Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(98)

Ballard put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and then a hand on each of the walls of the two buildings she stood between. She then raised her left foot and angled it against one wall, using the mortar line between two of the concrete blocks to find a shallow toehold. Pressing her hands against the wall and gripping the edges higher up, she raised herself up and brought her right foot against the opposite wall, angling it until it found purchase. She was wearing rubber-soled work shoes favored by professionals who worked a lot on their feet. They were chosen for comfort over style, and they grabbed the edges of the mortar lines well.

Ballard slowly started climbing up the walls of the passage between the two buildings, using her weight to counterbalance her body and to keep from falling. The ascent was slow and it was toward a complete unknown, but she pressed on, pausing once when she heard a car in the entrance lane of the industrial park. She quickly grabbed the flashlight out of her mouth and switched it off. She was halfway up the climb and could do nothing but hold still.

The car out in the lane drove by the passage without stopping. Ballard waited a moment, then turned the flashlight back on and started climbing again.

It took ten minutes to reach the top and then Ballard put her arm over the parapet around the roof of the CCB warehouse and carefully pulled her body over and onto the gravel rooftop. She stayed on her back for almost a minute, catching her breath and looking up at the dark sky.

She rolled onto her side and got up. Brushing off her clothes, she knew that she had burned through another suit. She was planning to take Monday and Tuesday off once her partner returned. She would complete all her laundry errands then.

Ballard looked around and saw that she had been wrong about there being a skylight on the roof. There were actually four of them—two over each garage bay—plastic bubbles shining in the moonlight. There was also a steel exhaust chimney that rose six feet above the roof line. The diffuser at the top was coated black by smoke and creosote.

Ballard inspected the skylights, moving from one to another with her flashlight, stepping around a pool of standing water that covered part of the roof. There were no lights on in the CCB warehouse below, but it didn’t matter. Visibility with the flashlight was limited. It appeared that each of the once-clear plastic bubbles had been haphazardly sprayed with white paint from the inside.

This was curious to Ballard. It appeared to be a move designed to keep anyone from looking down at activities below. But there were no taller buildings in the area with views through the skylights. Ballard thought about the boys caught earlier in the week attempting to glimpse naked women through the skylights of a strip club. Here, the attempt at skylight privacy seemed unwarranted.

Each of the skylights was hinged on one edge and could presumably be opened from within. This was the moment of decision. She had certainly already trespassed on private property but she would be crossing a more important line if she took things further. It was a line she had crossed before.

She had no direct evidence of anything but plenty of circumstantial facts that pointed the needle toward Dillon. She had the fact that the crime scene cleaner was in Hollywood with his van and his chemicals and cleansers on the night Daisy Clayton was taken. And she had the fact that he had ordered storage containers with the same brand mark that had ended up on the victim’s body, and in the size that would have been used to store and bleach it. The circumstances of the murder pointed to a killer who knew something about law enforcement and took the effort to rid the body of potential evidence to an extreme level.

She knew she could call Judge Wickwire, her go-to, and run these things by her in an effort to establish probable cause. But in her mind she could hear the judge’s voice saying, “Renée, I don’t think you have it.”

But Ballard thought she did have the right man. She decided she had come this far and was not turning around. She reached into a pocket and took out a pair of rubber gloves. Then she started checking the skylights.

Each of the rooftop bubbles was locked, but one of them felt loose on its frame. She moved around it, stepping in the water that had accumulated around its rear edge. The standing water was apparently a longtime problem. The moisture had worked its corrosive magic on the skylight’s hinges.

Ballard put the light in her mouth and reached down with both hands to the frame. She pulled up and the hinge screws gave way, coming out of the wet plaster abutment below the frame without protest. She pushed the skylight up until it rolled back on its rounded surface and into the water.

She pointed her light down and was looking at the flat white top of a box truck parked in the bay directly below the opening.

Ballard estimated that it was a drop of no more than eight feet.





46



Ballard lowered herself through the roof opening and hung for a moment by her hands before letting go and falling to the roof of the truck. She hit it off balance and fell onto her back, momentarily stunning herself and leaving a dent on the truck’s roof.

After lying still and recovering for a few seconds, she crawled toward the front of the truck, slipped down onto the cab, and then climbed down the side of it, using the sideview mirror and door handle as toeholds and grips.

Once she was on the concrete floor, Ballard checked the warehouse’s doors to see if she would have a quick escape route if needed. But the deadbolts on both front and back doors required a key on the inside as well.

With her flashlight in hand, she located a panel next to the front door with what she believed were the garage door switches, but like the doors, these required a key to operate. Ballard realized that she was going to have to figure out how to get up and out through the skylight or somehow break down one of the doors. Neither was a good choice.