Dark Sacred Night - Ballard and Bosch #1;Renée Ballard #2 Page 7

  “Where are the officers?” she asked.

  “I’ll walk you back,” the bouncer said.

  He opened a door that matched the walls in red-velvet paisley and led her down a dark hallway to the open door of a well-lit office. He then headed back to the front.

  Three officers were crowded into the small room in front of a desk where a man sat. Ballard nodded. The blue suiters were Dvorek in charge and Herrera and Dyson, whom Ballard knew well because they were a rare female team, and the women on the late show often took code seven together. Herrera was the senior lead officer and had four hash marks on her sleeves. Her partner had one. Both women wore their hair short to avoid having it grabbed and pulled by suspects. Ballard knew that most days they worked out in the gym after their shifts and their shoulders and upper arms showed the results. They could hold their own in a confrontation and the word on Dyson was that she liked to start them.

  “Detective Ballard, glad you could make it,” Dvorek said. “This is Mr. Peralta, manager of this fine establishment, and he requested your services.”

  Ballard looked at the man behind the desk. He was in his fifties, overweight, with slicked-back hair and long, sharply edged sideburns. He wore a garish purple vest over a black collared shirt. On the wall behind his chair was a framed poster of a naked woman using a stripper pole to strategically cover her privates, but not quite enough to hide that her pubic hair had been trimmed to the shape of a small heart. To his right was a video monitor that showed sixteen camera angles of the stages, bars, and exits of the club. Ballard saw herself in one of the squares from a camera over her right shoulder.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” she asked.

  “This is like a dream come true,” Peralta said. “I didn’t realize the LAPD was almost all women. You want a part-time job?”

  “Sir, do you have a problem that requires police involvement or not?” Ballard replied.

  “I do,” Peralta said. “I’ve got a problem—someone is going to break in.”

  “Going to? Why would someone break in when they can walk in the front door?”

  “You tell me. All I’m saying is, it’s going down. Look at this.”

  He turned to the video monitor and pulled out a drawer beneath it, revealing a keyboard. He hit a few keys and the camera angles were replaced with a schematic of the premises.

  “I’ve got every opening in the building wired,” Peralta said. “Somebody’s on the roof fucking with the skylights. They’re going to come down through there.”

  Ballard leaned across the desk so she could see the screen better. It was showing breaches at two of the skylights over the stages.

  “When did this happen?” she asked.

  “Tonight,” Peralta said. “Like an hour ago.”

  “Why would they break in?”

  “Are you kidding me? This is a cash business, and I don’t walk out of here at four-thirty in the fucking morning with a cash bag under my arm. I’m not that stupid. Everything goes into the safe and then once, maybe twice, a week—in daylight—I come in to do the banking, and I have two guys you don’t want to fuck with watching my back the whole time.”

  “Where’s the safe?”

  “You’re standing on it.”

  Ballard looked down. The officers moved back toward the walls of the room. There was an outline cut in the planked wood floor and a fingerhold for pulling open the trap door.

  “Is it removable?” Ballard asked.

  “Nope,” Peralta said. “Set in concrete. They’d have to drill it—unless they knew the combo, and there are only three people who know that.”

  “So how much is in there?”

  “I did the banking after the weekend, so it’s going to be light tonight. About twelve thou in there right now and we’ll get it up to sixteen when I close out the registers tonight.”

  Ballard assessed things, looked up, and caught Dvorek’s eye and nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’re going to take a look around. Any cameras on the roof?”

  “No,” Peralta said. “Nothing up there.”

  “Any access?”

  “Nothing from inside. You’d need a ladder on the outside.”

  “All right. I’ll be back in after we check around. Where’s the door to the alley?”

  “Marv will take you.”

  Peralta reached under the desk and pushed a button to call his bouncer. Soon the big man from the velvet rope was back.

  “Take them out the back, Marv,” Peralta said. “To the alley.”

  A few minutes later Ballard was standing in the alley, assessing the roofline of the club. The building was freestanding with a flat roof about twenty feet up. There was no approach from the business on either side and no ladders or obvious means of getting up. Ballard checked behind her. The other side of the alley was contained by wood and concrete fences and bordered on a residential neighborhood.

  “Can I borrow a light?” Ballard asked.

  Dyson pulled her Pelican off her equipment belt and handed it to Ballard. It was a small but powerful flashlight. Ballard walked the length of the building, looking for upward access. She found a possible ascension point by the west corner. A cinder-block enclosure had been built to contain a row of city trash containers. It was about six feet high and was next to the downspout of a gutter that ran along the edge of the roofline. Ballard shone the light up the downspout and saw that it was secured to the exterior wall with brackets every few feet.

  Dvorek came up behind her.

  “There’s your ladder,” Ballard said.

  “You going up?” Dvorek asked.

