Dark Sacred Night

25

After spending the day with Aaron Hayes and Lola, Ballard headed downtown for a preshift dinner with Heather Rourke, the helicopter spotter, at the Denny’s outside the entrance to Piper Tech, on whose roof the LAPD air unit was located.

It had become a routine for Ballard and Rourke to meet once or twice a month before their respective shifts. A connection had grown between them. They both worked graveyard and more often than not Rourke was Ballard’s partner in the sky, running as both lookout and backup. Their first meal together had been offered by Ballard as a thank-you after Rourke had spotted a hooded man waiting in ambush for Ballard when she responded to a burglary call. The suspect turned out to have been previously arrested by Ballard for an attempted rape. He was out on bail, awaiting trial, and had made the phony burglary call hoping that it would be Ballard who responded.

Rourke had picked up a heat signature on the air unit’s camera screen and radioed a warning down to Ballard. The hooded man was arrested after a short foot chase. Rourke was able to direct Ballard back to a duffel bag the man had thrown while running. It contained a complete rape package — duct tape, handcuffs, and snap ties. After this latest arrest, the man was deemed a danger to the community and denied bail.

When Ballard and Rourke got together, they mostly gossiped about the department. Ballard had early on told Rourke about her fall from grace at Robbery-Homicide Division, but in subsequent meetings she listened more than she talked because she largely worked alone and mostly encountered the same group of officers on the Hollywood late show. It was a closed environment that produced little in the way of new department intel from dinner to dinner. Rourke on the other hand was part of a large unit that supported eighteen helicopters — the largest police air force in the country. Veteran officers gravitated to the unit because the hours were steady and it included a hazard bump on the salary scale. She heard a lot in the break room from officers with connections all over the department and was happy to keep Ballard up to speed. It was a sisterhood of two.

Ballard always ordered breakfast there because it seemed like a meal that was impossible to mess up. Denny’s was their choice because it was more convenient to Rourke and was part of Ballard’s ongoing thank-you for the warning about the hooded man. Also, both women were fans of the movie Drive and it was at this location that the film’s female lead worked as a waitress.

Now Ballard told Rourke about her involvement in the investigation of the nine-year-old murder of Daisy Clayton and her meeting Harry Bosch. Rourke had never met him or heard of him.

“It’s weird,” Ballard said. “I like working with him and think I can learn a few things. But at the end of the day, I don’t think I can trust him. It’s like he’s not telling me everything he knows.”

“You gotta be careful of those guys,” Rourke said. “On the job and off.”

Rourke was in her green flight suit, which went well with her red-brown hair, kept short like most of the other female coppers Ballard knew. She was petite and no more than a hundred pounds, which must have been a plus in an air unit where weight was a factor in lift and fuel consumption.

Rourke was more interested in hearing about Ballard’s other cases, and the ground-side story of the incidents she had been involved in from above, so Ballard told her about the dead woman whose cat ate her face and the young Peeping Toms on the roof of the strip bar.

When it was time to go, Ballard picked up the check, and Rourke said the next one was hers.

“Call me if you need me,” Rourke said, her usual goodbye.

“Fly like an eagle,” Ballard answered with hers.

Once in her van, Ballard’s goodbye to Rourke reminded her of the man called Eagle who had gotten baptized on the same night as Daisy Clayton. She had forgotten to follow up on him and planned to do it as soon as she returned to Hollywood Station and could access the moniker files in the department’s database.

She checked her phone to see if she had gotten a call from Bosch during dinner. There were no messages and she wondered if he would turn up tonight. She headed up the 101 to the Sunset exit and got to Hollywood Station two hours before the start of her shift. She had wanted to get there before PM watch went off duty. She needed to talk to Lieutenant Gabriel Mason, who worked PM watch and who had been a sergeant nine years ago and assigned as Hollywood Division liaison to the department’s GRASP program.

Since Hollywood was busiest during PM watch, which roughly ran from three p.m. to midnight, there were two lieutenants assigned to supervise the shift. Mason was one of the two and Hannah Chavez was the other. Ballard did not know Mason that well, because her limited experience with PM watch had been with Chavez. She decided that the straight-on approach would be best.

She found him in the break room, with deployment calendars spread out on a table. He was a bookish-looking administrator with glasses and black hair parted sharply on the left side. His uniform looked crisp and new.

“Lieutenant?” Ballard said.

He looked up, annoyed with the interruption, but then his scowl disappeared when he saw Ballard.

“Ballard, you’re in early,” he said. “Thanks for responding.”

Ballard shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yeah, I put a message in your box,” Mason said. “You get it?”

“No, but what’s up? I was actually going to ask you something.”

“I need you to do a welfare check.”

“During graveyard?”

“I know it’s unusual, but there’s something hinky going on with this one. Comes from the tenth floor. A missing guy, hasn’t responded to phone calls or social media in a week. We’ve gone by a few times today and his roommate says he’s out every time. Not much we can do, but I figure if you knock on the door in the middle of the night, the guy’s going to be home or not. And if not, then we go to the next step.”

The reference to the tenth floor meant the OCP — Office of the Chief of Police — on the tenth floor of the Police Administration Building.

“So, who’s the guy?” Ballard asked.

“I Googled him,” Mason said. “Looks like his father’s friends with the mayor. A high-dollar donor. So we can’t let it drop. If he’s still not home tonight, send a report to Captain Whittle and he’ll report to the OCP about it. And we’ll be done with it or not.”

“Okay. You have the name and address?”

“It’s all in your box. And I’ll put it on the activity report for your lieutenant.”

“Got it.”

“Now, you wanted to see me about something?”

He pointed to the chair across the table from him and Ballard sat down.

“I’m working a cold case from ’09,” she said. “Teenage runaway working the streets was found dumped in an alley off Cahuenga. Her name was Daisy Clayton.”

Mason thought for a moment and then shook his head.

“Not ringing any bells,” he said.

“I wasn’t expecting it to,” Ballard said. “But I asked around. Back then you were the division liaison for the GRASP program.”

“Jesus, don’t remind me. What a nightmare that was.”

“Well, I know the department dumped the program when the new chief came in, but what I’m wondering about is what happened to all the Hollywood crime data.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m trying to get a handle on this girl’s murder and I thought it would be good if I could get a look at everything that was happening in the division that night or that week. As you can tell, we don’t have a lot, so I’m grasping at straws a bit.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Just a figure of speech. So do you know where all the data went when the GRASP program ended?”

