They believed he had probably been one of the online suitors but they did not have evidence of that and could not charge him with solicitation of a minor. But they also did not need to pursue linking him to the online sting once they found brass knuckles in his pockets. He was arrested for felony possession of a dangerous weapon and booked into the Van Nuys jail.
The summary report listed the undercover officer who arrested Trent by serial number only. Ballard sent the report to the bureau’s printer, then picked up the desk phone and called the department’s personnel unit. She quickly had a name to go with the serial number of the vice officer. He was Jorge Fernandez and he was still assigned to the Valley Bureau’s vice squad. Ballard called the Valley vice unit and was told that Fernandez was off duty. She left her cell number and a message for him to call her back, no matter what time.
She next took a deeper dive into online records and pulled up an abstract on Trent’s case. She learned that following his arrest, Trent negotiated an agreement with the District Attorney’s Office in which he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, paid a five-hundred-dollar fine, and was placed on three years’ probation. The plea was part of a pretrial intervention program that would allow Trent to have his record cleaned if he completed probation without another arrest.
On the court records, Trent’s home address was listed on Wrightwood Drive in Studio City. Ballard plugged the address into Google and found a map showing that Wrightwood dropped off of Mulholland Drive on the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. She clicked on the street-view feature and saw what looked like a contemporary ranch house with a double-wide garage. But she knew from the map that the house was on the mountain and that it was most likely that the structure stretched one or two levels down the slope from the street. It was a very typical design of many of the homes in the hills. The top floor contained the common areas—kitchen, dining room, living room, and so on—while the lower levels contained the bedrooms. There would be stairs, or in some cases an elevator, that led down to the lower floors.
Ballard realized that someone unfamiliar with these mountainside designs could view the houses as odd because the bedrooms were on the bottom floors. In that way, Trent’s home might be considered an upside-down house.
That realization dumped a jolt of adrenaline into Ballard’s blood. She leaned closer to the computer screen to study Trent’s booking photo and arrest report. The personal details on the report said Trent was a car salesman who worked at an Acura dealership on Van Nuys Boulevard. The first question that struck her at that point was how a car salesman afforded a home in the hills, where price tags easily started in the seven figures.
She switched over to a different search site that handled public records and put in Trent’s name and date of birth. Soon she was looking at records of a marriage dissolution that occurred seven months after his arrest. Beatrice Trent had claimed irreconcilable differences in her divorce petition and it appeared that Trent did not contest the filing. The three-year marriage was dissolved.
There was also a record of a lawsuit from 2011 in which Trent was the plaintiff in a personal injury claim against a company called Island Air and its insurer. The record showed only the filing—for injuries sustained in a helicopter crash in Long Beach—but not the outcome of the case. Ballard assumed that this meant the case had been settled before trial.
Ballard printed all of these reports and then picked up the desk phone and called the dealership where Trent worked. She asked for him by name and the call was transferred.
A voice said, “This is Tom. How can I help you?”
Ballard hesitated and then disconnected. She looked at the clock and saw it was just past six o’clock and in the guts of rush hour. It would be a miserable crawl from Hollywood up into the Valley.
There was no guarantee that Trent would even still be working by the time she got there, but Ballard decided to give it a shot. She wanted to get a look at him.
10
The Acura dealership where Thomas Trent worked was at the end of a long stretch of competing dealerships that stretched north along Van Nuys Boulevard toward the center of the Valley. It took Ballard almost an hour to get there. She had driven her own van because the city-ride assigned to her and Jenkins screamed COP! with its baby-shit-brown paint, no-frills hubcaps, and grille-and-rear-window flashers. Her purpose was only to get a look at Trent and get a read on him, not to alert him to the police interest.
She had downloaded the mug shot from Trent’s arrest three years earlier to her phone and she pulled it up on the screen now. Parked at a curb on Van Nuys, she studied it and then scanned the new- and used-car lots for salesmen. There was no match. The interior showroom was still a possibility, but since the sales booths appeared to be lined along the rear wall, she had no angle on their occupants. She called the dealership’s main number and asked for Trent again, just to make sure he hadn’t left for the day. He once again answered in the same way, but this time Ballard didn’t disconnect.
“This is Tom, how can I help you?”
There was a salesman’s confidence in his voice.
“I wanted to come in and look at an RDX but with this traffic I may be a while getting there,” Ballard said.
She had read the name of the model off the windshield of an SUV that sat on a pedestal near the lot’s entrance.
“No worries!” Trent exclaimed. “I’m here till we shut her down tonight. What’s your name, hon?”
“Stella.”
“Well, Stella, are you looking to buy or lease?”
“Purchase.”
“Well, you’re in luck. We have a one percent financing deal going on this month. You bringing in a trade for me?”
“Uh, no. I think I’m just looking to buy.”
Through the showroom glass Ballard saw a man stand up in one of the booths on the rear wall. He was holding a corded phone to his ear. He put his arm down on top of the booth’s partition and spoke into the phone.
