AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, I remember that.”
“That one ended up being about bent cops, too.”
Bosch got out of the city car and looked back in at Ballard before closing the door.
“I’ll call you when I get eyes on Rawls.”
“Roger—I mean, sounds good.”
“That was close.”
“Caught myself.”
“Good luck with the warrant.”
He closed the door, and Ballard pulled back into traffic, drawing a horn from a driver who thought she had cut him off. She checked her rearview and saw Bosch standing on the sidewalk looking at his phone. He was summoning a ride.
An hour later, Ballard was at her workstation at Ahmanson. She was putting the finishing touches on the probable cause statement that would be included in an application for a search warrant allowing her to take a DNA swab from the mouth of Ted Rawls.
Paul Masser arrived. He was wearing shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt.
“Oh, shit, I pulled you off the golf course?” Ballard said.
“Not a big deal,” Masser said. “I was on the seventeenth green at Wilshire when you called. I would have had to walk in from there. So I just played the last hole, took a quick shower, and came directly here.”
He gestured to the golfing outfit he was wearing.
“I got these in the golf shop because I didn’t have anything in my locker to change into.”
“Well, I have the PC statement. I’ll print it and you can start.”
A search warrant was all about the probable cause statement. It had to convince a judge that there was enough legal cause to allow for a search and seizure of a citizen’s property or person.Everything else in a search warrant was largely boilerplate. The judge it was submitted to would likely skip over all of that and go directly to the PC.
“Who’s up today?” Masser asked. “Did you check yet?”
“No,” Ballard asked. “Why don’t you do that while I get this from the printer.”
Masser was inquiring about which judge from the criminal courts division was up on rotation to handle after-hours search warrant requests. This was a key question because judges had particular viewpoints and practices that became known to the trade—the lawyers who appeared before them and the police officers who went to them for search warrant approval. Some judges were fierce defenders of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Others were fierce law-and-order judges who never saw a search warrant application they didn’t like. In addition, they were elected to the bench. While they were charged with wielding their power without personal or political bias, it was a rare judge who didn’t occasionally peek out from under the blindfold at the possible electoral ramifications of a ruling—like whether to allow the state to take a DNA sample from an ex-cop suspected of being a killer.
Ballard came back from the printer and handed Masser the two-page PC statement just as he was hanging up his desk phone.
“Judge Canterbury is up,” he said. “And that is not good. He’s very strict on search and seizure.”
“I’ve heard,” Ballard said. “I might have another way to go.”
Most detectives worked on establishing a relationship with a go-to judge whom they could count on to be sympathetic whenit came to questions of probable cause. It was a form of judge shopping, but it was practiced widely. Ballard, from her years on the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, had woken more than a few judges up in the middle of the night to get a search warrant signed. She had a few names on her contact list that she could call if she and Masser didn’t want to go to Judge Canterbury.
Ballard pointed to the document now in Masser’s hands.
“You’re going to be upset by what you read,” she said. “And I don’t want you repeating any of it to anybody. Clear?”
“Yes, clear,” Masser said. “Now I can’t wait.”
She left him at his workstation and went back to hers. While Masser was going through the PC document, she opened one of the original murder books from the Pearlman case and started leafing through the transcripts from the interviews conducted by the original detectives. Her memory was correct. There were apparently no interviews with Nelson Hastings or Ted Rawls. And this carried through to the original lab reports. Neither one of them had ever had their palm print compared to that found on the windowsill in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom.
This was a serious flaw in the original investigation. Hastings and Rawls were close friends of Jake Pearlman’s and were acquainted with his sister. They should have been interviewed and printed—as Kramer had been. The fact that they weren’t interviewed contradicted what had appeared to Ballard to be a tight and thorough investigation. Since the ODs on the case were no longer available, Ballard felt there was only one person she could talk to for clarification of this issue.
She called Nelson Hastings.
