Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(99)

Below the garage-door panel was a row of light switches that were not key controlled. She flicked them up and two rows of overhead fluorescents came on, brightly lighting the warehouse. She stood there for a long moment, studying the layout of the place. The two side-by-side parking bays took up the front half of the warehouse, while the rear half was dedicated to the storage of supplies and a small office area with a couch. In the corner opposite the office was an incinerator for burning the biologically hazardous materials collected at crime scenes.

One of the parking bays was empty, but there were fresh oil drips on the floor where a truck would normally sit. Ballard knew that the truck backed into the other bay was not the one she had seen earlier in the week when she had met Dillon. It was painted differently, with the full name of the company on the driver-side door and not the large CCB across the side panel. It was older, had low air in its tires, and appeared to her to have been sitting in disuse. It seemed to put the lie to what Dillon had said about having two trucks and four employees ready to go 24/7. He apparently was a one man operation.

It all added up to Ballard realizing that the truck Dillon currently used was out there somewhere, and she had no idea if he was on a job and could arrive back at the warehouse at any time or if he simply took his work truck home at night. It didn’t seem to Ballard that it would go over well with fellow residents to park a biohazard truck in the neighborhood. But Ballard had not seen any personal car that could belong to Dillon parked near the warehouse.

She decided to move quickly with her search and started with a survey of the desk standing against the wall near the rear door of the warehouse. Ballard scanned for any information or notation about a job that might give her an idea of where Dillon and the truck were. But after finding nothing, she moved on, attempting to open the desk’s file drawers to see if there were any historical records regarding the purchase of supplies from American Storage Products.

The drawers were locked and that ended her search of the desk.

The warehouse was neat and orderly. Against the wall opposite the incinerator were large plastic barrels containing cleaning and disinfecting liquids with hand pumps for filling smaller containers for use on individual jobs. There were shelves stacked high with empty plastic containers. Ballard checked these for size and the ASP logo that had left a mark on Daisy Clayton, but there was nothing that would be large enough to contain her body and nothing with the logo. She realized that she had neglected to ask Mittleberg the time frame of the orders from CCB that he had seen on his computer.

There was a small bathroom with a shower and it looked like it had been recently cleaned. She opened the medicine cabinet and found routine first-aid materials on its shelves.

Next to the bathroom was a closet in which Ballard found several white jumpsuits on hangers, CCB embroidered on the left breast pocket of each, and Roger on the right—further evidence that Dillon’s claim of fielding four employees was self-aggrandizement.

Ballard closed the closet and stepped over to the incinerator. It was a square stand-alone appliance with stainless-steel sidings and an exhaust pipe going straight up through the ceiling. The front was double-doored, and a matching stainless-steel staging table was positioned in front of it.

Ballard opened one of the doors of the burning chamber and the other opened automatically with it. She pointed the beam of her flashlight inside and got a sharp kick back of reflecting light. The interior panels of the chamber were so clean as to be shiny, and it looked like the ash trap below the flame bars had been vacuumed after its last use. The incinerator looked brand-new. She could see a gas pilot light burning blue in the back corner.

She closed the incinerator doors and turned around. She saw no shop vac or any other kind of vacuum that could have been used to clean it. She then remembered seeing equipment in the truck Dillon had driven to the job site earlier in the week and assumed that he carried both wet and dry vacuums with him.

This thought drew her focus to the truck parked in the second bay. It was the last place for her to search. It had been backed into the warehouse and she was staring at the two double doors of the rear compartment.

Ballard next checked the license plate. The registration sticker was two years out of date. It was clear this truck was not part of CCB’s active fleet.

She pulled back a handle that disengaged upper and lower locking pins on the doors and pulled one of them open. She stepped back to swing it to the side and saw that the truck might have been taken out of service but it was being used as storage. It was full of cleaning and containment supplies packaged in bulk. A tower of twenty-four-packs of paper towel rolls, five-gallon containers of soap, a trash can full of brand-new mops, plastic-wrapped cases of aerosol cleaners and air fresheners. Leaning against one side of the interior was a thick stack of cardboard boxes that needed to be folded into shape for use.

It was essentially a wall of supplies that blocked her view into the truck. There was a handle mounted just inside the door. Ballard grabbed it and pulled herself up, using the truck’s rear bumper as a step. The inside of the truck was shielded from the fluorescents. Ballard used her light to cut through the shadows and look farther in. She quickly realized that the supplies were stacked at the back of the truck only as a blind and that there was an open space behind them. She shoved the trash can and mops in and out of the way and moved into the truck to look.

On the floor there were some old food wrappers, napkins, and fast-food bags strewn around a thin mattress that looked like it had been taken from a folding cot. A dirty blanket and pillow were thrown haphazardly on top of it and a battery-operated lantern was on the floor. Ballard moved the blanket with her foot and exposed a metal loop bolted to the floor of the truck. She squatted down and looked closely at it, saw the scratch marks on the interior of the loop, and knew it could be used to handcuff or chain a person to the mattress. She noticed that there was a slightly sour smell to this area of the truck. It told Ballard someone had recently been inhabiting this space.