Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  Ballard was put on hold. While she waited, Herrera came over, having just run Prada’s name through the MDT terminal in her patrol car.

  “Can you talk?”

  “While I’m on hold. Anything?”

  “Just some TVs back in New Jersey and New York. Nothing serious.”

  Traffic violations. Ballard knew they would not help her get a search warrant approval from the judge.

  “Okay,” she said. “I still need you to stick around if I get this. Can you find out if there’s an on-site manager?”

  “Roger that,” Herrera said.

  She headed off just as Wickwire came back on the line.

  “Now, what do we have here, Renée?”

  “This is a missing persons case but I think there’s foul play involved and need to get into the missing man’s condominium and the common areas of the building. It’s complicated because a person of interest in the disappearance is the missing man’s roommate.”

  “Are they a couple or just roommates?”

  “Just roommates. Separate bedrooms.”

  “Okay. Tell me what you got.”

  Ballard recounted her investigation, putting the facts in an order that would intrigue the judge and build toward a conclusion of probable cause. She said Jacob Cady had now been missing for forty-eight hours and was not responding to any communication, ranging from his cell phone to his business website. She told the judge that the man living in Cady’s condo had given a false name but left out Prada’s explanation that he was in the process of legally changing it. She said Prada had expressed a reluctance to cooperate, leaving out that he had been awakened by her at one a.m.

  Lastly, she mentioned the rug and her suspicion that it had been moved to cover up something.

  When she was finished, Wickwire was silent as she digested Ballard’s verbal probable cause statement. Finally, she spoke.

  “Renée, I don’t think you have it,” she said. “You have some interesting facts and suspicions but no evidence of foul play here.”

  “Well, I’m trying to get that, Judge,” Ballard said. “I want to find out why the rug was moved.”

  “But you have the cart before the horse here. You know I like to help you when I can, but this is too thin.”

  “What would you need? The guy’s not texting or tweeting, he’s not driving his car, he’s not handling his business. It looks like he left all his clothes behind. Something’s clearly happened.”

  “I’m not arguing that. But you have no indication of what happened. This guy could be on a nude beach down in Baja where he doesn’t need a change of clothes. He could be in love. He could be in a lot of things. The point is, there’s a person living in his domicile and you do not have the right to search that domicile without probable cause.”

  “Okay, Judge, thank you. I’m probably going to call you back after I get what you need.”

  She disconnected the call. Dyson was standing there.

  “No on-site management,” she said.

  “Okay,” Ballard said. “See if you and Herrera can get down into the garage and take a look around.”

  “Did you get the warrant?”

  “No. I’m going up for my flashlight. If you don’t hear from me in about ten, come on up.”

  “Roger that.”

  Ballard took the elevator back to three and knocked on Jacob Cady’s door. After a few moments she heard movement inside and then Prada’s voice through the door.

  “Oh my god! What?”

  “Mr. Prada, can you open the door?”

  “What do you want now?”

  “Can you open the door so we don’t have to talk so loudly? People are sleeping.”

  The door was flung open. The anger was clear on Prada’s face.

  “I know people are sleeping. I want to be one of them. What is it now?”

  “I’m sorry. I left my flashlight. I think it might be in Jacob’s closet. Could you get it?”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Prada turned and headed toward the hallway that led to both of the condo’s bedrooms. Ballard noticed that Prada had now put on a T-shirt with a pink silhouette of a whale on it.

  The moment Prada was out of sight, Ballard moved into the living room and went to the coffee table. She grabbed her flashlight from where it was partially hidden by the torso sculpture and pocketed it. She then stepped back and lifted a cushioned chair off the corner of the area rug. She put the chair down quietly on the wood floor, then stooped and flipped the corner of the rug back as far as was possible, laying it over the coffee table.

  Ballard squatted down and looked at the floor. The gray-washed wood had been bleached of its stain in a pattern of semi-circular swipes. Someone had scrubbed this area of the floor with a powerful cleanser. Ballard noted the seams between the planking. It was a tongue-and-groove floor, meaning there was a good chance that residue from whatever had been cleaned up could have seeped down into the subflooring.

  Ballard felt the heavy footfalls of Prada approaching. She flipped the carpet back down, then stood and quickly swung the chair back into place just as he entered the room.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not there.”

  “Are you sure?” Ballard said. “I know I had it in that closet.”

  “I’m sure. I looked. You can look if you want to.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Ballard pulled the rover off her belt and keyed it twice before speaking into it.

  “Six-Adam-Fourteen, did one of you pick up my flashlight in the apartment?”

  Prada threw his hands up in dismay.

  “Couldn’t you have asked them first before waking me up again?” he said.

  Ballard kept her hand depressed on the rover so that she was still transmitting.

  “Calm down, Mr. Prada,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask you one last question and then I’ll get out of your hair?”

  “Whatever,” Prada said. “Just ask it and go.”

  “What happened to the living room rug?”

  “What?”

