Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  Ballard knocked on the door, though she did not expect any sort of response. She stepped back and looked up and down the access lane, checking to see if her knock on the hollow metal had aroused any interest.

  It had not.

  Ballard stepped over to the thin channel between CCB and its neighbor to the north, a building with no sign or other identifiers on it. The alley, if it was big enough to be classified as such, was unlit. Ballard poked a flashlight into the space and saw it was strewn with debris but passable. At the far end, which Ballard guessed was eighty feet away, there was no gate or other obstacle.

  Ballard tentatively stuck one foot into the slim opening. She kicked away a pile of old and dusty breathing masks that she could only imagine had come from CCB.

  Another step in and then there was no longer anything tentative about her advance. She moved quickly down the passage, concrete block walls on either side of her, toward the opening ahead. Remembering the old movie gag about the walls closing in on the hero, she thought herself into a bout of vertigo and had to put a hand out on one of the walls for support and to keep her balance.

  She stumbled out of the narrow opening and into a rear alley and bent over, hands on knees, and waited for the dizziness to pass. When it did, she straightened up and looked around. It was the cleanest alley she had ever seen. No debris, no junk, no impromptu storage of old vehicles or anything else. Each unit had its own neatly kept and closed trash bin that was secured inside a concrete corral. Ballard opened the bin behind CCB and found it empty except for a couple of crumpled to-go bags and several empty coffee cups. Ballard expected there to be bloody mop heads and other debris from cleaning crime scenes, but nothing like that was here.

  There was a single rear door with just CCB painted on it. Ballard checked it but it was locked with a deadbolt. She knocked anyway to complete the due diligence but did not wait by the door for a reply she was confident wasn’t coming. Moving back into the narrow passage between the buildings, she shone the light up the walls to the slim slice of night sky. The roofline was about twenty feet up. Because the warehouse was windowless, she knew there was a strong possibility that there would be a skylight on the roof to allow in natural light as well as ventilation.

  Ballard put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and then a hand on each of the walls of the two buildings she stood between. She then raised her left foot and angled it against one wall, using the mortar line between two of the concrete blocks to find a shallow toehold. Pressing her hands against the wall and gripping the upper edges, she raised herself up and brought her right foot against the opposite wall, angling it until it found purchase. She was wearing rubber-soled work shoes favored by professionals who worked a lot on their feet. They were chosen for comfort over style, and they grabbed the edges of the mortar lines well.

  Ballard slowly started climbing the walls of the passage between the two buildings, using her weight to counterbalance her body and to keep from falling. The ascent was slow and it was toward a complete unknown, but she pressed on, pausing once when she heard a car in the entrance lane of the industrial park. She quickly grabbed the flashlight out of her mouth and switched it off. She was halfway up the climb and could do nothing but hold still.

  The car out in the lane drove by the passage without stopping. Ballard waited a moment, then turned the flashlight back on and started climbing again.

  It took ten minutes to reach the top and then Ballard put her arm over the parapet around the roof of the CCB warehouse and carefully pulled her body over and onto the gravel rooftop. She stayed on her back for almost a minute, catching her breath and staring at the dark sky.

  She rolled onto her side and got up. Brushing off her clothes, she knew that she had burned through another suit. She was planning to take Monday and Tuesday off once her partner returned. She would complete all her laundry errands then.

  Ballard looked around and saw that she had been wrong about there being a skylight on the roof. There were actually four of them—two over each garage bay—plastic bubbles shining in the moonlight. There was also a steel exhaust chimney that rose six feet above the roofline. The diffuser at the top was coated black by smoke and creosote.

  Ballard inspected the skylights, moving from one to another with her flashlight, stepping around a pool of standing water that covered part of the roof. There were no lights on in the CCB warehouse below, but it didn’t matter. Visibility with the flashlight was limited. It appeared that each of the once-clear plastic bubbles had been haphazardly sprayed with white paint from the inside.

  This was curious to Ballard. It appeared to be a move designed to keep anyone from looking down at activities below. But there were no taller buildings in the area with views through the skylights. Ballard thought about the boys caught earlier in the week attempting to glimpse naked women through the skylights of a strip club. Here, the attempt at skylight privacy seemed unwarranted.

  Each of the skylights was hinged on one edge and could presumably be opened from within. This was the moment of decision. She had certainly already trespassed on private property but she would be crossing a more important line if she took things further. It was a line she had crossed before.

  She had no direct evidence of anything but plenty of circumstantial facts that pointed the needle toward Dillon. She had the fact that the crime scene cleaner was in Hollywood with his van and his chemicals and cleansers on the night Daisy Clayton was taken. And she had the fact that he had ordered storage containers with the same brand mark that had ended up on the victim’s body, and in the size that would have been used to store and bleach it. The circumstances of the murder pointed to a killer who knew something about law enforcement and took the effort to rid the body of potential evidence to an extreme level.

