Ballard had the kind of night she had been waiting for all week. No calls for a detective, no calls for backup, no officer-needs-assistance calls. She spent the whole shift in the detective bureau and even ordered food delivered to the front desk. This gave her time to focus and power through the remaining field interview cards.
The pickings were thin in the first two boxes in terms of pulling cards for follow-up investigation. Ballard put only two in the stack that had been accumulating from the start of the project. But the third box produced five cards, including three that she felt should immediately go to the top.
Three weeks before the murder of Daisy Clayton, two officers had stopped their car and inspected a panel van that was parked illegally in front of a red curb on Gower south of Sunset. When they approached, they heard voices from within the van and saw light inside. There were windows on the rear doors and they noticed a makeshift curtain had fallen partially open behind one of them. Through the narrow opening they saw a man and woman having sex on a mattress while a second man videoed them with a camera.
The officers broke the party up and checked the IDs of all three of the van’s occupants. They confirmed with the woman—who had a record of prostitution arrests—that both the sex and the videoing of it were consensual. She denied that any money had changed hands or that she was engaged in prostitution.
No arrests were made, because there was no crime the threesome could be charged with. Under the law, officers could make an arrest for lewd behavior only if it was witnessed by the public and a citizen reported being offended. The three were let off with a warning and told to move on.
Three individual shake cards were filled out. What Ballard keyed on—besides the van—was that one of the men had the word “porno actor” under his name. He was listed as Kurt Pascal, twenty-six years old at the time and living on Kester Street in Sherman Oaks.
From the few details that were on the shake cards, Ballard drew the likely conclusion that the officers had interrupted a porno shoot in the van. Pascal and the cameraman, identified as Wilson Gayley, thirty-six, had paid prostitute Tanya Vickers, thirty-one, to perform in the van. Ballard took it a step further and envisioned a night three weeks later when they picked up another prostitute for filming and then found out after the fact that they had committed a crime because she was underage. One solution to their problem would be to eliminate the prostitute and make it look like the work of a sexual sadist.
Ballard knew it was all supposition. Extrapolation upon extrapolation. But something about the scenario held her. She needed to run with those three shake cards and knew just where to start.
She looked up at the wall clock and saw that the shift had gone by quickly. It was already five a.m. and she realized that Bosch had not shown up, as he had said he would. She thought about calling him but didn’t want to wake him if he had instead decided to get a full night’s sleep.
Ballard looked at the three shake cards spread on the desk in front of her. She wanted to dive right in on them but she had an allegiance to Bosch and how he said the review of the cards should go. She moved to the final box and started looking through more cards.
Two hours later she had finished going through the last box. She had pulled no cards. Bosch still had not shown up. She checked her phone to see if she had somehow missed a call or text from him but there was nothing. She wrote him a text instead.
I’m heading to USC in 30—you coming?
She sent it and waited. There was no immediate reply.
Ballard went back to work and used the next half hour before leaving to run the three names from the van through the computer in an attempt to get current addresses and legal status. She determined that, over the four years that followed the van incident, Tanya Vickers was arrested nine times for prostitution and drug offenses before she died of a heroin overdose at age thirty-five.
The porno actor, Kurt Pascal, had no record and was still listed in Department of Motor Vehicle Records as living on Kester in Sherman Oaks, but the record was old. The driver’s license had expired two years ago without being renewed.
The cameraman, Wilson Gayley, was also unaccounted for. In 2012 he was sentenced to prison after being convicted of intentionally infecting a person with a sexually transmitted disease. He spent three years in prison and completed a year on parole. He then dropped off the grid. Ballard could find no record of him having a driver’s license in any state.
Ballard had her work cut out for her, but it was now eight a.m. and she was supposed to meet Professor Calder at USC in thirty minutes to pick up the GRASP data. She couldn’t miss the window of time he had given her, because he had a three-hour computer lab starting at nine.
She put the four boxes of FI cards on top of the file cabinets that ran the length of the bureau, grabbed a rover from the charging station, and headed out the back door.
It was after eight by the time she pulled out of the parking lot, and Ballard felt no concern about calling and waking Bosch. But her call went straight to his voice mail.
“Bosch, it’s Ballard. What happened to you? I thought we were doing this together. I’m on my way to USC. Call me. I found some shake cards I really like.”
She disconnected, half expecting Bosch to call her back right away.
He didn’t.
