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

by Michael Connelly

  “Well, I know the department dumped the program when the new chief came in, but what I’m wondering about is what happened to all the Hollywood crime data.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m trying to get a handle on this girl’s murder and I thought it would be good if I could get a look at everything that was happening in the division that night or that week. As you can tell, we don’t have a lot, so I’m grasping at straws a bit.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Just a figure of speech. So do you know where all the data went when the GRASP program ended?”

  “Yeah, it went down the digital toilet. It was purged when the new administration wanted to go another way.”

  Ballard frowned and nodded. It was a dead end.

  “Officially, at least,” Mason said.

  Ballard looked at him. What was he saying?

  “I was the guy who had to collate and send all the data downtown. There was a guy we called the ‘GRASP guru.’ He wasn’t a sworn officer. He was this computer genius from USC who came up with the whole thing and sold it to the chief. All the data went to him and he did all the modeling.”

  Ballard started to get excited. She knew that guys like the one Mason was describing were proprietary about their work and accomplishments. The order may have come down to end the program and spike the data, but there was a chance the civilian whose baby it was had kept records of the program.

  “Do you remember his name?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I should. I worked with him every day for two years,” Mason said. “Professor Scott Calder. Don’t know if he’s still there but at the time he was on sabbatical from the Computer Science school.”

  “Thanks, L-T. I’ll find him.”

  “Hope it helps. Don’t forget about that welfare check.”

  “I’m going to my box now.”

  Ballard got up but then sat back down and looked at Mason. She was going to risk turning what could be the start of a solid relationship with a supervisor into something fraught.

  “Something else?” Mason asked.

  “Yes, L-T,” Ballard began. “Last night I was working during PMs and busted a guy on a burglary. I was working solo and I called for backup. It never came. The guy made a move on me and I put him down but he wouldn’t have had the chance if I’d had the backup.”

  “I was the one who took your call when you used the private line to ask where the troops were.”

  “I thought so. Did you find out what happened?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t. I got caught up in some stuff. All I know was there was no call on the board. There must have been a fuckup between the com center and the watch office. We never were copied. I heard no backup call go out.”

  Ballard looked at him for a long moment.

  “So you’re saying the problem wasn’t at Hollywood Station. It was at the com center.”

  “Near as I can tell.”

  Mason sat silently. He did not offer to follow up. He wasn’t going to rock any boats. It was clear that it was Ballard’s decision whether to pursue it.

  “Okay, thanks, Lieutenant,” she said.

  Ballard got up and left the room.

  26

  Ballard used her password to enter the department database and then began a search of the man who signed “Eagle” to his photo at the Moonlight Mission. The database contained a moniker file, which carried thousands of nicknames and aliases amassed from crime reports, arrest records, and field interviews.

  “Eagle” turned out to be a popular moniker. She got 241 initial hits. She was then able to chop this down to sixty-eight by limiting her search to white males thirty-plus years old. She had the nine-year-old photo she had borrowed from the mission to guide her. The man depicted looked to be mid- to late twenties and that would put him over thirty now. She refined the search further by eliminating possibles who were over forty.

  She was left with sixteen names and set to work pulling up reports and photos of the men. She quickly eliminated men who looked nothing like the man in the photo provided by John the Baptist. She hit pay dirt with the eleventh man she looked at. His name was Dennis Eagleton and he was thirty-seven years old. Mug shots from multiple arrests between 2008 and 2013 matched the face of the man in the photo from the mission.

  She pulled up and started printing all reports in the database regarding Eagleton. He had a record of numerous arrests for drugs and loitering and only one incident of violence, an aggravated assault charge in 2010 that was knocked down to simple battery. Ballard even found a digitized field interview report written by Tim Farmer in 2014—his last full year on the job. The summary section included Farmer’s unique take on the Hollywood streets and this particular denizen.

  This is not the first nor the last time we will cross paths with “Eagle.”

  A deep, cancerous river of hate and violence courses through his blood.

  I can feel it, see it.

  He waits. He hates. He blames the world for its betrayal of all hope.

  I fear for us.

  Ballard read Farmer’s take twice. It was written five years after Daisy Clayton’s murder. Could the pulsing, waiting violence that Farmer saw in Eagleton have already been let loose in 2009? Rather than seeing the future, had Farmer also seen the past?

  Ballad spent the next half hour trying to locate Eagleton, but she found nothing. No driver’s license, no recent arrests. The last known record of him had been the FI card Farmer had filled out. He had stopped Eagleton and questioned him when he was seen loitering around the Metro entrance on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine. In the blank marked “Occupation” Farmer had written “panhandler.” There were now no indications as to whether Eagleton was alive or dead, only that he had gone completely off the electronic grid.

  It was now after midnight and time to conduct the welfare check Lieutenant Mason had assigned Ballard. She used a BOLO template to put together a wanted-for-questioning sheet on Eagleton that would be distributed at all roll calls. After including screen grabs of his three most recent mug shots, she sent the package to the printer and signed off the computer. She was ready to go.

