Because the case was of highest priority—high enough to draw Dr. J., the coroner herself, out to the crime scene—the examinations of the bodies were conducted late Friday morning at the Medical Examiner’s Office, with Dr. J. supervising several deputy coroners assigned to each of the bodies. While there was little doubt as to cause of death of the victims, recovery of bullets from the bodies was an important step in the investigation and thus gave the individual cases priority status. Usually autopsies weren’t even scheduled for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. These were conducted less than twelve hours after the deaths.
Dr. J. conducted the Fabian autopsy herself. The actual autopsy report would take several days to produce but in the meantime Chastain took notes as the attending investigator. It was in those notes that Ballard came across a sentence and a question that turned her thoughts on the case in a new direction.
According to Chastain’s notes, Dr. J. had labeled a wound on Fabian’s chest as a first-degree burn that had occurred at the time of death but was not caused by a firearm. Chastain had added a second notation to this conclusion: “Battery burn?”
Ballard froze as she remembered seeing Chastain, Dr. J., and Lieutenant Olivas gathered around Fabian’s body at the crime scene and studying his chest.
Now she knew why. Fabian had a burn on his chest that may have come from a battery.
Ballard quickly moved back to the property report on Fabian and saw nothing listed as recovered with the body that could explain the burn. Whatever was burning him at the time of the shooting was taken from the scene—apparently by the shooter.
It all tumbled together for Ballard. She believed that Fabian was wearing a listening device. He was wired at the Dancers meeting, and the battery of the device had started to burn him. It was a well-known hazard in undercover work. Compact listening devices overheat and oils and sweat from the body can create an arcing connection with the battery. Professional UCs take measures to insulate themselves from what they call bug burn, wrapping the devices in rubber sheathing to place the devices away from the body’s sweat glands.
There was nothing in the background material on Fabian that Ballard had reviewed that showed he had ever worked as an undercover operative. But there was a burn on his chest that indicated otherwise in the Dancers massacre.
Ballard believed that Chastain was onto something and it might have been what got him killed.
18
Ballard waited until nine a.m. Sunday to knock on Dean Towson’s door. She had just come from breakfast at the Du-par’s in Studio City after a relatively slow night on the late shift. She’d had only two callouts, first to sign off on a suicide, and second to aid in the search for a missing old man with Alzheimer’s. He was found in a neighbor’s carport before she even got to the call location.
It had taken all of her will and patience to hold back from attempting to make contact with Towson in the middle of the night. The more she considered Ken Chastain’s autopsy notes, the more she believed that Towson might hold a key to solving the mystery of what had happened in the booth at the Dancers.
But she managed to exercise restraint and used the time between the callouts to take a deeper dive into all law enforcement databases available in a search for details about the three men murdered in the booth at the Dancers. The effort paid off just before dawn. By collating the criminal histories of the three men along with their incarceration locations she was able to find the crossing point—the place where all three of them could have previously met and interacted. Five years earlier, all three men from the booth were housed at the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic.
Pitchess was part of Los Angeles County’s vast jail system. Decades earlier it was a minimum-security drunk farm, where hapless miscreants dried out and served their sentences for drunk driving and public intoxication. Now it was the biggest facility in the county system and operated under heavy security. Almost eight thousand male inmates were housed there while awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year. In May 2012, Santangelo was in Pitchess in the middle of a ninety-day sentence for battery while Fabian was there for a thirty-day stint for a drug-possession rap and Abbott was finishing a six-month term for an illegal gaming conviction. As far as Ballard could determine, the three men had overlapped at Pitchess for three weeks.
Ballard knew Pitchess was a big place. She had been there numerous times to conduct interviews with inmates. But she knew there were ways of cutting down the population pool that would have included the three men from the booth. Gangs were segregated according to race and affiliation, and the dorms dedicated to gangs at Pitchess accounted for half of the facility’s capacity. Ballard had found no record of any of the three booth men having street gang affiliation.
The remaining half of the facility was further segregated into dorms for inmates awaiting trials and hearings, and for those already convicted and serving out sentences. Santangelo, Fabian, and Abbott were in this latter group—they were already sentenced. That put the pool that they were swimming in at approximately two thousand inmates. It was a small enough number that Ballard believed it was possible that the three men interacted. All three were involved in crimes of vice—gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs—and they may have engaged in their businesses even behind the steel fences of the jail. The bottom line was that Ballard had good reason to believe that Santangelo, Fabian, and Abbott had known each other for as long as five years before their fateful and final meeting at the Dancers.
There was nothing in the case reports Ballard had reviewed to indicate that the official investigation of the Dancers massacre had reached the same conclusion about the victims in the booth. Ballard now faced the dilemma of whether she should find a way to share her information with the investigation, even though it was headed by the man who had done his level best to drive her from the police department.
Additionally, her conclusions about the three men could reflect on the fourth unknown man in the booth—the shooter. Had he also been at Pitchess with the other three? Was he also a trafficker in vice operations? Or was he someone whose connection to the other men came from a completely different angle?
