Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(62)

She stepped out into the hallway to call Lieutenant McAdam, the head of the Hollywood Division detective bureau and Ballard’s real boss, even though she rarely saw him. She had to directly inform him of any case of this magnitude. She took a guilty pleasure in waking him up. He was a strict nine-to-fiver.

“Hey, boss, it’s Ballard,” she said. “We’ve got a homicide.”





28



When Ballard returned to the detective bureau after handing off the Jacob Cady case to a West Bureau homicide team, she found Harry Bosch ensconced at the desk he had used the night before, going through a box of field interview cards.

“Don’t you sleep, Bosch?” she said.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Ballard saw the coffee cup on the desk. He had helped himself in the break room.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Not long,” Bosch said. “I was out looking for somebody all night.”

“Find him?”

“Her, and no, not yet. What have you been up to?”

“Working a homicide. And now I have to do the paperwork, so I won’t be looking at any shake cards today.”

“No problem. I’m making progress.”

He held up the handful of cards he had put to the side for closer study later. She was about to say that there was a problem in him coming into the station and working the case alone, but she let it go. She pulled out a seat and sat down at a desk in the same pod as Bosch.

After logging into the computer, Ballard started writing an incident report that she would send to the team that took over the Cady case.

“What was the case?” Bosch asked. “The homicide.”

“It’s a no-body case,” she said. “So far, at least. Started as a missing persons and that’s why I was called in. Got a guy who admits killing the man, cutting up the body, and putting it all in a dumpster. Oh, and he says it was self-defense.”

“Of course, he does.”

“We checked with the building manager – the dumpster got picked up yesterday, so they’ll be going out to the landfill today as soon as they figure out who the trash hauler was and which dump they use. One of the few times I’m glad I don’t get to see a case all the way through. The two guys that caught it were not too happy.”

“I had a no-body case once. Same thing. We had to go to the dump but we were a week behind it. So we spent about two weeks out there. And we found a body but it was the wrong one. Only in L.A., I guess.”

“You mean you found a murder victim but not the one you were looking for?”

“Yeah. We never found the one we were looking for. We went out there on a tip anyway. So maybe it never happened. The one we found was a mob case and we eventually cleared it. But those two weeks out there, I didn’t get the smell out of my nose for months. And forget about the clothes. I threw everything away.”

“I’ve heard it can be pretty ripe at those places.”

She went back to work, but less than five minutes went by before Bosch interrupted again.

“Did you ever get a chance to check on the GRASP files?” he asked.

“Matter of fact, I did,” Ballard said. “Supposedly they were all purged, but I got a line on the USC professor who designed the program and helped implement it. I’m hoping he kept the data. I have an appointment at eight with him, if you’re interested.”

“I’m interested. I’ll buy you breakfast on the way.”

“I won’t have time for breakfast if I don’t get the paperwork filed.”

“Got it. I’ll shut up.”

Ballard smiled as she went back to work on the report. She was in the summary section, where she was typing out Tyldus’s self-serving statements—he was being booked under his current legal name—after he was arrested and realized that he needed to try to talk his way out of a murder. His fervent plea of self-defense lost credibility when the forensics team called to the apartment pulled up the bathtub drain trap and found blood and tissue. Then Tyldus admitted cutting the body up and bagging the parts in plastic trash bags—an extreme measure for a self-defense killing.

It made Ballard feel bad for Cady’s parents and family. In the next hours and days they would learn that their son was presumed dead, dismembered, and buried somewhere amid the garbage at a landfill. And Bosch’s story about an unsuccessful search for a body in a landfill concerned her. It was critical that they find Cady’s body so that injuries aside from dismemberment could be analyzed in concert with the details provided by Tyldus. If the injuries on the body told a different story, it would be Jacob’s way of helping to convict his killer.

Despite what Ballard had said about being glad she was not seeing the case through to the end, she intended to volunteer to help look for Jacob. She felt the need to be there.

Ballard’s shift ended at seven but she got her reports emailed to the West Bureau detectives an hour before that and she and Bosch headed downtown early. They ate breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car, an expensive LAPD tradition across the street from the Rampart Division station. They didn’t talk much about the current case. Instead, they filled each other in on their histories in the LAPD. Bosch had bounced around a lot in the early years before spending several years in Hollywood homicide and finishing his career at RHD. He also revealed that he had a daughter who went to college down in Orange County.