The Dark Hours (Harry Bosch #23)(64)

It also told her that she needed to reframe her search. She didn’t see going through the next two years of records as the best use of her time. Instead she went back to the search engine and asked for records from 2000 to 2004, producing 3,113 reports with Bonner’s name on them.

These reports began with Bonner as a patrol officer in Hollywood Division. He then got a promotion to detective in early 2002 and was assigned to the third watch, which was considered an entry detective position at the time. It still was, but it had not been an entry position for Ballard. Her assignment to the dark hours had come as punishment for pushing back against one of the many ills of the department: sexual harassment. She had lost a departmental skirmish with her boss at the Robbery-Homicide Division and was banished to the night shift in Hollywood.

An hour later, Ballard found the needle in the digital haystack of reports: a report dated October 5, 2004, in which Bonner was listed as the late-show detective who responded to a call about a shooting into an occupied dwelling. The incident occurred at 3:20 a.m. at a home on Lemon Grove Avenue near Western Avenue. The summary stated that the occupants of the home were asleep when a drive-by shooting occurred, a gunman spraying automatic fire from a passing car. No one was hurt and the occupants might not have even called the police, but several neighbors did.

The report listed the occupants of the house as Humberto Viera and his girlfriend, Sofia Navarro. Ballard believed she now knew Darla’s real name.

A follow-up report written by Bonner, who at this point had been a detective for less than a year, described Viera and Navarro as uncooperative. The summary described Viera as a high-ranking member of the Las Palmas 13 street gang.

The summary also stated that information from GED indicated that Viera was suspected of having been involved in an abduction attempt of a rival gang member named Julio Sanz. According to the intel, Sanz was a member of the White Fence street gang, which operated out of Boyle Heights but was encroaching on Las Palmas turf. The abduction was an attempt to gain leverage in brokering an agreement between the gangs on the turf border.

Ballard tried one more shot at backgrounding Bonner. The Hollywood Division had always enjoyed the support of a local citizens group called Blue Hollywood. The group supplied equipment, paid for the Christmas party, and staged neighborhood meetings. It also welcomed new transfers and thanked those retiring, often with a story and photo on their website.

Ballard went to bluehollywood.net and put Bonner’s name into the search window. She was rewarded with a mention and photo in the monthly “Comings and Goings” column that ran seven years before. It was the formal photo that had been on the division’s organization chart outside the captain’s office when Bonner had served. Ballard enlarged the photo on her screen and studied it. Bonner had deep-set eyes and a shaved head. His neck was tight against the collar of his uniform. He was not smiling in the photo.

Ballard leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Dawn’s light was just beginning to come in through the casement windows that ran along the top of the walls of the detective bureau.

She had directly connected Bonner and Viera, which lent credence and confirmation to what Darla/Sofia had revealed: Viera had put Javier Raffa in touch with Bonner when Raffa needed a big sum of money. She had also found a visual on Bonner that was consistent with the description she had received from both Darla and Gabriel Raffa.

The next connection that had to be made was between Bonner and the dentists and their factoring operation. The money Bonner had arranged and delivered for Raffa came from somewhere, and most likely not from Bonner’s own bank account. But Ballard had no idea where the late-show detective and the daytime dentists had crossed paths.

She printed out all the reports on the drive-by shooting incident. And while she waited, she put the name Julio Sanz into the search window and learned that he had been murdered in November 2004, just five weeks after the drive-by shooting of Humberto Viera’s house.

Despite her eyes being tired and unable to hold focus on the computer screen, Ballard pulled up the reports on that murder. Sanz had been gunned down in Evergreen Cemetery, where he had gone to visit his father’s grave on the anniversary of his death. He was found sprawled across the grave, shot once in the head execution-style.

The case was never solved.

Ballard leaned back from the screen again and considered this latest piece of information. Five weeks after Humberto Viera’s home got strafed, and five weeks after Viera met Detective Christopher Bonner on that case, the man thought to be behind the drive-by was murdered in an East L.A. cemetery.

Ballard saw no coincidence in that. She was beginning to see the relationships between elements in her investigation. It was all moving in one orbit, circling the killing of Javier Raffa.





26


Ballard didn’t know how early Robinson-Reynolds would be coming in after the holiday weekend. She decided to use the time waiting to switch gears from the Raffa case to the Midnight Men investigation.

She knew that most city services departments began work at seven. She left the station and drove into East Hollywood, where the Bureau of Street Lighting had a service lot at Santa Monica Boulevard and Virgil Avenue. Its location was marked by a procession of the various types of streetlights found in Los Angeles, all planted on the sidewalk in front of the work-and-storage yard. Over at the county museum, there was an art installation of L.A. streetlights that tourists and art aficionados flocked to for selfies. Here was the real thing. Ballard pulled into the yard and parked in front of the office. She knew she needed to be cautious here. It was not outside the bounds of possibility that one or both Midnight Men worked for the BSL. It might explain their familiarity with the various neighborhoods of Hollywood, and their knowing which wire to cut to disable the light outside Cindy Carpenter’s house without cutting the line that fed power to all the lights on the street. Ballard had seen a tangle of wires behind the access panel but only one had been cut.