Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(69)

As he came around, Bosch saw the man pull something from a back pocket and use the woman’s body as a blind. Bosch could not tell if it was a gun or knife or pack of cigarettes. But in his experience, if you had a gun, you showed a gun.

Bosch stopped six feet from them, his arms still raised.

“Elizabeth?”

He peered into the darkness. He could not tell and she didn’t answer. His hands still over his head, he snapped on the light and put the beam on her.

It wasn’t Elizabeth.

“Okay, sorry, wrong person,” Bosch said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

He started backing away.

“Damn right, it’s the wrong person,” the man said. “What the fuck you doing, runnin’ up on people like that?”

“I told you, I’m looking for somebody, okay? I’m sorry.”

“I coulda had a gun, you fucking idiot. I coulda blown your shit away.”

Bosch reached under his jacket and snapped his gun off his belt. He held it barrel up and took a step back toward the couple.

“You mean like this?” he said. “This what you have?”

The man dropped whatever he was holding and raised his hands.

“Sorry, man. Sorry,” he called out.

“Put that damn thing away,” the woman yelled. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”

Bosch looked down at the pavement and saw what the man had dropped. It was a plastic pill crusher. They were about to turn the pills she got at the clinic into powder for snorting. Bosch had carried a crusher just like it while working undercover the year before.

All at once he was struck by how pitiful the lives of the two people in front of him were. He wondered how Elizabeth could have gone back to this. He put his gun back into its holster and returned to the door of the Cherokee, the two addicts watching him.

“What are you, some kind of cop?” the woman yelled.

Bosch looked at her before getting back in.

“Something like that,” he said.

He got in, dropped the transmission into drive, and peeled off.

He decided to call it a night. If Elizabeth was out there on her own, she would no longer have Bosch looking for her. He headed home, resigned to the idea that he had done what he could for her. He would continue to look for her daughter’s killer, but finding Elizabeth would no longer be a priority.

He picked up tacos at the Poquito Más on Cahuenga and then went up the hill to his house. The plan was to eat, shower, and put on fresh clothes. He would then head to Hollywood to read shake cards with Ballard.

The house was dark because he had forgotten to leave any lights on. He came in through the kitchen door and grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator before heading out to the back deck to eat his dinner.

As he crossed the living room, he noticed that the sliding door to the deck was halfway open. He stopped. He knew he hadn’t left it that way. He then felt the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head.

An image of his daughter went through his mind. It was from a few years ago, of a moment when he had been teaching her how to drive and told her she had done well. She smiled proudly at him.





Ballard





32



Ballard had the kind of night she had been waiting for all week. No calls for a detective, no calls for backup, no officer-needs-assistance calls. She spent the whole shift in the detective bureau and even ordered food delivered to the front desk. This gave her time to focus and power through the remaining field interview cards.

The pickings were thin in the first two boxes in terms of pulling cards for follow-up investigation. Ballard put only two in the stack that had been accumulating from the start of the project. But the third box produced five cards, including three that she felt should immediately go to the top.

Three weeks before the murder of Daisy Clayton, two officers had stopped their car and inspected a panel van that was parked illegally in front of a red curb on Gower south of Sunset. When they approached, they heard voices from within the van and saw light inside. There were windows on the rear doors and they noticed a makeshift curtain had fallen partially open behind one of them. Through the narrow opening they saw a man and woman having sex on a mattress while a second man videoed them with a camera.

The officers broke the party up and checked the IDs of all three of the van’s occupants. They confirmed with the woman—who had a record of prostitution arrests—that both the sex and the videoing of it were consensual. She denied that any money had changed hands or that she was engaged in prostitution.

No arrests were made, because there was no crime the threesome could be charged with. Under the law, officers could make an arrest for lewd behavior only if it was witnessed by the public and a citizen reported being offended. The three were let off with a warning and told to move on.

Three individual shake cards were filled out. What Ballard keyed on—besides the van—was that one of the men had the word “porno actor” under his name. He was listed as Kurt Pascal, twenty-six years old at the time and living on Kester Street in Sherman Oaks.

From the few details that were on the shake cards, Ballard drew the likely conclusion that the officers had interrupted a porno shoot in the van. Pascal and the cameraman, identified as Wilson Gayley, thirty-six, had paid prostitute Tanya Vickers, thirty-one, to perform in the van. Ballard took it a step further and envisioned a night three weeks later when they picked up another prostitute for filming and then found out after the fact that they had committed a crime because she was underage. One solution to their problem would be to eliminate the prostitute and make it look like the work of a sexual sadist.