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

by Michael Connelly

  “Well, where is everybody? The house seems empty.”

  “Each night I seek a new flock. Anyone I bring in to feed and clothe must be on their own by this time. This is just a way station on the journey to salvation.”

  “Right. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Follow me.”

  McMullen turned and headed out of the room. His heels kicked up from under his robe and Ballard saw that he was barefoot. They went around the staircase and down a short hallway into a kitchen with a large eating space taken up by a long picnic table and benches. McMullen stepped into a side room that might have been a servant’s pantry when the house was originally built but now served as an office or perhaps a confessional. It was spartan, with a small table and folding chairs on either side of it. Prominent on the wall opposite the doorway was a paper calendar with a photo of the heavenly skies and a verse from the Bible printed on it.

  “Please sit,” McMullen said.

  He took one chair and Ballard sat opposite him, leaving her right hand down by her hip and her weapon.

  She saw that the wall behind McMullen was lined with cork. Pinned to it was a collage of photos of young people wearing layers of sometimes ragged clothing. Many had dirty faces, some were missing teeth, some had drug-glazed eyes, and all of them comprised the homeless flock that McMullen brought to his baptismal font. The people on the wall were diverse in gender and ethnicity. They shared one thing: each smiled for the camera. Some of the photos were old and faded, others were covered by new shots pinned over them. There were first names and dates handwritten on the photos. Ballard assumed these were the dates of their acceptance of Jesus Christ.

  “If you are here to talk me out of a complaint, then you can save your words,” he said. “I decided that charity would be more useful than anger.”

  Ballard thought about Bosch’s saying that it would be suspicious if McMullen did not make a complaint.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I was coming to apologize if we offended you. We had an incomplete description of the van we were looking for.”

  “I understand,” McMullen said.

  Ballard nodded at the wall behind him.

  “Those are the people you’ve baptized?” she asked.

  McMullen glanced behind him at the wall and smiled.

  “Just some of them,” he said. “There are many more.”

  Ballard looked up at the calendar. The photo showed a gold and maroon sunset and a quote:

  Commit your way to the LORD. Trust HIM and HE will help you.

  Her eyes scanned down to the dates and she noticed that a number was scribbled in each day’s square. Most were single digits but on some days the number was higher.

  “What do the numbers mean?” she asked.

  McMullen followed her eyes to the calendar.

  “Those are the numbers of souls who receive the sacrament,” he said. “Each night I count how many people took the Lord and Savior into their hearts. Each dark sacred night brings more souls to Christ.”

  Ballard nodded but said nothing.

  “What are you really doing here, Detective?” McMullen asked. “Is Christ in your life? Do you have faith?”

  Ballard felt herself being pushed onto the defensive.

  “My faith is my business,” she said.

  “Why not proclaim your faith?” McMullen pressed.

  “Because it’s private. I don’t…I’m not part of any organized religion. I don’t feel the need for it. I believe in what I believe. That’s it.”

  McMullen studied her for a long moment before repeating a question.

  “What are you really doing here?”

  Ballard returned the penetrating look and decided to see if she could draw a reaction.

  “Daisy Clayton.”

  McMullen held her eyes but she could see he was not expecting what she had said. She could also see that the name meant something to him.

  “She was murdered,” he said. “That was a long—Is that your case?”

  “Yes,” Ballard said. “It’s my case.”

  “And what does it have to do with—”

  McMullen stopped short as he apparently answered his own question.

  “The stop this morning,” he said. “The detective looked in my van. For what?”

  Ballard ignored his question and tried to steer things in the direction she wanted to go.

  “You knew her, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I saved her,” he said. “I brought her to Christ and then he called her home.”

  “What does that mean? Exactly.”

  “I baptized her.”

  “When?”

  McMullen shook his head.

  “I don’t remember. Obviously before she was taken.”

  “Is she on the wall?”

  Ballard pointed behind him. McMullen turned to study the collage.

  “I think—Yes, I put her up there,” he said.

  He got up and moved to the corked wall. He started pulling pins and tacks and removing the outer layers of photos, which he gently put down on the table. In a few minutes he had taken off several layers and then stopped as he studied one.

  “I think this is Daisy,” he said.

  He pulled down the photo and showed it to Ballard. It depicted a young girl with a pink blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair had a streak of purple and was wet. Ballard could see some of the banners from the baptism room in the background. The photo was dated by hand four months before Daisy Clayton’s murder. Instead of writing her name she had drawn a daisy on the corner of the photograph.

  “It’s her,” Ballard said.

  “She was baptized into the grace of Jesus Christ,” McMullen said. “She’s with him now.”

  Ballard held up the photo.

  “Do you remember this night?”

  “I remember all of the nights.”

  “Was she alone when you brought her here?”

  “Oh, well, that I don’t remember. I would have to find my calendar from that year and look at the number on that date.”

  “Where would the calendar be?”

  “In storage. In the garage.”

  Ballard nodded and moved past McMullen to look at the photos still on the corked wall.

