Ballard packed up her things and left her borrowed workstation. She first went into the print room to gather the reports she had fed into the communal printer after typing them up earlier. The detective squad lieutenant was old school and still liked hard-copy reports from her in the morning, even though she also filed them digitally. She separated the reports on the death investigation and the earlier burglary call, stapled them, and then walked them to the inbox on the desk of the lieutenant’s adjutant so they were ready for his arrival. She then sauntered over to the sex crimes section and came up behind Rivera as he was sitting at his station and preparing for the day by dumping an airline-size bottle of whiskey into a mug of coffee. She didn’t let on that she had seen this when she spoke.
“Hail, Cesar.”
Rivera was another mustache guy, his almost white against his brown skin. He matched this with flowing white hair that was a little long by LAPD standards but acceptable on an old detective. He jolted a bit in his seat, afraid his morning routine had been seen. He swiveled his chair around but relaxed when he saw it was Ballard. He knew she would not make any waves.
“Renée,” he said. “What’s up, girl? You got something for me?”
“No, nothing,” she said. “Quiet night.”
Ballard kept her distance in case she smelled like decomp.
“So what’s up?” Rivera asked.
“About to leave,” Ballard said. “I was wondering, though. You know a guy used to work out of here named Harry Bosch? He worked homicide.”
She pointed to the corner of the room where the homicide squad was once located. It was now used by an anti-gang team.
“Before I got here,” Rivera said. “I mean, I know who he is—everybody does, I think. But no, I never dealt with the guy. Why?”
“He was in the station this morning,” Ballard said.
“You mean on graveyard?”
“Yeah, he said he came in to talk to Dvorek about an old homicide. But I found him looking through your stack.”
She pointed toward the long row of file cabinets running along the wall. Rivera shook his head in confusion.
“My stack?” Rivera said. “What the fuck?”
“How long have you been at Hollywood Division, Cesar?” Ballard asked.
“Seven years, what’s that got to—”
“You know the name Daisy Clayton? She was murdered in ’09. It’s an open case, classified as sexually motivated.”
Rivera shook his head.
“That was before my time here,” he said. “I was at Hollenbeck then.”
He got up and walked over to the row of file cabinets and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket to open the top drawer of his four-drawer stack.
“Locked now,” he said. “Was locked when I left last night.”
“I locked it after he left,” Ballard said.
She said nothing about finding the bent paper clip in the drawer.
“Isn’t Bosch retired?” Rivera said. “How’d he get in here? He keep his nine-nine-nine when he split?”
Every officer was given what was called a 999 key, which unlocked the back door of every station in the city. They were distributed as a backup to the electronic ID keys, which were more prone to malfunction and failure during power outages. The city was not scrupulous about collecting them when officers retired.
“Maybe, but he told me Lieutenant Munroe let him in so he could wait for Dvorek to come in off patrol,” Ballard said. “He wandered, and that’s when I saw him looking in your files. I was working over in the corner and he didn’t see me.”
“He’s the one who mentioned the Daisy case?”
“Daisy Clayton. No, actually Dvorek said that’s what Bosch wanted to talk to him about. Dvorek was first officer on scene with her.”
“Was it Bosch’s case back then?”
“No. It was worked by King and Carswell initially. Now it’s assigned to Open-Unsolved downtown.”
Rivera walked back to his desk but stayed standing while he grabbed his coffee cup and took a long drink out of it. He then abruptly pulled the cup away from his mouth.
“Shit, I know what he was doing,” he said.
“What?” Ballard asked.
There was a sense of urgency in her voice.
“I got here just as they were reorganizing and moving homicide over to West Bureau,” Rivera said. “The sex table was expanding and they brought me in. Me and Sandoval were add-ons, not replacements. We both came from Hollenbeck, see.”
“Okay,” Ballard said.
“So the lieutenant assigned me that cabinet and gave me the key. But when I opened the top drawer to put stuff in there, it was full. All four drawers were full. Same with Sandoval—his four were filled up as well.”
“Filled with what? You mean with files?”
“No, every drawer was filled with shake cards. Stacks and stacks of them crammed in there. The homicide guys and the other detectives had decided to keep the old cards after the department went digital. They stuck them in the file drawers for safekeeping.”
