Ballard was depressed. She left the Monahan estate not knowing which of the two people she had interviewed was the more loathsome example of the human form. And yet neither would face consequences for their actions of the night. She decided to focus her enmity on Chloe as a betrayer of the cause. For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.
She tried to shake it off as she came through the back door of the station and headed down the hallway to the detective bureau. She had a half box of FI cards she wanted to finish before the end of her shift. She checked her watch. It was 4:15 a.m. Her plan was to write up a report on the callout to Electra Drive. She would pull no punches, naming all parties in the investigation and describing their actions, even though the investigation had come to nothing so far. She would file it in the detective commander’s inbox and it would be someone else’s decision from there. It might go down to the task force and it might even make it to the D.A.’s Office for consideration. Along the way, it might also get leaked to the media. No matter how it went, she was passing the buck on it, and that did not sit well with her. She could have arrested them both on the spot for different crimes, but such a move would have resulted in her actions being studied and questioned by a command staff that didn’t like her or want her. Some fault would likely be found and she would be further buried by the department and pulled away from the one thing she needed most: her job on the late show.
She turned into the detective bureau and headed to the back corner where she had set up for work earlier. She was nearly there when she saw the familiar head of gray curly hair over one of the half walls of the workstation. Bosch.
When she got to him, she saw that he was looking through the last four-inch stack of cards from the storage box she had brought in.
“So, they just let you waltz in here anytime you like,” she said by way of a greeting.
“To be honest, I sort of let myself in tonight,” Bosch said. “They never took my nine-nine-nine key when I quit.”
Ballard nodded.
“Well, I have to write a report. I won’t be able to look at shake cards till I file.”
“I’m on the last stack here. I’ll go out back and get another box.”
“I’d better go with you. Let’s do it now before I settle in and start writing. I can tell you the latest on John the Baptist on the way.”
They headed back through the station and out the back door to the parking lot. Ballard updated Bosch on her return to the Moonlight Mission and interview with McMullen. She said that her gut instinct was still that McMullen wasn’t their guy. She told him about the head count he kept on his calendars and the photo of Daisy she had found.
“So, you actually placed him with the victim,” Bosch said. “He knew her.”
“He baptized her several months before the murder,” Ballard said. “But come on, she was a night dweller and he roams Hollywood at night, looking for souls to save. I would be surprised if they didn’t cross paths. I still don’t think there’s anything there and I might have an alibi for McMullen’s van.”
She told him about the van being in the shop on the night of the abduction and murder.
“McMullin looked it up and left me a message about the place,” she said. “As soon as they open this morning, I’m going to see if I can confirm that the van was there when Daisy got taken. If I do, then I think we move on from John the Baptist.”
Bosch said nothing, indicating he was not ready to scratch the missionary man off the list of potential suspects.
“So, what’s happening with your search warrant case?” Ballard asked.
“We got part of the way there,” Bosch said. “We found the bullets we were looking for but they were no good for comparison. And then my source ended up dead out in Alhambra.”
“Oh shit! And it’s connected?”
“Looks that way. Done in by his own gang. LAPD SWAT arrested the shooter last night in Sylmar. He wasn’t talking when I left but he’s known to be tight with our suspect on the cold case. Sometimes when you blow the dust off an old investigation, bad things happen.”
Ballard looked at him in the dim light of the parking lot. She wondered if that was some kind of warning about the Daisy Clayton case.
They walked silently the rest of the way to the storage facility. Once there, they each picked up a box of FI cards and headed back to the station. Ballard turned and assessed the boxes in the hallway before leaving. They were about halfway through.
Walking back across the lot, Bosch stopped for a breather and put his box on the trunk of a black-and-white.
“I’ve got a bad knee,” he explained. “I get acupuncture when it acts up. Just haven’t had the time.”
“I’ve heard that knee replacements are better than the real thing these days,” Ballard said.
“I’ll keep that in mind. But that would take me out of the game for a while. I might never get back.”
He picked up the box and pressed on.
“I was thinking,” he said. “You remember the GRASP program—Were you here then?”
“I was on patrol,” Ballard said. “‘Get a GRASP on crime’—I remember. A PR stunt.”
“Well, yeah, but I think that was still going strong when Daisy got taken. And I was wondering what happened to all that data they collected. I thought, if it was still around somewhere, we might get another angle on the lay of the land in Hollywood at the time of the murder.”
GRASP was indeed a public relations ploy by a former chief who took the reins of the department and touted a law enforcement think-tank idea of studying crime through geography to help determine how people and facilities were targeted. It was revealed with much fanfare by the department but suffered a quiet death a few years later when a new chief with new ideas came in.
“I don’t remember what it stood for,” Ballard said. “I was on patrol in Pacific Division and I remember filling out the forms on the MDC. Geographic something or other.”
“Geographic Reporting and Safety Program,” Bosch said. “The guys down in the ASS Office really worked some OT on it.”
“Ass Office?”
“The Acronym Selection Section. You never heard of it? They got about ten guys down there full-time.”
Ballard started laughing as she lifted her knee, held her box with one hand on her thigh, and used her key card to open the door of the station. She then opened it with her hip and let Bosch in first.
They walked down the hallway.
“I’ll look into the GRASP files,” she said. “I’ll start at the ASS office.”
“Let me know what you find.”
Back at the workstation, Ballard noticed the blue binder that had been left at her spot. She flipped it open.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I told you I had started a new murder book for the reinvestigation,” Bosch said. “I figured you would want to start adding to it, maybe do a chrono. I think it should stay with you.”
There were only a few reports in the binder at the moment. One was Bosch’s summary of his interview with a supervisor at American Storage Products about the container that he believed Daisy Clayton’s body had been stuffed into.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll print out everything I have and put it in. I already have an online chrono going.”
She flipped the binder closed and saw that it was old and the blue plastic faded. Bosch was recycling an old murder book and it didn’t surprise her. She guessed that he had the records from several old cases in his home. He was that kind of detective.
“Did you close the one this came from?” she asked.
“I did,” Bosch said.
“Good,” she said.
The went back to work. There were no more callouts for Ballard that shift. She got her report writing finished and filed and then joined Bosch on the FI cards. By dawn they had made it through the two boxes they brought from storage. Fifty more cards were added to the stack that warranted a second look but did not rise to the level of requiring immediate action. As they worked through the cards, they had talked and Bosch had told her stories about his days in Hollywood Homicide in the 1990s. She noticed that he, or in some instances the media, had given names to many of his cases: the Woman in the Suitcase, the Man with No Hands, the Dollmaker, and so on. It was as though homicides back then were an event. Now it seemed that nothing was new, nothing shocked.
Ballard gathered their two stacks of keepers together along with the murder book.
“I’m going to put these in my locker and then go over to the auto repair shop,” she said. “You want to go with me? To the shop, I mean.”
“No,” Bosch said. “I mean, I do, but I think I better get up to the Valley and see where we are on things. Maybe I’ll see if I can get some pins stuck in my knee on the way.”
“Let’s check in later, then. I’ll let you know what I get.”
“That’s a plan.”