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

  In recent months, the irony of this was not lost on Ballard as the country and the Hollywood entertainment industry in particular were awash in scandals involving sexual harassment and worse. The chief of police even instituted a task force to handle all the claims pouring in from the movie industry, many of them decades old. Of course, the chief’s task force was composed of RHD detectives, and Olivas was one of its supervisors.

  The history with Olivas was not far from Ballard’s mind as her curiosity about Bosch and the case he was working sent her into the department’s digital channels. Technically she was not breaking any rules by pulling up the old reports, but the case had been moved from Hollywood when its homicide team was disbanded and placed with the Open-Unsolved Unit, which was part of the Robbery-Homicide Division and Olivas’s domain. Ballard knew that her moves in the department database would leave a digital trail that Olivas might become aware of. If that happened, he would have the opportunity to be spiteful and initiate an internal investigation into what she was doing with an RHD case.

  The threat was there but it wasn’t enough to stop her. She hadn’t been afraid of Olivas when he followed her into the bathroom at the Christmas party three years ago; she had shoved him back and he’d fallen into a bathtub. She wasn’t afraid of him now.

  While the chronological record was the most important part of a case review, Ballard started with a quick survey of the photos. She wanted to see Daisy Clayton in life and in death.

  The photo packet included crime scene and autopsy photos but also a posed shot of the girl in what looked to Ballard to be a private school uniform—a white blouse with a monogram over the left breast that said SSA. She was smiling at the camera, her blond hair midlength, makeup covering acne on her cheeks, a distant look already in her eyes. The back of the photo had been scanned as well and it read “Grade 7, St. Stanislaus Academy, Modesto.”

  Ballard decided to leave the crime scene photos for later and went to the chrono, first scrolling to see the latest moves on the case. She quickly learned that outside of annual due-diligence checks, the investigation had largely been dormant for eight years, until it was assigned six months earlier to a cold case detective named Lucia Soto. Ballard didn’t know Soto but she knew of her. She was the youngest female detective ever assigned to RHD, beating the record Ballard had previously held by being eight months younger when appointed.

  “Lucky Lucy,” Ballard said out loud.

  Ballard also knew that Soto was currently assigned to the Hollywood Sexual Harassment Task Force because the powers that be in the department—mostly white men—knew that putting as many women on the task force as possible was a prudent move. Soto, who already had a media profile and nickname because of an act of heroism that led to her RHD posting, was often used as the face of the task force for press conferences and other media interactions.

  This knowledge now gave Ballard pause. She put together a quick chronology. Six months earlier, Soto either requested or was assigned to the unsolved Daisy Clayton case. Shortly afterward, she was reassigned from the Open-Unsolved Unit to the harassment task force. Then Bosch shows up at Hollywood Station to ask questions about the case and attempt to get a look at the files of a sex crimes detective.

  There was a connection there that Ballard didn’t yet have. She quickly found it and started to understand things better when she conducted a new search of the department database and called up all cases that listed Bosch as a lead investigator. She zeroed in on the last case he handled before leaving the LAPD. It was a multiple-victim murder involving an arson of an apartment building in which several victims, including children, died of smoke inhalation. On several of the reports associated with the case, Bosch’s partner was listed as Lucia Soto.

  Ballard now had the connection—Soto took the Clayton case on and then somehow drew her former partner Bosch into it, even though he was no longer with the department. But Ballard didn’t have the reason, meaning there was no explanation as to why Soto would go outside the department for help with the investigation, especially when she was moved out of Open-Unsolved for the task force.

  Unable to answer that question for the moment, Ballard went back to the case files and started reviewing the investigation from the start. Daisy Clayton was deemed a chronic runaway who repeatedly left her own home as well as the temporary group homes and shelters she was placed in by the Department of Children and Family Services. Each time she ran, she ended up on the streets of Hollywood, joining other runaways in homeless camps and squats in abandoned structures. She abused alcohol and drugs and sold herself on the streets.

  The first record of a police interaction with Daisy was sixteen months before her death. It was followed by several more arrests for drugs, loitering, and solicitation for prostitution. Because of her age, the early arrests only resulted in her being returned to her single mother, Elizabeth, or to DCF authorities. But nothing seemed to stop the cycle of her returning to the streets and of being under the influence of Adam Sands, a nineteen-year-old former runaway with his own history of drugs and crime.

  Sands was interviewed at length by the original investigators on the case and was eliminated as a potential suspect when his alibi was confirmed: he was being held in the Hollywood Division jail at the time of Daisy Clayton’s murder.

  Cleared as a suspect, Sands was questioned extensively about the victim’s routines and relationships. He claimed to have no information on who she had met with on the night of her murder. He revealed that her routine was to loiter near a shopping plaza on Hollywood Boulevard near Western Avenue that included a mini-market and a liquor store. She would solicit men as they were leaving the stores and then have sex with them in their cars after they drove into one of the many nearby alleys for privacy. Sands said he often stood lookout for her during the transactions but on the night in question he had been grabbed by police on a warrant for not appearing in court on a misdemeanor drug charge.