  She knew she could call Judge Wickwire, her go-to, and run these things by her in an effort to establish probable cause. But in her mind she could hear the judge’s voice saying, “Renée, I don’t think you have it.”

  But Ballard thought she did have the right man. She decided she had come this far and was not turning around. She reached into a pocket and took out a pair of rubber gloves. Then she started checking the skylights.

  Each of the rooftop bubbles was locked, but one of them felt loose on its frame. She moved around it, stepping in the water that had accumulated around its rear edge. The standing water was apparently a longtime problem. The moisture had worked its corrosive magic on the skylight’s hinges.

  Ballard put the light in her mouth and reached down with both hands to the frame. She pulled up and the hinge screws gave way, coming out of the wet plaster abutment below the frame without protest. She pushed the skylight up until it rolled back on its rounded surface and into the water.

  She pointed her light down and was looking at the flat white top of a box truck parked in the bay directly below the opening.

  Ballard estimated that it was a drop of no more than eight feet.

  46

  Ballard lowered herself through the roof opening and hung for a moment by her hands before letting go and falling to the roof of the truck. She hit it off balance and fell onto her back, momentarily stunning herself and leaving a dent on the truck’s roof.

  After lying still and recovering for a few seconds, she crawled toward the front of the truck, slipped down onto the cab, and then climbed down the side of it, using the sideview mirror and door handle as toeholds and grips.

  Once she was on the concrete floor, Ballard checked the warehouse’s doors to see if she would have a quick escape route if needed. But the deadbolts on both front and back doors required a key on the inside as well.

  With her flashlight in hand, she located a panel next to the front door with what she believed were the garage door switches, but like the doors, these required a key to operate. Ballard realized that she was going to have to figure out how to get up and out through the skylight or somehow break down one of the doors. Neither was a good choice.

  Below th
e garage-door panel was a row of light switches that were not key controlled. She flicked them up and two rows of overhead fluorescents came on, brightly lighting the warehouse. She stood there for a long moment, studying the layout of the place. The two side-by-side parking bays took up the front half of the warehouse, while the rear half was dedicated to the storage of supplies and a small office area with a couch. In the corner opposite the office was an incinerator for burning the biologically hazardous materials collected at crime scenes.

  One of the parking bays was empty, but there were fresh oil drips on the floor where a truck would normally sit. Ballard knew that the truck backed into the other bay was not the one she had seen earlier in the week when she had met Dillon. It was painted differently, with the full name of the company on the driver’s-side door and not the large CCB across the side panel. It was older, had low air in its tires, and appeared to her to have been sitting in disuse. It seemed to put the lie to what Dillon had said about having two trucks and four employees ready to go 24/7. He apparently was a one-man operation.

  It all added up to Ballard realizing that the truck Dillon currently used was out there somewhere, and she had no idea if he was on a job and could arrive back at the warehouse at any time or if he simply took his work truck home at night. It didn’t seem to Ballard that it would go over well with fellow residents to park a biohazard truck in the neighborhood. But Ballard had not seen any personal car that could belong to Dillon parked near the warehouse.

  She decided to move quickly with her search and started with a survey of the desk standing against the wall near the rear door of the warehouse. Ballard scanned for any information or notation about a job that might give her an idea of where Dillon and the truck were. But after finding nothing, she moved on, attempting to open the desk’s file drawers to see if there were any historical records regarding the purchase of supplies from American Storage Products.

  The drawers were locked and that ended her search of the desk.

  The warehouse was neat and orderly. Against the wall opposite the incinerator were large plastic barrels containing cleaning and disinfecting liquids with hand pumps for filling smaller containers for use on individual jobs. There were shelves stacked high with empty plastic containers. Ballard checked these for size and the ASP logo that had left a mark on Daisy Clayton, but there was nothing that would be large enough to contain her body and nothing with the logo. She realized that she had neglected to ask Mittleberg the time frame of the orders from CCB that he had seen on his computer.

  There was a small bathroom with a shower and it looked like it had been recently cleaned. She opened the medicine cabinet and found routine first-aid materials on its shelves.

  Next to the bathroom was a closet in which Ballard found several white jumpsuits on hangers, CCB embroidered on the left breast pocket of each, and Roger on the right—further evidence that Dillon’s claim of fielding four employees was self-aggrandizement.

  Ballard closed the closet and stepped over to the incinerator. It was a square stand-alone appliance with stainless-steel sidings and an exhaust pipe going straight up through the ceiling. The front was double-doored, and a matching stainless-steel staging table was positioned in front of it.

  Ballard opened one of the doors of the burning chamber and the other opened automatically with it. She pointed the beam of her flashlight inside and got a sharp kickback of reflecting light. The interior panels of the chamber were so clean as to be shiny, and it looked like the ash trap below the flame bars had been vacuumed after its last use. The incinerator looked brand-new. She could see a gas pilot light burning blue in the back corner.

  She closed the incinerator doors and turned around. She saw no shop vac or any other kind of vacuum that could have been used to clean it. She then remembered seeing equipment in the truck Dillon had driven to the job site earlier in the week and assumed that he carried both wet and dry vacuums with him.