  “Not on your life. I’m calling an airship. They’ll light it up and if anybody’s up there, we’ll grab them coming down.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Put the sisters on the other corner just in case they have a ladder up there with them and decide to come down the other side. I’ll get the air unit offline.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Ballard didn’t want to radio for the airship, because a burglar could be monitoring LAPD frequencies. She had a working relationship with the tactical flight officer on the chopper that covered the city’s west side on most nights. They often responded to the same calls. Ballard on the ground, Heather Rourke, the spotter, in the air with her pilot partner Dan Sumner. Ballard shot a text to Rourke.

  You guys up?

  Two minutes went by before there was a response.

  Yup. Just cleared a pursuit of an H/R suspect. What’s up RB?

  Ballard knew that the Rourke-Sumner team would have high adrenaline after chasing down a car involved in a hit-and-run. She was glad they were free.

  Need you to fly over Sirens strip bar 7171 Sunset. Light up the roof to see if we have suspects.

  Roger that—ETA 3

  Copy. Switch to Tac 5

  Copy. Tac 5

  In the event they had to speak by radio for expediency, the tactical channel was an unpublished frequency that wasn’t readily obtained on the internet.

  Ballard still had Dyson’s light. She waved it to get the attention of the three officers at the other corner of the building. She put the light on her free hand and held up three fingers and twirled her hand in the air.

  They waited. Ballard was pretty sure it was a fruitless exercise. If there had actually been someone up there, they most likely would have noticed the lights from the arrival of the patrol cars and made their escape when the officers entered the building. But checking out the roof with the airship should give some measure of satisfaction to Peralta. Ballard would then write up a recommendation to the detective commander to send out someone from the commercial burglary unit to check the roof in daylight for any signs of an attempted break-in.

  Ballard heard the helicopter’s approach and tucked in close to the rear wall of the building, next to the trash enclosure. She raised the rover and switched it to the tactical 5 frequency.

  She waited. The alley smelled like booze and cigarett
es. She breathed through her mouth.

  Soon the powerful beam of the chopper washed over everything, turning night into day. Ballard raised the rover.

  “Anything, Air six?”

  She held the radio to her ear, hoping to hear the response over the sound of the airship rotor. She partially heard it. The tenor of Heather Rourke’s voice told her more than the words she could make out. There was somebody on the roof.

  “…suspects. Heading…corner…”

  Ballard dropped the rover and pulled her weapon. She backed into the alley, raising her gun toward the roofline. The light from the chopper was blinding. Soon she saw movement and heard yelling, but she could not make out the words over the sound of the rotor. She saw someone sliding down the gutter’s downspout. Halfway down he lost his grip and fell to the ground. Soon another body was coming down the pipe, and then another.

  Ballard tracked the movement with her gun. Soon all three of the suspects started running down the alley.

  “Police! Freeze it right there!”

  Two of the fleeing figures stopped in their tracks. The third kept going and after reaching the end, turned left into the neighborhood.

  Ballard started approaching the two who had stopped and already raised their hands. As she ordered them to their knees, Dyson blew by her, running, and continued down the alley after the third suspect. Herrera followed her younger partner but at a much slower pace.

  As Ballard approached, her gun at the ready, she saw—

  The two suspects kneeling on the ground were just kids.

  “What the fuck?” Dvorek said as he came up next to her.

  Ballard holstered her weapon and put her hand on Dvorek’s arm to make him lower his. She walked around and shone the beam of Dyson’s light on their faces. They were no older than fourteen. Both were white, both looked scared. They were wearing T-shirts and blue jeans.

  She realized she had dropped her rover to the ground near the trash enclosure.

  “I can’t hear myself think,” she called to Dvorek. “Advise the airship on tac five that we have a code four here and they can stay with A twenty-five’s pursuit.”

  Dvorek went to his rover to make the call and soon the chopper headed south in the direction the third boy had run. Ballard held the light on the young faces in front of her. One boy lowered one of his hands to try to block the blinding light.

  “Keep your hands up,” Ballard ordered.

  He complied.

  Ballard looked at the two boys in front of her and had a good idea why they had been on the roof.

  “You two almost just got yourselves killed, you know that?” she barked.

  “We’re sorry, we’re sorry,” one of them said meekly.

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “We were just looking around. We didn’t—”

  “Looking around? You mean looking down at naked women?”

  In the cold, hard light of her beam Ballard could see their cheeks turn red with shame. But she knew it was shame at being caught and called on it by a woman, not shame at climbing onto a roof to look down through a skylight at women’s bodies.

  She glanced at Dvorek and saw a small smile on his face. She realized that on some level he admired their ingenuity—boys will be boys—and she knew that in the world of men and women, there would never be a time when women were viewed and treated completely as equals.

  “Are you going to have to tell our parents?” one of the boys asked.

  Ballard lowered the light and headed back to pick up her rover.

  “What do you think?” Dvorek asked her quietly as she passed him.

  The question further revealed him.

  “Your call,” Ballard said. “I’m out of here.”

