Dark Sacred Night - Ballard and Bosch #1;Renée Ballard #2 Read online

Ballard turned to go past Doucette and step out of the room.

  “Find the cat,” she said.

  2

  By three a.m. Ballard had cleared the scene of the death investigation and was back at Hollywood Division, working in a cubicle in the detective bureau. That vast room, which housed the workstations of forty-eight detectives by day, was deserted after midnight and Ballard always had her pick of the place. She chose a desk in the far corner, away from spillover noise and radio chatter from the watch commander’s office down the front hallway. At five, seven she could sit down and disappear behind the computer screen and the half walls of the workstation like a soldier in a foxhole. She could focus and get her report writing done.

  The report on the residential break-in that she had rolled on earlier in the night was completed first and now she was ready to type up the death report on the bathtub case. She would classify the death as undetermined pending autopsy. She had covered her bases, called in a crime scene photographer, and documented everything, including the cat. She knew a determination of accidental death might be second-guessed by the victim’s family and maybe even her superiors. She was confident, however, that the autopsy would find no indications of foul play and the death would eventually be ruled accidental.

  She was working alone. Her partner, John Jenkins, was on bereavement leave. There were no replacements for detectives who worked the late show. Ballard was halfway through the first night of at least a week going solo. It all depended on when Jenkins came back. His wife had endured a long, painful death from cancer. It had torn him up and Ballard told him to take all the time he needed.

  She opened her notebook to the page containing the details she had written about the second investigation and then called up a blank incident report on her screen. Before beginning, she dipped her chin and pulled the collar of her blouse up to her nose. She thought she picked up the slight odor of decomposition and death but couldn’t be sure if it had permeated her clothes or was simply an olfactory memory. Still, it meant that her plan to wear the suit again that week was not going to work out. It was going to the cleaners.

  While her head was down, she heard the metal-on-metal bang of a file drawer being closed. She looked up over the workstation divider to the far side of the bureau, where four-drawer file cabinets ran the length of the room. Every pair of detectives was assigned a four-drawer stack for storage.

  But the man Ballard saw now opening another drawer to check its contents was not a detective she recognized, and she knew them all from once-a-month squad meetings that drew her to the station during daylight hours. The man who was checking the cabinets seemingly at random had gray hair and a mustache. Ballard instinctively knew he didn’t belong. She scanned the entire squad room to see if anybody else was there. The rest of the place was deserted.

  The man opened and closed yet another drawer. Ballard used the sound to cover getting up from her chair. She squatted down and, with the row of work cubicles as a blind, moved to the central aisle, which would allow her to come up behind the intruder without being seen.

  She had left her suit jacket in the cardboard box in the trunk of her car. This gave her unfettered access to the Glock holstered on her hip. She put her hand on the grip of the weapon and came to a stop ten feet behind the man.

  “Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

  The man froze. He slowly raised his hands out of the open drawer he was looking through and held them so she could see them.

  “That’s good,” Ballard said. “Now you mind telling me who you are and what you’re doing?”

  “Name’s Bosch,” he said. “I came in to see somebody.”

  “What, somebody hiding in the files?”

  “No, I used to work here. I know Money up front. He told me I could wait in the break room while they called the guy in. I sort of started wandering. My bad.”

  Ballard came down from high alert and took her hand off her gun. She recognized the name Bosch, and the fact that he knew the watch commander’s nickname gave her some ease as well. But she was still suspicious.

  “You kept a key to your old cabinet?” she asked.

  “No,” Bosch said. “It was unlocked.”

  Ballard could see the push-in lock at the top of the cabinet was indeed extended in unlocked position. Most detectives kept their files locked.

  “You got some ID?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Bosch said. “But just so you know, I’m a police officer. I have a gun on my left hip and you’re going to see it when I reach back for my ID. Okay?”

  Ballard brought her hand back up to her hip.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said. “Tell you what, forget the ID for now. Why don’t we secure the weapon first? Then we’ll—”

  “There you are, Harry.”

  Ballard looked to her right and saw Lieutenant Munroe, the watch commander, entering the squad room. Munroe was a thin man who still walked with his hands up near his belt like a street cop, even though he rarely left the confines of the station. He had modified the belt so it carried only his gun, which was required. All of the other bulky equipment was left in a drawer of his desk. Munroe wasn’t as old as Bosch but he had the mustache that seemed to be standard with cops who came on in the seventies and eighties.

  He saw Ballard and read her stance.

  “Ballard, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “He came in here and was going through the files,” Ballard said. “I didn’t know who he was.”

  “You can stand down,” Munroe said. “He’s good people—used to work homicide here. Back when we had a homicide table.”

  Munroe turned his gaze to Bosch.

  “Harry, what the hell were you doing?” he asked.

  Bosch shrugged.

  “Just checking my old drawers,” he said. “Sort of got tired of waiting.”

  “Well, Dvorek’s in the house and waiting in the report room,” Munroe said. “And I need you to talk to him now. I don’t like taking him off the street. He’s one of my best guys and I want him back out there.”

  “Got it,” Bosch said.

