Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  “No, that’s what you got. I got three eighty-three.”

  She looked at him, her eyes amused. “Very good, Sid. Let’s hope if we get into a gunfight, it’s long enough so you get to warm up.”

  4

  “This is the neighborhood where they found him,” said Ronnie. “It’s nice. Look at all those big old trees. Sycamore, camphor, sweetgum, Aleppo pine.”

  “It’s pretty much what I expected,” said Sid. “The twigs and leaves and needles are probably what caused the storm drain to get blocked.”

  “The report Hemphill gave us seems to support your theory. The first cop on the scene was a guy named Stearns. He said the body was entangled in vegetation when the DPW found it.”

  Sid parked the black BMW at the curb. “Where’s the drain where they found him?”

  “The map indicates they opened the one right by the corner, on the northwest side.” They walked to the corner and looked down at the storm drain opening. It was set sideways into the curb, with a metal grate covering it. From the curb nearly to the sidewalk was a concrete slab with a manhole cover set into the middle.

  “I don’t think I ever looked at these things closely before,” Sid said.

  Ronnie looked at the printed sheet she carried. “It says here that each year these drains keep eight hundred forty thousand pounds of trash from entering the LA River. There are twelve thousand of these things, called ‘connector pipe screens, or CPS.’ The fancy ones like this one have ‘automatic retractable screens, or ARS.’”

  “Why do they always have to do that?”

  “Give initials?”

  “Yeah. As though you couldn’t figure out what the first letter of each word is, and as though the initials mattered.”

  “It’s a government publication, or GP.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “It’s a pretty impressive system, though.” She read. “‘Even on the driest day, there are enough millions of gallons of runoff from sprinklers to fill the Rose Bowl. On a rainy day, the flow can be ten billion gallons.’ The storm drains are completely separate from the sewage system. This water all goes straight into the ocean.”

  “When was the system built?”

  “The nineteen thirties and forties, like most things in the east Valley. These screens and things are much more recent.”

  Sid stopped and looked up and down the street. “I’m starting to get a feeling this can’t be the crime scene. He wasn’t killed here and dumped into the drain. People would see the killing or hear the gunshots. And the screens, retractable or not, would keep anything as big as a man from getting into the main drainpipe.”

  “Maybe he was put into the system somewhere upstream from here, and he got washed along until he hit a snag.”

  “It’s possible they hoped he would make it into the river channel and get washed all the way to the ocean,” Sid said. “We’ll have to find out where he could have gone in. Where did he live?”

  Ronnie leafed through her printed sheets. “Twelve thousand eight sixty Cambridge in Woodland Hills, number six.”

  “Something like eleven miles west of here. I guess that’s out.”

  As they walked along the street toward their car, Ronnie said, “He must have been dumped at some access point somewhere upstream. He could even have been murdered a day or two before the big rain. When the storm came, he would suddenly be in a high-pressure bath, cleaned of every bit of external blood, hairs, and fibers, and as he went along, he’d have an unknown quantity of meaningless stuff attach to him.”

  “I’m starting to see why the homicide people got nowhere.” Sid stepped onto the concrete slab above the curb, knelt and took a large screwdriver out of his coat, then put the end of it into one of the holes on top of a manhole cover and pried.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting a feel for the structure of these things.” With difficulty he lifted the edge of the cover and slid it onto the concrete.

  “I read that these covers weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, which is why scrap scavengers sometimes steal them—that’s a lot of iron.”

  “It’s not light, but one man can get one open.” He looked down, with Ronnie at his shoulder staring down into the space beneath the concrete. She took a small LED flashlight out of her purse and shone it into the manhole. The space was a concrete box about six feet square, and then a screened-off opening to the underground conduit.

  She said, “There’s another screen down there before water gets to the storm drain. Even if you pushed a body through the manhole, it wouldn’t go into the drainage system. It would just stay here. I guess that’s what it’s for—not bodies, but keeping things from plugging the main drain.”

  “So where did James Ballantine get into the system?” he said.

  “Time to take a trip downtown to the Department of Public Works.”

  Two hours later, they were in the main office of the DPW, talking to a supervisor named Alan Weiss. He took a large notebook off a shelf in his office and said, “I remember the case very well. We helped the police try to figure out the same thing. There was a detective from the North Hollywood division. Detective Kapp. We looked up the information for him. We have lots of breaks in the water supply system—three or four a day. Not many in the storm sewers. I can show you what we found.”

  The Abels followed him to a small office, and watched him set the notebook down. He leafed through the notebook, took out a map, and unfolded it. “Here. Here’s what we found. Nothing in the existing system had been opened for months before then. With the catch basins and the grates over the openings, there’s hardly ever a reason. And the drains themselves have held up for about eighty years.”

  Ronnie pointed. “What are these red marks on the edges for?”

  “Progress. Each of those dots is a place where a developer was building a new subdivision. Up there in the north edge of the Valley in the foothills is the only place where there’s room.”

  “New streets, new storm drains,” said Sid. “So they were adding new ones at that time?”