  Her first stop was the watch office to drop off the BOLO sheet with Lieutenant Munroe and to tell him she was leaving the station to handle the welfare check. Munroe said the officers assigned to patrol in the neighborhood in question were finishing up a minor call but he would send them to her location as soon as they were clear.

  The missing man was named Jacob Cady. His home was in a four-story condominium building on Willoughby just a block from the West Hollywood border. Ballard pulled over against a red curb and looked around for her backup. She saw nothing and used her rover to check with Munroe, who said the patrol unit had not cleared their call.

  Ballad decided to give it ten minutes before she went in alone. She pulled her phone and checked her texts. There had been no response from Bosch to her message about John the Baptist and none to a text she had sent earlier to Aaron Hayes to check on his well-being. She didn’t think she should text him again, for fear she might wake him up.

  She checked her email next and saw that the blind email she had sent to Scott Calder with the standard USC address had already been answered. She opened it to find that she had reached the correct Calder and that he would be happy to meet early the next morning in his office to discuss the LAPD’s defunct GRASP program. He gave his office location in the Viterbi building on McClintock Avenue and said he had an opening in his schedule at eight a.m.

  After ten minutes, there was still no sign of a backup unit. Ballard decided to check out Jacob Cady’s online profile. In a just a few minutes she was able to determine that he was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a City Hall player of the same name who held several city maintenance contracts. The son apparently didn’t want any part of the father’s business and described himself on Facebook as a party planner. The photos on Facebook revealed a jet-set lifestyle for the young Cady. It looked like he favored Mexican resor
ts and the company of men. He was tan and trim with feathered blond hair. He liked form-fitting clothing and Tito’s vodka.

  Twenty minutes after arrival, Ballard got out with her rover and headed toward the entrance to the condo building. She radioed the watch office and reported that she was going in solo.

  The documents left in her mailbox by Lieutenant Mason said that Cady owned the two-bedroom condo and rented space in it to a roommate named Talisman Prada. On the two prior welfare checks by patrol officers, Prada had answered the door and said that Cady had met a man in a bar two nights before and gone home with him. But this did not explain why Cady was no longer answering texts, email, or phone calls. Or why his car was parked in a reserved spot in the condominium’s underground garage.

  Ballard pressed the buzzer at the gate three separate times before a sleepy voice answered.

  “Mr. Cady?”

  “No, he’s not here.”

  The connection was ended. Ballard buzzed again.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Prada?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “The police. Will you open the gate?”

  “I told you, Jacob is not here. You woke me up.”

  “Again, Mr. Prada, this is the police. Open the gate.”

  There was a long beat of silence before the gate buzzed, and Ballard pulled it open. She checked the street for the backup unit and saw nothing. She looked around the entry area. There was a rack of mailboxes with a shelf below it where some unclaimed newspapers were left. Ballard grabbed one and used it to prop open the gate for the backup officers, if they ever arrived. She entered and, while waiting for the elevator, used the rover to check on them. This time Munroe said the car was on the way.

  Ballard took the elevator to the third floor. Down the hallway to the right she saw a man standing in front of the open door to a unit. He was wearing silk sleeping pants and no shirt. He was small but muscular with jet-black hair.

  Ballard headed toward him.

  “Mr. Prada?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the man said. “Can we get this over with? I’d like to get back to sleep.”

  “Sorry for the bother, but there’s still no word from Jacob Cady. It’s been forty-eight hours since we got the report and this is now a criminal investigation.”

  “Criminal? What is criminal about a guy shacking up with somebody?”

  “We don’t think that’s what’s going on. Can you step into the apartment so I can enter?”

  Prada walked back inside and Ballard entered after him. She assessed him as she walked in. He was no more than five five and 125 pounds. It was clear he had no weapon on him. She left the door open and Prada noticed.

  “Do you want to close that, please?” he asked.

  “No, let’s leave it open,” Ballard said. “A couple uniform officers are coming.”

  “Whatever. Look around. He’s not here. Just hurry, please.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ballard stepped into the living room and did a 180 sweep. The condo was nicely decorated in a modern style. Gray-washed wood floors, armless sofa and chairs, glass coffee table. Everything carefully coordinated like a picture in a magazine. The adjacent dining room featured a square table with stainless-steel legs and matching chairs. The wall beyond was hung with a 10 x 6 painting consisting of black slashes on a field of white.

  Prada spread his arms to prove the point that Cady was not there.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Why don’t you show me the bedrooms?” Ballard said.

  “I mean, don’t you have to have a warrant to conduct a search?”

  “Not on a welfare check. If Mr. Cady is hurt or needs help, we need to find him.”

  “Well, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “Can I see the bedrooms?”

  Prada showed her through the home, and as she expected, there was no sign of Jacob Cady. She pulled her mini-light out of a pocket and used it to check the closet in the bedroom Prada said was Cady’s. It was full of clothing, and there was an empty suitcase on a shelf. Stepping back out she noticed that the bed was crisply made and unslept in.