  Daisy was left on her own at the shopping plaza and her body was found the next night in one of the alleys she used for her tricks. It was naked and there were indications of violent sexual assault and torture. Afterward, it had been cleaned with bleach. None of the victim’s clothes were ever found. Detectives determined that as many as twenty hours had passed between the time she was last seen at the shopping plaza soliciting johns and when police received an anonymous call about a body being seen in a dumpster in an alley off Cahuenga and Officer Dvorek was dispatched to roll on the call. The missing hours were never accounted for but it was clear from the bleaching of the body that Daisy had been taken somewhere and then used and murdered, and her body was carefully cleaned of any evidence that might lead to her killer.

  The one clue that the original detectives puzzled over throughout the investigation was a bruise on the body that they were convinced was a mark left by the killer. It was a circle two inches in diameter on the upper right hip. Within the circle was a crossword with the letters A-S-P arranged horizontally and vertically with the S in common.

  The letters of the crossword were backwards on the victim’s body, indicating that they read correctly on the device or tool used to make the mark. The circle around the crossword appeared to be a snake eating itself but the blurring of the bruising in the tissue made this impossible to confirm.

  Many hours of investigative work were expended on the crossword’s meaning but no definitive conclusion was reached. The case was originally investigated by two homicide detectives assigned to the Hollywood Division and then reassigned to Olympic Division when the regional homicide teams were consolidated and Hollywood lost its fabled murder unit. The investigators’ names were King and Carswell, and Ballard knew neither of them.

  Time of death was established during the autopsy at ten hours after the victim was last seen and ten hours before the body was found.

  The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as manual strangulation. It further refined this conclusion by stating that marks left on the victim’s n
eck by the killer’s hands indicated that she was strangled from behind, possibly while being sexually assaulted. Tissue damage in both the vagina and anus was listed as both pre- and postmortem. The victim’s fingernails were removed postmortem, a move viewed as an attempt by the killer to make sure no biological evidence was left behind.

  The body also showed postmortem abrasions and scratches that investigators believed occurred during an effort to clean the victim with a stiff brush and bleach, which was found in all orifices including the mouth, throat, and ear canals. The medical examiner concluded that the corpse had been submerged in bleach during this cleaning process.

  This finding coupled with the time of death led investigators to conclude that Daisy had been taken off the street and to a hotel room or other location by the killer where a bleach bath could be prepared for cleaning the body.

  “He’s a planner,” Ballard said out loud.

  The conclusions about the bleach led the original investigators to spend much of their time during the initial days of the investigation on a thorough canvass of every motel and hotel in the Hollywood area that offered direct access to rooms off the parking lot. The school photo of Daisy was shown to employees on all shifts, housekeepers were quizzed about any reports of a strong odor of bleach, and trash bins were searched for bleach containers. Nothing came of the effort. The location of the murder was never determined, and without a crime scene, the case was handicapped from the start. Six months into the investigation the case went cold with no leads and no suspects.

  Ballard finally came back to the crime scene photos and this time carefully studied them despite their grim nature. The victim’s age, the marks on her body and neck showing the overwhelming strength of her killer, her final naked repose on a spread of trash in a commercial trash bin…it all drew a sense of horror in Ballard, a sad empathy for this girl and what she had been through. Ballard had never been the kind of detective who could leave the work in a drawer at the end of shift. She carried it with her and it was her empathy that fueled her.

  Before being assigned to the night beat, Ballard had been working toward a specialization in sexually motivated homicide at RHD. Her then-partner, Ken Chastain, was one of the premier investigators of sex killings in the department. Both had taken classes from and been mentored by Detective David Lambkin, long considered the department expert, until he pulled the pin and left the city for the Pacific Northwest.

  That pursuit was largely sidelined by her transfer to the late show, but now as she reviewed the Clayton files, she saw a sexual predator hiding behind the words and reports, a predator unidentified for nine years now, and she felt a deep tug inside. It was the same pull that had first led her to thoughts of being a cop and a hunter of men who hurt women and left them like trash in the alley. She wanted in on whatever it was that Harry Bosch was doing.

  Ballard was pulled out of these thoughts when she heard voices. She looked up from the screen and over the workstation wall. She saw two detectives taking off their suit jackets and draping them over their chairs, readying for a new day of work.

  One of them was Cesar Rivera.

  4

  Ballard packed up her things and left her borrowed workstation. She first went into the print room to gather the reports she had fed into the communal printer after typing them up earlier. The detective squad lieutenant was old school and still liked hard-copy reports from her in the morning, even though she also filed them digitally. She separated the reports on the death investigation and the earlier burglary call, stapled them, and then walked them to the inbox on the desk of the lieutenant’s adjutant so they were ready for his arrival. She then sauntered over to the sex crimes section and came up behind Rivera as he was sitting at his station and preparing for the day by dumping an airline-size bottle of whiskey into a mug of coffee. She didn’t let on that she had seen this when she spoke.