  Bosch followed Munroe to the front hallway, which led to the watch office and the report-writing room, where Dvorek was waiting. Bosch looked back at Ballard as he went and nodded. Ballard just watched him go.

  After they were gone, Ballard stepped over to the file drawer Bosch had last been looking in. There was a business card taped to it. That’s what everybody did to mark their drawers.

  Detective Cesar Rivera

  Hollywood Sex Crimes Unit

  She checked the contents. It was only half full and the folders had fallen forward, probably while Bosch was leafing through them. She pushed them back up so they were standing and looked at what Rivera had written on the tabs. They were mostly victim names and case numbers. Others were marked with the main streets in Hollywood Division, probably containing miscellaneous reports of suspicious activities or persons.

  She closed the drawer and checked the two above it, remembering that she had heard Bosch open at least three of them.

  These were like the first, containing case folders primarily listed by victim name, specific sex crime, and case number. At the front of the top drawer she noticed a paper clip that had been bent and twisted. She studied the push-button lock on the top corner of the cabinet. It was a basic model and she knew it could easily have been picked with a paper clip. Security of the records themselves was not a priority, because they were contained in a high-security police station.

  Ballard closed the drawers, pushed in the lock, and went back to the desk she had been using. She remained intrigued by Bosch’s middle-of-the-night visit. She knew he had used the paper clip to unlock the file cabinet, and that indicated he had more than a casual interest in the contents of its drawers. His nostalgic story about checking out his old files had been a lie.

  She picked up the coffee cup on the desk and walked down the hall to the first-floor break room to replenish it. The room was empt
y, as usual. She refilled and carried the cup over to the watch office. Lieutenant Munroe was at his desk, looking at a deployment screen that showed a map of the division and the GPS markers for the patrol units out there. He didn’t hear Ballard until she came up behind him.

  “Quiet?” she asked.

  “For the moment,” Munroe said.

  Ballard pointed to a cluster of three GPS locators in the same spot.

  “What’s happening there?”

  “That’s the Mariscos Reyes truck. I’ve got three units code seven there.”

  It was a lunch break at a food truck at Sunset and Western. It made Ballard realize she had not taken a food break and was getting hungry. She wasn’t sure she wanted seafood, however.

  “So, what did Bosch want?”

  “He wanted to talk to the Relic about a body he found nine years ago. I take it Bosch is looking into it.”

  “He said he’s still a cop. Not for us, right?”

  “Nah, he’s a reserve up in the Valley for San Fernando PD.”

  “What’s San Fernando got to do with a murder down here?”

  “I don’t know, Ballard. You shoulda asked him while he was here. He’s gone now.”

  “That was quick.”

  “Because the Relic couldn’t remember shit.”

  “Is Dvorek back out there?”

  Munroe pointed to the three-car cluster on the screen.

  “He’s back out, but code seven at the moment.”

  “I was thinking about going over there, getting a couple shrimp tacos. You want me to bring you back something?”

  “No, I’m good. Take a rover with you.”

  “Roger that.”

  On the way back to the D bureau she stopped in the break room and dumped the coffee in the sink and rinsed out the cup. She then pulled a rover out of the charging rack and headed out the back door of the station to her city car. The mid-watch chill had set in and she got her suit jacket out of the trunk and put it on before driving out of the lot.

  The Relic was still parked at the food truck when Ballard arrived. As a sergeant, Dvorek rode in a solo car, so he had a tendency to hang with other officers on break for the company.

  “Sally Ride,” he said, when he noticed Ballard studying the chalkboard menu.

  “What’s up, Sarge?” she said.

  “Halfway through another night in paradise.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ballard ordered one shrimp taco and doused it liberally with one of the hot sauces from the condiment table. She took it over to Dvorek’s black-and-white, where he was leaning against the front fender and finishing his own meal. Two other patrol officers were eating on the hood of their car, parked in front of his.

  Ballard leaned against the fender next to him.

  “Whatcha get?” Dvorek asked.

  “Shrimp,” Ballard said. “I only order off the blackboard. Means it’s fresh, right? They don’t know what they’ll have until they buy it at the docks.”

  “If you think so.”

  “I need to think so.”

  She took her first bite. It was good and there was no fishy taste.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “I had the fish special,” Dvorek said. “It’s probably going to take me off the street as soon as it gets down into the lower track.”

  “T.M.I., Sarge. But speaking of coming in off the street, what did that guy Bosch want with you?”

  “You saw him?”

  “I caught him snooping in the files in the D bureau.”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of desperate. Looking for any angle on a case he’s working.”

  “In Hollywood? I thought he worked for San Fernando PD these days.”

  “He does. But this is a private thing he’s looking into. A girl who got killed here nine years ago. I was the one who found the body, but damn if I could remember much that helped him.”

  Ballard took another bite and started nodding. She asked the next question with her mouth full of shrimp and tortilla.

  “Who was the girl?” she asked.

  “A runaway. Name was Daisy. She was fifteen and putting it out on the street. Sad case. I used to see her on Hollywood up near Western. One night she got into the wrong car. I found her body in an alley off of Cahuenga. Came in on an anonymous call—I do remember that.”

  “Was that her street name?”

