Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  “He admitted to Daisy and to others,” he said. “Too many for him to even remember.”

  “Jesus,” Ballard said. “He just told you all of this? Who were the others?”

  “He only remembered one name, and that was because it made news and there was some heat at the time. Sarah Bender, you remember her? Her dad was some kind of a big shot, according to Dillon. I remember the name but can’t place the case. I want to use it as the control case. I brought up Daisy but he brought up Sarah Bender. If we can confirm it, we—”

  “We can. Confirm it, I mean. Sarah Bender’s dad has that club on Sunset—Bender’s on the Strip. There’s usually a line out the door.”

  “Right. I know it. Down near the Roxy.”

  “Sarah disappeared about three years ago. George Bender went very public, hired private eyes to find her. Supposedly he even went to the dark side for help when he didn’t think the LAPD was seriously looking for her.”

  “What’s that mean, the ‘dark side’?” Bosch asked.

  “You know, he had connections outside the law working on it. Mercenary types. There was a rumor that his backers in the club were organized crime. When his daughter went missing, that became part of the investigation, but it didn’t pan out. I think the official line was that she was a runaway.”

  “It may have looked that way but she wasn’t a runaway. Dillon grabbed her outside a coffee shop.”

  “I remember the father also put up a reward. They started getting sightings all over the country. People who wanted to cash in. Eventually it all went away and now it’s just another L.A. mystery.”

  “Well, mystery solved. He said he killed her, put her in the incinerator.”

  “Motherfucker. How’d you get him to tell you about her?”

  “Doesn’t matter. He did and I didn’t feed him the name. He came out with it. He said her and Daisy. The rest he couldn’t remember by name. Not even the woman with the pink fingernails.”

  There was a pause before Ballard spoke.

  “What did he say about her?”

  “Nothing. He said he never knew her name in the first place, let alone forgot it.”

  “Did you ask when he grabbed her?”

  “No. I guess I should have.”

  “I think it was recent. When I was in the back of that truck…I could smell her fear. I knew that’s where he kept her.”

  Bosch didn’t know how to respond to that. But it fed into the frustration and anger growing in him. The more he thought about it, the more he regretted dumping out the sulfuric acid on the ground and not Dillon’s head.

  Ballard spoke again before he could.

  “Is he still…”

  “Alive? I’ll probably regret it the rest of my life but, yeah, he’s alive.”

  “No, it’s just…never mind. What will you do with him now?”

  “I’ll call it in, let Van Nuys sort it out.”

  “Do you have him on tape?”

  “Yes, but it won’t matter. Inadmissible. They’ll have to start over, build a case. I’ll tell them to start with the inside of that truck. Fingerprints, DNA.”

  There was a long pause as they both contemplated how their illegal actions had imperiled any sort of traditional way of bringing Dillon to justice.

  Ballard finally spoke.

  “Let’s hope something’s there,” she said. “I don’t want him walking free again.”

  “He won’t,” Bosch said. “I promise you that.”

  More silence followed as they considered what Bosch had just said.

  It was time to hang up, but Bosch didn’t want to. He realized it might be the last time they would speak. Their relationship had been held together by the case. Now the case was over.

  “I need to make the call,” Bosch finally said.

  “Okay,” Ballard said.

  “I guess maybe I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Sure. Stay in touch.”

  Bosch hung up. It was a weird ending. He jangled the change in his hand as he thought about how to handle the call that would send investigators to Dillon’s warehouse. He needed to protect himself but wanted to make sure that the call created an urgent response.

  He dropped quarters into the phone’s slot but then his intentions were hijacked. Thoughts of Elizabeth Clayton hit him, and a deep grief washed over him as he imagined her sad ending, alone in a seedy motel room, empty pill bottle on the bed table, haunted by the ghost of her lost daughter. Then he remembered Dillon’s dismissal of his victims as women and girls who didn’t count or matter and suddenly he was filled with anger. He wanted revenge.

  When the dial tone pulled him out of his dark reverie he punched in 411 and asked the operator for the number of Bender’s on the Strip.

  He was about to drop in more quarters to make the call when caution pushed through the red glare of vengeance. He turned and looked up into the overhang of the police building. He counted at least two cameras.

  He hung up the phone and walked away.