“Yeah, it went down the digital toilet. It was purged when the new administration wanted to go another way.”

Ballard frowned and nodded. It was a dead end.

“Officially, at least,” Mason said.

Ballard looked at him. What was he saying?

“I was the guy who had to collate and send all the data downtown. There was a guy we called the ‘GRASP guru.’ He wasn’t a sworn officer. He was this computer genius from USC who came up with the whole thing and sold it to the chief. All the data went to him and he did all the modeling.”

Ballard started to get excited. She knew that guys like the one Mason was describing were proprietary about their work and accomplishments. The order may have come down to end the program and spike the data, but there was a chance the civilian whose baby it was had kept records of the program.

“Do you remember his name?” she asked.

“Yeah, I should. I worked with him every day for two years,” Mason said. “Professor Scott Calder. Don’t know if he’s still there but at the time he was on sabbatical from the Computer Science school.”

“Thanks, L-T. I’ll find him.”

“Hope it helps. Don’t forget about that welfare check.”

“I’m going to my box now.”

Ballard got up but then sat back down and looked at Mason. She was going to risk turning what could be the start of a solid relationship with a supervisor into something fraught.

“Something else?” Mason asked.

“Yes, L-T,” Ballard began. “Last night I was working during PMs and busted a guy on a burglary. I was working solo and I called for backup. It never came. The guy made a move on me and I put him down but he wouldn’t have had the chance if I’d had the backup.”

“I was the one who took your call when you used the private line to ask where the troops were.”

“I thought so. Did you find out what happened?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t. I got caught up in some stuff. All I know was there was no call on the board. There must have been a fuckup between the com center and the watch office. We never were copied. I heard no backup call go out.”

Ballard looked at him for a long moment.

“So you’re saying the problem wasn’t at Hollywood Station. It was at the com center.”

“Near as I can tell.”

Mason sat silently. He did not offer to follow up. He wasn’t going to rock any boats. It was clear that it was Ballard’s decision whether to pursue it.

“Okay, thanks, Lieutenant,” she said.

Ballard got up and left the room.

26

Ballard used her password to enter the department database and then began a search of the man who signed “Eagle” to his photo at the Moonlight Mission. The database contained a moniker file, which carried thousands of nicknames and aliases amassed from crime reports, arrest records, and field interviews.

“Eagle” turned out to be a popular moniker. She got 241 initial hits. She was then able to chop this down to sixty-eight by limiting her search to white males thirty-plus years old. She had the nine-year-old photo she had borrowed from the mission to guide her. The man depicted looked to be mid- to late twenties and that would put him over thirty now. She refined the search further by eliminating possibles who were over forty.

She was left with sixteen names and set to work pulling up reports and photos of the men. She quickly eliminated men who looked nothing like the man in the photo provided by John the Baptist. She hit pay dirt with the eleventh man she looked at. His name was Dennis Eagleton and he was thirty-seven years old. Mug shots from multiple arrests between 2008 and 2013 matched the face of the man in the photo from the mission.

She pulled up and started printing all reports in the database regarding Eagleton. He had a record of numerous arrests for drugs and loitering and only one incident of violence, an aggravated assault charge in 2010 that was knocked down to simple battery. Ballard even found a digitized field interview report written by Tim Farmer in 2014 — his last full year on the job. The summary section included Farmer’s unique take on the Hollywood streets and this particular denizen.

Ballard read Farmer’s take twice. It was written five years after Daisy Clayton’s murder. Could the pulsing, waiting violence that Farmer saw in Eagleton have already been let loose in 2009? Rather than seeing the future, had Farmer also seen the past?

Ballad spent the next half hour trying to locate Eagleton, but she found nothing. No driver’s license, no recent arrests. The last known record of him had been the FI card Farmer had filled out. He had stopped Eagleton and questioned him when he was seen loitering around the Metro entrance on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine. In the blank marked “Occupation” Farmer had written “panhandler.” There were now no indications as to whether Eagleton was alive or dead, only that he had gone completely off the electronic grid.

It was now after midnight and time to conduct the welfare check Lieutenant Mason had assigned Ballard. She used a BOLO template to put together a wanted-for-questioning sheet on Eagleton that would be distributed at all roll calls. After including screen grabs of his three most recent mug shots, she sent the package to the printer and signed off the computer. She was ready to go.

Her first stop was the watch office to drop off the BOLO sheet with Lieutenant Munroe and to tell him she was leaving the station to handle the welfare check. Munroe said the officers assigned to patrol in the neighborhood in question were finishing up a minor call but he would send them to her location as soon as they were clear.

The missing man was named Jacob Cady. His home was in a four-story condominium building on Willoughby just a block from the West Hollywood border. Ballard pulled over against a red curb and looked around for her backup. She saw nothing and used her rover to check with Munroe, who said the patrol unit had not cleared their call.

Ballad decided to give it ten minutes before she went in alone. She pulled her phone and checked her texts. There had been no response from Bosch to her message about John the Baptist and none to a text she had sent earlier to Aaron Hayes to check on his well-being. She didn’t think she should text him again, for fear she might wake him up.

She checked her email next and saw that the blind email she had sent to Scott Calder with the standard USC address had already been answered. She opened it to find that she had reached the correct Calder and that he would be happy to meet early the next morning in his office to discuss the LAPD’s defunct GRASP program. He gave his office location in the Viterbi building on McClintock Avenue and said he had an opening in his schedule at eight a.m.

After ten minutes, there was still no sign of a backup unit. Ballard decided to check out Jacob Cady’s online profile. In a just a few minutes she was able to determine that he was the twenty-nine-year-old son of a City Hall player of the same name who held several city maintenance contracts. The son apparently didn’t want any part of the father’s business and described himself on Facebook as a party planner. The photos on Facebook revealed a jet-set lifestyle for the young Cady. It looked like he favored Mexican resorts and the company of men. He was tan and trim with feathered blond hair. He liked form-fitting clothing and Tito’s vodka.

Twenty minutes after arrival, Ballard got out with her rover and headed toward the entrance to the condo building. She radioed the watch office and reported that she was going in solo.

The documents left in her mailbox by Lieutenant Mason said that Cady owned the two-bedroom condo and rented space in it to a roommate named Talisman Prada. On the two prior welfare checks by patrol officers, Prada had answered the door and said that Cady had met a man in a bar two nights before and gone home with him. But this did not explain why Cady was no longer answering texts, email, or phone calls. Or why his car was parked in a reserved spot in the condominium’s underground garage.

