Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  “Bosch, it’s Ballard. What happened to you? I thought we were doing this together. I’m on my way to USC. Call me. I found some shake cards I really like.”

  She disconnected, half expecting Bosch to call her back right away.

  He didn’t.

  Ballard looked up a number in her phone and called it. Beatrice Beaupre was a director of adult films as well as a previous performer. All told, she had almost twenty years in the business. Ballard knew her because the year before she had rescued Beaupre from a man with plans to kill her. In that regard Beaupre owed Ballard, and she was calling now to collect.

  Ballard knew that at this hour Beaupre was either wrapping up a night’s work at her studio out in Canoga Park or she was asleep and dead to the world.

  The call was answered after one ring.

  “What?”

  “Beatrice, it’s Renée Ballard.”

  Beaupre was known by several different names in the porno field. Few people called her by or even knew her given name.

  “Ballard, what are you doing? I was about to crash. Been working all night.”

  “Then I’m glad I got you beforehand. I need your expertise.”

  “My expertise. What, you want to try bondage or something?”

  “Not quite. I want to run a few names by you, see if anything clicks.”

  “Okay.”

  “First one is Kurt Pascal. He’s supposedly a porn actor. Was, at least, nine years ago.”

  “Nine years ago. Shit, the industry’s turned over twice in that time. People come and go—no pun intended.”

  “So you don’t know him.”

  “Well, I know these guys by their stage names and that ain’t no stage name. Let me get to my computer. See if he’s in the database under his real name.”

  “What database is that?”

  “Adult casting. Hold on.”

  Ballard heard typing and then:

  “Pascal? P-A-S-C-A-L?”

  “That’s what I have, yeah.”

  “Okay, yeah, he’s here. I don’t recognize the photo, so I would say I never worked with him. What did he do?”

  “Nothing. Does it say where he lives?”

  “No, nothing like that. It’s got his management listing and then age and body details. He’s a ten hard, which explains why he got into the business and apparently stayed. He’s thirty-five and that’s kinda old for the game.”

  Ballard thought for a moment about what would be the best way to connect with Pascal. For the time being she moved on.

  “What about a guy named Wilson Gayley?” she asked. “He might be a cameraman.”

  “Is that a performing name?” Beaupre asked. “I don’t make gay porn, so I wouldn’t know him.”

  “No, it’s a real name. I think.”

  “You think.”

  Ballard heard typing.

  “He’s not in the database,” Beaupre said. “But it kinda rings a bell. You know, a guy with a name for gay porn but who’s in the straight game. Let me ask around.”

  “He went to prison about five years ago for intentionally infecting someone with an STD,” Ballard said.

  “Oh, wait a minute,” Beaupre said. “That guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “I think it’s him. There was a guy back around that time that was mad at a girl—a performer—because she’d talked trash or something about one of his partners. So he hired her for a scene and put himself in it. She ended up getting syph and that forced her out of the business. She went to vice because somebody told her that the producer—sounds like this Gayley guy—did it on purpose. Like he knew he had it when he fucked her. And then vice made a case. They got his medical reports and stuff. Proved he knew it, and he went to jail.”

  “Have you heard of him since then? He got out a couple years ago.”

  “I don’t think so. I just remember that story. It’s about the scariest thing that can happen in this business.”

  Ballard knew she had to pull the files on Gayley to confirm Beaupre’s story. But it sounded like they were talking about the same man.

  “On the first guy, Pascal,” she said. “You could hire him for a shoot through that database?”

  “I would send his management a message checking on availability,” Beaupre said.

  “Would there be like an audition or something?”

  “No. In this business, you look at his reel, which the manager will send me, and you either hire him or you don’t. He gets three hundred a pop. It says it right here in the database.”

  “Can you hire him for a shoot today?”

  “What are you talking about? What shoot?”

  “There is no shoot. I just want to get him to your place so I can talk to him.”

  There was a pause before Beaupre responded.

  “I don’t know, Ballard. If it gets out I did this for the cops, it might hurt me, being able to hire people in the future. Especially with that management group. It’s one of the big ones.”

  Now Ballard paused, hoping her silence would communicate what she didn’t want to say: You owe me, Beaupre.

  The strategy worked.

  “Okay, I guess I could claim innocence,” Beaupre said. “Say I thought you were a valid producer or something.”

  “Whatever you need to do,” Ballard said.

  “What day?”

  “How about today?”

  “Same-day booking is kind of suspect. Nobody does that.”

  “Okay, what about tomorrow?”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “At night, right?”

  “No, morning.”

  “Nobody works in the morning.”

  “Okay, tomorrow afternoon, then.”

  “Okay, I’ll book him for four o’clock and let you know. And then you’ll be here?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  They disconnected. Ballard then tried Bosch again and once more the call went directly to message.

  It was as if Bosch’s phone had been turned off.

  33

  Traffic was a bear getting down to USC. Even with her city car allowing her access to a no-parking zone on campus, Ballard didn’t get to Professor Calder’s office until he was locking the door to go to his lab.

