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.”