Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(6)

Uniformed cops got a hash mark on their sleeves for every five years of service. Nine years ago, the Relic was a near-rookie. Ballard nodded and asked her last question.

“Did Bosch ask you anything I didn’t just ask?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t about her. He asked about Daisy’s boyfriend and whether I ever saw him on the street again after the murder.”

“Who was the boyfriend?”

“Just another runaway throwaway. I knew him by his graffiti handle: Addict. Bosch said his name was Adam something. I forget. But the answer was no, I never saw him after that. Guys like that come and go.”

“Was that all it was—a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?”

“They ran together. You know, for protection. Girl like that, she needed a guy out there. Like a pimp. She worked the street, he watched out for her, and they split the profits. Except that night, he dropped the ball. Too bad for her.”

Ballard nodded. She guessed that Bosch wanted to talk to Adam/Addict as the person who would know the most about who Daisy Clayton knew and interacted with, and where she went on the last night of her life.

He could also have been a suspect.

“You know about Bosch, right?” Dvorek asked.

“Yeah,” Ballard said. “He worked in the division way back when.”

“You know the stars out on the front sidewalk?”

“’Course.”

There were memorial stars on the sidewalk in front of Hollywood Station honoring officers from the division who were killed in the line of duty.

“Well, there’s one out there,” Dvorek said. “Lieutenant Harvey Pounds. The story on him was he was Bosch’s L-T when he worked here, and he got abducted and died of a heart attack when he was being tortured on a case Bosch was working.”

Ballard had never heard the story before.

“Anybody ever go down for it?” she asked.

“Depends on who you talk to,” Dvorek said. “It’s supposedly ‘cleared-other,’ but it’s another mystery in the big bad city. The word was that something Bosch did got the guy killed.”

“Cleared-other” was a designation for a case that was officially closed but without an arrest or prosecution. Usually because the suspect was dead or serving a life sentence for another crime, and it was not worth the time, expense, and risk of going to trial on a case that would not result in additional punishment.

“Supposedly the file on it is sealed. High jingo.”

“High jingo” was LAPD-speak for when a case involved department politics. The kind of case where a career could be diverted by a wrong move.

The information on Bosch was interesting but not on point. Before Ballard could think of a question that would steer Dvorek back toward the Daisy Clayton case, his rover squawked and he took a call from the watch office. Ballard listened as Lieutenant Munroe dispatched him to a Beachwood Canyon address to supervise a team responding to a domestic dispute.

“Gotta go,” he said as he balled up the foil his tacos had come in. “Unless you want to ride along and back me up.”

It was said in jest, Ballard knew. The Relic didn’t need backup from the late show detective.

“I’ll see you back at the barn,” she said. “Unless that goes sideways and you need a detective.”

She hoped not. Domestics usually ended up being he-said-she-said deals in which she acted more as a referee than a detective. Even obvious physical injuries didn’t always tell the tale.

“Roger that,” Dvorek said.





3



Day watch detectives were all about traffic patterns. Most days the majority of daysiders got to the bureau before six a.m. so they could split by midafternoon, missing the traffic swell both coming and going. Ballard counted on this when she decided she was going to ask Cesar Rivera about the Daisy Clayton case. She spent the remainder of her shift waiting on his arrival by pulling up and studying the electronic records available on the nine-year-old murder.

The murder book, a blue binder full of printed reports and photos, was still the bible of a homicide investigation in the Los Angeles Police Department, but as the world turned digital, so did the department. Using her LAPD password, Ballard was able to access most of the reports and photos from the case that had been scanned into the digital archives. The only thing missing would be the handwritten notes detectives usually shoved into the back sleeve of the murder book.

Most important, she was able to view the chronological record, which was always the spine of the case, a narrative of all moves made by investigators assigned to it.

Ballard determined immediately that the murder was officially classified as a cold case and assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, which was part of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division working out of headquarters downtown. Ballard had once been assigned to the RHD and knew many of the detectives and associated players. Included in that number was her former lieutenant, who had pushed her up against a wall and tried to force himself on her in a bathroom at a squad Christmas party three years earlier. Her rejection of him and subsequent complaint and internal investigation was what landed her on the night shift at Hollywood Division. The complaint was determined to be unfounded because her own partner at the time did not back her up, even though he had witnessed the altercation. Department administrators decided that it would be for the good of all involved to separate Ballard and Lieutenant Robert Olivas. He stayed put in RHD and Ballard was moved out, the message to her clear. Olivas got by unscathed, while she went from an elite unit to a posting no one ever applied or volunteered for, a slot normally reserved for the department’s freaks and fuckups.