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

by Michael Connelly

Ballard backed out to the table under the canopy, lowered her mask, and drank half a bottle of water in one pull. Lee came over as well. The searchers had moved out of the refuse so the coroner’s investigators and crime scene photographer could document everything.

  “What a wonderful world,” Lee said.

  “What a wonderful world,” Ballard repeated.

  Lee opened a bottle of water and started gulping it down.

  “Where are you with Tyldus?” Ballard asked.

  “We got him on tape telling his self-defense story,” Lee said. “I’ve seen enough here to know it won’t hold up. He’s going down.”

  “What about the victim’s parents? How much have you told them?”

  “We told them that we had a guy in custody and they should prepare themselves. We didn’t get into the details of it yet. Now we will.”

  “Glad it’s not me.”

  “Why we get the big bucks. So you were in RHD a while back, right?”

  “A few years, yeah.”

  Lee didn’t say anything further, leaving the question of what happened hanging like landfill stink in the air.

  “I didn’t go to the late show by choice,” Ballard said. “But it turns out I like what I’m doing.”

  She left it at that. She took another drink from the water bottle and then pulled the breathing mask back into place. It felt like the mask and everything else was useless. The stench of the landfill was invading her pores. She knew that when she was finished here, she would shoot down the 118 freeway to Ventura and her grandmother’s house, where she planned to spend at least a half hour under the shower while double-washing her clothes. She was going to run the hot-water heater dry.

  “I guess I’m out of here, Travis,” she said. “You’ve got the remains and I’ve got to get cleaned up before my shift.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Lee said.

  He thanked her for volunteering and used a radio to call for an ATV to take her down to the parking lot and her van.

  Lee went back into the pile to join his partner and monitor the investigation. As she waited for her ride, Ballard watched the two coroner’s investigators start to unfold a body bag. She hoped they had brought more than one. She turned from the scene and looked west. The sun was about to drop behind the ridge of the debris pile. The sky was orange above Sunshine Canyon.

  Bosch

  31

  Bosch’s phone buzzed. The screen said UNKNOWN CALLER but he guessed it was Bella Lourdes again. The last two times, he had let the call go to message and she had left him voice mails saying she wanted to talk about his suspension and his taking the bullet for the Luzon plan they had both signed off on and taken part in. But Bosch didn’t want to talk about any of that yet.

  He took another gulp of black coffee and kept his eyes on the entrance to the clinic on Van Nuys Boulevard. There had been a steady flow of activity there for the past two hours but Bosch had not seen Elizabeth Clayton among those wandering in and out. It would be eight p.m. soon and the clinic was due to close.

  He checked his texts again. He had sent a message to his daughter, inquiring about his coming down on the train for a breakfast or a dinner, maybe even an Angels game over the weekend, but it had been forty minutes and there was no response. He had her schedule and knew she didn’t have night class but she could be studying in the library with her cell phone turned off. He thought about what Ballard had said about her not carrying the phone when she didn’t want to be tracked. He wondered if this was one of those times.

  He opened up the tracking app on his phone, but before he could locate his daughter, the phone buzzed with another call. This time, the ID wasn’t blocked and he took the call.

  “Renée, what’s up?”

  “Hey, Harry, where are you at?”

  He could tell she was driving.

  “Van Nuys,” he said. “I’m watching a pain clinic, looking for Elizabeth.”

  “I thought you said you tracked her to North Hollywood,” Ballard asked.

  “I did but I was there last night. No sign. Tonight I’m watching a clinic she went to before. Maybe she’ll show. Where are you? Sounds like a freeway.”

  “The 101 coming in from Ventura.”

  She told him about the landfill dig and the need to clean up at her grandmother’s house.

  “Am I going to see you later tonight at the shop?” she asked.

  “Unless something happens here, I’ll be by,” Bosch said.

  “I got a message from Professor Calder. He said he has the GRASP files on a thumb drive for us. He’ll have it with him at the school tomorrow. I’ll head back to USC after my shift if you’re interested in joining. We can print out hard copies for you.”

  “Yeah, count me in for all of it.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight and have a quiet shift and then I’ll be able to finish off the shake cards.”

  “Good luck.”

  Ballard disconnected and Bosch went back to watching the pain clinic.

  He wasn’t sure why he was doing it. Despite Elizabeth’s previous connection to Dr. Ali Rohat, the shady doctor who ran the place, there were thousands of clinics in the Los Angeles area. She could be at any of them or none. He guessed he was doing it to be doing something. The alternative was to go home to an empty house and wonder about her.

  He’d take his chances on a long shot. Besides, concentrating on the clinic kept some of the darker thoughts about his recent miscues out of the front of his mind. He knew that he was putting off a critical self-evaluation of his recent moves, an evaluation that might conclude with his deciding that he was unfit to do the work anymore. That would be his call to make, but he knew he set his standards higher than any other person he’d come across. If he believed it was time to retire, then that would be it.

  His phone buzzed again. It was an unknown caller. This time he decided to get the conversation with Bella Lourdes over with. He took the call.