  This thought drew her focus to the truck parked in the second bay. It was the last place for her to search. It had been backed into the warehouse and she was staring at the two double doors of the rear compartment.

  Ballard next checked the license plate. The registration sticker was two years out of date. It was clear this truck was not part of CCB’s active fleet.

  She pulled back a handle that disengaged upper and lower locking pins on the doors and pulled one of them open. She stepped back to swing it to the side and saw that the truck might have been taken out of service but it was being used as storage. It was full of cleaning and containment supplies packaged in bulk. A tower of twenty-four-packs of paper towel rolls, five-gallon containers of soap, a trash can full of brand-new mops, plastic-wrapped cases of aerosol cleaners and air fresheners. Leaning against one side of the interior was a thick stack of cardboard boxes that needed to be folded into shape for use.

  It was essentially a wall of supplies that blocked her view into the truck. There was a handle mounted just inside the door. Ballard grabbed it and pulled herself up, using the truck’s rear bumper as a step. The inside of the truck was shielded from the fluorescents. Ballard used her light to cut through the shadows and look farther in. She quickly realized that the supplies were stacked at the back of the truck only as a blind and that there was an open space behind them. She shoved the trash can and mops in and out of the way and moved into the truck to look.

  On the floor there were some old food wrappers, napkins, and fast-food bags strewn around a thin mattress that looked like it had been taken from a folding cot. A dirty blanket and pillow were thrown haphazardly on top of it and a battery-operated lantern was on the floor. Ballard moved the blanket with her foot and exposed a metal loop bolted to the floor of the truck. She squatted down and looked closely at it, saw the scratch marks on the interior of the loop, and knew it could be used to handcuff or chain a person to the mattress. She noticed that there was a slightly sour smell to this area of the truck. It told Ballard someone had recently been inhabiting this space.

  Ballard suddenly knew that it was the scent of fear. She had recognized it in herself before. She had heard of dogs trained to track it. Ballard knew she was in a place where someone had trembled and feared for her life.

  Something on the floor next to the mattress caught her eye and Ballard leaned farther down to look. On closer examination, she realized it was a broken fingernail that had been painted pink.

  The truck suddenly started shaking as a sharp metallic sound engulfed the warehouse. Ballard’s first thought was earthquake, but then she quickly identified it as one of the aluminum garage doors rolling up. Someone was about to enter.

  She killed the flashlight, pulled her weapon, and thought about quickly climbing out of the truck. But that would put her out in the open and exposed. She held her place and listened. She heard the high idle of a truck engine but no movement. Then the engine revved and the vehicle entered the garage. After Ballard judged that it was in the bay next to her, the engine was killed.

  Again, for several seconds there was only silence. Ballard didn’t even hear the sound of anyone getting out of the cab. And then the ratcheting sound of the garage door began again, this time as it was lowered.

  Ballard listened intently, her ears her only tool at the moment.

  She had to assume that the driver of the truck was Dillon. She listed three things in her mind that he could have noticed upon his arrival. The lights of the warehouse were on, one of the out-of-service truck’s back doors was standing open, and there was a missing skylight above. She had to assume that Dillon would notice all three and be aware that there had been a break-in. It remained to be seen if he thought the intruder had come and gone or was still in the warehouse. If he called 9-1-1, Ballard knew she would probably be arrested and her career would be over. If he chose not to call, then he would be confirming that he didn’t want police in the warehouse because of the things that had gone on in here. She flashed on the incinerator, its exhaust pipe coated black on the roof fr
om use but its burning chamber spotlessly cleaned and vacuumed.

  Ballard looked down at the thin mattress on the floor. She wondered if she would ever know who had been in this dark place and shivered under the thin blanket. Who had broken her nail trying to find an escape route. Her anger toward Dillon began to grow to the point of no return. To the killing place she knew she carried inside.

  Ballard heard the door of the other truck open and its occupant climb out and drop to the concrete floor. Her only view out to the warehouse was through the open door at the back of the truck she was in, and that gave a tight angle of the space beyond. She waited and listened, trying to pick up Dillon’s footsteps and movements but hearing nothing.

  Suddenly the back door of the truck she hid in was slammed shut, plunging Ballard into darkness. She heard the handle on the outside turn and the locking pins at the top and bottom of the door snap into place. She was locked in. She gripped her gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, but chose to stay in darkness, thinking it might keep her ears sharper.

  “Okay, I know you’re in there. Who are you?”

  Ballard froze. Though she had spoken to Dillon only once before, she knew it was his voice.

  She said nothing in return.

  “Looks like you broke my skylight pretty good. And that makes me mad because I don’t have the money for that.”

  Ballard pulled her phone and checked the screen. She was basically in a metal box inside a concrete box and she had no service. And the rover she had taken from the station was sitting in the mobile charger in her car two blocks away.

  Dillon started pounding on the door, a sharp metal-on-metal sound.