Ballard pressed the buzzer at the gate three separate times before a sleepy voice answered.

“Mr. Cady?”

“No, he’s not here.”

The connection was ended. Ballard buzzed again.

“What?”

“Mr. Prada?”

“Who’s this?”

“The police. Will you open the gate?”

“I told you, Jacob is not here. You woke me up.”

“Again, Mr. Prada, this is the police. Open the gate.”

There was a long beat of silence before the gate buzzed, and Ballard pulled it open. She checked the street for the backup unit and saw nothing. She looked around the entry area. There was a rack of mailboxes with a shelf below it where some unclaimed newspapers were left. Ballard grabbed one and used it to prop open the gate for the backup officers, if they ever arrived. She entered and, while waiting for the elevator, used the rover to check on them. This time Munroe said the car was on the way.

Ballard took the elevator to the third floor. Down the hallway to the right she saw a man standing in front of the open door to a unit. He was wearing silk sleeping pants and no shirt. He was small but muscular with jet-black hair.

Ballard headed toward him.

“Mr. Prada?” she asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “Can we get this over with? I’d like to get back to sleep.”

“Sorry for the bother, but there’s still no word from Jacob Cady. It’s been forty-eight hours since we got the report and this is now a criminal investigation.”

“Criminal? What is criminal about a guy shacking up with somebody?”

“We don’t think that’s what’s going on. Can you step into the apartment so I can enter?”

Prada walked back inside and Ballard entered after him. She assessed him as she walked in. He was no more than five five and 125 pounds. It was clear he had no weapon on him. She left the door open and Prada noticed.

“Do you want to close that, please?” he asked.

“No, let’s leave it open,” Ballard said. “A couple uniform officers are coming.”

“Whatever. Look around. He’s not here. Just hurry, please.”

“Thank you.”

Ballard stepped into the living room and did a 180 sweep. The condo was nicely decorated in a modern style. Gray-washed wood floors, armless sofa and chairs, glass coffee table. Everything carefully coordinated like a picture in a magazine. The adjacent dining room featured a square table with stainless-steel legs and matching chairs. The wall beyond was hung with a 10 x 6 painting consisting of black slashes on a field of white.

Prada spread his arms to prove the point that Cady was not there.

“Satisfied?”

“Why don’t you show me the bedrooms?” Ballard said.

“I mean, don’t you have to have a warrant to conduct a search?”

“Not on a welfare check. If Mr. Cady is hurt or needs help, we need to find him.”

“Well, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Can I see the bedrooms?”

Prada showed her through the home, and as she expected, there was no sign of Jacob Cady. She pulled her mini-light out of a pocket and used it to check the closet in the bedroom Prada said was Cady’s. It was full of clothing, and there was an empty suitcase on a shelf. Stepping back out she noticed that the bed was crisply made and unslept in.

Prada’s bedroom was more lived in, with the bed unmade and clothes hanging over a chair in front of a makeup table Ballard would’ve expected to see in a woman’s room. The closet door was open and clothes were piled on the floor inside.

“Not all of us are as neat as Jacob,” Prada said.

Ballard heard voices from the living room and turned toward the door.

“Coming out,” Ballard called down the hallway.

Ballard and Prada returned to the living room and were met by Officers Herrera and Dyson. Ballard gave a nod.

“Glad you could make it,” she said.

Prada spoke impatiently before either officer could respond.

“Are we finished now?” he asked. “I’d like to get some sleep. I have appointments tomorrow.”

“Not quite,” Ballard said. “I have to fill out full reports this time. Can I see your driver’s license or passport, please?”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Yes, sir, it is. I’m sure you want to keep cooperating. It’s the quickest way to get us out of here.”

Prada disappeared back down the short hallway toward his bedroom. Ballard nodded to Herrera to follow and watch.

Ballard assessed the living room again. It had been carefully composed but something didn’t seem right. She realized that the area rug was too small for the space and the furniture and that its abstract design of overlapping gray, black, and brown squares clashed with the striped pattern of the upholstery. She checked the adjacent dining room and noticed for the first time that there was no rug under the square table with stainless steel legs.

“What are you thinking here?” Dyson whispered.

“Something’s not right,” Ballard whispered back.

Prada and Herrera returned to the living room and Herrera handed Ballard a driver’s license.

“I want you to know that my lawyer has filed the paperwork to officially change my name,” Prada said. “I was not lying. I’m a DJ and I need a better name.”

Ballard looked at the license. It had been issued in New Jersey, and the photo matched Prada but the name on it was Tyler Tyldus. Ballard put the flashlight down on the coffee table next to a small sculpture of a woman’s torso. She pulled a small notebook and pen from her pocket and wrote down the information from the license.

“What’s wrong with Tyler Tyldus?” she asked as she wrote.

“No imagination,” Prada said.

Ballard checked the date of birth and saw that he had been lying about his age as well. The documents left for her had him at twenty-six years old. The DL said he was twenty-two.

“What are your appointments tomorrow, Mr. Prada?” she asked.

“Personal business,” Prada said. “Nothing that concerns the police.”

Ballard nodded. She finished writing and handed the license to Prada. She then handed him one of her business cards.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “If you hear from Mr. Cady, please call me at that number and ask Mr. Cady to call me as well.”

“Of course,” Prada said, his voice friendlier now that he saw the end of the intrusion in sight.

“You can go back to sleep now,” Ballard said.

“Thank you,” Prada said.

As she waited for Herrera and Dyson to head to the door, Ballard looked down at the area rug. It was too small for the space it was in. She also saw what first looked like an imperfection in the design, a place where the material had knotted in manufacture. But then she realized it was just an indentation. The rug had been switched from the dining room so recently that the depression left by one of the legs of the table remained apparent.

Prada followed them to the door and closed it behind them. Ballard heard him turn a deadbolt.

The three women were silent until they got in the elevator and closed the door.

“So?” Dyson said.

Ballard was still holding her notebook. She tore the page out with the info on Tyler Tyldus and handed it to Herrera.

“Run that name and see what comes up,” she said. “I’m going to call a judge. I want to see what’s under that rug in there.”

“Couldn’t you just look?” Herrera asked. “Exigent circumstances.”

Ballard shook her head. Using exigent circumstances was a tricky thing and you didn’t want it to come back and bite you on a case.

“EC refers to the missing man and possible danger to him,” Ballard said. “You don’t look under a rug for a missing man. You look under a rug for evidence. I’m going to call a judge, and that way there are no issues down the road.”

“Is there a car we should be looking for?” Herrera asked.