“Well, whatever you want, we’ve got,” he said.
Ballard heard the words at the same time the man in the showroom said them. It was Trent, though his appearance had changed some since his bust on Sepulveda Boulevard. He had a shaved head now and eyeglasses. Judging from what she could see of him, he had bulked up as well. His shoulders stretched the fabric of his short-sleeved dress shirt and it looked like his neck was too thick for him to connect the top button behind his tie.
Ballard saw something then and quickly reached into the storage compartment in the center console. She pulled out a compact set of binoculars.
“So, when you think you’ll get here?” Trent asked.
“Um …” Ballard stalled.
She put the phone on her lap and looked through the binos. She focused and got her first good look at Trent. The hand that was holding the phone to his ear appeared to be bruised along the knuckles.
She picked the phone back up.
“Twenty minutes,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”
“Good deal,” Trent said. “I’ll have an RDX ready to go.”
She ended the call, started the van, and pulled away from the curb.
Ballard drove up Van Nuys two blocks and took a right into a neighborhood of World War II–era homes. She pulled to a stop in front of one without any lights on and then climbed into the back of the van. She took off her gun, badge, and rover and put them into the lockbox welded to the wheel well. She pulled her wallet out of her shoulder bag and put it in there as well—no matter what happened at the dealership, she was not going to give Trent her driver’s license. She had already given a fake name and she would never risk him knowing her real name or address.
She quickly took off her suit next and put on a pair of jeans to go with her blouse. The jeans were loose-fitting so that she could wear her backup pistol in an ankle holster without it being obvious.
After putting on a pair of running shoes, she climbed back into the d
river’s seat. She returned to the dealership and this time drove in through the entrance and parked in front of the showroom.
Before she even got out, a silver RDX glided up behind her van and stopped—a salesman’s trick. It would prevent her from leaving. Trent got out smiling and pointing his finger at Ballard as she stepped out of the van.
“Stella, right?”
Without waiting for confirmation he raised his hand to present the RDX.
“And here she is.”
Ballard stepped to the back of the van. She looked at the RDX even though she wanted to look at Trent.
“Nice,” she said. “Is that the only color you have?”
“At the moment,” he said. “But I can get you any color you want. Two days tops.”
Now she looked at Trent and put out her hand.
“Hi, by the way,” she said.
He took her hand and she squeezed his firmly as they shook. She studied his face as she made sure to apply pressure to his knuckles. He never lost his salesman’s smile but she saw pain pulse in his cheeks. The bruising was fresh. She knew that brass knuckles, if fitted loosely, could easily damage and bruise the hand of the user.
“You want to take a test-drive?” Trent asked.
“Sure,” Ballard said.
“Perfect. I just need to make a copy of your driver’s license and insurance.”
“No problem.”
She opened her bag and began looking through it.
“Oh, damn,” she exclaimed. “I left my wallet at the office. It was my turn to pay for Starbucks and I must’ve left it on my desk. Damn it.”
“Not a problem,” Trent said. “Why don’t we take the RDX and drive to your office, then we’ll make copies and you drive back here?”
Ballard had considered that he might offer that and she had worked a response into her play.
“No, my office is out in Woodland Hills and I live in Hollywood,” she said. “That will take too long. My wife’s already going to be waiting for me for dinner. We go out on Fridays.”
“Your—” Trent said before catching himself. “Uh, well …”
He glanced through the glass into the showroom as if looking for someone.
“Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll make an exception to the rules this time if you want to take a short test-drive. Then we’ll set everything up for tomorrow and you can come back with ID, insurance … and your checkbook. Okay?”
“All right, but I’m not completely sure I want the car,” Ballard said. “I also don’t like silver. I was hoping for white.”
“I can get white here by Sunday, Monday at the latest. Tell you what, let’s roll!”
He walked quickly around the car to the passenger side, his arms pumping as though he were running. Ballard got in behind the wheel, drove the car out onto Van Nuys Boulevard, and headed north.
Trent gave her instructions to go up to Sherman Way and then turn west to the 405. She could then take the freeway down to the Burbank Boulevard exit and back over to Van Nuys, completing a driving rectangle that would give her a sense of the vehicle in urban and freeway environments. Ballard knew that the pattern would twice take them across Sepulveda Boulevard, the street where Trent had been arrested three years earlier.
Trent’s plan hit a snag when they got on the 405. It was still a virtual parking lot with evening commuters. Ballard said she would get off early at Vanowen. Most of the conversation up until that point had been about the RDX and what Ballard was looking for in a vehicle. She incorporated mention of her wife into a few of the answers to see if she could get a read on whether Trent had an issue with same-sex couples, but he never took the bait.
After exiting on Vanowen, Ballard turned south on Sepulveda. It ran parallel to Van Nuys and would take them right by the Tallyho Lodge without it seeming like she was purposely going out of their way.
