Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(55)

Bosch thought about the place he had rescued Elizabeth from the previous year. A clinic that was little more than a pill mill with examination rooms crowded with the items stolen and offered in trade by addicts. When he found her, Elizabeth had only herself to trade.

“The place I took her from—this so-called clinic in Van Nuys—has got to be closed by now,” he said. “My old partner from Hollywood detectives is now with the state medical board. He was there and saw that place. He was going to shut them down.”

“You sure?” Cisco asked. “Sometimes these doctors get a slap on the wrist and just open up across the street.”

Bosch recalled Jerry Edgar talking about how difficult it was to put charlatan doctors and pill mills out of business permanently.

“Let me call you back,” he said.

Without waiting for a reply, he disconnected and went to his contacts screen. He called his former partner, and Edgar picked up right away.

“Harry Bosch,” he said. “The man who said he would stay in touch but waited a lot of months to actually do it.”

“Sorry, Jerry, I’ve been kind of busy,” Bosch said. “I’ve got a question for you though. Remember that clinic where we found Elizabeth Clayton last year?”

“Yeah, Sherman Way.”

“You said you were going to close that down. Did that happen?”

“Wait a minute, I said I was going to try to close it down. It’s not an easy thing to do, Harry. I told you about how—”

“Yeah, I know, a lot of red tape. So, you’re telling me that seven months later that place is still operating?”

“I opened a file, did the work, and submitted it. The license to practice is under what we call administrative review. I’m waiting on the board to act on it.”

“So in the meantime, that guy we saw in there, that guy masquerading as a doctor, is still in there writing scrips.”

“I haven’t checked but that’s probably the case.”

“Thanks, Jerry, that’s all I needed. I gotta go.”

“Harry—”

Bosch disconnected. Before calling Cisco back he pulled his wallet and dug out the credit card he had given to Elizabeth to set up her Uber account. He called the phone number on the back and asked the service specialist to read him a list of his most recent charges. Other than an Uber charge from that morning, all the purchases had been his own.

Bosch grabbed the phone Elizabeth had left behind on the dining room table. He opened the Uber app and was greeted with a template for rating the driver who had picked Elizabeth up that morning. Bosch gave him five stars, then tapped the My Trips link and was taken to a map that showed the morning’s ride and the address of the destination. Elizabeth had obviously called for the Uber, then left the phone behind when the car arrived. The destination was the Greyhound bus terminal in North Hollywood.

It would seem that Elizabeth had left the city on a Greyhound bus, but Bosch was familiar with the area, having worked cases over the years that took him to the bus terminal and its surroundings, and he knew the neighborhood had a high transient population, many of whom were drug addicts, and had several clinics and mom-and-pop pharmacies that catered to them.

Bosch called Wojciechowski back.

“The place I pulled her out of is still in business,” he said. “But I just traced an Uber she took this morning to the bus station in North Hollywood. She could be back in Modesto by now. Or…”

“Or what?” Cisco prompted.

“You talked about addicts returning to the places they know. The area around the bus terminal is pretty gritty. Lots of clinics, lots of pharmacies, lots of addicts. There’s a park there next to the one seventy where they hang.”

There was a moment of silence before Cisco responded.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.





Ballard





25



After spending the day with Aaron Hayes and Lola, Ballard headed downtown for a preshift dinner with Heather Rourke, the helicopter spotter, at the Denny’s outside the entrance to Piper Tech, on whose roof the LAPD air unit was located.

It had become a routine for Ballard and Rourke to meet once or twice a month before their respective shifts. A connection had grown between them. They both worked graveyard and more often than not Rourke was Ballard’s partner in the sky, running as both lookout and backup. Their first meal together had been offered by Ballard as a thank-you after Rourke had spotted a hooded man waiting in ambush for Ballard when she responded to a burglary call. The suspect turned out to have been previously arrested by Ballard for an attempted rape. He was out on bail, awaiting trial, and had made the phony burglary call hoping that it would be Ballard who responded.

Rourke had picked up a heat signature on the air unit’s camera screen and radioed a warning down to Ballard. The hooded man was arrested after a short foot chase. Rourke was able to direct Ballard back to a duffel bag the man had thrown while running. It contained a complete rape package—duct tape, handcuffs, and snap ties. After this latest arrest, the man was deemed a danger to the community and denied bail.

When Ballard and Rourke got together, they mostly gossiped about the department. Ballard had early on told Rourke about her fall from grace at Robbery-Homicide Division, but in subsequent meetings she listened more than she talked because she largely worked alone and mostly encountered the same group of officers on the Hollywood late show. It was a closed environment that produced little in the way of new department intel from dinner to dinner. Rourke on the other hand was part of a large unit that supported eighteen helicopters—the largest police air force in the country. Veteran officers gravitated to the unit because the hours were steady and it included a hazard bump on the salary scale. She heard a lot in the break room from officers with connections all over the department and was happy to keep Ballard up to speed. It was a sisterhood of two.