  “What about here?” she asked. “Are there others who were baptized the same night?”

  “If they allowed their pictures to be taken,” McMullen said.

  He stepped next to Ballard as they scanned the images. He started taking down photos and checking the dates on the back, then pinning them back up to the side of the collage.

  “This one,” he said. “It has the same date.”

  He handed Ballard a photo of a dirty and disheveled man who looked to be in his late twenties. Ballard confirmed that the date on the back matched the date of Daisy’s baptism. The name etched in marker on the print said Eagle.

  “Another,” he said.

  He handed her another photo, this one of a much younger man, with blond hair and a hard look in his eyes. The dates matched and the name on this print was Addict. Ballard took the print and studied it. It was Adam Sands, Daisy’s supposed boyfriend and pimp.

  “Looks like that’s it for that date,” McMullen said.

  “Can we go look for the calendar?” Ballard asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I keep these photos?”

  “As long as I get them back. They’re part of the flock.”

  “I’ll copy and return them.”

  “Thank you. Follow me, please.”

  They went outside and McMullen used a key to open a side door on the free-standing garage. They entered a space crowded with stored furniture and wheeled racks of clothing. There were also several boxes stacked against the walls, some with the years marked on them.

  Fifteen minutes later, McMullen unearthed the 2009 calendar from a dusty box. On the date corresponding to the photo of Daisy, the calendar recorded seven baptisms. Ballard then took the calendar a
nd flipped it four months forward to look at the date when Daisy was abducted and murdered. She found no number in the calendar square for the date of the murder or the two days after it.

  McMullen saw the empty spots on the calendar at the same time Ballard did.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I almost never take a night off from my work. I don’t—Oh, I remember now. The van had to have been in the shop. It’s the only reason I would miss so many days in a row.”

  Ballard looked at him.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Of course,” McMullen said.

  “You think you have any record of that? Which shop it was, what was wrong with the van?”

  “I can look. I think this was a transmission problem back then. I remember I took it to the place on Santa Monica by the cemetery. Santa Monica and El Centro. On the corner. It begins with a Z but I can’t remember the name.”

  “Okay. You take a look at your records and let me know what you find. Can I keep this calendar? I’ll copy and return it.”

  “I guess.”

  Ballard could have photographed the photos and the calendar but she needed to take the originals in case they became evidence in the investigation.

  “Good,” she said. “I need to go now. I have a call I need to respond to.”

  She pulled out a business card and handed it to McMullen.

  “If you find the receipt for the transmission overhaul or remember anything about Daisy, give me a call.”

  “I will, I will.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  Ballard walked out of the garage and down a walkway to the front gate. She trusted her instincts that John the Baptist was not the killer of Daisy Clayton, but she knew she still had a long way to go before he was in the clear.

  16

  A white box truck with CCB painted on its side was parked in front of the Hollywood Boulevard house where the woman whose face was eaten by her cat had been found. There was also a patrol car and two blue-suiters standing on the street with a man in a white jumpsuit. This time there was no space for Ballard, who was still driving her own van, so she drove by, gave a wave, and parked in front of a garage two doors down. Few houses on the edge side of the hills had driveways. The garages were right at the curb, and blocking one involved risking the potential ire of a homeowner, especially when the culprit was not obviously a police vehicle.

  She walked back to the house in question and had to introduce herself to all three waiting men. She had little experience with day watch blue suiters. These two were named Felsen and Torborg. Both were young and cut with military precision and bearing. Ballard recognized the name Torborg and knew him by reputation. He was a hard charger nicknamed Torpedo, who had accumulated several one-day suspensions for overaggressive enforcement and behavior. Female cops referred to these as testosterone timeouts.

  The man in the jumpsuit was named Roger Dillon. He worked for CCB, a biohazard cleaning service. He had reported the burglary. Though he had told his story to Felsen and Torborg, he was prompted to repeat it to the detective, who would actually compose the burglary report.

  Dillon said the dead woman’s niece in New York hired his firm to clean and decontaminate the house after her aunt’s body was removed and the premises were cleared as a possible crime scene. She overnighted him her key but it didn’t arrive until the early afternoon, delaying his getting to the house to perform the job. He was under a deadline because the niece, whom Ballard had identified during the death investigation as Bobbi Clark, was due to arrive the following morning. She planned to stay in the house while she organized services and took stock of the property she would be inheriting as the dead woman’s only living relative.

  “So, I get here and I don’t even need the key, because the door’s unlocked,” Dillon said.

  “Unlocked and open?” Ballard asked. “Or unlocked and closed?”

  “Unlocked and closed but so you could see that it wasn’t pulled all the way. I pushed on the door and it opened.”

  Ballard checked his hands.

  “No gloves on?” she asked. “Show me where you touched the door.”

  Dillon moved up the short walkway to the front door. Ballard turned back to Felsen and Torborg.

  “Hey, I don’t have my rover with me,” she said. “Can one of you call the watch office and tell them I’m code six here and to cancel the one-hour backup at Moonlight Mission? I forgot about it.”

