Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  She could not think of any other words of sympathy, as she had her own beliefs about the predictability of crime.

  Bosch said nothing.

  “Well, we appreciate the historical perspective on the program,” Ballard continued. “What we’re here for is to ask if you kept any of the data from it. We’re investigating an unsolved murder from ’09, which was the second year of GRASP. So it was up and running and collecting data. We thought it would be helpful if we had sort of a snapshot of the entire crime picture in Hollywood on that night, maybe the whole week of the murder.”

  Calder was silent for a moment as he considered Ballard’s question. Then he spoke carefully.

  “You know that the new chief purged all the data when he killed the program, right?” he said. “He said he didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. You believe that?”

  The bitter tone that had come into Calder’s voice revealed the anger he had stored for nearly a decade.

  “That seems a bit contradictory to the department’s keeping all kinds of other records,” Ballard offered, hoping to separate the current investigation from political decisions she had nothing to do with.

  “It was stupid,” Bosch said. “The whole decision was stupid.”

  Ballard realized that Bosch was the way to win Calder’s cooperation. He answered to nobody. He could say whatever he wanted and especially what Calder wanted to hear.

  “I was told by the police department that I had to purge my own data storage on the project,” Calder said.

  “But it was your baby,” Bosch said. “I’m guessing you didn’t purge it all, and if I’m right, you might be able to help us solve a murder. That would be a nice little fuck-you to the chief, right?”

  Ballard had to hold back a smile. She could tell that Bosch was playing this perfectly. If Calder had anything, he was going to give it up.

  “What specifically are you looking for?” Calder said.

  “We’d like a forty-eight-hour read on every crime in the division centered on the night our victim was grabbed off the street,” Ballard said urgently.

  “Twenty-four hours before and twenty-four after?” Calder asked.

  “Make it forty-eight on both sides of it,” Bosch said.

  Ballard pulled out her notebook and tore off the top page. She had already written the date down. Calder took it and looked at it.

  “How do you want this—digital or print?” he asked.

  “Digital,” Ballard said.

  “Print,” Bosch said at the same time.

  “Okay, both,” Calder said.

  He looked back at the paper with the date on it, as if that alone held some great moral weight.

  “Okay,” he said. “I can do this.”

  29

  Calder said he needed a day to retrieve the hard drive on which he had kept the GRASP data. It wasn’t at the school but at a private storage facility. He said he would call as soon as he had the material ready for pickup.

  Ballard had driven them both in her city car so they wouldn’t have to worry about legit parking both their private cars, but before they left, Bosch asked to be dropped off at the nearby Exposition Park.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I’ve never seen the shuttle,” he said. “I thought I’d check it out.”

  The decommissioned space shuttle Endeavour had been flown to L.A. six years earlier, slowly moved through the streets of South-Central, and put on permanent display inside the air and space center at the park.

  Ballard smiled at the thought of Bosch in the air and space museum.

  “You don’t seem like a space-travel guy, Harry.”

  “I’m not really. Just want to look at it to know it’s really true.”

  “You mean you’re a conspiracy-theory guy, then? Like the space program was a hoax? Fake news?”

  “No, no, not like that. I believe it. It’s just kind of amazing, you know, to think we could send those things up, circle the planet, fix satellites, and do whatever they were doing and we can’t fix things down here. I just wanted to see it once, ever since they brought it here. I was…”

  He trailed off like he was unsure he should continue.

  “What?” Ballard prompted.

  “Nah, I was just going to say, I was in Vietnam back in ’69,” Bosch said. “Way before you were even born, I know. And on this one day, I had just gotten back to base camp on Airmobile after a hairy op where we had to clear the enemy out of a tunnel system. That’s what I did over there. Tunnels. It was late morning and base camp was completely deserted. It was like a ghost town because everybody was sitting in their tents, listening to their radios. Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon and they all wanted to hear it…

  “And it was the same thing, you know? How did we put a guy up there bouncing around on the moon when things were so fucked up down here? I mean, that morning during the op…I had to kill a guy. In the tunnel. I was nineteen years old.”

  Bosch was looking out his window. He almost seemed to be talking to himself.

  “Harry, I’m really sorry,” Ballard said. “That you were put in that situation at that age. At any age.”

  “Yeah, well…” Bosch said. “That’s the way it was.”

  He didn’t say anything further. Ballard could feel the fatigue coming off him like a wave.

  “You still want to see the shuttle?” she asked. “How will you get back to your car at the station?”

  “Yeah, drop me off. I can grab a taxi or an Uber after.”

  She started the car and drove the few blocks over to the park. They didn’t speak. She got him as close as she could to the giant building that housed the shuttle.

  “I’m not sure they’re going to be open yet,” Ballard said.

  “It’s okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll find something to do.”

  “After this, you should go home and get a nap. You seem tired, Harry.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  He opened his door, then looked back at Ballard before getting out.

  “Just so you know, I’m done at San Fernando,” he said. “So I’m fully committed to the Daisy case.”

  “What do you mean ‘done’?” Ballard asked. “What happened?”