Rivera was talking about what were officially called field interview cards. They were 3 x 5 cards that were filled out by officers while they were on patrol when they encountered people on the streets. The front of each card was a form with specific identifiers regarding the person interviewed, such as name, date of birth, address, gang affiliation, tattoos, and known associates. The back of each card was blank, and that was where the officer could write any ancillary information about the subject.
Officers carried stacks of blank FI cards on their person or in their patrol cars—Ballard had always kept hers under the sun visor in her car when she had worked patrol in Pacific Division. At the end of shift, the cards were turned in to the divisional watch commander and the information on them was entered by clerical staff into a searchable database. Should a name that was run through the database produce a match, the inquiring officer or detective would have a ready set of facts, addresses, and known associates to start with.
The American Civil Liberties Union had long protested the department’s use of the cards and the collection of information from citizens who had not committed crimes, calling the practice unlawful search and seizure and routinely referring to the Q&As as shakedowns. The department had fended off all legal attempts to stop the practice, and many of the rank and file referred to the 3 x 5 cards as shake cards, a not-so-subtle dig at the ACLU.
“Why were they keeping them?” Ballard asked. “Everything was put into the database and would be easier to find there.”
“I don’t know,” Rivera said. “They didn’t do it that way at Hollenbeck.”
“So, what did you do, clear them out?”
“Yeah, me and Sandy emptied the drawers.”
“You threw them all out?”
“No, if I’ve learned anything in this department, it’s not to be the guy who fucks up. We boxed them and took them to storage. Let it be somebody else’s problem.”
“What storage?”
“Across the lot.”
Ballard nodded. She knew he meant the structure at the south end of the station’s parking lot. It was a single-level building that had once been a city utilities office but had been turned over to the station when more space was needed. The building was largely unused now. A gym for officers’ use and a padded martial arts studio had been set up in two of the larger rooms, but the smaller offices were empty or used for nonevidentiary storage.
“So, this was seven years ago?” she asked.
“More or less,” Rivera said. “We didn’t move it all at once. I cleared one drawer out, and when it got filled and I had to go down to the next, I’d clear that one. It went like that. Took about a year.”
“So what makes you think that Bosch was looking for shake cards last night?”
Rivera shrugged.
“There would have been shake cards in there from the time of the murder you’re talking about, right?”
“But the info on the shake cards is in the database.”
“Supposedly. But what do you put in the search window? See what I mean? There’s a flaw. If he wanted to see who was hanging around Hollywood at the time of the murder, how do you search the database for that?”
Ballard nodded in agreement but knew that there were many ways to pull up info on field interviews in the database such as by geography and time frame. She thought Rivera was wrong about that but probably right about Bosch. He was an old-school detective. He wanted to look through the shakes to see who the street cops in Hollywood were talking to at the time of the Clayton murder.
“Well,” she said, “I’m out of here. Have a good one. Stay safe.”
“Yeah, you too, Ballard,” Rivera said.
Ballard left the detective bureau and went up to the women’s locker room on the second floor. She changed out of her suit and into her sweats. Her plan was to head out to Venice, drop off laundry, pick up her dog at the overnight kennel, and then carry her tent and a paddleboard out to the beach. In the afternoon, after she had rested and considered her approach, she’d deal with Bosch.
The morning sun blistered her eyes as she crossed the parking lot behind the station. She popped the locks on her van and threw her crumpled suit onto the passenger seat. She then saw the old utilities building at the south end of the lot and changed her mind about leaving right away.
She used her key card to enter the building and found a couple other denizens of the late show working out before heading home after the morning rush hour. She threw a mock salute at them and went down a hallway that led to former city offices now used for storage. The first room she checked contained items recovered in one of her own cases. The year before, she had taken down a burglar who had filled a motel room with property from the homes he had broken into or had bought with the money and credit cards he had stolen. Now a year later, the case had been adjudicated and much of the property had still not been claimed. It had been returned to Hollywood Station for when the division organized an annual open house for victims as a last chance for them to claim their property.
The next room down was stacked with cardboard boxes containing old case files that for various reasons had to be kept. Ballard looked around here and moved several boxes in order to get to others. Soon enough, she opened a dusty box that was filled with FI cards. She had hit pay dirt.
Twenty minutes later she had culled twelve boxes of FI cards and lined them along the wall in the hallway. By individually sampling cards from each of the boxes, she was able to determine that the cards spanned the years from 2006, when the digitizing initiative began, to 2010, when the homicide section was moved out of Hollywood Division.
