Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(94)

“What’s it got to do with that tattoo artist?” Munroe asked. “That one was solved.”

Now Ballard looked over at Munroe.

“What are you talking about, L-T?” she asked.

“Sorry, I guess I was being snoopy,” Munroe asked. “I saw a murder book in your mail slot when I was going through the records retention box. I took a quick look. I remember that one, but they got the bad guy on it pretty quick, from what I can remember.”

The ZooToo book. Ballard had been waiting on it but had forgotten to check her slot when she had come in from dinner.

“They did clear it,” she said. “I just wanted a look at it. Thanks for letting me know it’s there.”

She walked out of the break room and down the back hallway to the mail room, where every officer and detective in the division had an open slot for internal and external deliveries. She pulled the plastic binder out of her slot.

Munroe was gone when she got back to the break room. She decided to review the murder book there so she would not have to leave the spread of shake cards unattended. She sat down and opened the binder.

The design of a murder book was consistent across all department homicide squads. It was divided into twenty-six sections—crime scene reports, lab reports, photos, witness statements, and so on. The first section was always the chronological record, where the case investigators logged their moves by date and time. Ballard flipped back to section sixteen, which contained the crime scene photos.

Ballard pulled a thick stack of 3 x 5 photos out of a plastic pocket and started looking through them. The photographer had been thorough and clinical. It seemed that every inch of the tattoo parlor and the murder scene had been documented in the bright, almost overexposed prints. In 2009 the department was still using film, as digital photography had not yet been accepted by the court system because of concerns about digital tampering.

Ballard moved quickly through the photos until she reached those taken of the victim’s body at the center of the crime scene. Audie Haslam had put up a fight. Her arms, hands, and fingers were all deeply lacerated with defensive wounds. Eventually, though, she succumbed to her larger and more powerful attacker. There were deep stab wounds in her chest and neck. Blood completely soaked the ZooToo tank top she was wearing. Arterial spray had splashed all four walls of the small storage room the killer had pushed her into. She died on the polished concrete floor with one hand clasping a crucifix on a chain around her neck. Incongruously, the tattoo artist had no tattoos herself, at least none that were visible to Ballard in the photos.

Murder was murder, and Ballard knew that every case deserved the full attention and effort of the police department. But Ballard was always struck by the murder of a woman. Most times the cases she reviewed and worked were exceedingly violent. Most times the killers were men. There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair that went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that in every moment of their lives, their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex.

She stacked the photos and slid them back into the pocket of section sixteen. She then went to section twelve, which was dedicated to the suspect. She wanted to see a photo of the man who had killed Audie Haslam.

In his booking photo, Clancy Devoux stared at the camera with dead eyes and an expression that seemed devoid of human empathy. He was unshaven and unclean and one eyelid drooped farther than the other. A straight, thin-lipped mouth was set in a smirk of defiance rather than an expression of guilt or apology. He was a hardened psychopath who had probably hurt many before the killing of Audie Haslam brought his run to an end. Ballard guessed that most of those victims—whatever the crimes—were women.

A printout of his prior record substantiated this. He had been charged numerous times going back to his juvenile days in Mississippi. The crimes ranged from drug possession to multiple aggravated assaults and an attempted murder. The list did not denote the gender of the victims but Ballard knew. Devoux was a woman hater. You didn’t stab a woman in the back room of a tattoo parlor as many times and with as much ferocity as he had without building toward it over years. Poor Audie Haslam was at the wrong place at the wrong time. She had probably set her own death in motion with the wrong word or a judgmental look that set Devoux off.

A notation on the pocket of section twelve said that Devoux was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder in the tattoo parlor. He would never hurt a woman again.

From there Ballard went to the section containing the statements of witnesses in the case. There was no witness to the actual murder, because the killer had waited until he was alone in the shop before robbing and murdering Haslam. But the investigators had run down and talked to other customers who had been in the shop that night.

Ballard took out a notebook and started writing down the names of the witnesses and their contact information. These were all denizens of the Hollywood night circa 2009 and they might be useful to interview if they could be located now. She realized that one of these witnesses, a man named David Manning, sounded familiar. She put the murder book aside and looked over the shake cards she had spread out for Bosch’s perusal. She found Manning.

According to the witness statement, Manning had been in the tattoo shop less than two hours before the murder. He was described as a fifty-eight-year-old ex-smuggler from Florida. He lived in an old RV he parked on different streets in Hollywood on different days of the week. He was a frequent visitor to ZooToo because he liked Audie Haslam and liked to add to the prodigious collection of tattoos that sleeved both his arms. From reading between the lines of the statement, which had been written before the investigation focused on Clancy Devoux, it appeared to Ballard that Manning was an early person of interest in the Haslam case. He had a record, albeit one without violence, and was one of the last people to see her alive. He was actually in police custody and being interviewed when the results of fingerprint analysis from the crime scene came in and put the investigation in a different direction.