  “I sort of messed things up. My witness getting killed, that’s going to be on me. I didn’t do enough to protect him. Then things happened yesterday between me and the guy who leaked it and I got suspended by the chief. Being a reserve, there are no protections so…I’m just done. That’s it.”

  Ballard waited to see if he would say more but he didn’t.

  “So…the woman you were looking for all night,” she said. “That wasn’t part of that case?”

  “No,” Bosch said. “That was Daisy’s mother. I came home and she’d split. Sorry you never got the chance to talk to her.”

  “It’s okay,” Ballard said. “You think she went back to the life?”

  Bosch shrugged.

  “I hit all her familiars last night,” he said. “Nobody had seen her. But those were only the places I knew of. She could have had others. Places to score and crash. People who would take her in. She might’ve just hopped on a Greyhound and split, too. That’s what I’m hoping. But I’ll keep looking when I can.”

  Ballard nodded. That seemed to be the end of the conversation but she wanted to tell him something. Just as he started to get out, she spoke.

  “My father went to Vietnam,” she said. “You remind me of him.”

  “That right?” Bosch said. “He live here in L.A.?”

  “No, I lost him when I was fourteen. But during the war, he came to Hawaii on…what was it called, furlough?”

  “Yeah, or liberty. I went to Hawaii a few times. They didn’t let you go back to CONUS, so you could go to Hong Kong, Sydney, a few other places. But Hawaii was the best.”

  “What was CONUS?”

  “Continental United States. They didn’t want you going back to the mainland because of all the protests. But if y
ou worked things right in Honolulu, you could sneak onto a flight in civvies and get back to L.A.”

  “I don’t think my dad did that. He met my mother in Hawaii and then after the war he came back and stayed.”

  “A lot of guys did that.”

  “He was from Ventura originally, and after I was born, we would visit my grandmother there—once a year—but he didn’t like coming back. He saw it like you do. A fucked-up world. He just wanted to camp on the beach and surf.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I get that. He was smart and I was the fool. I came back and thought I could do something about things.”

  Before Ballard could respond, Bosch got out of the car and closed the door. Ballard watched him walk toward the building where they kept the space shuttle. She noticed a slight limp in his walk.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Harry,” she said out loud.

  30

  By the time Ballard switched vehicles, drove out to Venice, picked up Lola, and got to the beach it was midmorning and the wind had kicked up a two-foot chop on the surface that would make paddling a challenge instead of the therapy she usually drew from it. As much as she needed the exercise, she knew she needed sleep more. She pitched her tent, posted Lola at the front, and crawled in to rest. She thought about her father as she trailed off, remembering him straddling his favorite board and telling her about Vietnam and about killing people, putting it the way Bosch had put it, saying he’d had to do it and then had to live with it. He wrapped all of his Vietnam experiences into one phrase, “Sin loi.” Tough shit.

  Four hours later her watch vibrated her awake. She had been in deep, and waking was slow and disorienting. Finally, she sat up, split the tent flaps with her hand and checked on Lola. The dog was there, sunning herself. She looked back at Ballard with expectant eyes.

  “You hungry, girl?”

  Ballard climbed out of the tent and stretched. She checked the Rose Avenue tower and saw Aaron Hayes in the nest, gazing out at sea. There were no swimmers out there.

  “Come on, Lola.”

  She walked down the sand toward the lifeguard tower. The dog followed behind her.

  “Aaron,” she called up to the tower.

  Hayes turned and looked down at her from his perch.

  “Renée. I saw your tent but didn’t want to wake you up. You doing all right?”

  “Yeah. What about you?”

  “You know, back on the bench. But pretty quiet today.”

  Ballard glanced out toward the water as if to confirm the paucity of swimmers.

  “You want to grab dinner tonight?” he asked.

  “I think I have to work,” Ballard said. “Let me make a call and see what’s what, then I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “You have your phone?”

  “Got my phone.”

  He was breaking a rule, having a personal phone with him while in the tower. A scandal had rocked a rescue crew up the coast a year before when a texting lifeguard missed seeing a drowning woman waving for help. Ballard knew Aaron would not text or take calls, but he could play back messages without taking his eyes off the water.

  She walked back to the tent, pulled her phone out of the pocket of her beach sweats, and called the number given to her by Travis Lee, one of the homicide detectives who took over the Jacob Cady case that morning. He answered and she asked what the status of the case was. Lee had remarked to her early that morning that it was an unusual set of circumstances for him and his partner Rahim Rogers. They came into the case with the admitted killer in custody, thanks to Ballard, and the detective work would be in finding the remains of the victim.

  “We traced the truck that made the pickup on the dumpster,” Lee said. “It first went to a sorting center in Sunland, then what was not picked out for recycling was dumped at the landfill in Sylmar. Believe it or not, it’s called Sunshine Canyon. We’re putting on moon suits now and about to start picking.”

  “You have an extra moon suit?” Ballard asked.

  “You volunteering, Ballard?”

  “I am. I want to see it through.”