  Bosch moved through the government plaza toward Van Nuys Boulevard, where he had parked the Jeep. He popped the back hatch and reached in for his bad-weather attire, a Dodgers cap and an army jacket with a high collar that offered protection from wind and rain. He put them on, closed the hatch, and crossed the street to a row of twenty-four-hour bail bonds offices. At the end of the row was a pay phone attached to the side wall of the building.

  He pulled his hat down and his collar up as he approached. He dropped in quarters and made the call, checking his watch while he waited for it to ring. It was 1:45 a.m. and he knew the clubs on the Sunset Strip would close at two.

  The call was answered by a woman whose voice was engulfed by a background of loud electronic music.

  “Is there an office?” Bosch yelled. “Give me the office.”

  He was put on hold for nearly a minute before a male voice answered.

  “Mr. Bender?”

  “He’s not here. Who’s this, please?”

  Bosch didn’t hesitate.

  “This is the Los Angeles police. I need to speak to Mr. Bender right now. It’s an emergency. It’s about his daughter.”

  “Is this bullshit? The guy’s been through enough with you people.”

  “This is very serious, sir. I have news about his daughter and need to speak with him right now. Where can I reach him?”

  “Hold on.”

  He was put on hold for another minute. And then another male voice came on the line.

  “Who is this?”

  “Mr. Bender?”

  “I said, who is this?”

  “It doesn’t matter who this is. I’m sorry to be so blunt with news that is so bad. But your daughter was murdered three years ago. And the man who killed her is sitting in a—”

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that, sir. What I’m going to do is give you an address where you will find the man who killed your daughter waiting for you. The door will be unlocked.”

  “How can I believe you? You call up here out of the blue, won’t give your name. How do I—”

  “Mr. Bender, I’m sorry. I can’t give you any more than what I have. And I need to do it now before I change my mind.”

  Bosch let that hang in the darkness between them for a bit.

  “Do you want the address?” he finally asked.

  “Yes,” Bender said. “Give it to me.”

  50

  After supplying Bender with the Saticoy address, Bosch hung up without a further word. He left the phone and started across the deserted boulevard, back toward his car.

  A collision of thoughts went through his head. Faces came too. Elizabeth’s face. And her daughter’s—known to him only in photos. Bosch thought about his own daughter and about George Bender losing his, and the blinding grief something like that would bring.

  He realized then that he had put Bender on a path that would simply trade a momentary urge for justice and vengeance for another
kind of guilt and grief. For both of them.

  In the middle of the boulevard, Bosch turned around.

  He went back to the pay phone for one final call. He dialed a direct line to Valley Bureau detectives and asked for the investigator working the late show. He got a detective named Palmer and told him that there was a killer left bound and waiting for him in a warehouse on Saticoy. He said there was a recorder with a confession on it that should jump-start an investigation and prosecution. There was evidence in the back of a truck in the warehouse as well.

  He gave him the exact address and told him to hurry.

  “Why’s that?” Palmer asked. “Sounds like this guy isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Because you’ve got competition,” Bosch said.

  Ballard and Bosch

  Epilogue

  Bosch came out of the glass doors of the Medical Examiner’s Office and found Ballard waiting for him, leaning on the front wall.

  “Is it her?” she asked.

  Bosch nodded somberly.

  “But I knew it would be,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ballard said.

  He nodded his thanks. He noticed that her hair was wet and slicked back. She noticed him noticing.

  “I was on my board this morning when you left the message,” she said. “First time I’ve been able to get out on the water after my shift in a while.”

  “You took the Scooby-Doo van?” he said.

  “I did,” she said.

  They started walking down the steps toward the parking lot.

  “You check the newspaper this morning?” Ballard asked.

  “Not yet,” Bosch said. “What did they have?”

  “They had a story about the SIS thing up in the Valley. But it happened so late they didn’t get many details in. There will probably be a fuller story online today and in the paper tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. SIS means headlines. They’ll be all over it for days. Anything about Dillon?”

  “Not in the paper. But I got a call last night from Valley Bureau.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They were looking for guidance on the Daisy Clayton case—they knew I had been working it. They said they picked up a guy who they think was good for her killing, among others. They were tipped to him by someone calling himself a concerned citizen. Like Batman or something. Identity unknown.”

  “Did they say whether they can make a case?”

  “They said the taped confession was no good but otherwise they had enough probable cause to get a judge to give them a search warrant for the truck inside the warehouse.”

