Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

The next room down was stacked with cardboard boxes containing old case files that for various reasons had to be kept. Ballard looked around here and moved several boxes in order to get to others. Soon enough, she opened a dusty box that was filled with FI cards. She had hit pay dirt.

Twenty minutes later she had culled twelve boxes of FI cards and lined them along the wall in the hallway. By individually sampling cards from each of the boxes, she was able to determine that the cards spanned the years from 2006, when the digitizing initiative began, to 2010, when the homicide section was moved out of Hollywood Division.

Ballard estimated that each of the boxes held up to a thousand cards. It would take many hours to comb through them all thoroughly. She wondered if that was what Bosch was expecting to do, or if he was planning a more precise search for one card or one night in particular, perhaps the night Daisy Clayton was taken off the street.

Ballard wouldn’t know the answer until she asked Bosch.

She left a note on the row of boxes in the hallway, saying that they were on hold for her. She returned to the parking lot and got into her van after checking the straps holding her boards to the roof racks. Shortly after she had been assigned to Hollywood Division and word leaked that she was involved in an internal harassment investigation, there were some in the station who attempted to retaliate against her. Sometimes it was basic bullying, sometimes it went deeper. One morning at the end of her shift, when she stopped her van at the station lot’s electric gate, her paddleboard slid forward off the roof and crashed against the gate, splintering the nose’s fiberglass. She repaired the board herself and started checking the rack straps every morning after her shift.

She took La Brea down to the 10 freeway and headed west toward the beach. She waited until a few minutes after eight o’clock to call the number for RHD that she still had programmed into her phone. A clerk answered and Ballard asked for Lucy Soto. She said the name with a clipped familiarity that imparted the idea that this was a cop-to-cop call. The transfer was made without question.

“This is Detective Soto.”

“This is Detective Ballard, Hollywood Division.”

There was a pause before Soto responded.

“I know who you are,” she said. “How can I help you, Detective Ballard?”

Ballard was used to detectives she wasn’t personally acquainted with knowing about her. With female detectives, there was always an awkward moment. They either admired Ballard for her perseverance in the department or believed her actions had made their own jobs more difficult. Ballard always had to find out which it was, and Soto’s opener gave no hint as to which camp she was in. Her repeating Ballard’s name out loud might have been a move to let someone like a partner or supervisor on the task force know who she was talking to.

Not being able to read her yet, Ballard just pressed on.

“I work the late show here,” she said. “Some nights it keeps me running, some nights not so much. My L-T likes me to have a hobby case to kind of keep me busy.”

“I don’t understand,” Soto said. “What’s this have to do with me? I’m sort of in the middle of—”

“Yeah, I know you’re busy. You’re on the harassment task force. That’s why I’m calling. One of your cold cases — that you’re not working because of the task force — I was wondering if I could take a whack at it.”

“Which case?”

“Daisy Clayton. Fifteen-year-old murdered up here in—”

“I know the case. What makes you so interested?”

“It was a big case here at the time. I heard some blue suiters talking about it, pulled up what I could on the box, and got interested. It looked like with this task force thing you weren’t doing much with it at the moment.”

“And you want to give it a shot.”

“I make no promises but, yeah, I’d like to do some work on it. I would keep you in the loop. It’s still your case. I’d just do some street work.”

Ballard was on the freeway but not moving. Her weeding through the boxes in the storage room had pushed her into the heart of rush hour. She knew the morning breeze would also be in full effect on the coast. She’d be paddling against it and the chop it would kick up. She was missing her window.

“It’s nine years later,” Soto said. “I’m not sure the street’s going to produce anything. Especially on graveyard. You’ll be spinning your wheels.”

“Well, maybe,” Ballard said. “But they’re my wheels to spin. You okay with this or not?”

There was another long pause. Enough time for Ballard to move the van about five feet.

“There’s something you should know,” Soto said. “There’s somebody else looking into it. Somebody outside the department.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ballard said. “Who’s that?”

“My old partner. His name’s Harry Bosch. He’s retired now but he... he needs the work.”

“One of those, huh? Okay. Anything else I should know? Was this one of his cases?”

“No. But he knows the victim’s mother. He’s doing it for her. Like a dog with a bone.”

“Good to know.”

Ballard was now getting a better sense of the lay of the land. It was the true purpose of her call. Permission to work the case was the least of her concerns.

“If I come up with anything, I’ll feed it to you,” Ballard said. “And I’ll let you get back to the reckoning.”

Ballard thought she heard a muffled laugh.

“Hey, Ballard?” Soto then added quietly. “I said I knew who you were. I also know who Olivas is. I mean, I work with him. I want you to know I appreciate what you did and I know you paid a price. I just wanted to say that.”

Ballard nodded to herself.

“That’s good to know,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

From the San Fernando Courthouse it was only a block’s walk back to the old jail where Bosch did his file work. He covered the distance quickly, a spring in his step caused by the search warrant in his hand. Judge Atticus Finch Landry had read it in chambers and asked Bosch a few perfunctory questions before signing the approval page. Bosch now had the authority to execute the search and hopefully find the bullet that would lead to an arrest and the closing of another case.

He took the shortcut through the city’s Public Works yard to the back door of the old jail. He pulled the key to the padlock as he moved toward the former drunk tank, where the open-case files were kept on steel shelves. He found that he had left the lock open and silently chastised himself. It was a breach of his own as well as departmental protocol. The files were to be kept locked up at all times. And Bosch liked to keep the matters on his desk secure too, even during a forty-minute search-warrant run to the courthouse next door.

He moved behind his makeshift desk — and old wooden door set across two stacks of file boxes — and sat down. Immediately, he saw the twisted paper clip sitting on top of his closed laptop.

He stared at it. He had not put it there.

“You forgot that.”

Bosch looked up. The woman — the detective — from the night before at Hollywood Station was straddling the old bench that ran between the freestanding shelves full of case files. She had been out of his line of sight as he came into the cell. He looked over at the open door where the padlock dangled from its chain.

“Ballard, right?” he said. “Good to know I’m not going crazy. I thought I had locked up.”

“I let myself in,” Ballard said. “Lock picking 101.”

“It’s a good skill to have. Meantime, I’m kind of busy here. Just got a search warrant I need to figure out how to execute without my suspect finding out. What do you want, Detective Ballard?”