Ballard estimated that each of the boxes held up to a thousand cards. It would take many hours to comb through them all thoroughly. She wondered if that was what Bosch was expecting to do, or if he was planning a more precise search for one card or one night in particular, perhaps the night Daisy Clayton was taken off the street.
Ballard wouldn’t know the answer until she asked Bosch.
She left a note on the row of boxes in the hallway, saying that they were on hold for her. She returned to the parking lot and got into her van after checking the straps holding her boards to the roof racks. Shortly after she had been assigned to Hollywood Division and word leaked that she was involved in an internal harassment investigation, there were some in the station who attempted to retaliate against her. Sometimes it was basic bullying, sometimes it went deeper. One morning at the end of her shift, when she stopped her van at the station lot’s electric gate, her paddleboard slid forward off the roof and crashed against the gate, splintering the nose’s fiberglass. She repaired the board herself and started checking the rack straps every morning after her shift.
She took La Brea down to the 10 freeway and headed west toward the beach. She waited until a few minutes after eight o’clock to call the number for RHD that she still had programmed into her phone. A clerk answered and Ballard asked for Lucy Soto. She said the name with a clipped familiarity that imparted the idea that this was a cop-to-cop call. The transfer was made without question.
“This is Detective Soto.”
“This is Detective Ballard, Hollywood Division.”
There was a pause before Soto responded.
“I know who you are,” she said. “How can I help you, Detective Ballard?”
Ballard was used to detectives she wasn’t personally acquainted with knowing about her. With female detectives, there was always an awkward moment. They either admired Ballard for her perseverance in the department or believed her actions had made their own jobs more difficult. Ballard always had to find out which it was, and Soto’s opener gave no hint as to which camp she was in. Her repeating Ballard’s name out loud might have been a move to let someone like a partner or supervisor on the task force know who she was talking to.
Not being able to read her yet, Ballard just pressed on.
“I work the late show here,” she said. “Some nights it keeps me running, some nights not so much. My L-T likes me to have a hobby case to kind of keep me busy.”
“I don’t understand,” Soto said. “What’s this have to do with me? I’m sort of in the middle of—”
“Yeah, I know you’re busy. You’re on the harassment task force. That’s why I’m calling. One of your cold cases—that you’re not working because of the task force—I was wondering if I could take a whack at it.”
“Which case?”
“Daisy Clayton. Fifteen-year-old murdered up here in—”
“I know the case. What makes you so interested?”
“It was a big case here at the time. I heard some blue suiters talking about it, pulled up what I could on the box, and got interested. It looked like with this task force thing you weren’t doing much with it at the moment.”
“And you want to give it a shot.”
“I make no promises but, yeah, I’d like to do some work on it. I would keep you in the loop. It’s still your case. I’d just do some street work.”
Ballard was on the freeway but not moving. Her weeding through the boxes in the storage room had pushed her into the heart of rush hour. She knew the morning breeze would also be in full effect on the coast. She’d be paddling against it and the chop it would kick up. She was missing her window.
“It’s nine years later,” Soto said. “I’m not sure the street’s going to produce anything. Especially on graveyard. You’ll be spinning your wheels.”
“Well, maybe,” Ballard said. “But they’re my wheels to spin. You okay with this or not?”
There was another long pause. Enough time for Ballard to move the van about five feet.
“There’s something you should know,” Soto said. “There’s somebody else looking into it. Somebody outside the department.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ballard said. “Who’s that?”
“My old partner. His name’s Harry Bosch. He’s retired now but he…he needs the work.”
“One of those, huh? Okay. Anything else I should know? Was this one of his cases?”
“No. But he knows the victim’s mother. He’s doing it for her. Like a dog with a bone.”
“Good to know.”
Ballard was now getting a better sense of the lay of the land. It was the true purpose of her call. Permission to work the case was the least of her concerns.
“If I come up with anything, I’ll feed it to you,” Ballard said. “And I’ll let you get back to the reckoning.”
Ballard thought she heard a muffled laugh.
“Hey, Ballard?” Soto then added quietly. “I said I knew who you were. I also know who Olivas is. I mean, I work with him. I want you to know I appreciate what you did and I know you paid a price. I just wanted to say that.”
Ballard nodded to herself.
“That’s good to know,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”