Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(48)

Ballard looked at him in the dim light of the parking lot. She wondered if that was some kind of warning about the Daisy Clayton case.

They walked silently the rest of the way to the storage facility. Once there, they each picked up a box of FI cards and headed back to the station. Ballard turned and assessed the boxes in the hallway before leaving. They were about halfway through.

Walking back across the lot, Bosch stopped for a breather and put his box on the trunk of a black-and-white.

“I’ve got a bad knee,” he explained. “I get acupuncture when it acts up. Just haven’t had the time.”

“I’ve heard that knee replacements are better than the real thing these days,” Ballard said.

“I’ll keep that in mind. But that would take me out of the game for a while. I might never get back.”

He picked up the box and pressed on.

“I was thinking,” he said. “You remember the GRASP program—Were you here then?”

“I was on patrol,” Ballard said. “‘Get a GRASP on crime’—I remember. A PR stunt.”

“Well, yeah, but I think that was still going strong when Daisy got taken. And I was wondering what happened to all that data they collected. I thought, if it was still around somewhere, we might get another angle on the lay of the land in Hollywood at the time of the murder.”

GRASP was indeed a public relations ploy by a former chief who took the reins of the department and touted a law enforcement think-tank idea of studying crime through geography to help determine how people and facilities were targeted. It was revealed with much fanfare by the department but suffered a quiet death a few years later when a new chief with new ideas came in.

“I don’t remember what it stood for,” Ballard said. “I was on patrol in Pacific Division and I remember filling out the forms on the MDC. Geographic something or other.”

“Geographic Reporting and Safety Program,” Bosch said. “The guys down in the ASS Office really worked some OT on it.”

“Ass Office?”

“The Acronym Selection Section. You never heard of it? They got about ten guys down there full-time.”

Ballard started laughing as she lifted her knee, held her box with one hand on her thigh, and used her key card to open the door of the station. She then opened it with her hip and let Bosch in first.

They walked down the hallway.

“I’ll look into the GRASP files,” she said. “I’ll start at the ASS office.”

“Let me know what you find.”

Back at the workstation, Ballard noticed the blue binder that had been left at her spot. She flipped it open.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I told you I had started a new murder book for the reinvestigation,” Bosch said. “I figured you would want to start adding to it, maybe do a chrono. I think it should stay with you.”

There were only a few reports in the binder at the moment. One was Bosch’s summary of his interview with a supervisor at American Storage Products about the container that he believed Daisy Clayton’s body had been stuffed into.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll print out everything I have and put it in. I already have an online chrono going.”

She flipped the binder closed and saw that it was old and the blue plastic faded. Bosch was recycling an old murder book and it didn’t surprise her. She guessed that he had the records from several old cases in his home. He was that kind of detective.

“Did you close the one this came from?” she asked.

“I did,” Bosch said.

“Good,” she said.

The went back to work. There were no more callouts for Ballard that shift. She got her report writing finished and filed and then joined Bosch on the FI cards. By dawn they had made it through the two boxes they brought from storage. Fifty more cards were added to the stack that warranted a second look but did not rise to the level of requiring immediate action. As they worked through the cards, they had talked and Bosch had told her stories about his days in Hollywood Homicide in the 1990s. She noticed that he, or in some instances the media, had given names to many of his cases: the Woman in the Suitcase, the Man with No Hands, the Dollmaker, and so on. It was as though homicides back then were an event. Now it seemed that nothing was new, nothing shocked.

Ballard gathered their two stacks of keepers together along with the murder book.

“I’m going to put these in my locker and then go over to the auto repair shop,” she said. “You want to go with me? To the shop, I mean.”

“No,” Bosch said. “I mean, I do, but I think I better get up to the Valley and see where we are on things. Maybe I’ll see if I can get some pins stuck in my knee on the way.”

“Let’s check in later, then. I’ll let you know what I get.”

“That’s a plan.”





22



Ballard stopped for a latte after leaving the station. While waiting for it, she got a text from Aaron saying he was off all day. She took this to mean that the man he had pulled from the riptide had not survived and Aaron was given a “therapy day” to deal with it. She texted him back and said she had a stop to make before heading out toward the beach.

The two garage doors were open at Zocalo Auto Services when she got there. She had driven her van because she was not planning to go back to the station afterward.