The area was lined with cluttered strip malls, gas stations, mini-markets, and cheap hotels. It was prime territory for vice operations. As she drove, Ballard scanned the sidewalks but knew it was too early in the night to catch street prostitutes out and about. After they crossed Victory Boulevard, they caught a light and she used the time to survey the area and comment.
“I didn’t realize it was so sketchy over this way,” she said.
Trent looked about as if seeing it for the first time himself before commenting.
“Yeah, I hear it gets pretty bad over here at night,” he said. “Pimps, drug pushers. Streetwalkers of all kinds.”
Ballard faked a laugh.
“Like what?” she asked.
“You’d be surprised,” Trent said. “Men who dress up as women, women who used to be men. Every variety of disgusting thing you can imagine.”
Ballard was silent and Trent seemed to realize that he might have endangered his sale.
“Not that I make any judgments on anybody,” he said. “I say, to each his own, live and let live.”
“Me too,” Ballard said.
After the test-drive, Ballard told Trent she wanted to think about the purchase and would call him in a day or two. He asked her to come into the showroom and go to his desk so he could fill out a customer information sheet. She declined, saying she was already late for dinner. She offered her hand again and when he shook it, she clinched her thumb and index finger sharply, causing an involuntary flinch from Trent. She turned his wrist slightly and looked down at his hand, acting as if she saw the bruising for the first time.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know you were hurt.”
“It’s okay. Just a bruise.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a long story and not worth the time. I’d rather talk about how we can get you into a new RDX.”
“Well, I’ll think about it and give you a call.”
“Hey, do you mind, I got a boss who’s a stickler for documenting our leads. It goes into the performance evaluations, to tell you the truth. Any chance I can get you to give me your number so I can show I took the car out on a valid lead? Otherwise, he’ll ding me for not verifying license and insurance.”
“Uh …”
Ballard thought about it and decided it would not be an issue. He would not be able to trace the number to her real name.
“Sure.”
She gave him the number and he wrote it down on the back of one of his own business cards. He then gave a clean one to her.
“Have a great date night, Stella.”
“Thanks, Tom.”
As Ballard backed her Ford out of its parking space, Trent stood in the lot and watched her go, sending her off with a friendly wave. She drove up Van Nuys Boulevard and back to the same street and spot where she had parked before. She pulled out a notebook and wrote down as many quotes from her conversation with Trent as she could remember. Extemporaneous notes written just moments after a conversation were given greater weight in court than those written much later. She had no idea if her undercover encounter with Trent would eventually become part of a case but she knew it was the smart thing to do.
After putting her notebook away, she climbed into the rear of the van again to retrieve her gun, badge, and rover. She decided she would change back into her work suit when she got to Hollywood Station. Her phone buzzed as she was climbing into the driver’s seat. It was an 818 number and she took the call. It was Trent.
“Just looking at the computer here, Stella,” he said. “We can get you a white one. They have them all over the place—Bakersfield, Modesto, Downey, plenty of choices. All of them fully loaded, backup camera, everything.”
Ballard guessed that he was only calling to see if she had stiffed him with a phony number. The fact that she had not seemed to energize him.
“All right, well, let me think about it,” Ballard said.
“You sure I can’t pull the trigger on one of these right now?” Trent asked. “You would qualify for our end-of-the-day discount. That’s a five-hundred-dollar credit on your down payment, Stella. You could t
ake that money and order custom door mats or upgrade the headliner, if you want. There’s a lot of—”
“No, Tom, not yet,” Ballard said decisively. “I told you I was going to think about it and I will call you tomorrow or Sunday.”
“Okay, Stella,” Trent said. “Then I’ll wait to hear from you.”
The line went dead. Ballard started the engine and pulled away from the curb. She started heading south toward the mountains. She checked the dashboard clock. If Trent was working at the dealership until the ten p.m. closing, then it would be two hours before he got home. That was plenty of time for what she had planned.
11
Ballard sat in the van at the Mulholland Overlook about two blocks from Wrightwood Drive. It was a clear night and the lights of the Valley spread out to infinity toward the north. She had her rover on and tuned to the North Hollywood Division dispatch frequency. She didn’t have to wait long. A radio call went out to all patrol units, reporting a possible prowler and home break-in on Wrightwood. A patrol unit accepted the call and asked where they would meet the person who reported the incident. The dispatcher said the call came from a passing motorist who declined to identify herself.
After another thirty seconds went by, Ballard keyed her rover. She identified herself to dispatch as a Hollywood Division detective who was in the area and would respond to the call as well. Dispatch repeated the information to the responding patrol unit so the officers would know that there was a friendly in the neighborhood. The dispatcher then called for an air unit to fly over the hillside neighborhood with its powerful spotlight.
Ballard pulled away from the overlook and headed to Wrightwood. As she dropped down the steep street and took the first curve, she saw a patrol car—its blue lights engaged—parked a block away. She flashed her beams as she approached and stopped the van alongside the cruiser. Two officers were getting out. Since she was in her personal car, she held her badge out the window so they could confirm she was a cop. They were from North Hollywood Division, so they were strangers to Ballard.