  “Come on, then. We’ll fix you up.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  After packing up and dropping Lola at doggy day care, Ballard took the 405 freeway directly north, through the charred hills in the Sepulveda Pass and into the Valley. She called Aaron along the way and left a message telling him dinner was not going to happen.

  Sylmar was at the north end of the Valley and Sunshine Canyon was in the armpit created by the intersection of the 405 and 14 freeways. Ballard could smell it long before she got to it. Slapping a name like Sunshine Canyon on a landfill was typical iconography. Take something ugly or horrible and put a pretty name on it.

  Upon arrival, Ballard was driven out to the search site on an all-terrain vehicle. Lee and Rogers and a forensics team were already using what looked like ski poles to pick through an area of refuse that had been cordoned off with yellow tape. It was about thirty yards long and ten wide, and Ballard assumed that this was the spread of refuse from the garbage truck that had picked up Jacob Cady’s condo dumpster on its route.

  There was a table under a mobile canopy set up by the forensics team on the dirt road that skirted the landfill’s drop zone. Extra equipment was spread across it, including plastic hazmat coveralls, breathing masks, eye guards, glove and bootie boxes, hard hats, duct tape, and a case of bottled water. A barrel next to the table had extra search picks, some of which had orange flags attached for marking finds.

  Ballard was dropped off with an advisory from the ATV’s driver that hard hats were required to be worn in the debris zones of the landfill. She put on a breathing mask first. It didn’t do much to cut the odor but it was comforting to know it might cut down on the intake of larger particulate garbage. She pulled a moon suit on over her clothes next and noticed that none of the searchers on the debris pile had pulled the hood up on their hazmat suits. She did, tucking her midlength hair completely into the plastic and pulling the slip line that tightened the hood around her face.

  She put on gloves and booties and then used the duct tape to seal the cuffs of the suit around her wrists and ankles. She put on the eye guard and topped the outfit off with an orange hard hat with the number 23 on both sides of it. She was ready. She grabbed one of the picks from the barrel and started crossing the debris toward the other searchers. There were five of them in a line, working their way up the search zone.

  Because they had not pulled up their hoods, Ballard easily identified Lee and Rogers.

  “You guys want me to squeeze into the line here or do something else?” she asked.

  “Is that you, Ballard?” Lee said. “Yeah, squeeze in. Better chance we don’t miss anything.”

  Lee moved left and Rogers moved right, making room for Ballard to join the line.

  “Black plastic bags, Ballard,” Rogers said. “With blue pull straps.”

  “Got it,” Ballard said.

  “Everybody, this is Renée,” Lee said. “She’s the one we have to thank for being here today. Renée, this is everybody.”

  Ballard smiled though no one could see it.

  “My bad, I guess,” she said.

  “No, your good,” Rogers said. “If not for you, that shitbird from New Jersey might’ve gotten away with it. And they told us here that if we had come two, three, days from now, we would never have been able to isolate a drop zone like this. We got lucky.”

  “Now let’s hope we get lucky again,” Lee added.

  They moved slowly, each step sinking a foot or more into the debris, using the steel picks to dig down through the garbage. Line integrity was loose as sometimes a searcher would stop to use his or her hands to clear debris.

  At one point Lee became concerned about the time and asked the others to pick up the pace. They had at least four hours of sunlight left but if they started finding body parts, a crime scene investigation would be initiated an
d he wanted to conduct it in daylight.

  An hour after Ballard joined the search, they found the first body parts. One of the forensic techs uncovered a black plastic bag and ripped it open with her pick.

  “Here,” she called out.

  The others gathered around the find. In the ripped bag were a pair of feet and lower legs, cut just below the knee. While the tech took photos on her phone, Rogers started back toward the equipment table to get a pick with a flag. The search would continue after marking the first find. Lee pulled his phone and started the Medical Examiner’s Office rolling to the scene.

  The next piece of evidence found was the rug from the living room. Ballard came across it in her search channel. It was sitting near the top of the pile but disguised by a ripped bag of what looked like garbage from a Chinese restaurant. The rug had been loosely rolled up. It was pulled out of the debris and unrolled to reveal a massive blood stain but no body parts.

  Ballard was marking the find with a flagged pick when Kokoro, the criminalist who found the first black bag, called out that she had found two more. Again there was a grim gathering around these. One contained Jacob Cady’s head, the other his arms.

  Cady’s face showed no sign of trauma and was composed, eyes and mouth shut, almost as if he were asleep. Kokoro took more photos.

  The arms showed trauma beyond the obvious damage of being severed from the body. There were deep lacerations on both forearms and on the palms.

  “Defensive wounds,” Rogers said. “He held his hands up to ward off an attack.”

  “We’ve got a righteous murder case,” Lee said.

  They marked the location of these finds with flags and pressed on. By the time the van from the Medical Examiner’s Office and a crime scene team arrived, they had found two more bags containing the rest of the body and a third that contained the large knives and hacksaw that had been used during the dismemberment. Jacob Cady had been completely recovered for burial. It was one thing that would not have to haunt his family.

  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.