The Dark Hours (Harry Bosch #23)(18)

McGee’s cheeks started to blotch red with either anger or embarrassment or both.

“Don’t get upset, McGee,” Ballard said. “I didn’t say I was talking about you, did I?”

“Yeah, bullshit,” McGee said.

“Whatever,” Ballard said. “She told you it was two suspects?”

“She did,” Black said. “One got in, then let the other one in.”

“What time was this?” Ballard asked.

“Right about midnight,” Black said. “She said she didn’t stay up to see in the new year. Got home from work around nine-thirty, made some dinner, then took a shower and went to bed.”

“What was the address?” Ballard asked.

“She lives up in the Dell,” Black said.

He pulled a field interview card out of a back pocket and handed it to Ballard.

“Shit,” Ballard said.

“What?” McGee asked.

“I was sitting under the Cahuenga overpass at midnight,” Ballard said. “Right when these guys were up there behind me.”

The Dell was a hillside neighborhood a few blocks north of the overpass where Ballard and Moore had waited out the New Year’s fusillade. Looking at the field information card, she saw that the victim, Cynthia Carpenter, lived up on Deep Dell Terrace. It was almost all the way up the hill to the Mulholland Dam.

Ballard held the card up as if to ask, is this all you’ve got?

“You’ll do the IR today, right?” she asked.

“As soon as we get out of here,” Black said.

Ballard nodded. She needed the incident report as the starting point of the investigation.

“Well, I’ve got it from here,” she said. “You can go back to the six and write it up.”

“And you can go to hell, Ballard,” McGee said.

He didn’t move. Black grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the door.

“Let’s just go, dude,” he said. “Let it go.”

Ballard waited to see how McGee wanted to play it. There was a tense moment of silence and then he turned and followed his partner out to the parking lot.

Ballard took a breath and turned toward the admittance desk. The receiving nurse, Sandra, smiled at her, having heard the exchange.

“You tell ’em, Renée,” she said. “Your victim’s in room three with Martha. I’ll let her know you’ll be in the hallway.”

“Thanks,” Ballard said.

Ballard went behind the desk and down the short hallway, which had doors to four examination rooms. Ballard had been there at times when all four contained victims of sexual assault.

The hallway was pastel blue and a mural of flowers had been added, growing from the baseboard, in an attempt to make things seem more pleasant in a place where horrors were documented. On the wall between rooms 1 and 3 was a billboard with various posted offerings of post-traumatic stress therapy and self-defense classes. Ballard was studying a business card tacked to the board that offered firearms instruction from a retired LAPD officer named Henrik Bastin. She found herself hoping that he got a lot of business out of this place.

The door to room 3 opened and Dr. Martha Fallon stepped out, pulling the door closed behind her. She smiled despite the circumstances.

“Hey, Renée,” she said.

“Martha,” Ballard said. “No holiday for you, huh?”

“I guess when rape takes a holiday, we’ll get one, too. Sorry, that sounded trite and I didn’t mean it that way.”

“How is Cynthia?”

“She prefers Cindy. She’s, uh, well, she’s on the dark side of the moon.”

Ballard had heard Fallon use the phrase before. The dark side of the moon was where people lived who had been through what Cindy Carpenter had just been through. Where a few dark hours changed everything about every hour that would come after. The place that only the people who had been through it understood.

Life was never the same.

“You may have heard — she bathed,” Fallon said. “We didn’t get anything, not that it really matters.”

Ballard took that last part to be a reference to the backlog of rape kits waiting to be opened at the Forensics Unit for DNA typing and other evidentiary analysis. That fact alone seemed to stand for where the department and half of society, let alone Officer McGee, located sexual assault on the spectrum of serious crime. Every few years, there was a political outcry and money was found to process the backlog of rape cases. But then the furor subsided and the cases started backing up again. It was a cycle that never ended.

Fallon’s report was no surprise to Ballard. There had been no DNA recovered in the other two Midnight Men cases either. The unknown perpetrators planned and executed their crimes carefully. The cases were connected simply by modus operandi and the rarity of a tag team pair of rapists. It was in fact so rare that it had its own acronym, MOSA — multiple offender sexual assault.

“Are you finished?” Ballard asked. “Can I talk to her?”

“Yes, I told her you were here,” Fallon said.

“How is she?”

Ballard knew the victim wasn’t doing well. Her question referred to the level of psychological trauma within the range known to Fallon from treating thousands of rape survivors over the years, with stranger rapes being the most difficult to deal with.