Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(22)

“Looking around? You mean looking down at naked women?”

In the cold, hard light of her beam Ballard could see their cheeks turn red with shame. But she knew it was shame at being caught and called on it by a woman, not shame at climbing onto a roof to look down through a skylight at women’s bodies.

She glanced at Dvorek and saw a small smile on his face. She realized that on some level he admired their ingenuity—boys will be boys—and she knew that in the world of men and women, there would never be a time when women were viewed and treated completely as equals.

“Are you going to have to tell our parents?” one of the boys asked.

Ballard lowered the light and headed back to pick up her rover.

“What do you think?” Dvorek asked her quietly as she passed him.

The question further revealed him.

“Your call,” Ballard said. “I’m out of here.”





10



There was one booth in Du-par’s at the Farmers Market that afforded an entire view of the restaurant and its entrance. Ballard always took it when it was available, and most nights when she was able to get a real meal break, it was so late that the place was largely empty and she had her choice of the entire room.

She sat across from Bosch, who had ordered coffee only. He explained that there were almost always breakfast burritos or doughnuts at SFPD in the morning, and he intended to go there at six for a briefing before his team delivered the search warrant.

Ballard didn’t hold back. She had skipped dinner the evening before and was famished. She matched Bosch’s coffee but added a blue-plate special that included pancakes, eggs, and bacon. As she waited for the food, she asked about the stack of FI cards he had gone through in the car while she handled the call at Sirens.

“No keepers,” Bosch said.

“You come across any written by a P.O. named Farmer?” she asked. “Good writer.”

“I don’t think so…but I wasn’t checking too many names. Are you talking about Tim Farmer?”

“Yeah, you knew him?”

“I went to the academy with him.”

“I didn’t know he was that old.”

Ballard immediately realized what she had said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I mean, like, why was a guy who’d been around so long still on the street, you know?”

“Some guys can’t give up the street,” Bosch said. “Like some guys can’t give up homicide work. You know he—”

“Yeah, I know. Why’d he do it?”

“Who knows? He was a month from retirement. I heard it was kind of a forced retirement—if he stayed, they were going to put him on a desk. So he put in his papers and during his last deployment period pulled the plug.”

“That’s a sad fucking story.”

“Most suicides are.”

“I liked the way he wrote. His observations on the shakes were like poetry.”

“A lot of poets kill themselves.”

“I guess.”

A waiter brought her food and Ballard suddenly wasn’t all that hungry. She was feeling sad about a man she had never met. She poured syrup over her short stack and started to eat anyway.

“So, did you stay in touch after the academy?” she asked.

“Not really,” Bosch said. “We were close then, and there were class reunions, but we were on different tracks. It wasn’t like now with social media and all of that Facebook stuff. He was up in the Valley and came to Hollywood after I’d left.”

Ballard nodded and picked at her food. The pancakes were getting soggy and more unappetizing. She moved her fork to the eggs.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about King and Carswell,” she said. “I assume you or Soto talked to them at the start of this.”

“Lucia did,” Bosch said. “One of them, at least. King retired about five years ago and moved to Bumfuck, Idaho—somewhere out in the woods with no phone and no internet. He went completely off grid. She got the PO box where his pension checks go and sent him a letter asking for an interview on the case. She’s still waiting for an answer. Carswell also retired and he took a gig as an investigator with the Orange County D.A. Lucia went down and talked to him but he wasn’t a font of new information. He barely remembered the case and told her everything he did know was in the murder book. It didn’t sound as though he wanted to talk about a case he didn’t close. I’m sure you know the type.”

“Yeah—‘If I can’t close it, nobody else can.’ What about Adam Sands, the boyfriend. Either of you do a fresh interview?”

“We couldn’t. He died in 2014 of an overdose.”

Ballard nodded. It wasn’t a surprising end for Sands but it was a disappointment because he could have been helpful in setting the scene that Daisy Clayton lived and died in and in providing the names of other runaways and acquaintances. Ballard was beginning to see why Bosch wanted to locate the field interview cards. It might be their only hope.

“Anything else?” she asked. “I take it Soto has the murder book. Anything not in the database that’s important?”

“Not really,” Bosch said. “King and Carswell weren’t the extra-mile sort of guys. Carswell told Lucia they didn’t put their notebooks in the murder book because everything was in the reports.”