  10

  There was one booth in Du-par’s at the Farmers Market that afforded an entire view of the restaurant and its entrance. Ballard always took it when it was available, and most nights when she was able to get a real meal break, it was so late that the place was largely empty and she had her choice of the entire room.

  She sat across from Bosch, who had ordered coffee only. He explained that there were almost always breakfast burritos or doughnuts at SFPD in the morning, and he intended to go there at six for a briefing before his team delivered the search warrant.

  Ballard didn’t hold back. She had skipped dinner the evening before and was famished. She matched Bosch’s coffee but added a blue-plate special that included pancakes, eggs, and bacon. As she waited for the food, she asked about the stack of FI cards he had gone through in the car while she handled the call at Sirens.

  “No keepers,” Bosch said.

  “You come across any written by a P.O. named Farmer?” she asked. “Good writer.”

  “I don’t think so…but I wasn’t checking too many names. Are you talking about Tim Farmer?”

  “Yeah, you knew him?”

  “I went to the academy with him.”

  “I didn’t know he was that old.”

  Ballard immediately realized what she had said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I mean, like, why was a guy who’d been around so long still on the street, you know?”

  “Some guys can’t give up the street,” Bosch said. “Like some guys can’t give up homicide work. You know he—”

  “Yeah, I know. Why’d he do it?”

  “Who knows? He was a month from retirement. I heard it was kind of a forced retirement—if he stayed, they were going to put him on a desk. So he put in his papers and during his last deployment period pulled the plug.”

  “That’s a sad fucking story.”

  “Most suicides are.”

  “I liked the way he wrote. His observations on the shakes were like poetry.”

  “A lot of poets kill themselves.”

  “I guess.”

  A waiter brought her food and Ballard suddenly wasn’t all that hungry. She was feeling sad about a man she had never met. She poured syrup over her short stack and started to eat anyway.

  “So, did you stay in touch after the academy?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Bosch said. “We were close then, and there were class reunions, but we were on different tracks. It wasn’t like now with social media and all of that Facebook stuff. He was up in the Valley and came to Hollywood after I’d left.”

  Ballard nodded and picked at her food. The pancakes were getting soggy and more unappetizing. She moved her fork to the eggs.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about King and Carswell,” she said. “I assume you or Soto talked to them at the start of this.”

  “Lucia did,” Bosch said. “One of them, at least. King retired about five years ago and moved to Bumfuck, Idaho—somewhere out in the woods with no phone and no internet. He went completely off grid. She got the PO box where his pension checks go and sent him a letter asking for an interview on the case. She’s still waiting for an answer. Carswell also retired and he took a gig as an investigator with the Orange County D.A. Lucia went down and talked to him but he wasn’t a font of new information. He barely remembered the case and told her everything he did know was in the murder book. It didn’t sound as though he wanted to talk about a case he didn’t close. I’m sure you know the type.”

  “Yeah—‘If I can’t close it, nobody else can.’ What about Adam Sands, the boyfriend. Either of you do a fresh interview?”

  “We couldn’t. He died in 2014 of an overdose.”

  Ballard nodded. It wasn’t a surprising end for Sands but it was a disappointment because he could have been helpful in setting the scene that Daisy Clayton lived and died in and in providing the names of other runaways and acquaintances. Ballard was beginning to see why Bosch wanted to locate the field interview cards. It might be their only hope.

  “Anything else?” she asked. “I take it Soto has the murder book. Anything not in the database that’s important?”

  “Not really,” Bosch said. “King and Carswell weren’t the extra-mile sort of guys. Carsw
ell told Lucia they didn’t put their notebooks in the murder book because everything was in the reports.”

  “I got that feeling about them when I was reading the book online.”

  “Speaking of which, I started a secondary book with what I’ve been doing.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s in my car. I’ll bring it in when we get back. I guess you should keep it now that you have official standing.”

  “All right. I will. Thanks.”

  Bosch reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a shake card. He slid it across the table for Ballard to read.

  “I thought you said there were no keepers,” she said.

  “There weren’t,” he said. “That one’s from earlier. Read it.”

  She did. The card was written at 3:30 a.m. on February 9, 2009, several months before Daisy Clayton’s murder. The subject of the field interview was a man named John McMullen who was thirty-six years old at the time he was questioned at the intersection of Western and Franklin Avenues. McMullen had no criminal record. According to the card, he was driving a white Ford panel van marked with Bible quotes and religious sayings and registered to a city-licensed charitable foundation called the Moonlight Mission.

  The card said the van was parked in a red zone while McMullen was on the nearby sidewalk accosting pedestrians and asking if they wanted to be saved by the grace of Jesus Christ. Those who demurred were treated to a verbal lashing that included dire predictions of their being left behind during the upcoming rapture.

  There was more on the flip side of the card: “Subject refers to himself as John the Baptist. Cruises Hollywood in his van, looking for people to baptize.”

  Ballard flipped the card onto the table in front of Bosch.

  “Okay,” she said. “Why’d you wait to show me this now?”