  “Hail, Cesar.”

  Rivera was another mustache guy, his almost white against his brown skin. He matched this with flowing white hair that was a little long by LAPD standards but acceptable on an old detective. He jolted a bit in his seat, afraid his morning routine had been seen. He swiveled his chair around but relaxed when he saw it was Ballard. He knew she would not make any waves.

  “Renée,” he said. “What’s up, girl? You got something for me?”

  “No, nothing,” she said. “Quiet night.”

  Ballard kept her distance in case she smelled like decomp.

  “So what’s up?” Rivera asked.

  “About to leave,” Ballard said. “I was wondering, though. You know a guy used to work out of here named Harry Bosch? He worked homicide.”

  She pointed to the corner of the room where the homicide squad was once located. It was now used by an anti-gang team.

  “Before I got here,” Rivera said. “I mean, I know who he is—everybody does, I think. But no, I never dealt with the guy. Why?”

  “He was in the station this morning,” Ballard said.

  “You mean on graveyard?”

  “Yeah, he said he came in to talk to Dvorek about an old homicide. But I found him looking through your stack.”

  She pointed toward the long row of file cabinets running along the wall. Rivera shook his head in confusion.

  “My stack?” Rivera said. “What the fuck?”

  “How long have you been at Hollywood Division, Cesar?” Ballard asked.

  “Seven years, what’s that got to—”

  “You know the name Daisy Clayton? She was murdered in ’09. It’s an open case, classified as sexually motivated.”

  Rivera shook his head.

  “That was before my time here,” he said. “I was at Hollenbeck then.”

  He got up and walked over to the row of file cabinets and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket to open the top drawer of his four-drawer stack.

  “Locked now,” he said. “Was locked when I left last night.”

  “I locked it after he left,” Ballard said.

  She said nothing about finding the bent paper clip in the drawer.

  “Isn’t Bosch retired?” Rivera said. “How’d he get in here? He keep his nine-nine-nine when he split?”

  Every officer was given what was called a 999 key, which unlocked the back door of every station in the city. They were distributed as a backup to the electronic ID keys, which were more prone to malfunction and failure during power outages. The city was not scrupulous about collecting them when officers retired.

  “Maybe, but he told me Lieutenant Munroe let him in so he could wait for Dvorek to come in off patrol,” Ballard said. “He wandered, and that’s when I saw him looking in your files. I was working over in the corner and he didn’t see me.”

  “He’s the one who mentioned the Daisy case?”

  “Daisy Clayton. No, actually Dvorek said that’s what Bosch wanted to talk to him about. Dvorek was first officer on scene with her.”

  “Was it Bosch’s case back then?”

  “No. It was worked by King and Carswell initially. Now it’s assigned to Open-Unsolved downtown.”

  Rivera walked back to his desk but stayed standing while he grabbed his coffee cup and took a long drink out of it. He then abruptly pulled the cup away from his mouth.

  “Shit, I know what he was doing,” he said.

  “What?” Ballard asked.

  There was a sense of urgency in her voice.

  “I got here just as they were reorganizing and moving homicide over to West Bureau,” Rivera said. “The sex table was expanding and they brought me in. Me and Sandoval were add-ons, not replacements. We both came from Hollenbeck, see.”

  “Okay,” Ballard said.

  “So the lieutenant assigned me that cabinet and gave me the key. But when I opened the top drawer to put stuff in there, it was full. All four drawers were full. Same with Sandoval—his four were filled up as well.”

  “Filled with what? You mean with files?”

  “No, every drawer was fille
d with shake cards. Stacks and stacks of them crammed in there. The homicide guys and the other detectives had decided to keep the old cards after the department went digital. They stuck them in the file drawers for safekeeping.”

  Rivera was talking about what were officially called field interview cards. They were 3 x 5 cards that were filled out by officers while they were on patrol when they encountered people on the streets. The front of each card was a form with specific identifiers regarding the person interviewed, such as name, date of birth, address, gang affiliation, tattoos, and known associates. The back of each card was blank, and that was where the officer could write any ancillary information about the subject.

  Officers carried stacks of blank FI cards on their person or in their patrol cars—Ballard had always kept hers under the sun visor in her car when she had worked patrol in Pacific Division. At the end of shift, the cards were turned in to the divisional watch commander and the information on them was entered by clerical staff into a searchable database. Should a name that was run through the database produce a match, the inquiring officer or detective would have a ready set of facts, addresses, and known associates to start with.

  The American Civil Liberties Union had long protested the department’s use of the cards and the collection of information from citizens who had not committed crimes, calling the practice unlawful search and seizure and routinely referring to the Q&As as shakedowns. The department had fended off all legal attempts to stop the practice, and many of the rank and file referred to the 3 x 5 cards as shake cards, a not-so-subtle dig at the ACLU.