  But it wasn’t Bella Lourdes.

  “Hey, asshole.”

  He didn’t recognize the voice. It had a Spanish accent and he placed the age at mid- to late thirties. It had some weight to it.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are fucking with the wrong people.”

  “Which people is that?”

  “You’ll find out, muthafucker. Real soon, too.”

  “Cortez? Is this Cortez?”

  The caller disconnected.

  Bosch had received many threats over the years. Most of them were anonymous like this one. Receiving it gave him no pause. He had to assume the caller was Cortez or a member of the SanFers. And that would explain how the caller had his private cell number. Bosch had written it on the business card that had been given to Martin Perez and then ended up slotted between his teeth after his murder. It was another in a lengthening line of missteps Bosch had made recently, beginning with his acquiescing to Perez’s not wanting protection and ending with Luzon’s getting the drop on Bosch and locking him out of the cell so he could try to kill himself.

  He decided to call Bella Lourdes back and tell her about the threat. Threats were rarely carried out, but he thought there should be a record of this one should it prove to be the exception. He got her while she was still in the office doing accumulated paperwork.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all day, Harry.”

  “I know. I’ve been busy and just got the chance to call. What’s up?”

  “At some point we need to talk about Luzon and this bullshit suspension, but at the moment, there’s something more important. The gang guys picked up some intel today. The SanFers put a hit out on you.”

  Bosch was silent for a long moment, thinking about the threat he’d just gotten.

  “Harry, you there?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking. How good is the intel?”

  “They said it was good enough to want to warn you.”

  “Well, I just got an anonymous call on my
phone. My cell. Guy threatened me.”

  “Shit, did you recognize the voice?”

  “Not really. Coulda been Cortez, coulda been anybody. But why call and tip me off if the hit is legit? That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “No, not really, but you have to take this seriously.”

  “Think they know where I live?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe you should stay away from there to be safe.”

  Bosch saw a woman with a bandanna around her head come out of the clinic and start walking south on Van Nuys. She had the same thin build as Elizabeth but she had turned from Bosch’s direction so fast that he was unable to confirm whether it was her. The bandanna hid her hair color and length.

  “Bella, I need to go,” he said. “Keep me posted. I think it’s all talk, but let me know if you hear different.”

  “Harry, I think you need—”

  Bosch disconnected and started the car. He drove slowly down the street, keeping his eyes on the woman. She was almost to the end of the block now and Bosch planned to go past her, pull to the curb, and then get out to see if it was Elizabeth. He realized that he had concentrated so much on finding her that he wasn’t sure how he would handle things once he did.

  As the woman got to the corner, she turned and Bosch lost sight of her. His plan to identify and confront her on the well-lit Van Nuys Boulevard now changed. He sped up and made the same turn the woman had. Immediately he saw her standing with two men in the shadows of a closed paint store. One of the men had his hands cupped and the woman was placing something in them. Bosch still could not get a good look at her face. He pulled to the curb directly in front of them.

  Immediately one of the men ran off toward an alley perpendicular to Van Nuys. The woman and the remaining man stood frozen. Bosch’s old Cherokee did not resemble a police vehicle in any way. He jumped out, grabbing a mini-light from the center console, and held his hands up so they could see them over the roof of the Jeep.

  “It’s all right. I just want to talk. Just want to talk.”

  As he came around, Bosch saw the man pull something from a back pocket and use the woman’s body as a blind. Bosch could not tell if it was a gun or knife or pack of cigarettes. But in his experience, if you had a gun, you showed a gun.

  Bosch stopped six feet from them, his arms still raised.

  “Elizabeth?”

  He peered into the darkness. He could not tell and she didn’t answer. His hands still over his head, he snapped on the light and put the beam on her.

  It wasn’t Elizabeth.

  “Okay, sorry, wrong person,” Bosch said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

  He started backing away.

  “Damn right, it’s the wrong person,” the man said. “What the fuck you doing, runnin’ up on people like that?”

  “I told you, I’m looking for somebody, okay? I’m sorry.”

  “I coulda had a gun, you fucking idiot. I coulda blown your shit away.”

  Bosch reached under his jacket and snapped his gun off his belt. He held it barrel up and took a step back toward the couple.

  “You mean like this?” he said. “This what you have?”

  The man dropped whatever he was holding and raised his hands.

  “Sorry, man. Sorry,” he called out.

  “Put that damn thing away,” the woman yelled. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”

  Bosch looked down at the pavement and saw what the man had dropped. It was a plastic pill crusher. They were about to turn the pills she got at the clinic into powder for snorting. Bosch had carried a crusher just like it while working undercover the year before.

  All at once he was struck by how pitiful the lives of the two people in front of him were. He wondered how Elizabeth could have gone back to this. He put his gun back into its holster and returned to the door of the Cherokee, the two addicts watching him.

  “What are you, some kind of cop?” the woman yelled.

  Bosch looked at her before getting back in.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  He got in, dropped the transmission into drive, and peeled off.

