Ballard stopped for a latte after leaving the station. While waiting for it, she got a text from Aaron saying he was off all day. She took this to mean that the man he had pulled from the riptide had not survived and Aaron was given a “therapy day” to deal with it. She texted him back and said she had a stop to make before heading out toward the beach.
The two garage doors were open at Zocalo Auto Services when she got there. She had driven her van because she was not planning to go back to the station afterward.
A man stood in one of the open bays, wiping his already greasy hands on a rag and assessing the Ford Transit with the board racks. Ballard got out and quickly showed her badge to disabuse him of the idea that she was a potential client.
“Is the owner or manager here?” she asked.
“That’s me,” the man said. “Both. Ephrem Zocalo.”
He had a strong accent.
“Detective Ballard, LAPD Hollywood Division. I need your help, sir.”
“What can I do?”
“I’m trying to confirm that a particular van was here getting work done—a transmission possibly—nine years ago. Is that possible? Do you have records from ’09?”
“Yes, we have records. But that is a very long time ago.”
“You have computer records? Maybe just put in the name?”
“No, no computers. We have files and we keep, you know…we keep the papers.”
It didn’t sound too sophisticated but all Ballard cared about was that there were records of some sort.
“Are they here?” she asked. “Can I look? I have the name and dates.”
“Yeah, sure. We have in the back.”
He led her to a small office adjacent to the repair bays. They passed a man who was working in a trench beneath a car, the high-pitched whine of a drill sounding as he removed the bolts of a transmission cover. He looked suspiciously at Ballard as she followed Zocalo to the office.
The office was barely big enough to hold a desk, chair, and three four-drawer file cabinets. Each drawer had a framed card holder on which a year was handwritten. This meant Zocalo had records going back twelve years, which gave Ballard hope.
“You said ’09?” Zocalo asked.
“Yes,” Ballard said.
He pointed a finger up and down the drawers until he found the one marked 2009. The labels were not in a clear chronological order and Ballard guessed that each year, he dumped the oldest set of records and started with a fresh drawer.
The 2009 drawer was the second drawer up in the middle row. Zocalo waved at it with an open hand as if saying it was all Ballard’s to deal with.
“I’ll keep everything in order,” she said.
“Don’t matter,” Zocalo said. “You can use the desk.”
He left her there and went back out into the garage. Ballard heard him saying something in Spanish to the other worker, but they spoke too fast for her to translate the conversation. But she heard the word migra, and her sense was that the man in the garage trench was worried that she was really an immigration agent.
She pulled the file drawer open and found it to be only a third full of receipts leaning haphazardly against the back panel. She reached down with both hands, pulled about half of them out, and carried them to the desk.
All surfaces of the desk seemed to be coated with a patina of grease. Zocalo clearly didn’t visit the sink when he moved from doing repair work to office work. Many of the invoice copies she started looking through were also smudged with grease.
The invoices were generally kept in order by date, so the process of checking the alibi for John the Baptist’s van went quickly. Ballard moved through the stack directly to the week in question and soon found a copy of an invoice for installation of a new transmission in a Ford Econoline van with the name John McMullen and the address of the Moonlight Mission on it. Ballard studied it and saw that the dates the van was in the shop corresponded with the blank squares on McMullen’s calendar and covered the two days that Daisy Clayton was missing and then found dead.
Ballard looked around the office. She saw no copier. Leaving the McMullen receipt out, she returned the rest of the stack to the file drawer and closed it. She walked out of the office and into the garage. Zocalo was down in the trench with the other man. She squatted down next to the car they were working under and held out the grease-smudged invoice.
“Mr. Zocalo, this is what I was looking for. Can I take it and make a copy? I’ll bring you back the original if you need it.”
Zocalo shook his head.
“I don’t really need to have it,” he said. “Not for so long, you know. You just keep it. Is okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sí, sí, I’m sure.”
“Okay, thank you, sir. Here’s my card. If you ever need my help with anything, you give me a call, okay?”
She handed a business card down into the trench and right away it was marked with a greasy thumbprint as Zocalo took it.