  Ballard had seen the tell when she asked the question. A moment of surprise in his eyes. It was Prada who had moved the rug.

  “You heard me,” she said. “What happened to the rug?”

  “The rug is right there,” Prada said, like he was talking to an imbecile.

  “No, that’s the dining room rug. See, it still has the marks from the legs of the table. You moved it in here because you got rid of the rug that was in this spot. What happened to it? Why’d you have to get rid of it?”

  “Look, I’ve had enough of this. You can ask Jacob all about the rugs when he comes back and you see that there’s nothing wrong.”

  “He’s not coming back. We both know that. Tell me what happened, Tyler.”

  “That’s not my name. My name is—”

  Prada suddenly charged across the room at Ballard, raising his hands like claws as he aimed for her throat. But Ballard was ready, knowing her words might push him toward extreme measures. She turned and pivoted, sidestepping the rush like a bullfighter while bringing her hand holding the rover up and behind his back. She drove the heel of the radio into his spine and tripped him with her leg. Prada went down face-first into the corner of the room. Ballard dropped the radio and pulled her sidearm. She planted a foot on his back and pointed her weapon at his head.

  “You try to get up and I’m going to put a hole in your spine. You’ll never walk again.”

  Ballard felt him tense and test the pressure of her foot. But then he relaxed and gave up.

  “Smart boy,” she said.

  As she was cuffing him and reciting the rights advisory, she heard the elevator door open and then running steps as Herrera and Dyson rushed down the hall.

  Soon they were in the condo and by Ballard’s side.

  “Get him up and put him in a chair,” Ballard ordered. “I’m going to have to call homicide.”

  The two officers moved in and grabbed Prada by the
arms.

  “He was going to kill me,” Prada suddenly announced. “He wanted my business, everything I’ve worked for. I fought him. He fell and hit his head. I didn’t want him to die.”

  “And that’s why you rolled him up in a rug and dumped his body somewhere?” Ballard asked.

  “No one would have believed me. You don’t believe me now.”

  “Did you understand the rights I recited to you?”

  “He was going to cut me into pieces.”

  “Stop talking and answer the question. Do you understand the rights I just recited? Do you want me to say them again?”

  “I understand, I understand.”

  “Okay. Where’s Jacob Cady’s body?”

  Prada shook his head.

  “You’ll never find it,” he said. “I put it in a dumpster. It’s wherever the trash goes. And it’s what he deserves.”

  She stepped out into the hallway to call Lieutenant McAdam, the head of the Hollywood Division detective bureau and Ballard’s real boss, even though she rarely saw him. She had to directly inform him of any case of this magnitude. She took a guilty pleasure in waking him up. He was a strict nine-to-fiver.

  “Hey, boss, it’s Ballard,” she said. “We’ve got a homicide.”

  28

  When Ballard returned to the detective bureau after handing off the Jacob Cady case to a West Bureau homicide team, she found Harry Bosch ensconced at the desk he had used the night before, going through a box of field interview cards.

  “Don’t you sleep, Bosch?” she said.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  Ballard saw the coffee cup on the desk. He had helped himself in the break room.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “Not long,” Bosch said. “I was out looking for somebody all night.”

  “Find him?”

  “Her, and no, not yet. What have you been up to?”

  “Working a homicide. And now I have to do the paperwork, so I won’t be looking at any shake cards today.”

  “No problem. I’m making progress.”

  He held up the handful of cards he had put to the side for closer study later. She was about to say that there was a problem in him coming into the station and working the case alone, but she let it go. She pulled out a seat and sat down at a desk in the same pod as Bosch.

  After logging into the computer, Ballard started writing an incident report that she would send to the team that took over the Cady case.

  “What was the case?” Bosch asked. “The homicide.”

  “It’s a no-body case,” she said. “So far, at least. Started as a missing persons and that’s why I was called in. Got a guy who admits killing the man, cutting up the body, and putting it all in a dumpster. Oh, and he says it was self-defense.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “We checked with the building manager—the dumpster got picked up yesterday, so they’ll be going out to the landfill today as soon as they figure out who the trash hauler was and which dump they use. One of the few times I’m glad I don’t get to see a case all the way through. The two guys that caught it were not too happy.”

  “I had a no-body case once. Same thing. We had to go to the dump but we were a week behind it. So we spent about two weeks out there. And we found a body but it was the wrong one. Only in L.A., I guess.”

  “You mean you found a murder victim but not the one you were looking for?”

  “Yeah. We never found the one we were looking for. We went out there on a tip anyway. So maybe it never happened. The one we found was a mob case and we eventually cleared it. But those two weeks out there, I didn’t get the smell out of my nose for months. And forget about the clothes. I threw everything away.”

  “I’ve heard it can be pretty ripe at those places.”

  She went back to work, but less than five minutes went by before Bosch interrupted again.

  “Did you ever get a chance to check on the GRASP files?” he asked.