  “Right,” Weiss said. “They weren’t all going in at once, but when we went through the records for Detective Kapp, we found out that during the week of the murder, there were three places where new streets were going in. And under them, drain sections were being added to the system.”

  “And if somebody dragged the body into an open section of storm sewer—far enough in so that the workers wouldn’t see it—do you think they might pave over that section before anybody noticed?” said Sid.

  “That’s what I think is most likely,” said Weiss. “When you add a section to a drain, you dig up the last few feet of it to make a connection, but no more than that.”

  “Do you have a theory about which drain it was?” asked Ronnie.

  “I don’t,” he said. “But Detective Kapp did. This one, the farthest south.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Because this site was the closest to where Mr. Ballantine ended up, and closest to populated areas. He said the killer would be more likely to have driven by and noticed the construction. Whether Mr. Ballantine was lured to the spot or carried there, the process would be easier if the place was closer. And if his body was liable to get caught up in a snag somewhere—which is what happened—then the theory that it traveled from one of the longer distances starts to seem less likely.”

  “It sounds logical,” said Ronnie. “But if you were going to commit a murder, particularly with a firearm, wouldn’t you look for the most remote spot you could find?”

  Weiss smiled. “That’s not really my field, but I would think so.”

  Sid finished writing down the addresses of the drains that had been open a year ago. “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Weiss. You’ve been terrific.” In two more minutes, the Abels were out of the building and walking to their car.

  Ronnie said, “What do you think?”

  “The killer found a place where there was an opening in the storm sewer
system a year ago,” said Sid. “Which one he found is pure chance. He wouldn’t have had any way of knowing about all three of them and picking one. He must have seen one and used it.”

  “We probably ought to take a look at all three and see if there’s anything about one of them that connects to James Ballantine.”

  “We’ll need to know more about Ballantine before we can do that,” said Sid. “Right now I’d like to go home and spend some time going over the information that Hemphill gave us.”

  They drove home and sat down at the pair of desks they used in what used to be a recreation room, and Sid untied the thick package that Hemphill had given them. There were a number of file folders, most of them full of papers that had been made on copying machines. They split the pile of files and went to work.

  There were folders of newspaper clippings, a copy of James Ballantine’s personnel file, files of correspondence.

  They read through a few files, and Ronnie held one sheet up. “I’m surprised they have these on a case that’s still open. It quotes the autopsy report.”

  “Somebody at the company must be pretty persuasive. What does it say?”

  “Cause of death was two shots to the back of the skull, both .22 Long Rifle, 36 grain, copper plated. Unable to determine a manufacturer. They bounced around inside the skull doing damage, but didn’t go through.”

  “Interesting. The cheapest, most common round for sale, and probably the quietest. Fired in semiauto pistols, revolvers, rifles of every configuration. He was dead before he hit the water, right?”

  “Yes. No water in the lungs. And they didn’t determine a time of death, because he was in the water so long. He could have been dead for days before he got washed away.” She paused. “What does this sound like to you?”

  Sid shrugged. “If they’d shot him once, I’d say it might have started as an accident. If they’d beaten him up first, I’d say it was a robbery. Not this—two to the head. What they wanted was to kill him efficiently and make him disappear.”

  “So maybe a personal enemy, maybe a pro.”

  “Have you found anything in the files you looked at that might suggest any enemies?”

  “There’s a memo here that the company president wrote recording what Detective Kapp told him about his interviews.” She pushed papers aside until she found it. “Here it is. The memo is dated June eighth, a couple of months into the investigation. Everybody the police interviewed said Ballantine was a quiet, decent man who got along well with everyone at work, but didn’t socialize much with his colleagues, except at official events—company conferences, the Christmas party, and so on. No evidence of drugs, drinking, gambling. Took very few sick days.” Ronnie shrugged. “Of course, saying nice things about a murdered man helps keep you off the suspect list.”

  “Let’s keep at it,” Sid said. “All this is information we don’t have to work for. There’s got to be something that the homicide people have missed.”

  They kept at it until they had each read every bit of paper that Hemphill had given them. At eleven o’clock they went into the kitchen, where Sid poured them each a glass of scotch on ice, and then to the living room. Ronnie switched on the television and they watched the local news at a low volume while they talked. “Did you hear from Mitch or Janice today?” said Sid.

  “Mitch texted me. He wanted to know what to get Nancy for their anniversary.”

  “A new husband who knows what she wants.”

  “Nice, Sid. That’s our son. And Janice wants to know if we can fly to Chicago for Thanksgiving.”

  “Who the hell knows what he’ll be doing in eight months? What kind of life would that be?”

  “Never been my problem,” said Ronnie. “For the past thirty years I’ve been looking forward to being bored. I’m just not sure I want to go fifteen hundred miles for that and a dry turkey.”

  “Nice, Veronica. That’s our daughter.”

  They both knew they would go, and that Sid would make the plane reservations the next day, before prices began their inexorable rise month by month until holiday season. If he forgot, she would remind him. He stood, holding his glass, and took a step toward the bar.

  “Better not drink too much if you still want to fool around,” she said.

