Dark Sacred Night - Ballard and Bosch #1;Renée Ballard #2 Page 4

  “Why were they keeping them?” Ballard asked. “Everything was put into the database and would be easier to find there.”

  “I don’t know,” Rivera said. “They didn’t do it that way at Hollenbeck.”

  “So, what did you do, clear them out?”

  “Yeah, me and Sandy emptied the drawers.”

  “You threw them all out?”

  “No, if I’ve learned anything in this department, it’s not to be the guy who fucks up. We boxed them and took them to storage. Let it be somebody else’s problem.”

  “What storage?”

  “Across the lot.”

  Ballard nodded. She knew he meant the structure at the south end of the station’s parking lot. It was a single-level building that had once been a city utilities office but had been turned over to the station when more space was needed. The building was largely unused now. A gym for officers’ use and a padded martial arts studio had been set up in two of the larger rooms, but the smaller offices were empty or used for nonevidentiary storage.

  “So, this was seven years ago?” she asked.

  “More or less,” Rivera said. “We didn’t move it all at once. I cleared one drawer out, and when it got filled and I had to go down to the next, I’d clear that one. It went like that. Took about a year.”

  “So what makes you think that Bosch was looking for shake cards last night?”

  Rivera shrugged.

  “There would have been shake cards in there from the time of the murder you’re talking about, right?”

  “But the info on the shake cards is in the database.”

  “Supposedly. But what do you put in the search window? See what I mean? There’s a flaw. If he wanted to see who was hanging around Hollywood at the time of the murder, how do you search the database for that?”

  Ballard nodded in agreement but knew that there were many ways to pull up info on field interviews in the database such as by geography and time frame. She thought Rivera was wrong about that but probably right about Bosch. He was an old-school detective. He wanted to look through the shakes to see who the street cops in Hollywood were talking to at the time of the Clayton murder.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m out of here. Have a good one. Stay safe.”

  “Yeah, you too, Ballard,” Rivera said.

  Ballard left the detective bureau and went up to the women’s locker room on the second floor. She changed out of her suit and into her sweats. Her plan was to head out to Venice, drop off laundry, pick up her dog at the overnight kennel, and then carry her tent and a paddleboard out to the beach. In the afternoon, after she had rested and considered her approach, she’d deal with Bosch.

  The morning sun blistered her eyes as she crossed the parking lot behind the station. She popped the locks on her van and threw her crumpled suit onto the passenger seat. She then saw the old utilities building at the south end of the lot and changed her mind about leaving right away.

  She used her key card to enter the building and found a couple other denizens of the late show working out before heading home after the morning rush hour. She threw a mock salute at them and went down a hallway that led to former city offices now used for storage. The first room she checked contained items recovered in one of her own cases. The year before, she had taken down a burglar who had filled a motel room with property from the homes he had broken into or had bought with the money and credit cards he had stolen. Now a year later, the case had been adjudicated and much of the property had still not been claimed. It had been returned to Hollywood Station for when the division organized an annual open house for victims as a last chance for them to claim their property.

  The next room down was stacked with cardboard boxes containing old case files that for various reasons had to be kept. Ballard looked around here and moved several boxes in order to get to others. Soon enough, she opened a dusty box that was filled with FI cards. She had hit pay dirt.

  Twenty minutes later she had culled twelve boxes of FI cards and lined them along the wall in the hallway. By individually sampling cards from each of the boxes, she was able to determine that the cards spanned the years from 2006, when the digitizing initiative began, to 2010, when the homicide section was moved out of Hollywood Division.

  Ballard estimated that each of the boxes held up to a thousand cards. It would take many hours to comb through them all thoroughly. She wondered if that was what Bosch was expecting to do, or if he was planning a more precise search for one card or one night in particular, perhaps the night Daisy Clayton was taken off the street.

  Ballard wouldn’t know the answer until she asked Bosch.

  She left a note on the row of boxes in the hallway, saying that they were on hold for her. She returned to the parking lot and got into her van after checking the straps holding her boards to the roof racks. Shortly after she had been assigned to Hollywood Division and word leaked that she was involved in an internal harassment investigation, there were some in the station who attempted to retaliate against her. Sometimes it was basic bullying, sometimes it went deeper. One morning at the end of her shift, when she stopped her van at the station lot’s electric gate, her paddleboard slid forward off the roof and crashed against the gate, splintering the nose’s fiberglass. She repaired the board herself and started checking the rack straps every morning after her shift.

  She took La Brea down to the 10 freeway and headed west toward the beach. She waited until a few minutes after eight o’clock to call the number for RHD that she still had programmed into her phone. A clerk answered and Ballard asked for Lucy Soto. She said the name with a clipped familiarity that imparted the idea that this was a cop-to-cop call. The transfer was made without question.

  “This is Detective Soto.”

  “This is Detective Ballard, Hollywood Division.”

  There was a pause before Soto responded.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “How can I help you, Detective Ballard?”

