Dark Sacred Night

44

Ballard spread the final shake cards out on a table in the break room. There was more room here than on a borrowed desk in the detective bureau. She was waiting for Bosch. She had been through the cards and done the electronic backgrounding. It was time to work these in the field. If Bosch got in before it was too late, they could possibly knock off a few during the night. She wanted to text or call him to say she was waiting but remembered that he had no phone.

She was sitting there, staring at the cards, when Lieutenant Munroe came in to get a cup of coffee.

“Ballard, what are you doing in so early?” he asked.

“Just working on my hobby case,” she said.

She didn’t look up from the cards and he didn’t look up from his prepping of his coffee.

“That old murder of the girl?” Munroe asked.

“The girl, right,” Ballard said.

She moved two cards across the table to the lesser priority side.

“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.

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.

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.

After the arrest, the entries in the chronological record started tapering off as the case shifted from investigation to preparation for prosecution. But one entry in the log gave Ballard pause. It came in forty-eight hours after the murder and twenty-four hours after Clancy Devoux was arrested. It was an innocuous entry simply added for thoroughness. It said that two nights after the murder, at 7:45 p.m., Detective Peppers was notified by the watch sergeant at Hollywood Division that a crime scene cleaner named Roger Dillon had found additional evidence on the ZooToo case. This was described as a broken piece of knife blade that had been on the floor of the storage room but had been completely covered by the pool of blood that had flowed from the victim and then coagulated around her body. The two-inch blade had apparently gone completely unnoticed by the detectives and forensic techs.

Peppers wrote in the log that he asked the watch sergeant to dispatch a patrol team to go to the tattoo parlor, take the blade from Dillon, and bag it as evidence. Peppers, who lived more than an hour from Los Angeles, said he would pick up the evidence in the morning.

Ballard stared at the log entry for a long time. As far as the ZooToo case went, it was strictly housekeeping. She knew that if the blade matched the broken knife recovered during the Devoux arrest, then detectives had another piece of significant evidence against the suspect. She wasn’t bothered by the seeming gaffe made by the crime scene team. It was, in fact, not unusual for evidence to be missed or left behind at a complicated and bloody crime scene. Spilled blood can hide a lot.

What gave Ballard pause was the cleaner. By coincidence, Ballard had met Roger Dillon earlier in the week, when he had discovered the burglary of the Warhol prints from the house on Hollywood Boulevard. She still had the business cards he had given her in her briefcase.

The log entry documented that Dillon had called about the broken blade at 7:45 on the same night Daisy Clayton disappeared. It meant that Dillon had been working in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard just a few hours before. Ballard had seen his work van earlier in the week and had gotten only a quick glimpse inside it, but she had seen inside others like it at other crime scenes. She knew Dillon had chemicals and tools for cleaning. And he would have containers for the safe transport and disposal of biologically hazardous materials.

All in a moment, Ballard knew. She had to look at Roger Dillon.

45

Ballard went to her locker to store the shake cards and the Haslam murder book. She then pulled out the fledgling murder book Bosch had started putting together on the Clayton case. She sat on a bench in the locker room and opened it up, immediately flipping to Bosch’s report on the plastic container manufactured by American Storage Products. He listed the sales supervisor he had talked to as Del Mittleberg. Ballard almost jumped up off the bench with joy when she saw that Bosch, thorough detective that he was, had listed both Mittleberg’s office and cell numbers.

It was after ten. She called the cell and it was answered with a suspicious hello.

“Mr. Mittleberg?”

“I’m not interested.”

“This is the police, don’t hang up.”

“The police?”

“Mr. Mittleberg, my name is Renée Ballard. I’m a detective with the Los Angeles Police. You recently talked with a colleague of mine named Bosch about containers made by American Storage Products. Do you remember?”

“That was a couple of months ago.”

“Correct. We are still working that case.”

“It’s ten-fifteen. What is so urgent that this couldn’t—”

“Mr. Mittleberg, I’m sorry, but it is urgent. You told Detective Bosch that your company made some direct sales of the containers to commercial accounts.”

“We do, yes.”

“Are you at home, Mr. Mittleberg?”

“Where else would I be?”

“Do you have a laptop or access to sales records involving those commercial accounts?”

There was a pause while Mittleberg considered the question. Ballard held her breath. The case had been full of long shots. It was about time one of them paid off. If Dillon operated a business that ran close to the line — she remembered he had commented about competition — then he might be just the kind of man to seek a direct-sale discount from a manufacturer.

“I have some access to records,” Mittleberg finally said.

“I have the name of a company,” Ballard said. “Can you see if they have ever been a customer of ASP?”

“Hold the line. I’m going to my home office.”

Ballard waited while Mittleberg got to his computer. She heard a partially muffled discussion as he told someone that he was talking to the police and he would be up as soon as he was finished.