“Patrol supposedly looked at it on the first welfare check,” Ballard said. “Opened the trunk too. It’s in the garage underneath. But I’ll include it in the warrant and we’ll check it again.”

“You think you have enough for a warrant?” Dyson asked.

Ballard shrugged.

“If I don’t, I left my flashlight up there,” she said. “I’ll go back and wake him up.

27

Superior Court Judge Carolyn Wickwire was Ballard’s go-to. She wasn’t always the night-call judge but she liked Ballard and had given her a cell number, telling her she could always call day or night. Wickwire had been a cop, then a prosecutor, and was now a judge in a long career inside the justice system. Ballard guessed that she had persevered through her own share of misogyny and discrimination every step of the way. Though Ballard had never mentioned the obstacles she herself had encountered and overcome, some were known in the law enforcement community, and she believed Judge Wickwire was aware of them and empathized. There was a kinship there and Ballard wasn’t above using it if it helped move things along on a case. She called Wickwire from the building’s entry vestibule and woke her up.

“Judge Wickwire, I’m sorry to wake you. It’s Detective Ballard, LAPD.”

“Oh, Renée, it’s been a while. Are you all right?”

“Yes, it has, and I’m fine. But I need to get a telephonic search warrant approved.”

“Okay, okay. Just hold on a minute. Let me get my glasses and wake up a bit.”

Ballard was put on hold. While she waited, Herrera came over, having just run Prada’s name through the MDT terminal in her patrol car.

“Can you talk?”

“While I’m on hold. Anything?”

“Just some TVs back in New Jersey and New York. Nothing serious.”

Traffic violations. Ballard knew they would not help her get a search warrant approval from the judge.

“Okay,” she said. “I still need you to stick around if I get this. Can you find out if there’s an on-site manager?”

“Roger that,” Herrera said.

She headed off just as Wickwire came back on the line.

“Now, what do we have here, Renée?”

“This is a missing persons case but I think there’s foul play involved and need to get into the missing man’s condominium and the common areas of the building. It’s complicated because a person of interest in the disappearance is the missing man’s roommate.”

“Are they a couple or just roommates?”

“Just roommates. Separate bedrooms.”

“Okay. Tell me what you got.”

Ballard recounted her investigation, putting the facts in an order that would intrigue the judge and build toward a conclusion of probable cause. She said Jacob Cady had now been missing for forty-eight hours and was not responding to any communication, ranging from his cell phone to his business website. She told the judge that the man living in Cady’s condo had given a false name but left out Prada’s explanation that he was in the process of legally changing it. She said Prada had expressed a reluctance to cooperate, leaving out that he had been awakened by her at one a.m.

Lastly, she mentioned the rug and her suspicion that it had been moved to cover up something.

When she was finished, Wickwire was silent as she digested Ballard’s verbal probable cause statement. Finally, she spoke.

“Renée, I don’t think you have it,” she said. “You have some interesting facts and suspicions but no evidence of foul play here.”

“Well, I’m trying to get that, Judge,” Ballard said. “I want to find out why the rug was moved.”

“But you have the cart before the horse here. You know I like to help you when I can, but this is too thin.”

“What would you need? The guy’s not texting or tweeting, he’s not driving his car, he’s not handling his business. It looks like he left all his clothes behind. Something’s clearly happened.”

“I’m not arguing that. But you have no indication of what happened. This guy could be on a nude beach down in Baja where he doesn’t need a change of clothes. He could be in love. He could be in a lot of things. The point is, there’s a person living in his domicile and you do not have the right to search that domicile without probable cause.”

“Okay, Judge, thank you. I’m probably going to call you back after I get what you need.”

She disconnected the call. Dyson was standing there.

“No on-site management,” she said.

“Okay,” Ballard said. “See if you and Herrera can get down into the garage and take a look around.”

“Did you get the warrant?”

“No. I’m going up for my flashlight. If you don’t hear from me in about ten, come on up.”

“Roger that.”

Ballard took the elevator back to three and knocked on Jacob Cady’s door. After a few moments she heard movement inside and then Prada’s voice through the door.

“Oh my god! What?”

“Mr. Prada, can you open the door?”

“What do you want now?”

“Can you open the door so we don’t have to talk so loudly? People are sleeping.”

The door was flung open. The anger was clear on Prada’s face.

“I know people are sleeping. I want to be one of them. What is it now?”

“I’m sorry. I left my flashlight. I think it might be in Jacob’s closet. Could you get it?”

“Jesus Christ!”

Prada turned and headed toward the hallway that led to both of the condo’s bedrooms. Ballard noticed that Prada had now put on a T-shirt with a pink silhouette of a whale on it.

The moment Prada was out of sight, Ballard moved into the living room and went to the coffee table. She grabbed her flashlight from where it was partially hidden by the torso sculpture and pocketed it. She then stepped back and lifted a cushioned chair off the corner of the area rug. She put the chair down quietly on the wood floor, then stooped and flipped the corner of the rug back as far as was possible, laying it over the coffee table.

Ballard squatted down and looked at the floor. The gray-washed wood had been bleached of its stain in a pattern of semi-circular swipes. Someone had scrubbed this area of the floor with a powerful cleanser. Ballard noted the seams between the planking. It was a tongue and groove floor, meaning that there was a good chance that residue from whatever had been cleaned up could have seeped down into the subflooring.

Ballard felt the heavy footfalls of Prada approaching. She flipped the carpet back down, then stood and quickly swung the chair back into place just as he entered the room.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not there.”

“Are you sure?” Ballard said. “I know I had it in that closet.”

“I’m sure. I looked. You can look if you want to.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Ballard pulled the rover off her belt and keyed it twice before speaking into it.

“Six-Adam-Fourteen, did one of you pick up my flashlight in the apartment?”

Prada threw his hands up in dismay.

“Couldn’t you have asked them first before waking me up again?” he said.

Ballard kept her hand depressed on the rover so that she was still transmitting.

“Calm down, Mr. Prada,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask you one last question and then I’ll get out of your hair?”

“Whatever,” Prada said. “Just ask it and go.”

“What happened to the living room rug?”

“What?”

Ballard had seen the tell when she asked the question. A moment of surprise in his eyes. It was Prada who had moved the rug.

“You heard me,” she said. “What happened to the rug?”

“The rug is right there,” Prada said, like he was talking to an imbecile.

“No, that’s the dining room rug. See, it still has the marks from the legs of the table. You moved it in here because you got rid of the rug that was in this spot. What happened to it? Why’d you have to get rid of it?”

