Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

“Are you going to have to tell our parents?” one of the boys asked.

Ballard lowered the light and headed back to pick up her rover.

“What do you think?” Dvorek asked her quietly as she passed him.

The question further revealed him.

“Your call,” Ballard said. “I’m out of here.”

There was one booth in Du-par’s at the Farmers Market that afforded an entire view of the restaurant and its entrance. Ballard always took it when it was available, and most nights when she was able to get a real meal break, it was so late that the place was largely empty and she had her choice of the entire room.

She sat across from Bosch, who had ordered coffee only. He explained that there were almost always breakfast burritos or doughnuts at SFPD in the morning, and he intended to go there at six for a briefing before his team delivered the search warrant.

Ballard didn’t hold back. She had skipped dinner the evening before and was famished. She matched Bosch’s coffee but added a blue-plate special that included pancakes, eggs, and bacon. As she waited for the food, she asked about the stack of FI cards he had gone through in the car while she handled the call at Sirens.

“No keepers,” Bosch said.

“You come across any written by a P.O. named Farmer?” she asked. “Good writer.”

“I don’t think so... but I wasn’t checking too many names. Are you talking about Tim Farmer?”

“Yeah, you knew him?”

“I went to the academy with him.”

“I didn’t know he was that old.”

Ballard immediately realized what she had said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I mean, like, why was a guy who’d been around so long still on the street, you know?”

“Some guys can’t give up the street,” Bosch said. “Like some guys can’t give up homicide work. You know he—”

“Yeah, I know. Why’d he do it?”

“Who knows? He was a month from retirement. I heard it was kind of a forced retirement — if he stayed, they were going to put him on a desk. So he put in his papers and during his last deployment period pulled the plug.”

“That’s a sad fucking story.”

“Most suicides are.”

“I liked the way he wrote. His observations on the shakes were like poetry.”

“A lot of poets kill themselves.”

“I guess.”

A waiter brought her food and Ballard suddenly wasn’t all that hungry. She was feeling sad about a man she had never met. She poured syrup over her short stack and started to eat anyway.

“So, did you stay in touch after the academy?” she asked.

“Not really,” Bosch said. “We were close then, and there were class reunions, but we were on different tracks. It wasn’t like now with social media and all of that Facebook stuff. He was up in the Valley and came to Hollywood after I’d left.”

Ballard nodded and picked at her food. The pancakes were getting soggy and more unappetizing. She moved her fork to the eggs.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about King and Carswell,” she said. “I assume you or Soto talked to them at the start of this.”

“Lucia did,” Bosch said. “One of them, at least. King retired about five years ago and moved to Bumfuck, Idaho — somewhere out in the woods with no phone and no internet. He went completely off grid. She got the PO box where his pension checks go and sent him a letter asking for an interview on the case. She’s still waiting for an answer. Carswell also retired and he took a gig as an investigator with the Orange County D.A. Lucia went down and talked to him but he wasn’t a font of new information. He barely remembered the case and told her everything he did know was in the murder book. It didn’t sound as though he wanted to talk about a case he didn’t close. I’m sure you know the type.”

“Yeah — ‘If I can’t close it, nobody else can.’ What about Adam Sands, the boyfriend. Either of you do a fresh interview?”

“We couldn’t. He died in 2014 of an overdose.”

Ballard nodded. It wasn’t a surprising end for Sands but it was a disappointment because he could have been helpful in setting the scene that Daisy Clayton lived and died in and in providing the names of other runaways and acquaintances. Ballard was beginning to see why Bosch wanted to locate the field interview cards. It might be their only hope.

“Anything else?” she asked. “I take it Soto has the murder book. Anything not in the database that’s important?”

“Not really,” Bosch said. “King and Carswell weren’t the extra-mile sort of guys. Carswell told Lucia they didn’t put their notebooks in the murder book because everything was in the reports.”

“I got that feeling about them when I was reading the book online.”

“Speaking of which, I started a secondary book with what I’ve been doing.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“It’s in my car. I’ll bring it in when we get back. I guess you should keep it now that you have official standing.”

“All right. I will. Thanks.”

Bosch reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a shake card. He slid it across the table for Ballard to read.

“I thought you said there were no keepers,” she said.

“There weren’t,” he said. “That one’s from earlier. Read it.”

She did. The card was written at 3:30 a.m. on February 9, 2009, several months before Daisy Clayton’s murder. The subject of the field interview was a man named John McMullen who was thirty-six years old at the time he was questioned at the intersection of Western and Franklin Avenues. McMullen had no criminal record. According to the card, he was driving a white Ford panel van marked with Bible quotes and religious sayings and registered to a city-licensed charitable foundation called the Moonlight Mission.

The card said the van was parked in a red zone while McMullen was on the nearby sidewalk accosting pedestrians and asking if they wanted to be saved by the grace of Jesus Christ. Those who demurred were treated to a verbal lashing that included dire predictions of their being left behind during the upcoming rapture.

There was more on the flip side of the card: “Subject refers to himself as John the Baptist. Cruises Hollywood in his van, looking for people to baptize.”

Ballard flipped the card onto the table in front of Bosch.

“Okay,” she said. “Why’d you wait to show me this now?”

“I wanted to check him out a little bit first,” Bosch said. “I made some calls while you were in the strip club.”

“And?”

“And the Moonlight Mission still exists and he’s still there.”

“Anything else?”

“The van — it’s still registered to him and apparently still in service.”

“Okay, but I have a stack back at the station of about twenty van stops. Why is this the one card you decided to steal?”

“Well, I didn’t steal it. I’m showing it to you. How’s that stealing?”

“I told you all the cards had to remain on LAPD property except that stack I let you take tonight.”

“Okay, fine. I took one of the cards I read earlier because I thought maybe after your callout we’d cruise by the Moonlight Mission and see what it’s all about. That’s all.”

She dropped her eyes to her plate and pushed the eggs around again with her fork. She didn’t like the way she was acting, being so picky and by the book with Bosch.

“Look,” Bosch said. “I know about you. I know you’ve been burned bad in the department. So was I. But I’ve never betrayed a partner, and over the years, I’ve had a lot of them.”

Ballard looked up at him.

“Partner?” she said.

“On this case,” Bosch said. “You said you wanted in. I let you in.”