Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

“Nah, he’s a reserve up in the Valley for San Fernando PD.”

“What’s San Fernando got to do with a murder down here?”

“I don’t know, Ballard. You shoulda asked him while he was here. He’s gone now.”

“That was quick.”

“Because the Relic couldn’t remember shit.”

“Is Dvorek back out there?”

Munroe pointed to the three-car cluster on the screen.

“He’s back out, but code seven at the moment.”

“I was thinking about going over there, getting a couple shrimp tacos. You want me to bring you back something?”

“No, I’m good. Take a rover with you.”

“Roger that.”

On the way back to the D bureau she stopped in the break room and dumped the coffee in the sink and rinsed out the cup. She then pulled a rover out of the charging rack and headed out the back door of the station to her city car. The mid-watch chill had set in and she got her suit jacket out of the trunk and put it on before driving out of the lot.

The Relic was still parked at the food truck when Ballard arrived. As a sergeant, Dvorek rode in a solo car, so he had a tendency to hang with other officers on break for the company.

“Sally Ride,” he said, when he noticed Ballard studying the chalkboard menu.

“What’s up, Sarge?” she said.

“Halfway through another night in paradise.”

“Yeah.”

Ballard ordered one shrimp taco and doused it liberally with one of the hot sauces from the condiment table. She took it over to Dvorek’s black-and-white, where he was leaning against the front fender and finishing his own meal. Two other patrol officers were eating on the hood of their car, parked in front of his.

Ballard leaned against the fender next to him.

“Whatcha get?” Dvorek asked.

“Shrimp,” Ballard said. “I only order off the blackboard. Means it’s fresh, right? They don’t know what they’ll have until they buy it at the docks.”

“If you think so.”

“I need to think so.”

She took her first bite. It was good and there was no fishy taste.

“Not bad,” she said.

“I had the fish special,” Dvorek said. “It’s probably going to take me off the street as soon as it gets down into the lower track.”

“T.M.I., Sarge. But speaking of coming in off the street, what did that guy Bosch want with you?”

“You saw him?”

“I caught him snooping in the files in the D bureau.”

“Yeah, he’s kind of desperate. Looking for any angle on a case he’s working.”

“In Hollywood? I thought he worked for San Fernando PD these days.”

“He does. But this is a private thing he’s looking into. A girl who got killed here nine years ago. I was the one who found the body, but damn if I could remember much that helped him.”

Ballard took another bite and started nodding. She asked the next question with her mouth full of shrimp and tortilla.

“Who was the girl?” she asked.

“A runaway. Name was Daisy. She was fifteen and putting it out on the street. Sad case. I used to see her on Hollywood up near Western. One night she got into the wrong car. I found her body in an alley off of Cahuenga. Came in on an anonymous call — I do remember that.”

“Was that her street name?”

“No, the real thing. Daisy Clayton.”

“Was Cesar Rivera working the sex table back then?”

“Cesar? I’m not sure. We’re talking nine years ago. He coulda been.”

“Well, did you remember Cesar having anything to do with the case? Bosch picked his file cabinet.”

Dvorek shrugged.

“I found the body and called it in, Renée — that’s it,” he said. “I had no part in it after that. I remember they sent me down to the end of the alley to string tape and keep people out. I was just a slick sleeve.”

Uniformed cops got a hash mark on their sleeves for every five years of service. Nine years ago, the Relic was a near-rookie. Ballard nodded and asked her last question.

“Did Bosch ask you anything I didn’t just ask?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t about her. He asked about Daisy’s boyfriend and whether I ever saw him on the street again after the murder.”

“Who was the boyfriend?”

“Just another runaway throwaway. I knew him by his graffiti handle: Addict. Bosch said his name was Adam something. I forget. But the answer was no, I never saw him after that. Guys like that come and go.”

“Was that all it was — a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?”

“They ran together. You know, for protection. Girl like that, she needed a guy out there. Like a pimp. She worked the street, he watched out for her, and they split the profits. Except that night, he dropped the ball. Too bad for her.”

Ballard nodded. She guessed that Bosch wanted to talk to Adam/Addict as the person who would know the most about who Daisy Clayton knew and interacted with, and where she went on the last night of her life.

He could also have been a suspect.

“You know about Bosch, right?” Dvorek asked.

“Yeah,” Ballard said. “He worked in the division way back when.”

“You know the stars out on the front sidewalk?”

“’Course.”

There were memorial stars on the sidewalk in front of Hollywood Station honoring officers from the division who were killed in the line of duty.

“Well, there’s one out there,” Dvorek said. “Lieutenant Harvey Pounds. The story on him was he was Bosch’s L-T when he worked here, and he got abducted and died of a heart attack when he was being tortured on a case Bosch was working.”

Ballard had never heard the story before.

“Anybody ever go down for it?” she asked.

“Depends on who you talk to,” Dvorek said. “It’s supposedly ‘cleared-other,’ but it’s another mystery in the big bad city. The word was that something Bosch did got the guy killed.”

“Cleared-other” was a designation for a case that was officially closed but without an arrest or prosecution. Usually because the suspect was dead or serving a life sentence for another crime, and it was not worth the time, expense, and risk of going to trial on a case that would not result in additional punishment.

“Supposedly the file on it is sealed. High jingo.”

“High jingo” was LAPD-speak for when a case involved department politics. The kind of case where a career could be diverted by a wrong move.

The information on Bosch was interesting but not on point. Before Ballard could think of a question that would steer Dvorek back toward the Daisy Clayton case, his rover squawked and he took a call from the watch office. Ballard listened as Lieutenant Munroe dispatched him to a Beachwood Canyon address to supervise a team responding to a domestic dispute.

“Gotta go,” he said as he balled up the foil his tacos had come in. “Unless you want to ride along and back me up.”

It was said in jest, Ballard knew. The Relic didn’t need backup from the late show detective.

“I’ll see you back at the barn,” she said. “Unless that goes sideways and you need a detective.”

She hoped not. Domestics usually ended up being he-said-she-said deals in which she acted more as a referee than a detective. Even obvious physical injuries didn’t always tell the tale.

“Roger that,” Dvorek said.

Day watch detectives were all about traffic patterns. Most days the majority of daysiders got to the bureau before six a.m. so they could split by midafternoon, missing the traffic swell both coming and going. Ballard counted on this when she decided she was going to ask Cesar Rivera about the Daisy Clayton case. She spent the remainder of her shift waiting on his arrival by pulling up and studying the electronic records available on the nine-year-old murder.