, no witnesses to show photos of Rawls to. Just the box.”
Blodget nodded and wrote something down.
“Then there’s nothing I can do at the moment,” she said. “I’m sorry, Renée.”
“This is because of the recall, isn’t it?” Ballard said.
The district attorney was facing a recall election because his liberal policies of making it more difficult to send offenders to prison had resulted in a surge in crime stats across Los Angeles County. New directives from the sixteenth floor, which did not require bail for most crimes, prevented prosecutors fromadding penalty enhancements for use of guns in the commission of crimes, and deferred prosecution for misdemeanors and even some violent felonies, had created a revolving-door justice system. The media routinely reported on suspects freshly released from jail without bail or without being charged and then committing exactly the same types of crimes—sometimes within hours.
Though the D.A. attempted to blame this on the Covid pandemic and the need to lessen crowding in jails during the crisis, he had lost the support of the law enforcement agencies in the county as well as a significant percentage of the populace. A well-funded recall campaign was underway. A story about the D.A.’s Office putting an innocent man in prison—even though it was long before the current D.A. was elected—was not going to help him keep his job.
“Look, I’m not going to deny the reality of what is happening across the street,” Blodget said. “But I know how this will go. I go over there with this case as it is, and they’ll kill it and Ochoa never gets free.”
“So you’re telling me to wait until after the recall,” Ballard said. “Make Jorge Ochoa wait up there in Corcoran for another six months for something he didn’t do, never mind all the years he’s already spent there.”
“What I’m telling you is that if I take it across the street right now and it gets rejected, then good luck taking it a second time, no matter who is in the corner office on sixteen.”
Ballard nodded and held her tongue. She knew Blodget was not her enemy. The situation was what it was. And she needed to keep Blodget on her side because there would be future cases with issues that would come in wobbling. She would need Blodget then.
Ballard also knew this was not the only place she could take the case. There was an alternate way to free Jorge Ochoa if she wanted to risk it.
