Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(63)

Mention of the daughter prompted Bosch to pull out his phone.

“You’re not going to text her now, are you?” Ballard asked. “No college kid is awake this early.”

“No, just checking her location,” Bosch said. “Seeing if she’s at home. She’s twenty-one now and I thought that would lessen the worry, but it’s only made it worse.”

“Does she know you can track her?”

“Yeah, we made a deal. I can track her and she can track me. I think she worries about me as much as I worry about her.”

“That’s nice, but you know that she can just leave her phone in her room and you’d think she was there.”

Bosch looked up from the phone to Ballard.

“Really?” he said. “You had to plant that seed in my head?”

“Sorry,” Ballard said. “Just saying if I was a college kid and my dad could track my phone, I don’t think I’d carry it all the time.”

Bosch put his phone away and changed the subject.

As promised, Bosch picked up the tab, and they headed south toward USC. Along the way, Ballard told Bosch about Dennis Eagleton and his being picked up by the Moonlight Mission bus on the same night as Daisy Clayton. She said there wasn’t much of a tie between the two beyond that, but Eagleton was a dirtbag criminal and she wanted to interview him if he could be located.

“Tim Farmer talked to him,” she said. “He wrote a shake in 2014, said ‘Eagle’ was filled with hate and violence.”

“But no real record of violence?” Bosch asked.

“Just the one assault that got pled down. The dirtbag only did a month in county for splitting a guy’s head open with a bottle.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded as if the story about Eagleton’s light punishment was par for the course.

By eight a.m. they were at the office door of Professor Scott Calder at the University of Southern California. Calder was in his late thirties, which told Ballard he had been in his twenties when he designed the crime tracking program adopted by the police department.

“Professor Calder?” Ballard said. “I’m Detective Ballard. We spoke on the phone. And this is my colleague Detective Bosch.”

“Come in, please,” Calder said.

Calder offered his visitors seats in front of his desk and then sat down himself. He was casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt with USC in gold over the left breast. He had a shaved head and a long beard in the steampunk style. Ballard guessed that he thought it helped him fit in better with the students on campus.

“LAPD should never have disbanded GRASP,” he said. “It would have been paying dividends right now if they had kept it in place.”

Neither Ballard nor Bosch jumped to agree with him and Calder began a brief summary of how the program arose from his studies of crime patterns in and around USC after a spate of assaults and robberies of students just blocks from campus. After collecting data, Calder used statistics to project the frequency and locations of future crimes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university. The LAPD got wind of the project and the police chief asked Calder to take his computer modeling to the city, starting with three test areas: Hollywood Division because of the transient nature of its inhabitants and the variety of crimes that occurred there; Pacific Division because of the unique nature of crimes in Venice; and Southwest Division because it included USC. A city grant financed the project, and Calder and several of his students went to work collecting the data after a training period with officers in the three divisions. The project lasted two and a half years, until the chief’s five-year term was up. The police commission did not retain Calder afterward. A new chief was named and he killed the program, announcing a return to good old-fashioned community policing.

“It was a shame,” Calder said. “We were just starting to get our successes. GRASP would have worked if given the chance.”

“It sounds like it,” Ballard said.

She could not think of any other words of sympathy, as she had her own beliefs about the predictability of crime.

Bosch said nothing.

“Well, we appreciate the historical perspective on the program,” Ballard continued. “What we’re here for is to ask if you kept any of the data from it. We’re investigating an unsolved murder from ’09, which was the second year of GRASP. So it was up and running and collecting data. We thought it would be helpful if we had sort of a snapshot of the entire crime picture in Hollywood on that night, maybe the whole week of the murder.”

Calder was silent for a moment as he considered Ballard’s question. Then he spoke carefully.

“You know that the new chief purged all the data when he killed the program, right?” he said. “He said he didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. You believe that?”

The bitter tone that had come into Calder’s voice revealed the anger he had stored for nearly a decade.

“That seems a bit contradictory to the department’s keeping all kinds of other records,” Ballard offered, hoping to separate the current investigation from political decisions she had nothing to do with.

“It was stupid,” Bosch said. “The whole decision was stupid.”

Ballard realized that Bosch was the way to win Calder’s cooperation. He answered to nobody. He could say whatever he wanted and especially what Calder wanted to hear.