Ballard left the garage and stood next to her van. She pulled her phone and took a photo of the invoice Zocalo had let her keep. She then texted the photo to Bosch with a message.
Confirmed: JTB’s van was in the shop when Daisy was taken. He’s clear.
Bosch didn’t respond right away. Ballard got in her van and headed toward Venice.
She caught the morning migration west and it took almost an hour to get to the overnight pet-care facility where she kept Lola. After she got her dog and took her for a short walk around the Abbot Kinney neighborhood, she returned to the van and drove over to the canals, Lola sitting upright on the passenger seat.
Public parking near the canals was at a premium. Ballard did what she often did when she visited Aaron. She parked in the city lot on Venice Boulevard and then walked into the canal neighborhood on Dell. Aaron shared one side of a town house duplex on Howland with another lifeguard. The other side of the duplex was also the home of lifeguards. There seemed to be a steady rotation of them moving in and out as assignments changed. Aaron had been there for two years and liked working Venice Beach. While others aspired to assignments farther north toward Malibu, he was content to stay and therefore had the longest residency in the duplex, which was notable for its dolphin-shaped mailbox.
Ballard knew that Aaron would be home alone, since all lifeguards worked day shifts. She patted the dolphin on the head and led Lola through the gate by her leash. The sliding door on the lower level had been left half open for her and she entered without knocking.
Aaron was lying on the couch, eyes closed, balancing a bottle of tequila on his chest. He startled when Lola went over and licked his face. He grabbed the bottle before it fell.
“You okay?” Ballard asked.
“I am now,” he said.
He sat up and smiled, happy to see her. He held out the tequila but she shook her head.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
Ballard knew what he was feeling. Any death experience—whether it was a close call for oneself or involvement in the death of another—led to some kind of primordial need to affirm not having been vanquished from existence. That affirmation could turn into some of the best sex ever.
She pointed Lola to a dog bed in the corner. Aaron had a pit bull but he had apparently taken her to the kennel even though he had the day off. Lola dutifully climbed onto the round cushion, circled it three times, and finally sat down with a view of the sliding door. She would be on guard. There was no need to even close the slider.
Ballard went over to the couch, grabbed Aaron’s hand, and led him toward the stairs. He started to speak as they went up.
“They took him off life support at nine last night after they got all the family there. I went over. I sort of wish I hadn’t. Not a good scene. At least they didn’t blame me. I got to him as fast as I could.”
Ballard quieted him when they got to the bedroom door.
“No more,” she said. “Leave that out here.”
Thirty minutes later they were lying entwined and spent on the floor of Hayes’s bedroom.
“How’d we get off the bed?” Ballard asked.
“Not sure,” Hayes said.
He reached over to the tequila bottle on the wood floor but Ballard used her foot to push it out of reach. She wanted him to hear what she said next.
“Hey!” Hayes said, feigning upset.
“Did I ever tell you that my father drowned?” Ballard asked. “When I was a kid.”
“No, that’s awful.”
He moved in closer to her to console her. She was turned and looking at the wall.
“Did it happen here?” Hayes asked.
“No, Hawaii,” Ballard said. “That’s where we lived. He was surfing. They never found him.”
“I’m sorry, Renée. I—”
“It was a long time ago. I always just wished they had found him, you know? It was so strange that he just got on his board and went out there. And then he never came back.”
They were silent for a long moment.
“Anyway, I was thinking about that with that guy yesterday,” Ballard said. “At least you brought him in.”
Hayes nodded.
“That must’ve been awful for you back then,” he said. “You should have told me this before.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just sort of…you know, your father drowns at the beach and now you mostly sleep at the beach. You and me, with me being a lifeguard. What’s that say?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”
“Did your mother remarry?”
“No, she wasn’t around. I don’t think she knew for a long time.”
“Oh, man. This story just gets worse.”
He had his arm around her, just below her breasts. He pulled her against his chest and kissed the back of her neck.
“I don’t think I’d be here doing what I do if things hadn’t happened the way they did,” Ballard said. “There’s that.”
She reached her leg out, hooked the tequila bottle, and slid it in so he could reach it.
But he didn’t. He kept her in his embrace. She liked that.