  “No, the real thing. Daisy Clayton.”

  “Was Cesar Rivera working the sex table back then?”

  “Cesar? I’m not sure. We’re talking nine years ago. He coulda been.”

  “Well, did you remember Cesar having anything to do with the case? Bosch picked his file cabinet.”

  Dvorek shrugged.

  “I found the body and called it in, Renée—that’s it,” he said. “I had no part in it after that. I remember they sent me down to the end of the alley to string tape and keep people out. I was just a slick sleeve.”

  Uniformed cops got a hash mark on their sleeves for every five years of service. Nine years ago, the Relic was a near-rookie. Ballard nodded and asked her last question.

  “Did Bosch ask you anything I didn’t just ask?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t about her. He asked about Daisy’s boyfriend and whether I ever saw him on the street again after the murder.”

  “Who was the boyfriend?”

  “Just another runaway throwaway. I knew him by his graffiti handle: Addict. Bosch said his name was Adam something. I forget. But the answer was no, I never saw him after that. Guys like that come and go.”

  “Was that all it was—a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?”

  “They ran together. You know, for protection. Girl like that, she needed a guy out there. Like a pimp. She worked the street, he watched out for her, and they split the profits. Except that night, he dropped the ball. Too bad for her.”

  Ballard nodded. She guessed that Bosch wanted to talk to Adam/Addict as the person who would know the most about who Daisy Clayton knew and interacted with, and where she went on the last night of her life.

  He could also have been a suspect.

  “You know about Bosch, right?” Dvorek asked.

  “Yeah,” Ballard said. “He worked in the division way back when.”

  “You know the stars out on the front sidewalk?”

  “’Course.”

  There were memorial stars on the sidewalk in front of Hollywood Station honoring officers from the division who were killed in the line of duty.

  “Well, there’s one out there,” Dvorek said. “Lieutenant Harvey Pounds. The story on him was he was Bosch’s L-T when he worked here, and he got abducted and died of a heart attack when he was being tortured on a case Bosch was working.”

  Ballard had never heard the story before.

  “Anybody ever go down for it?” she asked.

  “Depends on who you talk to,” Dvorek said. “It’s supposedly ‘cleared-other,’ but it’s another mystery in the big bad city. The word was that something Bosch did got the guy killed.”

  “Cleared-other” was a designation for a case that was officially closed but without an arrest or prosecution. Usually because the suspect was dead or serving a life sentence for another crime, and it was not worth the time, expense, and risk of going to trial on a case that would not result in additional punishment.

  “Supposedly the file on it is sealed. High jingo.”

  “High jingo” was LAPD-speak for when a case involved department politics. The kind of case where a career could be diverted by a wrong move.

  The information on Bosch was interesting but not on point. Before Ballard could think of a question that would steer Dvorek back toward the Daisy Clayton case, his rover squawked and he took a call from the watch office. Ballard listened as Lieutenant Munroe dispatched him to a Beachwood Canyon address to supervise a team responding to a domestic dispute.

  “Gotta go,” he said as he balled up the foil his tacos had come in. “Unless you want to ride along and back me up
.”

  It was said in jest, Ballard knew. The Relic didn’t need backup from the late show detective.

  “I’ll see you back at the barn,” she said. “Unless that goes sideways and you need a detective.”

  She hoped not. Domestics usually ended up being he-said-she-said deals in which she acted more as a referee than a detective. Even obvious physical injuries didn’t always tell the tale.

  “Roger that,” Dvorek said.

  3

  Day watch detectives were all about traffic patterns. Most days the majority of daysiders got to the bureau before six a.m. so they could split by midafternoon, missing the traffic swell both coming and going. Ballard counted on this when she decided she was going to ask Cesar Rivera about the Daisy Clayton case. She spent the remainder of her shift waiting on his arrival by pulling up and studying the electronic records available on the nine-year-old murder.

  The murder book, a blue binder full of printed reports and photos, was still the bible of a homicide investigation in the Los Angeles Police Department, but as the world turned digital, so did the department. Using her LAPD password, Ballard was able to access most of the reports and photos from the case that had been scanned into the digital archives. The only thing missing would be the handwritten notes detectives usually shoved into the back sleeve of the murder book.

  Most important, she was able to view the chronological record, which was always the spine of the case, a narrative of all moves made by investigators assigned to it.

  Ballard determined immediately that the murder was officially classified as a cold case and assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, which was part of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division working out of headquarters downtown. Ballard had once been assigned to the RHD and knew many of the detectives and associated players. Included in that number was her former lieutenant, who had pushed her up against a wall and tried to force himself on her in a bathroom at a squad Christmas party three years earlier. Her rejection of him and subsequent complaint and internal investigation was what landed her on the night shift at Hollywood Division. The complaint was determined to be unfounded because her own partner at the time did not back her up, even though he had witnessed the altercation. Department administrators decided that it would be for the good of all involved to separate Ballard and Lieutenant Robert Olivas. He stayed put in RHD and Ballard was moved out, the message to her clear. Olivas got by unscathed, while she went from an elite unit to a posting no one ever applied or volunteered for, a slot normally reserved for the department’s freaks and fuckups.