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Detective Lisa Moore of the Hollywood Division Sexual Assault Unit
Midnight Men were out there somewhere.
The government gives them toilets. It takes their shit away but not much else.”
The pandemic and protests had changed everything. The department went from being proactive to reactive.
“Then I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “No mask, no ask.”
For a solid five minutes, there was an unbroken onslaught as revelers of the new year fired their weapons into the sky following a Los Angeles tradition of decades.
sometimes you needed predators to strike again in hopes of a mistake or a new piece of evidence that could lead to a solve.
Midnight Men was the unofficial moniker Ballard had bestowed on the tag team rapists who had assaulted two women in a five-week span. Both assaults had occurred on holiday nights—Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.
It was an example of how protesters demanding the defunding of the police department had achieved their goal in an indirect way.
burned through its budget in dealing with the protests that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
“The fire guys are considered health-care providers,” Ballard said. “We’re not.”
Ballard had already contracted Covid-19. She had been knocked down for three weeks in November and now just hoped she had enough antibodies to see her through to the vaccine’s arrival.
Smallwood and Vitello, who always had too much testosterone running in their blood. They also thought they were “too healthy” to contract the virus and eschewed the department-mandated mask requirement.
“How’s things in the tuna boat?” Smallwood said, a wide smile on his face.
“I think we can handle it,” Ballard called across. “You boys can go back up to Mulholland and watch for kids throwing their condoms out the window. Make it safe up there, guys.”
Gower Gulch was the name affixed by Hollywood lore to the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street,
It was said that a young actor named Marion Morrison picked up work here. He was better known as John Wayne.
crown jewel of Hollywood, Paramount Studios.
local gang called Las Palmas 13,
“Your victim is supposedly Javier Raffa, owner of the business,” he said. “Lives about a block from here.”
Victor Rodriguez. “You mind if I keep V-Rod to translate?”
Derek Robinson-Reynolds, the OIC of Hollywood detectives,
Ballard knew she wanted the case, that she would find a way to keep this conclusion to herself until she was too deeply embedded to be removed.
“Lara Rosas,”
to hit the streets only when it was requested and required, and only then doing the minimum so as not to engender a complaint or controversy.
Sergeant Rick Davenport
El Chopo got it tonight.”
“It’s pretty clear if they can’t defund us, they want to de-see us, right, Cordo?”
Losing empathy for victims was a self-protective measure, but Ballard hoped it never happened to her. Police work could easily hollow you out. But she believed that losing one’s empathy was losing one’s soul.
Tom Newsome.
Raffa’s lawyer, listed as Roger Mills,
la eMe, the prison gang also known as the Mexican Mafia.
Javier Raffa (El Chopo) DOB 02/14/82—said to have paid Humberto Viera $25K cash tribute for no-strings separation from the gang.
She had always known of the blood in, blood out,
“Humberto Viera of Las Palmas,
LP3 was a woman and possibly still active as an informant.
Forensic Science Center, the five-story lab shared by the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, was at the south end of the vast campus.
criminalist named Anthony Manzano,
“Mitch Elder,”
National Integrated Ballistic Information Network
“Lee, Albert, DOD two-two-eleven.”
“Albert Lee. Killed with a Walther P-twenty-two.
“Finbar McShane.”
“He killed a whole family and got away with it. I should let it go?”
“Audio camouflage. Clever.
“Albert Lee, black male, I think he was thirty-four when he died.
“It’s a high-interest business loan that is sort of a bridge loan. It’s secured by your accounts receivable. Make sense?”
How does that fit with ‘everybody counts or nobody counts’?”
“A dentist, actually. His name was John William James.
‘Nobody gives us rhyme or reason. Have one doubt, they call it treason.’”