“Look, I’ve had enough of this. You can ask Jacob all about the rugs when he comes back and you see that there’s nothing wrong.”

“He’s not coming back. We both know that. Tell me what happened, Tyler.”

“That’s not my name. My name is—”

Prada suddenly charged across the room at Ballard, raising his hands like claws as he aimed for her throat. But Ballard was ready, knowing her words might push him toward extreme measures. She turned and pivoted, sidestepping the rush like a bullfighter while bringing her hand holding the rover up and behind his back. She drove the heel of the radio into his spine and tripped him with her leg. Prada went down face-first into the corner of the room. Ballard dropped the radio and pulled her sidearm. She planted a foot on his back and pointed her weapon at his head.

“You try to get up and I’m going to put a hole in your spine. You’ll never walk again.”

Ballard felt him tense and test the pressure of her foot. But then he relaxed and gave up.

“Smart boy,” she said.

As she was cuffing him and reciting the rights advisory, she heard the elevator door open and then running steps as Herrera and Dyson rushed down the hall.

Soon they were in the condo and by Ballard’s side.

“Get him up and put him in a chair,” Ballard ordered. “I’m going to have to call homicide.”

The two officers moved in and grabbed Prada by the arms.

“He was going to kill me,” Prada suddenly announced. “He wanted my business, everything I’ve worked for. I fought him. He fell and hit is head. I didn’t want him to die.”

“And that’s why you rolled him up in a rug and dumped his body somewhere?” Ballard asked.

“No one would have believed me. You don’t believe me now.”

“Did you understand the rights I recited to you?”

“He was going to cut me into pieces.”

“Stop talking and answer the question. Do you understand the rights I just recited? Do you want me to say them again?”

“I understand, I understand.”

“Okay. Where’s Jacob Cady’s body?”

Prada shook his head.

“You’ll never find it,” he said. “I put it in a dumpster. It’s wherever the trash goes. And it’s what he deserves.”

She stepped out into the hallway to call Lieutenant McAdam, the head of the Hollywood Division detective bureau and Ballard’s real boss, even though she rarely saw him. She had to directly inform him of any case of this magnitude. She took a guilty pleasure in waking him up. He was a strict nine-to-fiver.

“Hey, boss, it’s Ballard,” she said. “We’ve got a homicide.”

28

When Ballard returned to the detective bureau after handing off the Jacob Cady case to a West Bureau homicide team, she found Harry Bosch ensconced at the desk he had used the night before, going through a box of field interview cards.

“Don’t you sleep, Bosch?” she said.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Ballard saw the coffee cup on the desk. He had helped himself in the break room.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Not long,” Bosch said. “I was out looking for somebody all night.”

“Find him?”

“Her, and no, not yet. What have you been up to?”

“Working a homicide. And now I have to do the paperwork, so I won’t be looking at any shake cards today.”

“No problem. I’m making progress.”

He held up the handful of cards he had put to the side for closer study later. She was about to say that there was a problem in him coming into the station and working the case alone, but she let it go. She pulled out a seat and sat down at a desk in the same pod as Bosch.

After logging into the computer, Ballard started writing an incident report that she would send to the team that took over the Cady case.

“What was the case?” Bosch asked. “The homicide.”

“It’s a no-body case,” she said. “So far, at least. Started as a missing persons and that’s why I was called in. Got a guy who admits killing the man, cutting up the body, and putting it all in a dumpster. Oh, and he says it was self-defense.”

“Of course, he does.”

“We checked with the building manager — the dumpster got picked up yesterday, so they’ll be going out to the landfill today as soon as they figure out who the trash hauler was and which dump they use. One of the few times I’m glad I don’t get to see a case all the way through. The two guys that caught it were not too happy.”

“I had a no-body case once. Same thing. We had to go to the dump but we were a week behind it. So we spent about two weeks out there. And we found a body but it was the wrong one. Only in L.A., I guess.”

“You mean you found a murder victim but not the one you were looking for?”

“Yeah. We never found the one we were looking for. We went out there on a tip anyway. So maybe it never happened. The one we found was a mob case and we eventually cleared it. But those two weeks out there, I didn’t get the smell out of my nose for months. And forget about the clothes. I threw everything away.”

“I’ve heard it can be pretty ripe at those places.”

She went back to work, but less than five minutes went by before Bosch interrupted again.

“Did you ever get a chance to check on the GRASP files?” he asked.

“Matter of fact, I did,” Ballard said. “Supposedly they were all purged, but I got a line on the USC professor who designed the program and helped implement it. I’m hoping he kept the data. I have an appointment at eight with him, if you’re interested.”

“I’m interested. I’ll buy you breakfast on the way.”

“I won’t have time for breakfast if I don’t get the paperwork filed.”

“Got it. I’ll shut up.”

Ballard smiled as she went back to work on the report. She was in the summary section, where she was typing out Tyldus’s self-serving statements — he was being booked under his current legal name — after he was arrested and realized that he needed to try to talk his way out of a murder. His fervent plea of self-defense lost credibility when the forensics team called to the apartment pulled up the bathtub drain trap and found blood and tissue. Then Tyldus admitted cutting the body up and bagging the parts in plastic trash bags — an extreme measure for a self-defense killing.

It made Ballard feel bad for Cady’s parents and family. In the next hours and days they would learn that their son was presumed dead, dismembered, and buried somewhere amid the garbage at a landfill. And Bosch’s story about an unsuccessful search for a body in a landfill concerned her. It was critical that they find Cady’s body so that injuries aside from dismemberment could be analyzed in concert with the details provided by Tyldus. If the injuries on the body told a different story, it would be Jacob’s way of helping to convict his killer.

Despite what Ballard had said about being glad she was not seeing the case through to the end, she intended to volunteer to help look for Jacob. She felt the need to be there.

Ballard’s shift ended at seven but she got her reports emailed to the West Bureau detectives an hour before that and she and Bosch headed downtown early. They ate breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car, an expensive LAPD tradition across the street from the Rampart Division station. They didn’t talk much about the current case. Instead, they filled each other in on their histories in the LAPD. Bosch had bounced around a lot in the early years before spending several years in Hollywood homicide and finishing his career at RHD. He also revealed that he had a daughter who went to college down in Orange County.

Mention of the daughter prompted Bosch to pull out his phone.

“You’re not going to text her now, are you?” Ballard asked. “No college kid is awake this early.”

