An hour later, Ballard was at her workstation at Ahmanson. She was putting the finishing touches on the probable cause statement that would be included in an application for a search warrant allowing her to take a DNA swab from the mouth of Ted Rawls.

Paul Masser arrived. He was wearing shorts and a tucked-in polo shirt.

“Oh, shit, I pulled you off the golf course?” Ballard said.

“Not a big deal,” Masser said. “I was on the seventeenth green at Wilshire when you called. I would have had to walk in from there. So I just played the last hole, took a quick shower, and came directly here.”

He gestured to the golfing outfit he was wearing.

“I got these in the golf shop because I didn’t have anything in my locker to change into.”

“Well, I have the PC statement. I’ll print it and you can start.”

A search warrant was all about the probable cause statement. It had to convince a judge that there was enough legal cause to allow for a search and seizure of a citizen’s property or person. Everything else in a search warrant was largely boilerplate. The judge it was submitted to would likely skip over all of that and go directly to the PC.

“Who’s up today?” Masser asked. “Did you check yet?”

“No,” Ballard asked. “Why don’t you do that while I get this from the printer.”

Masser was inquiring about which judge from the criminal courts division was up on rotation to handle after-hours search warrant requests. This was a key question because judges had particular viewpoints and practices that became known to the trade—the lawyers who appeared before them and the police officers who went to them for search warrant approval. Some judges were fierce defenders of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Others were fierce law-and-order judges who never saw a search warrant application they didn’t like. In addition, they were elected to the bench. While they were charged with wielding their power without personal or political bias, it was a rare judge who didn’t occasionally peek out from under the blindfold at the possible electoral ramifications of a ruling—like whether to allow the state to take a DNA sample from an ex-cop suspected of being a killer.

Ballard came back from the printer and handed Masser the two-page PC statement just as he was hanging up his desk phone.

“Judge Canterbury is up,” he said. “And that is not good. He’s very strict on search and seizure.”

“I’ve heard,” Ballard said. “I might have another way to go.”