  Ballard was used to detectives she wasn’t personally acquainted with knowing about her. With female detectives, there was always an awkward moment. They either admired Ballard for her perseverance in the department or believed her actions had made their own jobs more difficult. Ballard always had to find out which it was, and Soto’s opener gave no hint as to which camp she was in. Her repeating Ballard’s name out loud might have been a move to let someone like a partner or supervisor on the task force know who she was talking to.

  Not being able to read her yet, Ballard just pressed on.

  “I work the late show here,” she said. “Some nights it keeps me running, some nights not so much. My L-T likes me to have a hobby case to kind of keep me busy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Soto said. “What’s this have to do with me? I’m sort of in the middle of—”

  “Yeah, I know you’re busy. You’re on the harassment task force. That’s why I’m calling. One of your cold cases—that you’re not working because of the task force—I was wondering if I could take a whack at it.”

  “Which case?”

  “Daisy Clayton. Fifteen-year-old murdered up here in—”

  “I know the case. What makes you so interested?”

  “It was a big case here at the time. I heard some blue suiters talking about it, pulled up what I could on the box, and got interested. It looked like with this task force thing you weren’t doing much with it at the moment.”

  “And you want to give it a shot.”

  “I make no promises but, yeah, I’d like to do some work on it. I would keep you in the loop. It’s still your case. I’d just do some street work.”

  Ballard was on the freeway but not moving. Her weeding through the boxes in the storage room had pushed her into the heart of rush hour. She knew the morning breeze would also be in full effect on the coast. She’d be paddling against it and the chop it would kick up. She was missing her window.

  “It’s nine years later,” Soto said. “I’m not sure the street’s goin
g to produce anything. Especially on graveyard. You’ll be spinning your wheels.”

  “Well, maybe,” Ballard said. “But they’re my wheels to spin. You okay with this or not?”

  There was another long pause. Enough time for Ballard to move the van about five feet.

  “There’s something you should know,” Soto said. “There’s somebody else looking into it. Somebody outside the department.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ballard said. “Who’s that?”

  “My old partner. His name’s Harry Bosch. He’s retired now but he…he needs the work.”

  “One of those, huh? Okay. Anything else I should know? Was this one of his cases?”

  “No. But he knows the victim’s mother. He’s doing it for her. Like a dog with a bone.”

  “Good to know.”

  Ballard was now getting a better sense of the lay of the land. It was the true purpose of her call. Permission to work the case was the least of her concerns.

  “If I come up with anything, I’ll feed it to you,” Ballard said. “And I’ll let you get back to the reckoning.”

  Ballard thought she heard a muffled laugh.

  “Hey, Ballard?” Soto then added quietly. “I said I knew who you were. I also know who Olivas is. I mean, I work with him. I want you to know I appreciate what you did and I know you paid a price. I just wanted to say that.”

  Ballard nodded to herself.

  “That’s good to know,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Bosch

  5

  From the San Fernando Courthouse it was only a block’s walk back to the old jail where Bosch did his file work. He covered the distance quickly, a spring in his step caused by the search warrant in his hand. Judge Atticus Finch Landry had read it in chambers and asked Bosch a few perfunctory questions before signing the approval page. Bosch now had the authority to execute the search and hopefully find the bullet that would lead to an arrest and the closing of another case.

  He took the shortcut through the city’s Public Works yard to the back door of the old jail. He pulled the key to the padlock as he moved toward the former drunk tank, where the open-case files were kept on steel shelves. He found that he had left the lock open and silently chastised himself. It was a breach of his own as well as departmental protocol. The files were to be kept locked up at all times. And Bosch liked to keep the matters on his desk secure too, even during a forty-minute search-warrant run to the courthouse next door.

  He moved behind his makeshift desk—and old wooden door set across two stacks of file boxes—and sat down. Immediately, he saw the twisted paper clip sitting on top of his closed laptop.

  He stared at it. He had not put it there.

  “You forgot that.”

  Bosch looked up. The woman—the detective—from the night before at Hollywood Station was straddling the old bench that ran between the freestanding shelves full of case files. She had been out of his line of sight as he came into the cell. He looked over at the open door where the padlock dangled from its chain.

  “Ballard, right?” he said. “Good to know I’m not going crazy. I thought I had locked up.”

  “I let myself in,” Ballard said. “Lock picking 101.”

  “It’s a good skill to have. Meantime, I’m kind of busy here. Just got a search warrant I need to figure out how to execute without my suspect finding out. What do you want, Detective Ballard?”

  “I want in.”

  “In?”

  “On Daisy Clayton.”

  Bosch considered her for a moment. She was attractive, maybe midthirties, with brown, sun-streaked hair cut at the shoulders and a slim, athletic build. She was wearing off-duty clothes. The night before, she had been in work clothes that made her seem more formidable—a must in the LAPD, where Bosch knew female detectives were often treated like office secretaries.