“No, just checking her location,” Bosch said. “Seeing if she’s at home. She’s twenty-one now and I thought that would lessen the worry, but it’s only made it worse.”

“Does she know you can track her?”

“Yeah, we made a deal. I can track her and she can track me. I think she worries about me as much as I worry about her.”

“That’s nice, but you know that she can just leave her phone in her room and you’d think she was there.”

Bosch looked up from the phone to Ballard.

“Really?” he said. “You had to plant that seed in my head?”

“Sorry,” Ballard said. “Just saying if I was a college kid and my dad could track my phone, I don’t think I’d carry it all the time.”

Bosch put his phone away and changed the subject.

As promised, Bosch picked up the tab, and they headed south toward USC. Along the way, Ballard told Bosch about Dennis Eagleton and his being picked up by the Moonlight Mission bus on the same night as Daisy Clayton. She said there wasn’t much of a tie between the two beyond that, but Eagleton was a dirtbag criminal and she wanted to interview him if he could be located.

“Tim Farmer talked to him,” she said. “He wrote a shake in 2014, said ‘Eagle’ was filled with hate and violence.”

“But no real record of violence?” Bosch asked.

“Just the one assault that got pled down. The dirtbag only did a month in county for splitting a guy’s head open with a bottle.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded as if the story about Eagleton’s light punishment was par for the course.

By eight a.m. they were at the office door of Professor Scott Calder at the University of Southern California. Calder was in his late thirties, which told Ballard he had been in his twenties when he designed the crime tracking program adopted by the police department.

“Professor Calder?” Ballard said. “I’m Detective Ballard. We spoke on the phone. And this is my colleague Detective Bosch.”

“Come in, please,” Calder said.

Calder offered his visitors seats in front of his desk and then sat down himself. He was casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt with USC in gold over the left breast. He had a shaved head and a long beard in the steampunk style. Ballard guessed that he thought it helped him fit in better with the students on campus.

“LAPD should never have disbanded GRASP,” he said. “It would have been paying dividends right now if they had kept it in place.”

Neither Ballard nor Bosch jumped to agree with him and Calder began a brief summary of how the program arose from his studies of crime patterns in and around USC after a spate of assaults and robberies of students just blocks from campus. After collecting data, Calder used statistics to project the frequency and locations of future crimes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university. The LAPD got wind of the project and the police chief asked Calder to take his computer modeling to the city, starting with three test areas: Hollywood Division because of the transient nature of its inhabitants and the variety of crimes that occurred there; Pacific Division because of the unique nature of crimes in Venice; and Southwest Division because it included USC. A city grant financed the project, and Calder and several of his students went to work collecting the data after a training period with officers in the three divisions. The project lasted two and a half years, until the chief’s five-year term was up. The police commission did not retain Calder afterward. A new chief was named and he killed the program, announcing a return to good old-fashioned community policing.

“It was a shame,” Calder said. “We were just starting to get our successes. GRASP would have worked if given the chance.”

“It sounds like it,” Ballard said.

She could not think of any other words of sympathy, as she had her own beliefs about the predictability of crime.

Bosch said nothing.

“Well, we appreciate the historical perspective on the program,” Ballard continued. “What we’re here for is to ask if you kept any of the data from it. We’re investigating an unsolved murder from ’09, which was the second year of GRASP. So it was up and running and collecting data. We thought it would be helpful if we had sort of a snapshot of the entire crime picture in Hollywood on that night, maybe the whole week of the murder.”

Calder was silent for a moment as he considered Ballard’s question. Then he spoke carefully.

“You know that the new chief purged all the data when he killed the program, right?” he said. “He said he didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. You believe that?”

The bitter tone that had come into Calder’s voice revealed the anger he had stored for nearly a decade.

“That seems a bit contradictory to the department’s keeping all kinds of other records,” Ballard offered, hoping to separate the current investigation from political decisions she had nothing to do with.

“It was stupid,” Bosch said. “The whole decision was stupid.”

Ballard realized that Bosch was the way to win Calder’s cooperation. He answered to nobody. He could say whatever he wanted and especially what Calder wanted to hear.

“I was told by the police department that I had to purge my own data storage on the project,” Calder said.

“But it was your baby,” Bosch said. “I’m guessing you didn’t purge it all, and if I’m right, you might be able to help us solve a murder. That would be a nice little fuck-you to the chief, right?”

Ballard had to hold back a smile. She could tell that Bosch was playing this perfectly. If Calder had anything, he was going to give it up.

“What specifically are you looking for?” Calder said.

“We’d like a forty-eight-hour read on every crime in the division centered on the night our victim was grabbed off the street,” Ballard said urgently.

“Twenty-four hours before and twenty-four after?” Calder asked.

“Make it forty-eight on both sides of it,” Bosch said.

Ballard pulled out her notebook and tore off the top page. She had already written the date down. Calder took it and looked at it.

“How do you want this — digital or print?” he asked.

“Digital,” Ballard said.

“Print,” Bosch said at the same time.

“Okay, both,” Calder said.

He looked back at the paper with the date on it, as if that alone held some great moral weight.

“Okay,” he said. “I can do this.”

29

Calder said he needed a day to retrieve the hard drive on which he had kept the GRASP data. It wasn’t at the school but at a private storage facility. He said he would call as soon as he had the material ready for pickup.

Ballard had driven them both in her city car so they wouldn’t have to worry about legit parking both their private cars, but before they left, Bosch asked to be dropped off at the nearby Exposition Park.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’ve never seen the shuttle,” he said. “I thought I’d check it out.”

The decommissioned space shuttle Endeavour had been flown to L.A. six years earlier, slowly moved through the streets of South-Central, and put on permanent display inside the air and space center at the park.

Ballard smiled at the thought of Bosch in the air and space museum.

“You don’t seem like a space-travel guy, Harry.”

“I’m not really. Just want to look at it to know it’s really true.”

“You mean you’re a conspiracy-theory guy, then? Like the space program was a hoax? Fake news?”

“No, no, not like that. I believe it. It’s just kind of amazing, you know, to think we could send those things up, circle the moon, fix satellites, and do whatever they were doing and we can’t fix things down here. I just wanted to see it once, ever since they brought it here. I was...”

He trailed off like he was unsure he should continue.

“What?” Ballard prompted.

“Nah, I was just going to say, I was in Vietnam back in ’69,” Bosch said. “Way before you were even born, I know. And on this one day, I had just gotten back to base camp on Airmobile after a hairy op where we had to clear the enemy out of a tunnel system. That’s what I did over there. It was late morning and the place was completely deserted. It was like a ghost town because everybody was sitting in their tents, listening to their radios. Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon and they all wanted to hear it...

