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.