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.