  He set the glass down on its coaster and sat down on the couch beside her. “I just don’t want to rush you.”

  “The hell you don’t.” She kissed his cheek, stood, and walked off toward the hallway to the bedroom.

  It was afternoon the next day when they drove north on the 170 Freeway toward the northern part of the San Fernando Valley. Away from the city center past the hillside houses that belonged to the rich or the optimistic were pockets of poverty that hadn’t gotten much better than they’d been before World War II, only more crowded. Beyond them were the old places that were not small ranches anymore, but still had enough land to pasture and stable horses. More and more of the land had been broken up into communities that had no reason to be built except that the population never stopped spreading outward to cover any empty space. Ronnie kept looking at the picture of the storm drain map she had taken with her cell phone in the DPW office, and then switching to the GPS map for their present location.

  “One of these streets ahead is Cobblestone Way,” she said. “Keep your eyes open for the sign, and don’t drive so fast.”

  “There’s traffic building up behind me,” he said.

  She spun around in her seat to glance at the empty road behind him. “There is exactly one car, and it’s half a mile back.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Because he doesn’t want to crowd me. Here’s Cobblestone already. Good thing I drove fast.” Sid turned and they moved slowly up the side street. The houses were all new, all two-story buildings on lots they filled almost completely. There was a miniature Tuscan villa, a Cape Cod with clapboards, a Spanish-style house, a Tudor. It didn’t take the eye long to notice that they were all made from a single set of plans, with variations in roof material, siding, and windows to imply a variety of styles. The next series had the same selection of styles, but used a mirror image of the sequence, so the garage was on the left and the entrance door on the right.

  “This is the first possibility,” Ronnie said. “Nothing that’s here existed a year ago. The storm drains got closed in on March fifteenth, and the final stage of paving happened on April second. When James Ballantine turned up in the storm drain in North Hollywood, this was one place where he could have started. He was at work on March fourth, and was found March sixth. It would have been on or just before March fifth.”

  “Okay,” said Sid. “So I’m picturing this block on March fifth. It was raining hard, and had been, on and off, for a couple of days. If these houses hadn’t been framed and closed in yet, there wouldn’t be any carpenters working on those days—too wet.”

  Ronnie studied the storm drain map. “Right. This place is Detective Kapp’s candidate for crime scene.”

  “But there are quite a few older houses on the next block that were certainly here a year ago. If he was put in the drain here, he was probably dead already so nobody would hear the shots, and they’d have to do it at night, so nobody saw it.”

  They visited another site in the northern part of the Valley in the foothills below the wall of mountains. It looked similar to the first neighborhood, with a few variations.

  “This is a little bit newer,” said Ronnie. “If you picture the place a year ago, it’s a possibility. There wouldn’t have been people living close by who would hear a small-caliber gunshot, and probably nobody would pass by to see the body being dragged into the pipe. But this place isn’t on the way to anything, and it would be hard to discover by accident.”

  They reached the third development as it began to get dark. This was the farthest north, a bit higher elevation than the others, but still not high enough to notice unless the observer happened to be thinking about water flows. There were two streets that looked like the others, with many of the h
omes already occupied and only a few that still had the realtors’ signs on their lawns. But there were also three more streets with houses in varying stages of construction, and one that was only a gravel track through an empty field. On one side there was a single row of foundations dug and poured, with the wooden forms still installed. Far down at the end there were two houses that had been partially framed, like skeletal remains of something that had been started and abandoned. There were no streetlamps in yet. The street was dark.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Sid. “This would be a good place to kill somebody.”

  “Or dump a body, anyway.”

  Sid stopped the car. “There aren’t any cameras or fences like they sometimes have on construction sites. I guess there’s nothing here to protect yet. Nothing to steal.”

  “At least without prying apart the lumber they’ve nailed together,” said Ronnie.

  “Too much work for thieves, I guess. Okay. Let’s try to work this out while we can see it. So this guy decides to kill James Ballantine.”

  “Or gets hired to kill him.”

  “He figures a good place to do it would be in a sparsely populated area north of the city, a place where he can discharge a firearm without waking the neighborhood, because nobody lives in the houses yet. He drives Ballantine up here to look at the lots for sale, or brings him here, maybe drugged or tied up. At some point he shoots him twice in the back of the head with a .22 pistol. The street has an open trench dug in the middle, with a big concrete pipe being laid in as the main channel for storm runoff. The pipe is big enough to drag a body in, and the start of it is already connected to the existing part of the storm drain system. So he drags the victim as far as he can into the completed part of the storm sewer. Right now is the rainy season, and he hopes that as soon as there’s a storm, the body will be swept downstream, maybe all the way to the ocean. Or he might have done this after the rain had already begun. He saw the water running into the drain and realized he had a solution to his body problem.”

  “This doesn’t seem like a crime of opportunity to me,” said Ronnie. “There’s too much that’s ideal—no lights, nobody who lives nearby, a way to wash the body of all trace evidence and transport it far away at the same time. You don’t usually find all of those things by happy accident.”