Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(10)

The American Civil Liberties Union had long protested the department’s use of the cards and the collection of information from citizens who had not committed crimes, calling the practice unlawful search and seizure and routinely referring to the Q&As as shakedowns. The department had fended off all legal attempts to stop the practice, and many of the rank and file referred to the 3 x 5 cards as shake cards, a not-so-subtle dig at the ACLU.

“Why were they keeping them?” Ballard asked. “Everything was put into the database and would be easier to find there.”

“I don’t know,” Rivera said. “They didn’t do it that way at Hollenbeck.”

“So, what did you do, clear them out?”

“Yeah, me and Sandy emptied the drawers.”

“You threw them all out?”

“No, if I’ve learned anything in this department, it’s not to be the guy who fucks up. We boxed them and took them to storage. Let it be somebody else’s problem.”

“What storage?”

“Across the lot.”

Ballard nodded. She knew he meant the structure at the south end of the station’s parking lot. It was a single-level building that had once been a city utilities office but had been turned over to the station when more space was needed. The building was largely unused now. A gym for officers’ use and a padded martial arts studio had been set up in two of the larger rooms, but the smaller offices were empty or used for nonevidentiary storage.

“So, this was seven years ago?” she asked.

“More or less,” Rivera said. “We didn’t move it all at once. I cleared one drawer out, and when it got filled and I had to go down to the next, I’d clear that one. It went like that. Took about a year.”

“So what makes you think that Bosch was looking for shake cards last night?”

Rivera shrugged.

“There would have been shake cards in there from the time of the murder you’re talking about, right?”

“But the info on the shake cards is in the database.”

“Supposedly. But what do you put in the search window? See what I mean? There’s a flaw. If he wanted to see who was hanging around Hollywood at the time of the murder, how do you search the database for that?”

Ballard nodded in agreement but knew that there were many ways to pull up info on field interviews in the database such as by geography and time frame. She thought Rivera was wrong about that but probably right about Bosch. He was an old-school detective. He wanted to look through the shakes to see who the street cops in Hollywood were talking to at the time of the Clayton murder.

“Well,” she said, “I’m out of here. Have a good one. Stay safe.”

“Yeah, you too, Ballard,” Rivera said.

Ballard left the detective bureau and went up to the women’s locker room on the second floor. She changed out of her suit and into her sweats. Her plan was to head out to Venice, drop off laundry, pick up her dog at the overnight kennel, and then carry her tent and a paddleboard out to the beach. In the afternoon, after she had rested and considered her approach, she’d deal with Bosch.



The morning sun blistered her eyes as she crossed the parking lot behind the station. She popped the locks on her van and threw her crumpled suit onto the passenger seat. She then saw the old utilities building at the south end of the lot and changed her mind about leaving right away.

She used her key card to enter the building and found a couple other denizens of the late show working out before heading home after the morning rush hour. She threw a mock salute at them and went down a hallway that led to former city offices now used for storage. The first room she checked contained items recovered in one of her own cases. The year before, she had taken down a burglar who had filled a motel room with property from the homes he had broken into or had bought with the money and credit cards he had stolen. Now a year later, the case had been adjudicated and much of the property had still not been claimed. It had been returned to Hollywood Station for when the division organized an annual open house for victims as a last chance for them to claim their property.

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.