Monahan’s face revealed that he was realizing the can of worms he was opening up.
“Sorry, my bad,” he said. “I think you are probably perfectly capable of deciding how best to handle this.”
Ten minutes later, Ballard returned to the home theater where Chloe Lambert was waiting. She dropped the clothes she had collected from the bedroom on the floor in front of her.
“You can get dressed,” Ballard said.
“What’s happening?” Lambert asked.
“Nothing’s happening. You’re going home. You’re lucky you’re not going to jail.”
“Jail? What for?”
“Filing a false report. You weren’t raped, Chloe.”
“What the fuck? That guy’s a predator.”
“Maybe, but so are you. He has the whole thing on video. I watched it. So you can stop the act. Get dressed and I’ll have you driven down the hill.”
Ballard turned to leave but then hesitated and looked back.
“You know, it’s women like you that…”
She didn’t finish. She believed it would be lost on Chloe Lambert.
21
Ballard was depressed. She left the Monahan estate not knowing which of the two people she had interviewed was the more loathsome example of the human form. And yet neither would face consequences for their actions of the night. She decided to focus her enmity on Chloe as a betrayer of the cause. For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.
She tried to shake it off as she came through the back door of the station and headed down the hallway to the detective bureau. She had a half box of FI cards she wanted to finish before the end of her shift. She checked her watch. It was 4:15 a.m. Her plan was to write up a report on the callout to Electra Drive. She would pull no punches, naming all parties in the investigation and describing their actions, even though the investigation had come to nothing so far. She would file it in the detective commander’s inbox and it would be someone else’s decision from there. It might go down to the task force and it might even make it to the D.A.’s Office for consideration. Along the way, it might also get leaked to the media. No matter how it went, she was passing the buck on it, and that did not sit well with her. She could have arrested them both on the spot for different crimes, but such a move would have resulted in her actions being studied and questioned by a command staff that didn’t like her or want her. Some fault would likely be found and she would be further buried by the department and pulled away from the one thing she needed most: her job on the late show.
She turned into the detective bureau and headed to the back corner where she had set up for work earlier. She was nearly there when she saw the familiar head of gray curly hair over one of the half walls of the workstation. Bosch.
When she got to him, she saw that he was looking through the last four-inch stack of cards from the storage box she had brought in.
“So, they just let you waltz in here anytime you like,” she said by way of a greeting.
“To be honest, I sort of let myself in tonight,” Bosch said. “They never took my nine-nine-nine key when I quit.”
Ballard nodded.
“Well, I have to write a report. I won’t be able to look at shake cards till I file.”
“I’m on the last stack here. I’ll go out back and get another box.”
“I’d better go with you. Let’s do it now before I settle in and start writing. I can tell you the latest on John the Baptist on the way.”
They headed back through the station and out the rear door to the parking lot. Ballard updated Bosch on her return to the Moonlight Mission and interview with McMullen. She said that her gut instinct was still that McMullen wasn’t their guy. She told him about the head count he kept on his calendars and the photo of Daisy she had found.
“So, you actually placed him with the victim,” Bosch said. “He knew her.”
“He baptized her several months before the murder,” Ballard said. “But come on, she was a night dweller and he roams Hollywood at night, looking for souls to save. I would be surprised if they didn’t cross paths. I still don’t think there’s anything there and I might have an alibi for McMullen’s van.”
She told him about the van being in the shop on the night of the abduction and murder.
“McMullen looked it up and left me a message about the place,” she said. “As soon as they open this morning, I’m going to see if I can confirm that the van was there when Daisy got taken. If I do, then I think we move on from John the Baptist.”
Bosch said nothing, indicating he was not ready to scratch the missionary man off the list of potential suspects.
“So, what’s happening with your search warrant case?” Ballard asked.
“We got part of the way there,” Bosch said. “We found the bullets we were looking for but they were no good for comparison. And then my source ended up dead out in Alhambra.”
“Oh shit! And it’s connected?”
“Looks that way. Done in by his own gang. LAPD SWAT arrested the shooter last night in Sylmar. He wasn’t talking when I left but he’s known to be tight with our suspect on the cold case. Sometimes when you blow the dust off an old investigation, bad things happen.”
Ballard looked at him in the dim light of the parking lot. She wondered if that was some kind of warning about the Daisy Clayton case.
They walked silently the rest of the way to the storage facility. Once there, they each picked up a box of FI cards and headed back to the station. Ballard turned and assessed the boxes in the hallway before leaving. They were about halfway through.
Walking back across the lot, Bosch stopped for a breather and put his box on the trunk of a black-and-white.
“I’ve got a bad knee,” he explained. “I get acupuncture when it acts up. Just haven’t had the time.”
“I’ve heard that knee replacements are better than the real thing these days,” Ballard said.
“I’ll keep that in mind. But that would take me out of the game for a while. I might never get back.”