As she checked out at the end of shift and headed for breakfast, Ballard decided that she would continue her investigation and would find a conduit for feeding her findings to the official inquiry. She somehow felt she owed that to Chastain.
Fed and full, she now wanted to brace Towson before he could leave home for the day. Eight o’clock would have been her preferred time but she gave him an extra hour of sleep because it was a Sunday. She was counting on his cooperation, and that extra hour of sleep could pay off.
She also hoped to catch him before he’d had time to read the Times, because she knew there was a story in it about Chastain’s murder. If Towson was aware of the murder, he might refuse to talk to her out of fear that whoever had targeted Chastain might go after him next.
Ballard knew that all of Chastain’s moves over the last two days would be retraced by the detectives investigating his murder. The Times story, which she had read at Du-par’s, said that the murder was being folded into the Dancers investigation but that the team working the case would be bolstered by detectives from the Major Crimes Unit.
Ballard had pulled Towson’s home address off the DMV computer and proceeded to Sherman Oaks after breakfast, carrying with her two cups of coffee in a cardboard tray.
The defense lawyer lived in a town house on Dickens, just a block south of Ventura Boulevard. The place had underground parking and a security entrance on the street. Ballard waited on the sidewalk and went in when someone stepped through the gate to walk a dog.
“Forgot my keys,” she mumbled.
She located Towson’s door and knocked. She pulled her badge off her belt and had it up and ready. He answered the door in what she assumed were his sleep clothes: workout pants and a T-shirt with a Nike Swoosh on it. He was about fifty and short with a potbelly, glasses, and a gray beard.
“Mr. Towson, LAPD. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“How’d you get in the building?”
“The security door was ajar. I just came in.”
“It has a spring. It should have automatically closed. Anyway, I already talked to the LAPD and it’s a Sunday morning. Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I have no court. I’ll be in the office all day.”
“No, sir, it can’t wait. As you know, we have a critical investigation under way and we’re cross-matching our interviews.”
“What the hell is cross-matching?”
“Different detectives covering the same ground. Sometimes one picks up something the other missed. Witnesses remember new details.”
“I’m not a witness to anything.”
“But you have information that is important.”
“You know what cross-matching sounds like? It sounds like what you do when you don’t have jack shit.”
Ballard didn’t respond. She wanted him to think that. It would make him feel important and he would be more open. It seemed clear that he didn’t know that Chastain was dead. She proffered the cardboard tray.
“I brought you a coffee,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I brew my own.”
He stepped back so she could enter. She was in.
Towson offered Ballard a seat in the kitchen so they could talk while he brewed. Ballard drank her Du-par’s coffee. She had been running for almost twenty-four hours straight and needed it.
“Do you live alone here?” she asked.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m as single as they come. You?”
It was an odd question to throw back to her. She had been establishing the lay of the land: who was in the house and how she might conduct the interview. His question to her wasn’t an appropriate response but she saw in it the opportunity to foster cooperation and to get what she needed from him.
“Nothing serious,” she said. “I work odd hours and it’s hard to keep anything going.”
There, she had shown him the possibility. It was now time to get down to business.
“You were handling Gordon Fabian’s defense in the federal drug case,” she said.
“That’s right,” Towson said. “And I know it sounds cynical but his getting killed saved my having to put a goose egg on my scorecard, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean you were going to lose the case?”
“That’s right. He was going to go down.”
“Did Fabian know it?”
“I told him. They caught him fair and square with a kilo in the glove compartment of a car he was driving, was alone in, and that was registered to him. There really was no way out of that box. Their probable cause to stop him was down-the-line legit as well. I had nothing to work with. We were going to trial and it was going to be a very quick ride to a guilty verdict.”
“He wasn’t interested in a plea agreement?”
“None was offered. The kilo had cartel markings on it. The prosecutor would only talk about a plea if Fabian gave up his connection. And Fabian wasn’t going to do that, because he said he’d rather go to prison for five years—that’s the mandatory minimum—than have the Sinaloa Cartel put a hit on him for flipping.”
“He was out on bail. A hundred K. How’d he come up with money for that and money for you? You are one of the better, more expensive attorneys in town.”
“If there is a compliment in there, thank you. Fabian liquidated his mother’s home as well as some other valuables. It was enough to cover my fee and a ten percent bond.”
Ballard nodded and took a long drink of tepid coffee. She saw Towson surreptitiously check his reflection in the glass of an overhead cabinet door and smooth his hair. She had him saying more than he should about the case. Maybe it was because the client was dead and it didn’t matter. Maybe it was because he was interested in her and he knew the best way to a detective’s heart was through cooperation. She knew that she now had to get to the purpose of her visit.
“My colleague Detective Chastain called you Friday,” she said.
“That’s right,” Towson said. “And I told him pretty much what I’m telling you. I know nothing about what happened.”
