Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(66)
“You have an extra moon suit?” Ballard asked.
“You volunteering, Ballard?”
“I am. I want to see it through.”
“Come on, then. We’ll fix you up.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
After packing up and dropping Lola at doggy day care, Ballard took the 405 freeway directly north, through the charred hills in the Sepulveda Pass and into the Valley. She called Aaron along the way and told him dinner was not going to happen.
Sylmar was at the north end and Sunshine Canyon was in the armpit created by the intersection of the 405 and 14 freeways. Ballard could smell it long before she got to it. Slapping a name like Sunshine Canyon on a landfill was typical iconography. Take something ugly or horrible and put a pretty name on it.
Upon arrival, Ballard was driven out to the search site on an all-terrain vehicle. Lee and Rogers and a forensics team were already using what looked like ski poles to pick through an area of refuse that had been cordoned off with yellow tape. It was about thirty yards long and ten wide, and Ballard assumed that this was the spread of refuse from the garbage truck that had picked up Jacob Cady’s condo dumpster on its route.
There was a table under a mobile canopy set up by the forensics team on the dirt road that skirted the landfill’s drop zone. Extra equipment was spread across it, including plastic hazmat coveralls, breathing masks, eye guards, glove and bootie boxes, hard hats, duct tape, and a case of bottled water. A barrel next to the table had extra search picks, some of which had orange flags attached for marking finds.
Ballard was dropped off with an advisory from the ATV’s driver that hard hats were required to be worn in the debris zones of the landfill. She put on a breathing mask first. It didn’t do much to cut the odor but it was comforting to know it might cut down on the intake of larger particulate garbage. She pulled a moon suit on over her clothes next and noticed that none of the searchers on the debris pile had pulled the hood up on their hazmat suits. She did, tucking her midlength hair completely into the plastic and pulling the slip line that tightened the hood around her face.
She put on gloves and booties and then used the duct tape to seal the cuffs of the suit around her wrists and ankles. She put on the eye guard and topped the outfit off with an orange hard hat with the number 23 on both sides of it. She was ready. She grabbed one of the picks from the barrel and started crossing the debris toward the other searchers. There were five of them in a line, working their way up the search zone.
Because they had not pulled up their hoods Ballard easily identified Lee and Rogers.
“You guys want me to squeeze into the line here or do something else?” she asked.
“Is that you, Ballard?” Lee said. “Yeah, squeeze in. Better chance we don’t miss anything.”
Lee moved left and Rogers moved right, making room for Ballard to join the line.
“Black plastic bags, Ballard,” Rogers said. “With blue pull straps.”
“Got it,” Ballard said.
“Everybody, this is Renée,” Lee said. “She’s the one we have to thank for being here today. Renée, this is everybody.”
Ballard smiled though no one could see it.
“My bad, I guess,” she said.
“No, your good,” Rogers said. “If not for you, that shitbird from New Jersey might’ve gotten away with it. And they told us here that if we had come two, three, days from now, we would never have been able to isolate a drop zone like this. We got lucky.”
“Now let’s hope we get lucky again,” Lee added.
They moved slowly, each step sinking a foot or more into the debris, using the steel picks to dig down through the garbage. Line integrity was loose as sometimes a searcher would stop to use his or her hands to clear debris.
At one point Lee became concerned about the time and asked the others to pick up the pace. They had at least four hours of sunlight left but if they started finding body parts, a crime scene investigation would be initiated and he wanted to conduct it in daylight.
An hour after Ballard joined the search, they found the first body parts. One of the forensic techs uncovered a black plastic bag and ripped it open with her pick.
“Here,” she called out.
The others gathered around the find. In the ripped bag were a pair of feet and lower legs, cut just below the knee. While the tech took photos on her phone, Rogers started back toward the equipment table to get a pick with a flag. The search would continue after marking the first find. Lee pulled his phone and started the Medical Examiner’s Office rolling to the scene.
The next piece of evidence found was the rug from the living room. Ballard came across it in her search channel. It was sitting near the top of the pile but disguised by a ripped bag of what looked like garbage from a Chinese restaurant. The rug had been loosely rolled up. It was pulled out of the debris and unrolled to reveal a massive blood stain but no body parts.
Ballard was marking the find with a flagged pick when Kokoro, the criminalist who found the first black bag, called out that she had found two more. Again there was a grim gathering around these. One contained Jacob Cady’s head, the other his arms.
Cady’s face showed no sign of trauma and was composed, eyes and mouth shut, almost as if he were asleep. Kokoro took more photos.
The arms showed trauma beyond the obvious damage of being severed from the body. There were deep lacerations on both forearms and on the palms.