  “That’s good. Hopefully, they’ll find—”

  “They already did. Prints and DNA. If they get matches to any missing women, then Dillon goes down. Probably not for Clayton, though. That’ll be a long shot after so many years.”

  “I guess all that matters is that he’s taken off the board.”

  Ballard nodded.

  “Funny thing,” she said. “While they were at the warehouse, a car pulls up and then takes off. The guy I’m dealing with, Detective Palmer, he has patrol chase the car down and guess who’s in it?”

  “No idea,” Bosch said.

  “George Bender and a couple bouncers from his joint on the strip. Sarah Bender’s father—who we had just talked about last night.”

  “Strange.”

  “Even stranger is that he says he was told by an anonymous caller that the guy in the warehouse killed his daughter. They check his trunk and find a chain saw. Just sitting in his trunk. A frickin’ chain saw.”

  Bosch shrugged but Ballard wasn’t finished.

  “Makes me think this Batman guy was trying to play both ends against the middle,” she said. “Palmer even said that his caller told him to hurry because he had competition. So I’m glad you called me today, Harry, because I wanted to ask you what the fuck you were doing last night.”

  Bosch stopped so he could turn and face her. He shrugged.

  “Look, I was following the plan and then I started thinking about Elizabeth, okay?” he said. “It’s like he murdered her too, if you ask me. So I got angry and I made a call. But then I corrected it. And everything turned out okay.”

  “Barely,” Ballard said. “It could easily have gone the other way.”

  “And would that have been so bad?”

  “That’s not the question. The question is, is that how we do things?”

  Bosch shrugged again and continued toward his car.

  “Was that why you wanted to meet?” Ballard said. “To explain calling Bender?”

  “No,” Bosch said. “I actually wanted to talk about something else.”

  “About what?”

  “I was thinking that we worked pretty well together. Like, we were a good team on this.”

  They stopped at the Cherokee.

  “Okay, we were a good team,” Ballard said. “What are you saying?”

  Bosch shrugged.

  “That maybe we keep working on cases together,” he said. “You know, you find them, I find them. I’m outside, you’re inside. We see what we can get done.”

  “And what then?” she said. “You do your Batman thing and decide who we call at the end of the case?”

  “No, I told you. It was a mistake and I corrected it. That won’t happen. You can call the shots on that stuff, if you like.”

  “What about money? I get paid and you don’t? We split my check? What?”

  “I don’t want your money or anybody else’s. My pension’s probably higher than your paycheck anyway. I just want what you’ve got, Renée. Not too many have it.”

  “Not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. You know. You have that thing—maybe one in a hundred have it. You’ve got scars on your face but nobody can see them. It’s because you’re fierce. You keep pushing. I mean, I’d be dog food right now if it wasn’t for what you’ve got. So let’s work together. Let’s work cases. Badge, no badge, it doesn’t matter. I’m past all of that now anyway. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, but whatever I have, I want to use it to go out there and find people like Dillon. And one way or another, take them off the board.”

  Ballard had her hands in her pockets. She was looking down at the asphalt when Bosch said all those things about her. Things she knew were true. Especially about the scars.

  She nodded.

  “Okay, Harry. We can work cases. But we bend the rules. We don’t break them.”

  Bosch nodded back.

  “That sounds right,” he said.

  “Where do we start?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just call me when it’s time. I’ll be around.”

  “Okay, I’ll send up a signal.”

  They shook hands on it and went their separate ways.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to acknowledge those who contributed large and small to this novel. Chief among them is Detective Mitzi Roberts of the Los Angeles Police Department. Also, former and current detectives Rick Jackson, Tim Marcia, and David Lambkin provided great insight and detail.

  A cast of editors led by Asya Muchnick were an indispensable part of the process and included Bill Massey, Emad Akhtar, and Pamela Marshall.

  The Connelly Cabal of trusted readers helped sculpt the book, and they include Linda Connelly, Jane Davis, Terrill Lee Lankford, Heather Rizzo, Henrik Bastin, John Hougton, and Dennis Wojciechowski. Anyone who helped bring this story to the page is gratefully acknowledged.

  Many thanks to all.

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  About the Author

  Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-one previous novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Two Kinds of Truth, The Late Show, and The Wrong Side of Goodbye. His books, which include the Harry Bosch s
eries and Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels and is the executive producer of Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. He spends his time in California and Florida.

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