  “Professor, I’m sorry I’m so late,” she said to his back. “Any chance I can pick up the GRASP data?”

  Ballard realized she had adopted the imploring tone of a student. It was embarrassing.

  Calder turned and saw it was her and unlocked his door.

  “Come in, Detective.”

  Calder put a backpack down on a chair and went behind his desk, where he stayed standing while opening the middle drawer.

  “You know, I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “The LAPD did not treat me well.”

  He took a thumb drive from the drawer and held it out across the desk to Ballard.

  “I know,” she said. “It was the politics of the moment.”

  She took the drive from him and held it up.

  “But I can assure you,” she said. “If this helps us catch a killer, I will make sure people know it.”

  “I hope so,” Calder said. “You’ll have to print hard copies for your partner yourself. It’s the end of the semester and it turns out I don’t have the budget or the paper.”

  “Not a problem, Professor. Thanks.”

  “Let me know how it goes.”

  When Ballard got back to the car, no more than ten minutes after leaving it, there was a parking ticket under the windshield wiper.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said.

  She yanked the envelope out from under the windshield wiper and did a complete circle, looking for the parking enforcement officer who had issued it. There were only students on their way to classes.

  “It’s a fricking cop car!” she yelled.

  Students stared at her for a moment but then moved on. Ballard got in the car and tossed the envelope onto the dashboard.
<
br />   “Assholes,” she said.

  She headed back toward Hollywood. She had to decide what to do next. She could turn in the city ride, get her van, and head to the beach to follow her routine of paddling and then sleeping. Or she could keep moving on the case. She had fifty-six field interview cards that needed a second look. And she had the GRASP files, which represented a new angle of investigation.

  She had not been on the water in two days and knew she needed the exercise and the equilibrium it would bring to her being. But the case was calling to her. With the FI cards narrowed and the GRASP data in hand, she needed to keep case momentum going.

  She pulled her phone and called Bosch for the third time that morning. It once again went straight to message.

  “Bosch, what the fuck? Are we working together on this or not?”

  She disconnected, annoyed that there was no way to do an angry hang-up with a cell phone.

  As she slogged through heavy traffic, her annoyance with Bosch dissipated and turned into concern. When she got back to Hollywood, she headed north on Highland into the Cahuenga Pass. She knew Bosch lived in the pass. He had given her his address so she could talk to Elizabeth Clayton. She didn’t remember the number but she still had the street.

  Woodrow Wilson Drive edged the mountain over the pass and offered clipped views between houses that held their ground on steel-and-concrete pilings. But Ballard wasn’t interested in the views. She was looking for the old green Cherokee she had seen Bosch driving earlier in the week. Her hope was that Bosch didn’t have a garage.

  When she was three curves from the top of the mountain, she spotted the Jeep parked in a carport attached to a small house on the view side of the street. She drove past and pulled to the curb.

  Ballard went to the front door and knocked. She stepped back and checked the windows for an open curtain. There was nothing, and no one answered. She tried the door and it was locked.

  She moved to the carport and checked the side door. It too was locked.

  Back out on the street, she walked to the other side and studied the house from afar. She thought about the way Bechtel, the art thief, had gotten in to steal the Warhols. She saw that the carport was supported by a cross-hatched ironwork with squares she judged to be large enough to use as footholds.

  She headed across the street again.

  Just as she had done three days before, Ballard climbed up to the roof and then crossed it to the rear edge. Every house with a view had a rear deck and she wasn’t disappointed by Bosch’s home. She checked a gutter for the strength of its moorings, then gripped it with both hands and swung down to the deck. She dropped the remaining three feet without a problem.

  Something was definitely strange. The slider was open wide enough for her to slip inside without having to push it further. She stood in the middle of a small, sparsely furnished living room. Visually, nothing seemed wrong.

  “Harry?”

  No answer. She stepped further in. She noticed an odd food smell.

  There was an alcove with a dining room table and a wall of shelves behind it that contained books, files, and a collection of vinyl records and CDs. On the table she saw an unopened bottle of water and a paper bag from Poquito Más, its sides stained with grease. She touched the bag and bottle. Both were room temperature. The bag was open and she looked down into it. She saw wrapped food items and knew the food had gone uneaten for a long time and was the source of the smell in the house.

  “Harry?”

  She said it louder this time but that didn’t change the lack of response.

  Stepping into the entryway by the front door, she looked into the galley kitchen that led to the carport. Nothing seemed amiss. She saw a set of keys on the counter.

  She turned and walked down the hallway toward the bedrooms. A series of thoughts rushed through her mind as she moved. Bosch had said Elizabeth Clayton had mysteriously moved out. Had she come back to harm him? To rob him? Had something else gone wrong?

  Then she thought about Bosch’s age and the way he had limped away from her car to the space center. Was she going to find him collapsed in the bed or bathroom? Had he pushed himself too far with lack of sleep and exhaustion?

  “Harry? It’s Ballard. You here, Harry?”