He picked up the box and pressed on.
“I was thinking,” he said. “You remember the GRASP program—Were you here then?”
“I was on patrol,” Ballard said. “‘Get a GRASP on crime’—I remember. A PR stunt.”
“Well, yeah, but I think that was still going strong when Daisy got taken. And I was wondering what happened to all that data they collected. I thought, if it was still around somewhere, we might get another angle on the lay of the land in Hollywood at the time of the murder.”
GRASP was indeed a public relations ploy by a former chief who took the reins of the department and touted a law enforcement think-tank idea of studying crime through geography to help determine how people and facilities were targeted. It was revealed with much fanfare by the department but suffered a quiet death a few years later when a new chief with new ideas came in.
“I don’t remember what it stood for,” Ballard said. “I was on patrol in Pacific Division and I remember filling out the forms on the MDC. Geographic something or other.”
“Geographic Reporting and Safety Program,” Bosch said. “The guys down in the ASS Office really worked some OT on it.”
“Ass Office?”
“The Acronym Selection Section. You never heard of it? They got about ten guys down there full-time.”
Ballard started laughing as she lifted her knee, held her box with one hand on her thigh, and used her key card to open the door of the station. She then opened it with her hip and let Bosch in first.
They walked down the hallway.
“I’ll look into the GRASP files,” she said. “I’ll start at the ASS office.”
“Let me know what you find.”
Back at the workstation, Ballard noticed the blue binder that had been left at her spot. She flipped it open.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I told
you I had started a new murder book for the reinvestigation,” Bosch said. “I figured you would want to start adding to it, maybe do a chrono. I think it should stay with you.”
There were only a few reports in the binder at the moment. One was Bosch’s summary of his interview with a supervisor at American Storage Products about the container that he believed Daisy Clayton’s body had been stuffed into.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll print out everything I have and put it in. I already have an online chrono going.”
She flipped the binder closed and saw that it was old and the blue plastic faded. Bosch was recycling an old murder book and it didn’t surprise her. She guessed that he had the records from several old cases in his home. He was that kind of detective.
“Did you close the one this came from?” she asked.
“I did,” Bosch said.
“Good,” she said.
They went back to work. There were no more callouts for Ballard that shift. She got her report writing finished and filed and then joined Bosch on the FI cards. By dawn they had made it through the two boxes they brought from storage. Fifty more cards were added to the stack that warranted a second look but did not rise to the level of requiring immediate action. As they worked through the cards, they had talked and Bosch had told her stories about his days in Hollywood Homicide in the 1990s. She noticed that he, or in some instances the media, had given names to many of his cases: the Woman in the Suitcase, the Man with No Hands, the Dollmaker, and so on. It was as though homicides back then were an event. Now it seemed that nothing was new, nothing shocked.
Ballard gathered their two stacks of keepers together along with the murder book.
“I’m going to put these in my locker and then go over to the auto repair shop,” she said. “You want to go with me? To the shop, I mean.”
“No,” Bosch said. “I mean, I do, but I think I better get up to the Valley and see where we are on things. Maybe I’ll see if I can get some pins stuck in my knee on the way.”
“Let’s check in later, then. I’ll let you know what I get.”
“That’s a plan.”
22
Ballard stopped for a latte after leaving the station. While waiting for it, she got a text from Aaron saying he was off all day. She took this to mean that the man he had pulled from the riptide had not survived and Aaron was given a “therapy day” to deal with it. She texted him back and said she had a stop to make before heading out toward the beach.
The two garage doors were open at Zocalo Auto Services when she got there. She had driven her van because she was not planning to go back to the station afterward.
A man stood in one of the open bays, wiping his already greasy hands on a rag and assessing the Ford Transit with the board racks. Ballard got out and quickly showed her badge to disabuse him of the idea that she was a potential client.
“Is the owner or manager here?” she asked.
“That’s me,” the man said. “Both. Ephrem Zocalo.”
He had a strong accent.
“Detective Ballard, LAPD Hollywood Division. I need your help, sir.”
“What can I do?”
“I’m trying to confirm that a particular van was here getting work done—a transmission possibly—nine years ago. Is that possible? Do you have records from ’09?”
“Yes, we have records. But that is a very long time ago.”
“You have computer records? Maybe just put in the name?”
“No, no computers. We have files and we keep, you know…we keep the papers.”
It didn’t sound too sophisticated but all Ballard cared about was that there were records of some sort.
“Are they here?” she asked. “Can I look? I have the name and dates.”
“Yeah, sure. We have them in the back.”
He led her to a small office adjacent to the repair bays. They passed a man who was working in a trench beneath a car, the high-pitched whine of a drill sounding as he removed the bolts of a transmission cover. He looked suspiciously at Ballard as she followed Zocalo to the office.
The office was barely big enough to hold a desk, chair, and three four-drawer file cabinets. Each drawer had a framed card holder on which a year was handwritten. This meant Zocalo had records going back twelve years, which gave Ballard hope.