“You don’t have any idea why Fabian was at the Dancers on Thursday night?”
“Not really. All I know is he was a desperate man. They do desperate things.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know.”
“Had he ever mentioned the name Cordell Abbott or Gino Santangelo to you before?”
“We are straying into areas of attorney-client privilege, which happens to stay solidly in place after death. But I’ll tell you this: the answer is no, he never mentioned them to me, though it is obvious that he knew them. He was, after all, murdered with them.”
Ballard decided to get to the point. Towson was either willing to cross the privilege line or he was not.
“Why was Fabian wearing a wire to that meeting at the Dancers?” she asked.
Towson stared at her for a moment before answering. Ballard could tell the question had struck a chord. It meant something.
“That’s interesting,” Towson said.
“Really?” Ballard said. “Why is it interesting?”
“Because as we have already established, he was fucked. And at some point in our relationship, I told him that if he wasn’t willing to give up the cartel, his only way out might be to give up somebody else.”
“And how did he respond to that?”
Towson breathed out heavily.
“You know what, I think I need to wave the attorney-client confidentiality flag here. We are getting too far into private communications between—”
“Please, six people are dead. If you know something, I need to know it.”
“I thought it was five.”
Ballard realized that she had slipped and included Chastain in the count.
“I mean five. What did Fabian say when you asked if he could give somebody else up?”
Towson finally began to pour himself a cup of coffee. Ballard watched him and waited.
“Do you know that I worked for the District Attorney’s Office as a baby lawyer?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t know that,” Ballard said.
Ballard silently rebuked herself for not backgrounding Towson when she was backgrounding his client.
Towson got a half gallon container of skim milk out of the refrigerator and topped off his cup.
“Yes, I was eight years there as a deputy D.A.,” he said. “The last four, I was in J-SID. You know what that is, right?”
He pronounced it Jay-Sid. Everybody called it that and everybody knew what it meant. The Justice System Integrity Division was the D.A.’s own watchdog unit.
“You investigated cops,” Ballard said.
Towson nodded, then leaned back against the counter and stayed standing as he sipped from the cup. Ballard thought it was some kind of a male thing. Stay standing and you have the higher ground in the conversation.
“That’s right,” he said. “And we ran a lot of wires, you know? Best way to bring a dirty cop to ground was to get them on tape. They always folded if they knew their own words were going to be played in open court. Their own guilty words.”
He paused there and Ballard said nothing. She knew he was trying to give her something and still not tread all the way across the line of his dead client’s confidentiality. She waited and Towson took another drink of coffee before continuing.
“So let me preface this by saying again that I do not know why Fabian was in that club Thursday night and that I have no idea who he was meeting with or what it was about. But I explained to him that if he was going to give somebody up in exchange for a plea agreement, it had to be a bigger fish than himself. I mean, obviously that’s how it works. He had to give up somebody the US Attorney’s Office would want more than it wanted him.”
“Okay. And what did he say to that?”
“He said,
‘How about a cop?’”
Towson made a gesture with his coffee cup of sweeping his arm away from his body like he was saying, you can take the story from there.
Ballard composed herself and her thoughts. What Towson was saying matched the theory she had been considering through the night: that Fabian had worn a wire to the meeting at the Dancers and that the fourth man in the booth was a police officer. It was the only explanation for Chastain’s behavior—his continuing to work the case Friday night after being told to go home.
“Let’s back up a second,” she said. “When was your conversation about bigger fish with Fabian?”
“About a month ago,” Towson said. “It was the last time I spoke to him.”
“And what did you say when he said, ‘How about a cop’?”
“I said I knew from my J-SID days that the feds always liked to trade for cops. Sorry, but it’s a fact. More headlines, more political cachet. Single-key drug dealers are a dime a dozen. Prosecuting a cop gets a D.A. salivating.”
“So you told him all that. Did you tell him to wear a wire?”
“No, I never said that. I cautioned him. I said crooked cops are very dangerous because they have so much to lose.”
“Did you ask who the cop was?”
“No, I didn’t. You have to understand that this was a very general conversation. It was not a planning meeting. He didn’t say, ‘I know a bent cop.’ He said, ‘What if I could deliver a cop?’ And in very general terms I said, ‘Yeah, a cop would be good.’ And that was it. I didn’t tell him to wear a wire but I may have said something along the lines of making sure that he had something solid. That was it and that was the last time we spoke. I never saw him again.”
Ballard now believed she knew the motive for the massacre and the reason the shooter took out Fabian first—because he was the traitor. The shooter eliminated everyone in the booth, then reached into Fabian’s shirt and pulled the recorder.
The question was, how did the shooter know about the wire? To Ballard it seemed obvious. The recorder had started to burn Fabian’s chest and he revealed himself either by flinching or by attempting to pull the wire off his skin. There was some kind of tell that the cop in the booth picked up on. And he acted quickly and decisively when he realized the meeting was a setup.