Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(12)

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?”

“I want in.”

“In?”

“On Daisy Clayton.”

Bosch considered her for a moment. She was attractive, maybe midthirties, with brown, sun-streaked hair cut at the shoulders and a slim, athletic build. She was wearing off-duty clothes. The night before, she had been in work clothes that made her seem more formidable—a must in the LAPD, where Bosch knew female detectives were often treated like office secretaries.

Ballard also had a deep tan, which to Bosch was at odds with the idea of someone who worked the graveyard shift. Most of all he was impressed that it had been only twelve hours since she had surprised him at the file cabinets in the Hollywood detective bureau and she already appeared to have caught up to him and what he was doing.

“I talked to your old partner, Lucy,” Ballard said. “She gave me her blessing. It is a Hollywood Station case, after all.”

“Was—till RHD took it,” Bosch said. “They have standing now, not Hollywood.”

“And what’s your standing? You’re out of the LAPD. Doesn’t seem to be any link to the town of San Fernando that I could see in the book.”

In his capacity as an SFPD reserve officer for the past three years, Bosch had largely been working on a backlog of cold cases of all kinds—murders, rapes, assaults. But the work was part-time.

“They give me a lot of freedom up here,” Bosch said. “I work these cases and I also work my own. Daisy Clayton’s one of my own. You could say I have a vested interest. That’s my standing.”

“And I have twelve boxes of shake cards at Hollywood Station,” Ballard said.

Bosch nodded. He was even more impressed. She had somehow figured out exactly what he had gone to Hollywood for. As he studied her, he decided it wasn’t all a tan. She had a mix of races in her skin. He guessed that she was probably half white, half Polynesian.

“I figure between the two of us, we could get through them in a couple nights,” Ballard said.

There was the offer. She wanted in and would give Bosch what he was looking for in trade.

“The shake cards are a long shot,” he said. “Truth is, I’ve run the string out on the case. I was hoping there might be something in the cards.”

“That’s surprising,” Ballard said. “I heard you’re the kind of guy who never lets the string run out—your old partner called you a dog with a bone.”

Bosch didn’t know what to say to that. He shrugged.

Ballard got up and walked toward him down the aisle between the shelves.

“Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it isn’t,” she said. “I’m going to start looking through the cards tonight. Between calls. Anything in particular I should look for?”

Bosch paused but knew he needed to make a decision. Trust her or keep her on the outside.

“Vans,” he said. “Look for work vans, guys who carry chemicals maybe.”

“For transporting her,” she said.

“For the whole thing.”

“It said in the book the guy took her home or to a motel. Some place with a bathtub. For the bleaching.”

Bosch shook his head.

“No, he didn’t use a bathtub,” he said.

She stared at him, waiting, not asking the obvious question of how he knew.

“All right, come with me,” he finally said.

He got up and led her out of the cell and back to the door to the Public Works yard.

“You looked at the book and the photos, right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Everything that was digitized.”

They walked into the yard, which was a large open-air square surrounded by walls. Along the back wall there were four bays delineated by tool racks and workbenches where city equipment and vehicles were maintained and repaired. Bosch led Ballard into one of these.

“You saw the mark on the body?”

“The A-S-P?”

“Right. But they got the meaning of it wrong. The original detectives. They went down a spiral with it and it was all wrong.”

He went to a workbench and reached up to a shelf where there was a large, translucent plastic tub with a blue snap-on top. He brought it down and held it out to her.

“Twenty-five-gallon container,” Bosch said. “Daisy was five-two, a hundred and five pounds. Small. He put her in one of these, then put in the bleach as needed. He didn’t use a bathtub.”

Ballard studied the container. Bosch’s explanation was plausible but not conclusive.

“That’s a theory,” she said.