Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(95)
Much of the information on the shake card matched that on the witness statement. The shake card had made the final cut with Ballard because of Manning’s RV. It fell in with the van category that Ballard and Bosch were interested in. The card had been written seven weeks before the Clayton and Haslam murders when an officer had inspected the RV parked on Argyle just south of Santa Monica and told Manning it was illegal to park the recreational vehicle in a commercial parking zone. At the time, the LAPD was not shy about rousting the homeless and keeping them moving. But since then, a series of civil-rights lawsuits and a change in leadership in City Hall had led to a revision in that practice, and now bullying the homeless was practically a firing offense. Consequently, there was almost no enforcement of laws with them and someone like Manning would be allowed to park his RV just about anywhere he wanted to in Hollywood as long as it was not in front of a single-family home or a movie theater.
The officer who had rousted Manning in 2009 had filled out a field interview card with information garnered from their short conversation and his Florida driver’s license. When Ballard had run Manning’s name and birth date through the database as she prepped the cards for Bosch, she had determined that he now had a California license but the address on it was unhelpful. Manning had followed a routine tactic of using a church address as his own in order to get a California license or identification card. Though the address was a dead end, the RV registered to Manning should not be too hard to spot if he was still living in the area.
Ballard now picked up the Manning shake card and moved it over to the row of cards that she believed warranted a higher priority of attention. The fact that he knew, liked, and might have been obsessed with a woman who was murdered two days before Daisy Clayton was in her estimation worth checking out.
Ballard wanted to talk to him. She opened her laptop and went to work on an information-only bulletin on Manning. The bulletin was an informal BOLO with instructions: If Manning or his RV is spotted, do not roust or arrest, just contact Ballard 24/7.
She printed out the page, which included a description and plate number for the RV, and then walked it back down to the watch office to give to Lieutenant Munroe. When she got there, Munroe was standing with two other officers in the middle of the room and looking up at the flat-screen mounted high on the wall over the watch commander’s desk. Ballard could see the logo of channel 9, the local twenty-four-hour news channel, and a reporter she recognized doing a live stand-up with the flashing lights of several police vehicles behind her.
Ballard walked up beside them.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Police shooting in the Valley,” Munroe said. “Two bangers down for the count.”
“Is it SIS? The Bosch surveillance?”
“They’re not saying anything about it on this. They don’t know shit yet.”
Ballard pulled her phone and texted Heather Rourke, the airship spotter.
You over this thing in the Valley?
No, south end tonight. Heard about it. 2Ks. Is it the Bosch thing? SIS?
Sounds like. Checking.
She still had no working number for Bosch. She stared at the screen, watching the activity behind the reporter but not listening to what she was saying until she finished with her exact location.
“Reporting live from the Hansen Dam Recreation Area.”
Ballard knew that meant Foothill Division and, most likely, SanFers. It had to be the Bosch case, so she knew she would probably not be seeing him tonight.
She went back to the break room, stacked the shake cards according to priority, and then carried them and the ZooToo murder book back to the detective bureau. She checked the clock and saw that her shift didn’t start for an hour. She considered for a moment driving up to the Valley and crashing the SIS shooting scene. She felt proprietary about the case, considering her part in the rescue of Harry Bosch.
But she knew she would be kept on the fringe. The SIS was a closed society. Bosch would be lucky if they even let him under the yellow tape.
She decided not to go and instead opened the murder book again to complete her review. She turned to section one, the chronological record. This was as close as she would get to riding along on the investigation. The chrono was a step-by-step accounting of the case detectives’ movements.
She started at the beginning, from the moment they were called out from home and sent to the tattoo parlor. The case was carried by two detectives assigned to the Hollywood homicide squad before it had been dissolved and cases from the division were folded into West Bureau homicide. Their names were Livingstone and Peppers. Ballard knew neither of them.
The chrono, like the murder book, was shorter than what Ballard had seen in other murder books, including those she had prepared herself during her time in the Robbery-Homicide Division. But this was not a measure of the effort by Livingstone and Peppers. It was because the case so quickly came together. The detectives were moving forward and thoroughly when forensics handed them a suspect on a platter. A bloody fingerprint from the rear storage room of the shop was connected to Clancy Devoux. He was quickly located and picked up, a broken knife believed to have been the murder weapon was recovered in his possession, and the case was considered closed in less than twenty-four hours.
All murder cases should go so easily, Ballard thought. But they usually don’t. A girl gets snatched off the street and murdered, and nine years go by without so much as a clue to her killer. A woman gets brutally slashed with a knife in the back room of her business, and the case is closed in a day. There was no rhyme or reason to murder investigation.