“You said ’09?” Zocalo asked.
“Yes,” Ballard said.
He pointed a finger up and down the drawers until he found the one marked 2009. The labels were not in a clear chronological order and Ballard guessed that each year, he dumped the oldest set of records and started with a fresh drawer.
The 2009 drawer was the second drawer up in the middle row. Zocalo waved at it with an open hand as if saying it was all Ballard’s to deal with.
“I’ll keep everything in order,” she said.
“Don’t matter,” Zocalo said. “You can use the desk.”
He left her there and went back out into the garage. Ballard heard him saying something in Spanish to the other worker, but they spoke too fast for her to translate the conversation. But she heard the word migra, and her sense was that the man in the garage trench was worried that she was really an immigration agent.
She pulled the file drawer open and found it to be only a third full of receipts leaning haphazardly against the back panel. She reached down with both hands, pulled about half of them out, and carried them to the desk.
All surfaces of the desk seemed to be coated with a patina of grease. Zocalo clearly didn’t visit the sink when he moved from doing repair work to office work. Many of the invoice copies she started looking through were also smudged with grease.
The invoices were generally kept in order by date, so the process of checking the alibi for John the Baptist’s van went quickly. Ballard moved through the stack directly to the week in question and soon found a copy of an invoice for installation of a new transmission in a Ford Econoline van with the name John McMullen and the address of the Moonlight Mission on it. Ballard studied it and saw that the dates the van was in the shop corresponded with the blank squares on McMullen’s calendar and covered the two days that Daisy Clayton was missing and then found dead.
Ballard looked around the office. She saw no copier. Leaving the McMullen receipt out, she returned the rest of the stack to the file drawer and closed it. She walked out of the office and into the garage. Zocalo was down in the trench with the other man. She squatted down next to the car they were working under and held out the grease-smudged invoice.
“Mr. Zocalo, this is what I was looking for. Can I take it and make a copy? I’ll bring you back the original if you need it.”
Zocalo shook his head.
“I don’t really need to have it,” he said. “Not for so long, you know. You just keep it. Is okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sí, sí, I’m sure.”
“Okay, thank you, sir. Here’s my card. If you ever need my help with anything, you give me a call, okay?”
She handed a business card down into the trench and right away it was marked with a greasy thumbprint as Zocalo took it.
Ballard left the garage and stood next to her van. She pulled her phone and took a photo of the invoice Zocalo had let her keep. She then texted the photo to Bosch with a message.
Confirmed: JTB’s van was in the shop when Daisy was taken. He’s clear.
Bosch didn’t respond right away. Ballard got in her van and headed toward Venice.
She caught the morning migration west and it took almost an hour to get to the overnight pet-care facility where she kept Lola. After she got her dog and took her for a short walk around the Abbot Kinney neighborhood, she returned to the van and drove over to the canals, Lola sitting upright on the passenger seat.
Public parking near the canals was at a premium. Ballard did what she often did when she visited Aaron. She parked in the city lot on Venice Boulevard and then walked into the canal neighborhood on Dell. Aaron shared one side of a town house
duplex on Howland with another lifeguard. The other side of the duplex was also the home of lifeguards. There seemed to be a steady rotation of them moving in and out as assignments changed. Aaron had been there for two years and liked working Venice Beach. While others aspired to assignments farther north toward Malibu, he was content to stay and therefore had the longest residency in the duplex, which was notable for its dolphin-shaped mailbox.
Ballard knew that Aaron would be home alone, since all lifeguards worked day shifts. She patted the dolphin on the head and led Lola through the gate by her leash. The sliding door on the lower level had been left half open for her and she entered without knocking.
Aaron was lying on the couch, eyes closed, balancing a bottle of tequila on his chest. He startled when Lola went over and licked his face. He grabbed the bottle before it fell.
“You okay?” Ballard asked.
“I am now,” he said.
He sat up and smiled, happy to see her. He held out the tequila but she shook her head.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
Ballard knew what he was feeling. Any death experience—whether it was a close call for oneself or involvement in the death of another—led to some kind of primordial need to affirm not having been vanquished from existence. That affirmation could turn into some of the best sex ever.
She pointed Lola to a dog bed in the corner. Aaron had a pit bull but he had apparently taken her to the kennel even though he had the day off. Lola dutifully climbed onto the round cushion, circled it three times, and finally sat down with a view of the sliding door. She would be on guard. There was no need to even close the slider.
Ballard went over to the couch, grabbed Aaron’s hand, and led him toward the stairs. He started to speak as they went up.
“They took him off life support at nine last night after they got all the family there. I went over. I sort of wish I hadn’t. Not a good scene. At least they didn’t blame me. I got to him as fast as I could.”
Ballard quieted him when they got to the bedroom door.
Dark Sacred Night Page 15