  The house remained silent. Ballard nudged open the door of a bedroom that obviously was Bosch’s daughter’s room, with posters and photos on the walls, stuffed animals on the bed, her own phonograph, and a thin collection of records. There was a framed photo on the night table of a young girl hugging a woman. Ballard assumed it was Bosch’s daughter and her mother.

  Across the hall was another room, with a bed and a bureau. All very basic and spartan. Elizabeth’s room, she guessed. A communal bathroom off the hallway was next. And then the master bedroom, Harry’s room.

  Ballard entered and this time only whispered Bosch’s name, as if she expected to find him asleep. The bed was made with a military precision, the spread tightly tucked under the edges of the mattress.

  She checked the bathroom to finish the search but she knew Bosch was gone. She turned back and walked all through the house and out onto the deck. The last place she needed to check was the steep embankment below the cantilevered house.

  The arroyo down below was overgrown with heavy brush and acacia and scrub pine trees. Ballard moved up and down the length of the deck, changing her angles of view so she would be able to see all of the ground below. There was no sign of a body or any sort of break in the natural shape of the canopy of branches.

  Satisfied that the house and grounds below were clear, Ballard folded her arms and leaned down on the railing as she tried to decide what to do. She was convinced something had happened to Bosch. She checked her watch. It was now ten o’clock and she knew the detective bureau at Hollywood Station would be in full swing. She pulled her phone and called her boss, Lieutenant McAdam, on his direct line.

  “L-T, it’s Ballard.”

  “Ballard. I was just looking for the overnight log and couldn’t find it.”

  “I didn’t write one. It was a slow night. No calls.”

  “Well, that’s one in a million. Then what’s up?”

  “You remember I put on the overnight earlier this week that I’m working the cold case with the girl who got snatched nine years ago?”

  “Yes. Daisy something, right?”

  “Right, yeah. And I was working it with Harry Bosch.”

  “Without my permission, but yeah, I know Bosch was in on it.”

  “He had the watch commander’s permission. Anyway, here’s the thing. Bosch was supposed to come in this morning and go through old shake cards with me and he didn’t show.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then we had an appointment with a guy at USC and Bosch didn’t show for that either.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “I’ve been calling him all morning. No answer. I’m now at his house. The back door was open, there’s uneaten food from last night just sitting on the table, and it doesn’t look like his bed has been slept in.”

  There was a long silence as McAdam considered everything Ballard had said. She thought he was on the same concerned wavelength as her, but when he finally spoke, it was clear that he wasn’t.

  “Ballard, are you and Bosch…involved in some way beyond this case?”

  “No. Are you kidding me? I think something happened to him. I’m not—He’s missing, Lieutenant. We need to do something. That’s why I’m calling. What should we do?”

  “All right, settle down. My mistake, okay? Forget I said anything. So, when exactly was he supposed to show up on this thing?”

  “There wasn’t an exact time. But he said he’d be in early. I was looking for him around four or five.”

  Again, silence.

  “Renée, we’re talking about six hours at the most here.”

  “I know but there’s something wrong. His dinner’s sitting on the table. His car’s here but he isn’t.”

  “It
’s still too soon. We have to see how it plays out.”

  “Plays out? What are you talking about? He was one of us. LAPD. We need to put out a bulletin, get it on RACR at least.”

  RACR, pronounced racer, was an internal text alert system through which messages could be sent to the phones of thousands of officers at once.

  “No, it’s too soon,” McAdam said. “Let’s see what happens over the next few hours. Text me the address and I’ll send a car up there after lunch. You’re done for the day.”

  “What?” Ballard said.

  There was exasperation in her voice. McAdam wasn’t seeing what she was seeing, didn’t know what she knew. He was handling this wrong.

  “You’re done, Renée. I’ll send a car up later to check on Bosch. We’ve got to give this at least twelve hours. I’ll call you later when we know more. It’s probably nothing.”

  Ballard disconnected without acknowledging McAdam’s order. She was afraid that if she said anything further it would be in a high-pitched voice that was near hysterical.

  She kept her phone out and looked up the number for the San Fernando Police Department. She made the call and asked to be transferred to the detective bureau. A woman answered but identified herself too quickly for Ballard to pick up the name.

  “Is Harry Bosch there?”

  “No, he’s not. Can someone else help you?”

  “This is Detective Ballard with the LAPD. Can I speak to his partner, please? This is urgent.”

  “We don’t have partners here. It’s interchangeable. We—”

  “I need to talk to whoever he was working with last—on the gang murder where the witness was killed.”

  There was a pause before there was a response.

  “That was me. How do you know about that case?”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Detective Lourdes. How do you—”

  “Listen to me. I think something’s happened to Harry. I’m at his house now and he’s not here and it looks…it looks like he might have been taken.”

  “Taken?”

  “We were supposed to meet early this morning. He didn’t show. His phone’s turned off and he’s not here. He’s got uneaten food on the table from last night, the bed is still made, and his back door was open.”