Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(64)

“I was told by the police department that I had to purge my own data storage on the project,” Calder said.

“But it was your baby,” Bosch said. “I’m guessing you didn’t purge it all, and if I’m right, you might be able to help us solve a murder. That would be a nice little fuck-you to the chief, right?”

Ballard had to hold back a smile. She could tell that Bosch was playing this perfectly. If Calder had anything, he was going to give it up.

“What specifically are you looking for?” Calder said.

“We’d like a forty-eight-hour read on every crime in the division centered on the night our victim was grabbed off the street,” Ballard said urgently.

“Twenty-four hours before and twenty-four after?” Calder asked.

“Make it forty-eight on both sides of it,” Bosch said.

Ballard pulled out her notebook and tore off the top page. She had already written the date down. Calder took it and looked at it.

“How do you want this—digital or print?” he asked.

“Digital,” Ballard said.

“Print,” Bosch said at the same time.

“Okay, both,” Calder said.

He looked back at the paper with the date on it, as if that alone held some great moral weight.

“Okay,” he said. “I can do this.”





29



Calder said he needed a day to retrieve the hard drive on which he had kept the GRASP data. It wasn’t at the school but at a private storage facility. He said he would call as soon as he had the material ready for pickup.

Ballard had driven them both in her city car so they wouldn’t have to worry about legit parking both their private cars, but before they left, Bosch asked to be dropped off at the nearby Exposition Park.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’ve never seen the shuttle,” he said. “I thought I’d check it out.”

The decommissioned space shuttle Endeavour had been flown to L.A. six years earlier, slowly moved through the streets of South-Central, and put on permanent display inside the air and space center at the park.

Ballard smiled at the thought of Bosch in the air and space museum.

“You don’t seem like a space-travel guy, Harry.”

“I’m not really. Just want to look at it to know it’s really true.”

“You mean you’re a conspiracy-theory guy, then? Like the space program was a hoax? Fake news?”

“No, no, not like that. I believe it. It’s just kind of amazing, you know, to think we could send those things up, circle the moon, fix satellites, and do whatever they were doing and we can’t fix things down here. I just wanted to see it once, ever since they brought it here. I was…”

He trailed off like he was unsure he should continue.

“What?” Ballard prompted.

“Nah, I was just going to say, I was in Vietnam back in ’69,” Bosch said. “Way before you were even born, I know. And on this one day, I had just gotten back to base camp on Airmobile after a hairy op where we had to clear the enemy out of a tunnel system. That’s what I did over there. It was late morning and the place was completely deserted. It was like a ghost town because everybody was sitting in their tents, listening to their radios. Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon and they all wanted to hear it…

“And it was the same thing, you know? How did we put a guy up there bouncing around on the moon when things were so fucked up down here? I mean, that morning during the op…I had to kill a guy. In the tunnel. I was nineteen years old.”

Bosch was looking out his window. He almost seemed to be talking to himself.

“Harry, I’m really sorry,” Ballard said. “That you were put in that situation at that age. At any age.”

“Yeah, well…” Bosch said. “That’s the way it was.”

He didn’t say anything further. Ballard could feel the fatigue coming off him like a wave.

“You still want to see the shuttle?” she asked. “How will you get back to your car at the station?”

“Yeah, drop me off. I can grab a taxi or an Uber after.”

She started the car and drove the few blocks over to the park. They didn’t speak. She got him as close as she could to the giant building that housed the shuttle.

“I’m not sure they’re going to be open yet,” Ballard said.

“It’s okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll find something to do.”

“After this, you should go home and get a nap. You seem tired, Harry.”

“That’s a good idea.”

He opened his door, then looked back at Ballard before getting out.

“Just so you know, I’m done at San Fernando,” he said. “So I’m fully committed to the Daisy case.”

“What do you mean ‘done’?” Ballard asked. “What happened?”

“I sort of messed things up. My witness getting killed, that’s going to be on me. I didn’t do enough to protect him. Then things happened yesterday between me and the guy who leaked it and I got suspended by the chief. Being a reserve, there are no protections so…I’m just done. That’s it.”

Ballard waited to see if he would say more but he didn’t.