“Okay,” he then said directly into the phone. “I’m at my computer. What’s the name of the company.”

“It’s called Chemi-Cal Bio Services,” Ballard said. “Chemi-Cal is broken into two—”

“No, nothing,” Mittleberg said.

“You spelled it with a dash?”

“Nothing beginning with C-H-E-M.”

Ballard felt deflated. She needed something more in order to go all in on Dillon. Then she remembered the truck she had seen on the day they met on Hollywood Boulevard.

“Okay, try just CCB Services, please,” she said urgently.

She heard typing and then Mittleberg responded.

“Yes,” he said. “A customer since 2008. They order soft plastics.”

Ballard stood up, holding the phone tight against her ear.

“What kind of soft plastics?” she asked.

“Storage containers. Different sizes.”

Ballard remembered Bosch giving her the ASP container he had bought. It was still in the trunk of her city ride.

“Including the twenty-five-gallon container with the snap-on top?”

There was a pause while Mittleberg checked the records.

“Yes,” he finally said. “He ordered those.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mittleberg,” Ballard said. “One of us will follow up with you during business hours.”

She disconnected and went back to her locker. She put the murder book back on the top shelf and opened her briefcase, retrieving one of the business cards Dillon had given her. His company had an address on Saticoy Street in Van Nuys.

When Ballard entered the watch office, Munroe was still looking up at the TV screen.

“Anything new?” she asked.

“Not much,” Munroe said. “But they did say the dead guys were persons of interest in an abduction case. It’s gotta be the Bosch thing. You hear from him?”

“Not yet. I’m heading out to do an interview on my hobby case. Might not be back for roll call.”

Ballard stared at the screen for a moment. It was the same reporter on another stand-up.

“If Bosch happens to show up here, can you give him this? He’ll know what it means.”

She handed him the card with Dillon’s name and business address on it. He looked at it disinterestedly and then put it into one of his shirt pockets.

“Will do,” Munroe said. “But stay in touch, Ballard, okay? Lemme know where you are.”

“You got it, L-T.”

“And if I need you on a call, the hobby case goes back on the shelf and you come running.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard doubled back to the detective bureau and grabbed a rover out of the charging station and the keys to the city ride. She left out the back door into the parking lot.

Ballard took Laurel Canyon Boulevard over the mountain and then down into the Valley. It was near midnight when she turned down Saticoy and into an industrial sector lined with warehouses and fleet lots near the Van Nuys Airport.

Chemi-Cal Bio Services was in a warehouse park called the Saticoy Industry Center, where manufacturing and service businesses were lined side by side in duplicate duplex warehouses. Ballard drove down the center lane and by Dillon’s business and then out the other side of the industrial park. It looked like none of the businesses were open this late at night. She found parking on a side street and walked back.

Dillon had only a small sign on his warehouse. It wasn’t the kind of business that drew customers who were either walking or driving by. His was the kind of service you found through internet searches or recommendations from professionals in the same arena — detectives, coroners, forensic specialists. The sign was on the door next to the side-by-side garage doors. The building was freestanding but literally no more than two feet away from the identical structures on either side of it.

Ballard knocked on the door, though she did not expect any sort of response. She stepped back and looked up and down the access lane, checking to see if her knock on the hollow metal had aroused any interest.

It had not.

Ballard stepped over to the thin channel between CCB and its neighbor to the north, a building with no sign or other identifiers on it. The alley, if it was big enough to be classified as such, was unlit. Ballard poked a flashlight into the space and saw it was strewn with debris but passable. At the far end, which Ballard guessed was eighty feet away, there was no gate or other obstacle.

Ballard tentatively stuck one foot into the slim opening. She kicked away a pile of old and dusty breathing masks that she could only imagine had come from CCB.

Another step in and then there was no longer anything tentative about her advance. She moved quickly down the passage, concrete block walls on either side of her, toward the opening ahead. Remembering the old movie gag about the walls closing in on the hero, she thought herself into a bout of vertigo and had to put a hand out on one of the walls for support and to keep her balance.

She stumbled out of the narrow opening and into a rear alley and bent over, hands on knees, and waited for the dizziness to pass. When it did, she straightened up and looked around. It was the cleanest alley she had ever seen. No debris, no junk, no impromptu storage of old vehicles or anything else. Each unit had its own neatly kept and closed trash bin that was secured inside a concrete corral. Ballard opened the bin behind CCB and found it empty except for a couple of crumpled to-go bags and several empty coffee cups. Ballard expected there to be bloody mop heads and other debris from cleaning crime scenes, but nothing like that was here.

