Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

“They’re not saying anything about it on this. They don’t know shit yet.”

Ballard pulled her phone and texted Heather Rourke, the airship spotter.

You over this thing in the Valley?

No, south end tonight. Heard about it. 2Ks. Is it the Bosch thing? SIS?

Sounds like. Checking.

She still had no working number for Bosch. She stared at the screen, watching the activity behind the reporter but not listening to what she was saying until she finished with her exact location.

“Reporting live from the Hansen Dam Recreation Area.”

Ballard knew that meant Foothill Division and, most likely, SanFers. It had to be the Bosch case, so she knew she would probably not be seeing him tonight.

She went back to the break room, stacked the shake cards according to priority, and then carried them and the ZooToo murder book back to the detective bureau. She checked the clock and saw that her shift didn’t start for an hour. She considered for a moment driving up to the Valley and crashing the SIS shooting scene. She felt proprietary about the case, considering her part in the rescue of Harry Bosch.

But she knew she would be kept on the fringe. The SIS was a closed society. Bosch would be lucky if they even let him under the yellow tape.

She decided not to go and instead opened the murder book again to complete her review. She turned to section one, the chronological record. This was as close as she would get to riding along on the investigation. The chrono was a step-by-step accounting of the case detectives’ movements.

She started at the beginning, from the moment they were called out from home and sent to the tattoo parlor. The case was carried by two detectives assigned to the Hollywood homicide squad before it had been dissolved and cases from the division were folded into West Bureau homicide. Their names were Livingstone and Peppers. Ballard knew neither of them.

The chrono, like the murder book, was shorter than what Ballard had seen in other murder books, including those she had prepared herself during her time in the Robbery-Homicide Division. But this was not a measure of the effort by Livingstone and Peppers. It was because the case so quickly came together. The detectives were moving forward and thoroughly when forensics handed them a suspect on a platter. A bloody fingerprint from the rear storage room of the shop was connected to Clancy Devoux. He was quickly located and picked up, a broken knife believed to have been the murder weapon was recovered in his possession, and the case was considered closed in less than twenty-four hours.

All murder cases should go so easily, Ballard thought. But they usually don’t. A girl gets snatched off the street and murdered, and nine years go by without so much as a clue to her killer. A woman gets brutally slashed with a knife in the back room of her business, and the case is closed in a day. There was no rhyme or reason to murder investigation.

After the arrest, the entries in the chronological record started tapering off as the case shifted from investigation to preparation for prosecution. But one entry in the log gave Ballard pause. It came in forty-eight hours after the murder and twenty-four hours after Clancy Devoux was arrested. It was an innocuous entry simply added for thoroughness. It said that two nights after the murder, at 7:45 p.m., Detective Peppers was notified by the watch sergeant at Hollywood Division that a crime scene cleaner named Roger Dillon had found additional evidence on the ZooToo case. This was described as a broken piece of knife blade that had been on the floor of the storage room but had been completely covered by the pool of blood that had flowed from the victim and then coagulated around her body. The two-inch blade had apparently gone completely unnoticed by the detectives and forensic techs.

Peppers wrote in the log that he asked the watch sergeant to dispatch a patrol team to go to the tattoo parlor, take the blade from Dillon, and bag it as evidence. Peppers, who lived more than an hour from Los Angeles, said he would pick up the evidence in the morning.

Ballard stared at the log entry for a long time. As far as the ZooToo case went, it was strictly housekeeping. She knew that if the blade matched the broken knife recovered during the Devoux arrest, then detectives had another piece of significant evidence against the suspect. She wasn’t bothered by the seeming gaffe made by the crime scene team. It was, in fact, not unusual for evidence to be missed or left behind at a complicated and bloody crime scene. Spilled blood can hide a lot.

What gave Ballard pause was the cleaner. By coincidence, Ballard had met Roger Dillon earlier in the week, when he had discovered the burglary of the Warhol prints from the house on Hollywood Boulevard. She still had the business cards he had given her in her briefcase.

The log entry documented that Dillon had called about the broken blade at 7:45 on the same night Daisy Clayton disappeared. It meant that Dillon had been working in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard just a few hours before. Ballard had seen his work van earlier in the week and had gotten only a quick glimpse inside it, but she had seen inside others like it at other crime scenes. She knew Dillon had chemicals and tools for cleaning. And he would have containers for the safe transport and disposal of biologically hazardous materials.

All in a moment, Ballard knew. She had to look at Roger Dillon.

Ballard went to her locker to store the shake cards and the Haslam murder book. She then pulled out the fledgling murder book Bosch had started putting together on the Clayton case. She sat on a bench in the locker room and opened it up, immediately flipping to Bosch’s report on the plastic container manufactured by American Storage Products. He listed the sales supervisor he had talked to as Del Mittleberg. Ballard almost jumped up off the bench with joy when she saw that Bosch, thorough detective that he was, had listed both Mittleberg’s office and cell numbers.

It was after ten. She called the cell and it was answered with a suspicious hello.

“Mr. Mittleberg?”

“I’m not interested.”

“This is the police, don’t hang up.”

“The police?”

“Mr. Mittleberg, my name is Renée Ballard. I’m a detective with the Los Angeles Police. You recently talked with a colleague of mine named Bosch about containers made by American Storage Products. Do you remember?”

“That was a couple of months ago.”

“Correct. We are still working that case.”

“It’s ten-fifteen. What is so urgent that this couldn’t—”

“Mr. Mittleberg, I’m sorry, but it is urgent. You told Detective Bosch that your company made some direct sales of the containers to commercial accounts.”

“We do, yes.”

“Are you at home, Mr. Mittleberg?”

“Where else would I be?”

“Do you have a laptop or access to sales records involving those commercial accounts?”

There was a pause while Mittleberg considered the question. Ballard held her breath. The case had been full of long shots. It was about time one of them paid off. If Dillon operated a business that ran close to the line — she remembered he had commented about competition — then he might be just the kind of man to seek a direct-sale discount from a manufacturer.

“I have some access to records,” Mittleberg finally said.

“I have the name of a company,” Ballard said. “Can you see if they have ever been a customer of ASP?”

“Hold the line. I’m going to my home office.”

Ballard waited while Mittleberg got to his computer. She heard a partially muffled discussion as he told someone that he was talking to the police and he would be up as soon as he was finished.