“And it was the same thing, you know? How did we put a guy up there bouncing around on the moon when things were so fucked up down here? I mean, that morning during the op... I had to kill a guy. In the tunnel. I was nineteen years old.”

Bosch was looking out his window. He almost seemed to be talking to himself.

“Harry, I’m really sorry,” Ballard said. “That you were put in that situation at that age. At any age.”

“Yeah, well...” Bosch said. “That’s the way it was.”

He didn’t say anything further. Ballard could feel the fatigue coming off him like a wave.

“You still want to see the shuttle?” she asked. “How will you get back to your car at the station?”

“Yeah, drop me off. I can grab a taxi or an Uber after.”

She started the car and drove the few blocks over to the park. They didn’t speak. She got him as close as she could to the giant building that housed the shuttle.

“I’m not sure they’re going to be open yet,” Ballard said.

“It’s okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll find something to do.”

“After this, you should go home and get a nap. You seem tired, Harry.”

“That’s a good idea.”

He opened his door, then looked back at Ballard before getting out.

“Just so you know, I’m done at San Fernando,” he said. “So I’m fully committed to the Daisy case.”

“What do you mean ‘done’?” Ballard asked. “What happened?”

“I sort of messed things up. My witness getting killed, that’s going to be on me. I didn’t do enough to protect him. Then things happened yesterday between me and the guy who leaked it and I got suspended by the chief. Being a reserve, there are no protections so... I’m just done. That’s it.”

Ballard waited to see if he would say more but he didn’t.

“So... the woman you were looking for all night,” she said. “That wasn’t part of that case?”

“No,” Bosch said. “That was Daisy’s mother. I came home and she’d split. Sorry you never got the chance to talk to her.”

“It’s okay,” Ballard said. “You think she went back to the life?”

Bosch shrugged.

“I hit all her familiars last night,” he said. “Nobody had seen her. But those were only the places I knew of. She could have had others. Places to score and crash. People who would take her in. She might’ve just hopped on a Greyhound and split, too. That’s what I’m hoping. But I’ll keep looking when I can.”

Ballard nodded. That seemed to be the end of the conversation but she wanted to tell him something. Just as he started to get out, she spoke.

“My father went to Vietnam,” she said. “You remind me of him.”

“That right?” Bosch said. “He live here in L.A.?”

“No, I lost him when I was fourteen. But during the war, he came to Hawaii on... what was it called, furlough?”

“Yeah, or liberty. I went to Hawaii a few times. They didn’t let you go back to CONUS, so you could go to Hong Kong, Sydney, a few other places. But Hawaii was the best.”

“What was CONUS?”

“Continental United States. They didn’t want you going back to the mainland because of all the protests. But if you worked things right in Honolulu, you could sneak onto a flight in civvies and get back to L.A.”

“I don’t think my dad did that. He met my mother in Hawaii and then after the war he came back and stayed.”

“A lot of guys did that.”

“He was from Ventura originally, and after I was born, we would visit my grandmother there — once a year — but he didn’t like coming back. He saw it like you do. A fucked-up world. He just wanted to camp on the beach and surf.”

Bosch nodded.

“I get that. He was smart and I was the fool. I came back and thought I could do something about things.”

Before Ballard could respond, Bosch got out of the car and closed the door. Ballard watched him walk toward the building where they kept the space shuttle. She noticed a slight limp in his walk.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Harry,” she said out loud.

30

By the time Ballard switched vehicles, drove out to Venice, picked up Lola, and got to the beach it was midmorning and the wind had kicked up a two-foot chop on the surface that would make paddling a challenge instead of the therapy she usually drew from it. As much as she needed the exercise, she knew she needed sleep more. She pitched her tent, posted Lola at the front, and crawled in to rest. She thought about her father as she trailed off, remembering him straddling his favorite board and telling her about Vietnam and about killing people, putting it the way Bosch had put it, saying he’d had to do it and then had to live with it. He wrapped all of his Vietnam experiences into one phrase, “Sin loi.” Tough shit.

Four hours later her watch vibrated her awake. She had been in deep, and waking was slow and disorienting. Finally, she sat up, split the tent flaps with her hand and checked on Lola. The dog was there, sunning herself. She looked back at Ballard with expectant eyes.

“You hungry, girl?”

Ballard climbed out of the tent and stretched. She checked the Rose Avenue tower and saw Aaron Hayes in the nest, gazing out at sea. There were no swimmers out there.

“Come on, Lola.”

She walked down the sand toward the lifeguard tower. The dog followed behind her.

“Aaron,” she called up to the tower.

Hayes turned and looked down at her from his perch.

“Renée. I saw your tent but didn’t want to wake you up. You doing all right?”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“You know, back on the bench. But pretty quiet today.”

Ballard glanced out toward the water as if to confirm the paucity of swimmers.

“You want to grab dinner tonight?” he asked.

“I think I have to work,” Ballard said. “Let me make a call and see what’s what, then I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll be here.”

“You have your phone?”

“Got my phone.”

He was breaking a rule, having a personal phone with him while in the tower. A scandal had rocked a rescue crew up the coast a year before when a texting lifeguard missed seeing a drowning woman waving for help. Ballard knew Aaron would not text or take calls, but he could play back messages without taking his eyes off the water.

She walked back to the tent, pulled her phone out of the pocket of her beach sweats, and called the number given to her by Travis Lee, one of the homicide detectives who took over the Jacob Cady case that morning. He answered and she asked what the status of the case was. Lee had remarked to her early that morning that it was an unusual set of circumstances for him and his partner Rahim Rogers. They came into the case with the admitted killer in custody, thanks to Ballard, and the detective work would be in finding the remains of the victim.

“We traced the truck that made the pickup on the dumpster,” Lee said. “It first went to a sorting center in Sunland, then what was not picked out for recycling was dumped at the landfill in Sylmar. Believe it or not, it’s called Sunshine Canyon. We’re putting on moon suits now and about to start picking.”

“You have an extra moon suit?” Ballard asked.

“You volunteering, Ballard?”

“I am. I want to see it through.”

“Come on, then. We’ll fix you up.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

After packing up and dropping Lola at doggy day care, Ballard took the 405 freeway directly north, through the charred hills in the Sepulveda Pass and into the Valley. She called Aaron along the way and told him dinner was not going to happen.