  He decided to call it a night. If Elizabeth was out there on her own, she would no longer have Bosch looking for her. He headed home, resigned to the idea that he had done what he could for her. He would continue to look for her daughter’s killer, but finding Elizabeth would no longer be a priority.

  He picked up tacos at the Poquito Más on Cahuenga and then went up the hill to his house. The plan was to eat, shower, and put on fresh clothes. He would then head to Hollywood to read shake cards with Ballard.

  The house was dark because he had forgotten to leave any lights on. He came in through the kitchen door and grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator before heading out to the back deck to eat his dinner.

  As he crossed the living room, he noticed that the sliding door to the deck was halfway open. He stopped. He knew he hadn’t left it that way. He then felt the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head.

  An image of his daughter went through his mind. It was from a few years ago, of a moment when he had been teaching her how to drive and told her she had done well. She smiled proudly at him.

  Ballard

  32

  Ballard had the kind of night she had been waiting for all week. No calls for a detective, no calls for backup, no officer-needs-assistance calls. She spent the whole shift in the detective bureau and even ordered food delivered to the front desk. This gave her time to focus and power through the remaining field interview cards.

  The pickings were thin in the first two boxes in terms of pulling cards for follow-up investigation. Ballard put only two in the stack that had been accumulating from the start of the project. But the third box produced five cards, including three that she felt should immediately go to the top.

  Three weeks before the murder of Daisy Clayton, two officers had stopped their car and inspected a panel van that was parked illegally in front of a red curb on Gower south of Sunset. When they approached, they heard voices from within the van and saw light inside. There were windows on the rear doors and they noticed a makeshift curtain had fallen partially open behind one of them. Through the narrow opening they saw a man and woman having sex on a mattress while a second man videoed them with a camera.

  The officers broke the party up and checked the IDs of all three of the van’s occupants. They confirmed with the woman—who had a record of prostitution arrests—that both the sex and the videoing of it were consensual. She denied that any money had changed hands or that she was engaged in prostitution.

  No arrests were made, because there was no crime the threesome could be charged with. Under the law, officers could make an arrest for lewd behavior only if it was witnessed by the public and a citizen reported being offended. The three were let off with a warning and told to move on.

  Three individual shake cards were filled out. What Ballard keyed on—besides the van—was that one of the men had the word “porno actor” under his name. He was listed as Kurt Pascal, twenty-six years old at the time and living on Kester Street in Sherman Oaks.

  From the few details that were on the shake cards, Ballard drew the likely conclusion that the officers had interrupted a porno shoot in the van. Pascal and the cameraman, identified as Wilson Gayley, thirty-six, had paid prostitute Tanya Vickers, thirty-one, to perform in the van. Ballard took it a step further and envisioned a night three weeks later when they picked up another prostitute for filming and then found out after the fact that they had committed a crime because she was underage. One solution to their problem would be to eliminate the prostitute and make it look like the work of a sexual sadist.

  Ballard knew it was all supposition. Extrapolation upon extrapolation. But something about the scenario held her. She needed to run with those three shake cards and knew just where to start.

  She looked up at the wall clock and saw that the shift had gone by quickly. It was already five a.m. and sh
e realized that Bosch had not shown up, as he had said he would. She thought about calling him but didn’t want to wake him if he had instead decided to get a full night’s sleep.

  Ballard looked at the three shake cards spread on the desk in front of her. She wanted to dive right in on them but she had an allegiance to Bosch and how he said the review of the cards should go. She moved to the final box and started looking through more cards.

  Two hours later she had finished going through the last box. She had pulled no cards. Bosch still had not shown up. She checked her phone to see if she had somehow missed a call or text from him but there was nothing. She wrote him a text instead.

  I’m heading to USC in 30—you coming?

  She sent it and waited. There was no immediate reply.

  Ballard went back to work and used the next half hour before leaving to run the three names from the van through the computer in an attempt to get current addresses and legal status. She determined that, over the four years that followed the van incident, Tanya Vickers was arrested nine times for prostitution and drug offenses before she died of a heroin overdose at age thirty-five.

  The porno actor, Kurt Pascal, had no record and was still listed in Department of Motor Vehicle Records as living on Kester in Sherman Oaks, but the record was old. The driver’s license had expired two years ago without being renewed.

  The cameraman, Wilson Gayley, was also unaccounted for. In 2012 he was sentenced to prison after being convicted of intentionally infecting a person with a sexually transmitted disease. He spent three years in prison and completed a year on parole. He then dropped off the grid. Ballard could find no record of him having a driver’s license in any state.

  Ballard had her work cut out for her, but it was now eight a.m. and she was supposed to meet Professor Calder at USC in thirty minutes to pick up the GRASP data. She couldn’t miss the window of time he had given her, because he had a three-hour computer lab starting at nine.

  She put the four boxes of FI cards on top of the file cabinets that ran the length of the bureau, grabbed a rover from the charging station, and headed out the back door.