Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

Daisy was left on her own at the shopping plaza and her body was found the next night in one of the alleys she used for her tricks. It was naked and there were indications of violent sexual assault and torture. Afterward, it had been cleaned with bleach. None of the victim’s clothes were ever found. Detectives determined that as many as twenty hours had passed between the time she was last seen at the shopping plaza soliciting johns and when police received an anonymous call about a body being seen in a dumpster in an alley off Cahuenga and Officer Dvorek was dispatched to roll on the call. The missing hours were never accounted for but it was clear from the bleaching of the body that Daisy had been taken somewhere and then used and murdered, and her body was carefully cleaned of any evidence that might lead to her killer.

The one clue that the original detectives puzzled over throughout the investigation was a bruise on the body that they were convinced was a mark left by the killer. It was a circle two inches in diameter on the upper right hip. Within the circle was a crossword with the letters A-S-P arranged horizontally and vertically with the S in common.

The letters of the crossword were backwards on the victim’s body, indicating that they read correctly on the device or tool used to make the mark. The circle around the crossword appeared to be a snake eating itself but the blurring of the bruising in the tissue made this impossible to confirm.

Many hours of investigative work were expended on the crossword’s meaning but no definitive conclusion was reached. The case was originally investigated by two homicide detectives assigned to the Hollywood Division and then reassigned to Olympic Division when the regional homicide teams were consolidated and Hollywood lost its fabled murder unit. The investigators’ names were King and Carswell, and Ballard knew neither of them.

Time of death was established during the autopsy at ten hours after the victim was last seen and ten hours before the body was found.

The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as manual strangulation. It further refined this conclusion by stating that marks left on the victim’s neck by the killer’s hands indicated that she was strangled from behind, possibly while being sexually assaulted. Tissue damage in both the vagina and anus was listed as both pre- and postmortem. The victim’s fingernails were removed postmortem, a move viewed as an attempt by the killer to make sure no biological evidence was left behind.

The body also showed postmortem abrasions and scratches that investigators believed occurred during an effort to clean the victim with a stiff brush and bleach, which was found in all orifices including the mouth, throat, and ear canals. The medical examiner concluded that the corpse had been submerged in bleach during this cleaning process.

This finding coupled with the time of death led investigators to conclude that Daisy had been taken off the street and to a hotel room or other location by the killer where a bleach bath could be prepared for cleaning the body.

“He’s a planner,” Ballard said out loud.

The conclusions about the bleach led the original investigators to spend much of their time during the initial days of the investigation on a thorough canvass of every motel and hotel in the Hollywood area that offered direct access to rooms off the parking lot. The school photo of Daisy was shown to employees on all shifts, housekeepers were quizzed about any reports of a strong odor of bleach, and trash bins were searched for bleach containers. Nothing came of the effort. The location of the murder was never determined, and without a crime scene, the case was handicapped from the start. Six months into the investigation the case went cold with no leads and no suspects.

Ballard finally came back to the crime scene photos and this time carefully studied them despite their grim nature. The victim’s age, the marks on her body and neck showing the overwhelming strength of her killer, her final naked repose on a spread of trash in a commercial trash bin... it all drew a sense of horror in Ballard, a sad empathy for this girl and what she had been through. Ballard had never been the kind of detective who could leave the work in a drawer at the end of shift. She carried it with her and it was her empathy that fueled her.

Before being assigned to the night beat, Ballard had been working toward a specialization in sexually motivated homicide at RHD. Her then-partner, Ken Chastain, was one of the premier investigators of sex killings in the department. Both had taken classes from and been mentored by Detective David Lambkin, long considered the department expert, until he pulled the pin and left the city for the Pacific Northwest.

That pursuit was largely sidelined by her transfer to the late show, but now as she reviewed the Clayton files, she saw a sexual predator hiding behind the words and reports, a predator unidentified for nine years now, and she felt a deep tug inside. It was the same pull that had first led her to thoughts of being a cop and a hunter of men who hurt women and left them like trash in the alley. She wanted in on whatever it was that Harry Bosch was doing.

Ballard was pulled out of these thoughts when she heard voices. She looked up from the screen and over the workstation wall. She saw two detectives taking off their suit jackets and draping them over their chairs, readying for a new day of work.

One of them was Cesar Rivera.

Ballard packed up her things and left her borrowed workstation. She first went into the print room to gather the reports she had fed into the communal printer after typing them up earlier. The detective squad lieutenant was old school and still liked hard-copy reports from her in the morning, even though she also filed them digitally. She separated the reports on the death investigation and the earlier burglary call, stapled them, and then walked them to the inbox on the desk of the lieutenant’s adjutant so they were ready for his arrival. She then sauntered over to the sex crimes section and came up behind Rivera as he was sitting at his station and preparing for the day by dumping an airline-size bottle of whiskey into a mug of coffee. She didn’t let on that she had seen this when she spoke.

“Hail, Cesar.”

Rivera was another mustache guy, his almost white against his brown skin. He matched this with flowing white hair that was a little long by LAPD standards but acceptable on an old detective. He jolted a bit in his seat, afraid his morning routine had been seen. He swiveled his chair around but relaxed when he saw it was Ballard. He knew she would not make any waves.

“Renée,” he said. “What’s up, girl? You got something for me?”

“No, nothing,” she said. “Quiet night.”

Ballard kept her distance in case she smelled like decomp.

“So what’s up?” Rivera asked.

“About to leave,” Ballard said. “I was wondering, though. You know a guy used to work out of here named Harry Bosch? He worked homicide.”

She pointed to the corner of the room where the homicide squad was once located. It was now used by an anti-gang team.

“Before I got here,” Rivera said. “I mean, I know who he is — everybody does, I think. But no, I never dealt with the guy. Why?”

“He was in the station this morning,” Ballard said.

“You mean on graveyard?”

“Yeah, he said he came in to talk to Dvorek about an old homicide. But I found him looking through your stack.”

She pointed toward the long row of file cabinets running along the wall. Rivera shook his head in confusion.