  “Got it,” Felsen said as he keyed his shoulder mic.

  “Moonlight Mission?” Torborg said. “Talking to John the Baptist? I knew that freak would act out someday. What did he do?”

  “Just talking to him about a cold case,” Ballard said. “It wasn’t much.”

  She turned and followed Dillon to the door. Since Torborg obviously knew John McMullen, she wanted to talk to him about his interactions and impressions of the street preacher, but she had to deal with Dillon and the case at hand first.

  Dillon was tall and his white coveralls seemed to be a size too small. The cuffs on the pants just ticked the top of his work boots and the overall picture to Ballard was of a boy who had outgrown his clothes. Dillon, of course, was no boy. Ballard pegged him in his midthirties. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face, a full mane of brown hair, and a wedding ring on his finger.

  He was poised at the door, his finger running a clockwise circle around a spot shoulder-high on it. Ballard pulled a pair of gloves from her blazer pocket and started putting them on.

  “You pushed it open and went in?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Dillon said.

  She opened the door and held her hand up to signal him to enter.

  “Show me what you did next,” she said.

  Dillon pulled an air-filtering mask up from around his neck and over his mouth as he entered. Ballard looked back at Felsen and Torborg. Felsen had just finished the radio call to the watch commander.

  “Can you see if the print car is available and get an ETA?” she asked.

  “Roger that,” Felsen said.

  “And don’t leave,” she added. “I need you guys here.”

  “The L-T’s already asking when we can clear,” Felsen said.

  “Tell her I need you here,” Ballard said sternly.

  She entered the house after Dillon. The odor of decay still hung in the air but it had dissipated since she had worked the death case two nights before. Still, she wished she had her air mask, but it was in her kit in her city ride. Along with her hermetically sealable coveralls. She knew her third-string suit would be toast after one wearing. Luckily, the suit she had dropped off at the dry cleaners the day before would be ready in the morning.

  “Walk me through it,” she said. “How’d you know it was a break-in? The place was already pretty messed up.”

  Dillon gestured over her shoulder to the front wall of the living room. Ballard turned and saw that the three side-by-side prints of red lips were gone. When Ballard had called Bobbi Clark to report that her aunt was dead, Clark had asked specifically about the well-being of the prints, mentioning that they were the work of Andy Warhol and were rare APs—artist’s prints—that were worth over six figures each and even more when combined as a series.

  “Ms. Clark told me to be careful of these red lip paintings that were supposed to be in the living room,” Dillon said. “So, I come in and no red lips. I called you guys because this is why I rarely go into a house by myself. I don’t want to get accused of anything. We usually work in twos but my partner’s on another job and this lady Clark really wanted this done today. When she gets here, she doesn’t want to see blood or anything else. She told me about what the cat did.”

  Ballard nodded.

  “Is it your company or you just work for the company?” she asked.

  “It’s mine,” Dillon said. “Two trucks, four employees, available twenty-four-seven. We’re a small shop. You wouldn’t think it, but it’s a competitive business. A lot of companies cleaning up
after murders and bad things.”

  “Well, this wasn’t a murder. How’d Ms. Clark come to hire you from New York?”

  “Recommendation from the M.E. I give out a lot of business cards. And gifts at the holidays. People recommend me. I’ll give you a stack of cards if you’ll take them.”

  “Maybe later. I don’t do many crime scenes like this. Not a lot of murders in Hollywood these days and I’m usually on graveyard.”

  “They had that five-spot last year at the Dancers. I got that one. Worked four days cleaning up that mess and then they never reopened the joint.”

  “I know. I was there that night.”

  Dillon nodded.

  “I think I saw you on TV for that,” he said.

  Ballard decided to get back on track.

  “So, you come in, you see the prints are gone. Then what?” she asked.

  “I backed out and called you guys,” Dillon said. “Then I waited about an hour for them and then they waited an hour for you. I’m not getting any work done and Ms. Clark lands at ten tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m sorry about that, but we have to conduct the investigation—especially if we’re talking about a major theft. We’ve hopefully got a print car coming soon and we’ll need to get yours so we can exclude them. I’m going to ask you to step outside now and wait with the officers while I work in here.”

  “How long before I can go to work?”

  “I’ll get you cleared as soon as possible but I don’t think you’re getting in here today. Someone will have to do a walk-through in as-is condition with Ms. Clark after she arrives.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You keep saying that but I don’t make money on sorries.”

  Ballard understood his concerns as the owner of the company.

  “I’ll tell you what, get me some of your cards, and I’ll keep them handy down the line.”

  “I’d really appreciate that, Detective.”

  Ballard followed him out of the house and asked Felsen about the print car. He said the ETA was fifteen minutes and Ballard knew from experience that all waiting times on the print car should be doubled. The car was assigned to the entire West Bureau and was operated by a latent-print tech who responded to all needs, ranging from property capers to violent crimes. It was safe to say the print car tech never stopped working.