Sylmar was at the north end and Sunshine Canyon was in the armpit created by the intersection of the 405 and 14 freeways. Ballard could smell it long before she got to it. Slapping a name like Sunshine Canyon on a landfill was typical iconography. Take something ugly or horrible and put a pretty name on it.

Upon arrival, Ballard was driven out to the search site on an all-terrain vehicle. Lee and Rogers and a forensics team were already using what looked like ski poles to pick through an area of refuse that had been cordoned off with yellow tape. It was about thirty yards long and ten wide, and Ballard assumed that this was the spread of refuse from the garbage truck that had picked up Jacob Cady’s condo dumpster on its route.

There was a table under a mobile canopy set up by the forensics team on the dirt road that skirted the landfill’s drop zone. Extra equipment was spread across it, including plastic hazmat coveralls, breathing masks, eye guards, glove and bootie boxes, hard hats, duct tape, and a case of bottled water. A barrel next to the table had extra search picks, some of which had orange flags attached for marking finds.

Ballard was dropped off with an advisory from the ATV’s driver that hard hats were required to be worn in the debris zones of the landfill. She put on a breathing mask first. It didn’t do much to cut the odor but it was comforting to know it might cut down on the intake of larger particulate garbage. She pulled a moon suit on over her clothes next and noticed that none of the searchers on the debris pile had pulled the hood up on their hazmat suits. She did, tucking her midlength hair completely into the plastic and pulling the slip line that tightened the hood around her face.

She put on gloves and booties and then used the duct tape to seal the cuffs of the suit around her wrists and ankles. She put on the eye guard and topped the outfit off with an orange hard hat with the number 23 on both sides of it. She was ready. She grabbed one of the picks from the barrel and started crossing the debris toward the other searchers. There were five of them in a line, working their way up the search zone.

Because they had not pulled up their hoods Ballard easily identified Lee and Rogers.

“You guys want me to squeeze into the line here or do something else?” she asked.

“Is that you, Ballard?” Lee said. “Yeah, squeeze in. Better chance we don’t miss anything.”

Lee moved left and Rogers moved right, making room for Ballard to join the line.

“Black plastic bags, Ballard,” Rogers said. “With blue pull straps.”

“Got it,” Ballard said.

“Everybody, this is Renée,” Lee said. “She’s the one we have to thank for being here today. Renée, this is everybody.”

Ballard smiled though no one could see it.

“My bad, I guess,” she said.

“No, your good,” Rogers said. “If not for you, that shitbird from New Jersey might’ve gotten away with it. And they told us here that if we had come two, three, days from now, we would never have been able to isolate a drop zone like this. We got lucky.”

“Now let’s hope we get lucky again,” Lee added.

They moved slowly, each step sinking a foot or more into the debris, using the steel picks to dig down through the garbage. Line integrity was loose as sometimes a searcher would stop to use his or her hands to clear debris.

At one point Lee became concerned about the time and asked the others to pick up the pace. They had at least four hours of sunlight left but if they started finding body parts, a crime scene investigation would be initiated and he wanted to conduct it in daylight.

An hour after Ballard joined the search, they found the first body parts. One of the forensic techs uncovered a black plastic bag and ripped it open with her pick.

“Here,” she called out.

The others gathered around the find. In the ripped bag were a pair of feet and lower legs, cut just below the knee. While the tech took photos on her phone, Rogers started back toward the equipment table to get a pick with a flag. The search would continue after marking the first find. Lee pulled his phone and started the Medical Examiner’s Office rolling to the scene.

The next piece of evidence found was the rug from the living room. Ballard came across it in her search channel. It was sitting near the top of the pile but disguised by a ripped bag of what looked like garbage from a Chinese restaurant. The rug had been loosely rolled up. It was pulled out of the debris and unrolled to reveal a massive blood stain but no body parts.

Ballard was marking the find with a flagged pick when Kokoro, the criminalist who found the first black bag, called out that she had found two more. Again there was a grim gathering around these. One contained Jacob Cady’s head, the other his arms.

Cady’s face showed no sign of trauma and was composed, eyes and mouth shut, almost as if he were asleep. Kokoro took more photos.

The arms showed trauma beyond the obvious damage of being severed from the body. There were deep lacerations on both forearms and on the palms.

“Defensive wounds,” Rogers said. “He held his hands up to ward off an attack.”

“We’ve got a righteous murder case,” Lee said.

They marked the location of these finds with flags and pressed on. By the time the van from the Medical Examiner’s Office and a crime scene team arrived, they had found two more bags containing the rest of the body and a third that contained the large knives and hacksaw that had been used during the dismemberment. Jacob Cady had been completely recovered for burial. It was one thing that would not have to haunt his family.

Ballard backed out to the table under the canopy, lowered her mask, and drank half a bottle of water in one pull. Lee came over as well. The searchers had moved out of the refuse so the coroner’s investigators and crime scene photographer could document everything.

“What a wonderful world,” Lee said.

“What a wonderful world,” Ballard repeated.

Lee opened a bottle of water and started gulping it down.

“Where are you with Tyldus?” Ballard asked.

“We got him on tape telling his self-defense story,” Lee said. “I’ve seen enough here to know it won’t hold up. He’s going down.”

“What about the victim’s parents? How much have you told them?”

“We told them that we had a guy in custody and they should prepare themselves. We didn’t get into the details of it yet. Now we will.”

“Glad it’s not me.”

“Why we get the big bucks. So you were in RHD a while back, right?”

“A few years, yeah.”

Lee didn’t say anything further, leaving the question of what happened hanging like landfill stink in the air.

“I didn’t go to the late show by choice,” Ballard said. “But it turns out I like what I’m doing.”

She left it at that. She took another drink from the water bottle and then pulled the breathing mask back into place. It felt like the mask and everything else was useless. The stench of the landfill was invading her pores. She knew that when she was finished here, she would shoot down the 118 freeway to Ventura and her grandmother’s house, where she planned to spend at least a half hour under the shower while double-washing her clothes. She was going to run the hot-water heater dry.

“I guess I’m out of here, Travis,” she said. “You’ve got the remains and I’ve got to get cleaned up before my shift.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Lee said.

He thanked her for volunteering and used a radio to call for an ATV to take her down to the parking lot and her van.

Lee went back into the pile to join his partner and monitor the investigation. As she waited for her ride, Ballard watched the two coroner’s investigators start to unfold a body bag. She hoped they had brought more than one. She turned from the scene and looked west. The sun was about to drop behind the ridge of the debris pile. The sky was orange above Sunshine Canyon.