  Prada’s bedroom was more lived in, with the bed unmade and clothes hanging over a chair in front of a makeup table Ballard would’ve expected to see in a woman’s room. The closet door was open and clothes were piled on the floor inside.

  “Not all of us are as neat as Jacob,” Prada said.

  Ballard heard voices from the living room and turned toward the door.

  “Coming out,” Ballard called down the hallway.

  Ballard and Prada returned to the living room and were met by Officers Herrera and Dyson. Ballard gave a nod.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said.

  Prada spoke impatiently before either officer could respond.

  “Are we finished now?” he asked. “I’d like to get some sleep. I have appointments tomorrow.”

  “Not quite,” Ballard said. “I have to fill out full reports this time. Can I see your driver’s license or passport, please?”

  “Is that really necessary?”

  “Yes, sir, it is. I’m sure you want to keep cooperating. It’s the quickest way to get us out of here.”

  Prada disappeared back down the short hallway toward his bedroom. Ballard nodded to Herrera to follow and watch.

  Ballard assessed the living room again. It had been carefully composed but something didn’t seem right. She realized that the area rug was too small for the space and the furniture and that its abstract design of overlapping gray, black, and brown squares clashed with the striped pattern of the upholstery. She checked the adjacent dining room and noticed for the first time that there was no rug under the square table with stainless steel legs.

  “What are you thinking here?” Dyson whispered.

  “Something’s not right,” Ballard whispered back.

  Prada and Herrera returned to the living room and Herrera handed Ballard a driver’s license.

  “I want you to know that my lawyer has filed the paperwork to officially change my name,” Prada said. “I was not lying. I’m a DJ and I need a better name.”

  Ballard looked at the license. It had been issued in New Jersey, and the photo matched Prada but the name on it was Tyler Tyldus. Ballard put the flashlight down on the coffee table next to a small sculpture of a woman’s torso. She pulled a small notebook and pen from her pocket and wrote down the information from the license.

  “What’s wrong with Tyler Tyldus?” she asked as she wrote.

  “No imagination,” Prada said.

  Ballard checked the date of birth and saw that he had been lying about his age as well. The documents left for her had him at twenty-six years old. The DL said he was twenty-two.

  “What are your appointments tomorrow, Mr. Prada?” she asked.

  “Personal business,” Prada said. “Nothing that concerns the police.”

  Ballard nodded. She finished writing and handed the license to Prada. She then handed him one of her business cards.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “If you hear from Mr. Cady, please call me at that number and ask Mr. Cady to call me as well.”

  “Of course,” Prada said, his voice friendlier now that he saw the end of the intrusion in sight.

  “You can go back to sleep now,” Ballard said.

  “Thank you,” Prada said.

  As she waited for Herrera and Dyson to head to the door, Ballard looked down at the area rug. It was too small for the space it was in. She also saw what first looked like an imperfection in the design, a place where the material had knotted in manufacture. But then she realized it was just an indentation. The rug had been switched from the dining room so recently that the depression left by one of the legs of the table remained apparent.

  Prada followed them to the door and closed it behind them. Ballard heard him turn a deadbolt.

  The three women were silent until they got in the elevator and closed the door.r />
  “So?” Dyson said.

  Ballard was still holding her notebook. She tore the page out with the info on Tyler Tyldus and handed it to Herrera.

  “Run that name and see what comes up,” she said. “I’m going to call a judge. I want to see what’s under that rug in there.”

  “Couldn’t you just look?” Herrera asked. “Exigent circumstances.”

  Ballard shook her head. Using exigent circumstances was a tricky thing and you didn’t want it to come back and bite you on a case.

  “EC refers to the missing man and possible danger to him,” Ballard said. “You don’t look under a rug for a missing man. You look under a rug for evidence. I’m going to call a judge, and that way there are no issues down the road.”

  “Is there a car we should be looking for?” Herrera asked.

  “Patrol supposedly looked at it on the first welfare check,” Ballard said. “Opened the trunk too. It’s in the garage underneath. But I’ll include it in the warrant and we’ll check it again.”

  “You think you have enough for a warrant?” Dyson asked.

  Ballard shrugged.

  “If I don’t, I left my flashlight up there,” she said. “I’ll go back and wake him up.”

  27

  Superior Court Judge Carolyn Wickwire was Ballard’s go-to. She wasn’t always the night-call judge but she liked Ballard and had given her a cell number, telling her she could always call day or night. Wickwire had been a cop, then a prosecutor, and was now a judge in a long career inside the justice system. Ballard guessed that she had persevered through her own share of misogyny and discrimination every step of the way. Though Ballard had never mentioned the obstacles she herself had encountered and overcome, some were known in the law enforcement community, and she believed Judge Wickwire was aware of them and empathized. There was a kinship there and Ballard wasn’t above using it if it helped move things along on a case. She called Wickwire from the building’s entry vestibule and woke her up.

  “Judge Wickwire, I’m sorry to wake you. It’s Detective Ballard, LAPD.”

  “Oh, Renée, it’s been a while. Are you all right?”