There was a single rear door with just CCB painted on it. Ballard checked it but it was locked with a deadbolt. She knocked anyway to complete the due diligence but did not wait by the door for a reply she was confident wasn’t coming. Moving back into the narrow passage between the buildings, she shone the light up the walls to the slim slice of night sky. The roofline was about twenty feet up. Because the warehouse was windowless, she knew there was a strong possibility that there would be a skylight on the roof to allow in natural light as well as ventilation.

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.

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.

Ballard suddenly knew that it was the scent of fear. She had recognized it in herself before. She had heard of dogs trained to track it. Ballard knew she was in a place where someone had trembled and feared for her life.

Something on the floor next to the mattress caught her eye and Ballard leaned farther down to look. On closer examination, she realized it was a broken fingernail that had been painted pink.

The truck suddenly started shaking as a sharp metallic sound engulfed the warehouse. Ballard’s first thought was earthquake, but then she quickly identified it as one of the aluminum garage doors rolling up. Someone was about to enter.

She killed the flashlight, pulled her weapon, and thought about quickly climbing out of the truck. But that would put her out in the open and exposed. She held her place and listened. She heard the high idle of a truck engine but no movement. Then the engine revved and the vehicle entered the garage. After Ballard judged that it was in the bay next to her, the engine was killed.

Again, for several seconds there was only silence. Ballard didn’t even hear the sound of anyone getting out of the cab. And then the ratcheting sound of the garage door began again, this time as it was lowered.

Ballard listened intently, her ears her only tool at the moment.

She had to assume that the driver of the truck was Dillon. She listed three things in her mind that he could have noticed upon his arrival. The lights of the warehouse were on, one of the out-of-service truck’s back doors was standing open, and there was a missing skylight above. She had to assume that Dillon would notice all three and be aware that there had been a break-in. It remained to be seen if he thought the intruder had come and gone or was still in the warehouse. If he called 9-1-1, Ballard knew she would probably be arrested and her career would be over. If he chose not to call, then he would be confirming that he didn’t want police in the warehouse because of the things that had gone on in here. She flashed on the incinerator, its exhaust pipe coated black on the roof from use but its burning chamber spotlessly cleaned and vacuumed.

Ballard looked down at the thin mattress on the floor. She wondered if she would ever know who had been in this dark place and shivered under the thin blanket. Who had broken her nail trying to find an escape route. Her anger toward Dillon began to grow to the point of no return. To the killing place she knew she carried inside.

Ballard heard the door of the other truck open and its occupant climb out and drop to the concrete floor. Her only view out to the warehouse was through the open door at the back of the truck she was in, and that gave a tight angle of the space beyond. She waited and listened, trying to pick up Dillon’s footsteps and movements but hearing nothing.

Suddenly the back door of the truck she hid in was slammed shut, plunging Ballard into darkness. She heard the handle on the outside turn and the locking pins at the top and bottom of the door snap into place. She was locked in. She gripped her gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, but chose to stay in darkness, thinking it might keep her ears sharper.

“Okay, I know you’re in there. Who are you?”

Ballard froze. Though she had spoken to Dillon only once before, she knew it was his voice.

She said nothing in return.

“Looks like you broke my skylight pretty good. And that makes me mad because I don’t have the money for that.”

Ballard pulled her phone and checked the screen. She was basically in a metal box inside a concrete box and she had no service. And the rover she had taken from the station was sitting in the mobile charger in her car two blocks away.

Dillon started pounding on the door, a sharp metal-on-metal sound.

“Come on, talk to me. Maybe you agree to pay the damages and I don’t call the cops. How about that?”

Ballard knew that there was no way he was going to call the police. Not with what she had found in the truck. She needed to put that in her favor. She started to make her way toward the truck’s back doors. She had the gun. Most burglars don’t carry firearms, because it increases prison time if they are caught. Dillon would not anticipate her having one.

She startled when he hit the door again.

“You hear that? I’ve got a gun and I’m not fucking around. You need to tell me you are ready to come out with your hands where I can see them!”

That changed things. Ballard stopped moving forward and slowly crouched down to the floor in case Dillon started shooting through the thin steel skin of the truck. She held her weapon in a two-handed grip and was ready to approximate the origin of shots and fire back.

“Okay, fuck it. I’m opening the door and I’m just going to start shooting. It’ll be self-defense. I know lots of cops and they’ll believe me. You’ll be dead and I’ll—”

There was a loud bang on the back door of the truck — this one not metal-on-metal — and Dillon didn’t finish the threat. This was followed by the sound of metal clattering on the concrete. Ballard assumed that it was Dillon’s gun skittering across the floor. She knew at this point that there was a second person out there.

The handle on the truck’s back door was turned and the upper and lower locks released. The door opened, flooding the inside of the box with light. Ballard kept in a low crouch, using the trash can and mops as a blind. She raised her weapon to ready position.

“Renée, you in there? It’s all clear.”

It was Bosch.