  Ballard also had a deep tan, which to Bosch was at odds with the idea of someone who worked the graveyard shift. Most of all he was impressed that it had been only twelve hours since she had surprised him at the file cabinets in the Hollywood detective bureau and she already appeared to have caught up to him and what he was doing.

  “I talked to your old partner, Lucy,” Ballard said. “She gave me her blessing. It is a Hollywood Station case, after all.”

  “Was—till RHD took it,” Bosch said. “They have standing now, not Hollywood.”

  “And what’s your standing? You’re out of the LAPD. Doesn’t seem to be any link to the town of San Fernando that I could see in the book.”

  In his capacity as an SFPD reserve officer for the past three years, Bosch had largely been working on a backlog of cold cases of all kinds—murders, rapes, assaults. But the work was part-time.

  “They give me a lot of freedom up here,” Bosch said. “I work these cases and I also work my own. Daisy Clayton’s one of my own. You could say I have a vested interest. That’s my standing.”

  “And I have twelve boxes of shake cards at Hollywood Station,” Ballard said.

  Bosch nodded. He was even more impressed. She had somehow figured out exactly what he had gone to Hollywood for. As he studied her, he decided it wasn’t all a tan. She had a mix of races in her skin. He guessed that she was probably half white, half Polynesian.

  “I figure between the two of us, we could get through them in a couple nights,” Ballard said.

  There was the offer. She wanted in and would give Bosch what he was looking for in trade.

  “The shake cards are a long shot,” he said. “Truth is, I’ve run the string out on the case. I was hoping there might be something in the cards.”

  “That’s surprising,” Ballard said. “I heard you’re the kind of guy who never lets the string run out—your old partner called you a dog with a bone.”

  Bosch didn’t know what to say to that. He shrugged.

  Ballard got up and walked toward him down the aisle between the shelves.

  “Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it isn’t,” she said. “I’m going to start looking through the cards tonight. Between calls. Anything in particular I should look for?”

  Bosch paused but knew he needed to make a decision. Trust her or keep her on the outside.

  “Vans,” he said. “Look for work vans, guys who carry chemicals maybe.”

  “For transporting her,” she said.

  “For the whole thing.”

  “It said in the book the guy took her home or to a motel. Some place with a bathtub. For the bleaching.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “No, he didn’t use a bathtub,” he said.

  She stared at him, waiting, not asking the obvious question of how he knew.

  “All right, come with me,” he finally said.

  He got up and led her out of the cell and back to the door to the Public Works yard.

  “You looked at the book and the photos, right?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Everything that was digitized.”

  They walked into the yard, which was a large open-air square surrounded by walls. Along the back wall there were four bays delineated by tool racks and workbenches where city equipment and vehicles were maintained and repaired. Bosch led Ballard into one of these.

  “You saw the mark on the body?”

  “The A-S-P?”

  “Right. But they got the meaning of it wrong. The original detectives. They went down a spiral with it and it was all wrong.”

  He went to a workbench and reached up to a shelf where there was a large, translucent plastic tub with a blue snap-on top. He brought it down and held it out to her.

  “Twenty-five-gallon container,” Bosch said. “Daisy was five-two, a hundred and five pounds. Small. He put her in one of these, then put in the bleach as needed. He didn’t use a bathtub.”

  Ballard studied the container. Bosch’s explanation was plausible but not conclusive.

  “That’s a theory,” she said.

  “No theory,” he said.

  He put th
e container down on the floor so he could unsnap the top. He then lifted the tub up and angled it so she could see into it. He reached inside and pointed to a manufacturer’s seal stamped into the plastic at the bottom. It was a two-inch circle with the A-S-P reading horizontally and vertically in the center.

  “A-S-P,” he said. “American Storage Products or American Soft Plastics. Same company, two names. The killer put her in one of these. He didn’t need a bathtub or a motel. One of these and a van.”

  Ballard reached into the container and ran a finger over the manufacturer’s seal. Bosch knew she was drawing the same conclusion he had. The logo was stamped into the plastic on the underside of the tub, creating a ridged impression on the inside. If Daisy’s skin had been pressed against the ridges, the logo would have left its mark.

  Ballard pulled her arm out and looked up from the tub to Bosch.

  “How’d you figure this out?” she asked.

  “I thought like he did,” Bosch said.

  “Let me guess, these are untraceable.”

  “They make them in Gardena, ship them to retailers everywhere. They do some direct sales to commercial accounts but as far as individual sales go, forget it. You can get these at every Target and Walmart in the country.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bosch snapped the top back on the tub and was about to return it to the high shelf.

  “Can I take it?” Ballard asked.

  Bosch turned to her. He knew he could replace it and that she could easily get her own. He guessed it was a move to draw him further into a partnership. If he gave her something, then it meant they were working together.

  He handed the tub over.

  “It’s yours,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She looked at the open gate to the Public Works yard.

  “Okay, so I start tonight on the shakes,” she said.

  Bosch nodded.

  “Where were they?” he asked.

  “In storage,” Ballard said. “Nobody wanted to throw them out.”

  “I figured. It was smart.”