Ballard looked up a number in her phone and called it. Beatrice Beaupre was a director of adult films as well as a previous performer. All told, she had almost twenty years in the business. Ballard knew her because the year before she had rescued Beaupre from a man with plans to kill her. In that regard Beaupre owed Ballard, and she was calling now to collect.
Ballard knew that at this hour Beaupre was either wrapping up a night’s work at her studio out in Canoga Park or she was asleep and dead to the world.
The call was answered after one ring.
“What?”
“Beatrice, it’s Renée Ballard.”
Beaupre was known by several different names in the porno field. Few people called her by or even knew her given name.
“Ballard, what are you doing? I was about to crash. Been working all night.”
“Then I’m glad I got you beforehand. I need your expertise.”
“My expertise. What, you want to try bondage or something?”
“Not quite. I want to run a few names by you, see if anything clicks.”
“Okay.”
“First one is Kurt Pascal. He’s supposedly a porn actor. Was, at least, nine years ago.”
“Nine years ago. Shit, the industry’s turned over twice in that time. People come and go—no pun intended.”
“So you don’t know him.”
“Well, I know these guys by their stage names and that ain’t no stage name. Let me get to my computer. See if he’s in the database under his real name.”
“What database is that?”
“Adult casting. Hold on.”
Ballard heard typing and then:
“Pascal? P-A-S-C-A-L?”
“That’s what I have, yeah.”
“Okay, yeah, he’s here. I don’t recognize the photo, so I would say I never worked with him. What did he do?”
“Nothing. Does it say where he lives?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s got his management listing and then age and body details. He’s a ten hard, which explains why he got into the business and apparently stayed. He’s thirty-five and that’s kinda old for the game.”
Ballard thought for a moment about what would be the best way to connect with Pascal. For the time being she moved on.
“What about a guy named Wilson Gayley?” she asked. “He might be a cameraman.”
“Is that a performing name?” Beaupre asked. “I don’t make gay porn, so I wouldn’t know him.”
“No, it’s a real name. I think.”
“You think.”
Ballard heard typing.
“He’s not in the database,” Beaupre said. “But it kinda rings a bell. You know, a guy with a name for gay porn but who’s in the straight game. Let me ask around.”
“He went to prison about five years ago for intentionally infecting someone with an STD,” Ballard said.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Beaupre said. “That guy?”
“What guy?”
“I think it’s him. There was a guy back around that time that was mad at a girl—a performer—because she’d talked trash or something about one of his partners. So he hired her for a scene and put himself in it. She ended up getting syph and that forced her out of the business. She went to vice because somebody told her that the producer—sounds like this Gayley guy—did it on purpose. Like he knew he had it when he fucked her. And then vice made a case. They got his medical reports and stuff. Proved he knew it, and he went to jail.”
“Have you heard of him since then? He got out a couple years ago.”
“I don’t think so. I just remember that story. It’s about the scariest thing that can happen in this business.”
Ballard knew she had to pull the files on Gayley to confirm Beaupre’s story. But it sounded like they were talking about the same man.
“On the first guy, Pascal,” she said. “You could hire him for a shoot through that database?”
“I would send his management a message checking on availability,” Beaupre said.
“Would there be like an audition or something?”
“No. In this business, you look at his reel, which the manager will send me, and you either hire him or you don’t. He gets three hundred a pop. It says it right here in the database.”
“Can you hire him for a shoot today?”
“What are you talking about? What shoot?”
“There is no shoot. I just want to get him to your place so I can talk to him.”
There was a pause before Beaupre responded.
“I don’t know, Ballard. If it gets out I did this for the cops, it might hurt me, being able to hire people in the future. Especially with that management group. It’s one of the big ones.”
Now Ballard paused, hoping her silence would communicate what she didn’t want to say: You owe me, Beaupre.
The strategy worked.
“Okay, I guess I could claim innocence,” Beaupre said. “Say I thought you were a valid producer or something.”
“Whatever you need to do,” Ballard said.
“What day?”
“How about today?”
“Same-day booking is kind of suspect. Nobody does that.”
“Okay, what about tomorrow?”
“What time?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“At night, right?”
“No, morning.”
“Nobody works in the morning.”
“Okay, tomorrow afternoon, then.”
“Okay, I’ll book him for four o’clock and let you know. And then you’ll be here?”
“I’ll be there.”
They disconnected. Ballard then tried Bosch again and once more the call went directly to message.
It was as if Bosch’s phone had been turned off.