  “Matter of fact, I did,” Ballard said. “Supposedly they were all purged, but I got a line on the USC professor who designed the program and helped implement it. I’m hoping he kept the data. I have an appointment at eight with him, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested. I’ll buy you breakfast on the way.”

  “I won’t have time for breakfast if I don’t get the paperwork filed.”

  “Got it. I’ll shut up.”

  Ballard smiled as she went back to work on the report. She was in the summary section, where she was typing out Tyldus’s self-serving statements—he was being booked under his current legal name—after he was arrested and realized that he needed to try to talk his way out of a murder. His fervent plea of self-defense lost credibility when the forensics team called to the apartment pulled up the bathtub drain trap and found blood and tissue. Then Tyldus admitted cutting the body up and bagging the parts in plastic trash bags—an extreme measure for a self-defense killing.

  It made Ballard feel bad for Cady’s parents and family. In the next hours and days they would learn that their son was presumed dead, dismembered, and buried somewhere amid the garbage at a landfill. And Bosch’s story about an unsuccessful search for a body in a landfill concerned her. It was critical that they find Cady’s body so that injuries aside from dismemberment could be analyzed in concert with the details provided by Tyldus. If the injuries on the body told a different story, it would be Jacob’s way of helping to convict his killer.

  Despite what Ballard had said about being glad she was not seeing the case through to the end, she intended to volunteer to help look for Jacob. She felt the need to be there.

  Ballard’s shift ended at seven but she got her reports emailed to the West Bureau detectives an hour before that and she and Bosch headed downtown early. They ate breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car, an expensive LAPD tradition across the street from the Rampart Division station. They didn’t talk much about the current case. Instead, they filled each other in on their histories in the LAPD. Bosch had bounced around a lot in the early years before spending several years in Hollywood homicide and finishing his career at RHD. He also revealed that he had a daughter who went to college down in Orange County.

  Mention of the daughter prompted Bosch to pull out his phone.

  “You’re not going to text her now, are you?” Ballard asked. “No college kid is awake this early.”

  “No, just checking her location,” Bosch said. “Seeing if she’s at home. She’s twenty-one now and I thought that would lessen the worry, but it’s only made it worse.”

  “Does she know you can track her?”

  “Yeah, we made a deal. I can track her and she can track me. I think she worries about me as much as I worry about her.”

  “That’s nice, but you know that she can just leave her phone in her room and you’d think she was there.”

  Bosch looked up from the phone to Ballard.

  “Really?” he said. “You had to plant that seed in my head?”

  “Sorry,” Ballard said. “Just saying if I was a college kid and my dad could track my phone, I don’t think I’d carry it all the time.”

  Bosch put his phone away and changed the subject.

  As promised, Bosch picked up the tab, and they headed south toward USC. Along the way, Ballard told Bosch about Dennis Eagleton and his being picked up by the Moonlight Mission bus on the same night as Daisy Clayton. She said there wasn’t much of a tie between the two beyond that, but Eagleton was a dirtbag criminal and she wanted to interview him if he could be located.

  “Tim Farmer talked to him,” she said. “He wrote a shake in 2014, said ‘Eagle’ was filled with hate and violence.”

  “But no real record of violence?” Bosch asked.

  “Just the one assault that got pled down. The dirtbag only did a month in county for splitting a guy’s head open with a bottle.”

  Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded as if the story about Eagleton’s light p
unishment was par for the course.

  By eight a.m. they were at the office door of Professor Scott Calder at the University of Southern California. Calder was in his late thirties, which told Ballard he had been in his twenties when he designed the crime tracking program adopted by the police department.

  “Professor Calder?” Ballard said. “I’m Detective Ballard. We spoke on the phone. And this is my colleague Detective Bosch.”

  “Come in, please,” Calder said.

  Calder offered his visitors seats in front of his desk and then sat down himself. He was casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt with USC in gold over the left breast. He had a shaved head and a long beard in the steampunk style. Ballard guessed that he thought it helped him fit in better with the students on campus.

  “LAPD should never have disbanded GRASP,” he said. “It would have been paying dividends right now if they had kept it in place.”

  Neither Ballard nor Bosch jumped to agree with him and Calder began a brief summary of how the program arose from his studies of crime patterns in and around USC after a spate of assaults and robberies of students just blocks from campus. After collecting data, Calder used statistics to project the frequency and locations of future crimes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university. The LAPD got wind of the project and the police chief asked Calder to take his computer modeling to the city, starting with three test areas: Hollywood Division because of the transient nature of its inhabitants and the variety of crimes that occurred there; Pacific Division because of the unique nature of crimes in Venice; and Southwest Division because it included USC. A city grant financed the project, and Calder and several of his students went to work collecting the data after a training period with officers in the three divisions. The project lasted two and a half years, until the chief’s five-year term was up. The police commission did not retain Calder afterward. A new chief was named and he killed the program, announcing a return to good old-fashioned community policing.

  “It was a shame,” Calder said. “We were just starting to get our successes. GRASP would have worked if given the chance.”

  “It sounds like it,” Ballard said.