Ballard went to her locker to store the shake cards and the Haslam murder book. She then pulled out the fledgling murder book Bosch had started putting together on the Clayton case. She sat on a bench in the locker room and opened it up, immediately flipping to Bosch’s report on the plastic container manufactured by American Storage Products. He listed the sales supervisor he had talked to as Del Mittleberg. Ballard almost jumped up off the bench with joy when she saw that Bosch, thorough detective that he was, had listed both Mittleberg’s office and cell numbers.
It was after ten. She called the cell and it was answered with a suspicious hello.
“Mr. Mittleberg?”
“I’m not interested.”
“This is the police, don’t hang up.”
“The police?”
“Mr. Mittleberg, my name is Renée Ballard. I’m a detective with the Los Angeles Police. You recently talked with a colleague of mine named Bosch about containers made by American Storage Products. Do you remember?”
“That was a couple of months ago.”
“Correct. We are still working that case.”
“It’s ten-fifteen. What is so urgent that this couldn’t—”
“Mr. Mittleberg, I’m sorry, but it is urgent. You told Detective Bosch that your company made some direct sales of the containers to commercial accounts.”
“We do, yes.”
“Are you at home, Mr. Mittleberg?”
“Where else would I be?”
“Do you have a laptop or access to sales records involving those commercial accounts?”
There was a pause while Mittleberg considered the question. Ballard held her breath. The case had been full of long shots. It was about time one of them paid off. If Dillon operated a business that ran close to the line—she remembered he had commented about competition—then he might be just the kind of man to seek a direct-sale discount from a manufacturer.
“I have some access to records,” Mittleberg finally said.
“I have the name of a company,” Ballard said. “Can you see if they have ever been a customer of ASP?”
“Hold the line. I’m going to my home office.”
Ballard waited while Mittleberg got to his computer. She heard a partially muffled discussion as he told someone that he was talking to the police and he would be up as soon as he was finished.
“Okay,” he then said directly into the phone. “I’m at my computer. What’s the name of the company.”
“It’s called Chemi-Cal Bio Services,” Ballard said. “Chemi-Cal is broken into two—”
“No, nothing,” Mittleberg said.
“You spelled it with a dash?”
“Nothing beginning with C-H-E-M.”
Ballard felt deflated. She needed something more in order to go all in on Dillon. Then she remembered the truck she had seen on the day they met on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Okay, try just CCB Services, please,” she said urgently.
She heard typing and then Mittleberg responded.
“Yes,” he said. “A customer since 2008. They order soft plastics.”
Ballard stood up, holding the phone tight against her ear.
“What kind of soft plastics?” she asked.
“Storage containers. Different sizes.”
Ballard remembered Bosch giving her the ASP container he had bought. It was still in the trunk of her city ride.
“Including the twenty-five-gallon container with the snap-on top?”
There was a pause while Mittleberg checked the records.
“Yes,” he finally said. “He ordered those.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mittleberg,” Ballard said. “One of us will follow up with you during business hours.”
She disconnected and went back to her locker. She put the murder book back on the top shelf and opened her briefcase, retrieving one of the business cards Dillon had given her. His company had an address on Saticoy Street in Van Nuys.
When Ballard entered the watch office, Munroe was still looking up at the TV screen.
“Anything new?” she asked.
“Not much,” Munroe said. “But they did say the dead guys were persons of interest in an abduction case. It’s gotta be the Bosch thing. You hear from him?”
“Not yet. I’m heading out to do an interview on my hobby case. Might not be back for roll call.”
Ballard stared at the screen for a moment. It was the same reporter on another stand-up.
“If Bosch happens to show up here, can you give him this? He’ll know what it means.”
She handed him the card with Dillon’s name and business address on it. He looked at it disinterestedly and then put it into one of his shirt pockets.
“Will do,” Munroe said. “But stay in touch, Ballard, okay? Lemme know where you are.”
“You got it, L-T.”
“And if I need you on a call, the hobby case goes back on the shelf and you come running.”
“Roger that.”
Ballard doubled back to the detective bureau and grabbed a rover out of the charging station and the keys to the city ride. She left out the back door into the parking lot.
Ballard took Laurel Canyon Boulevard over the mountain and then down into the Valley. It was near midnight when she turned down Saticoy and into an industrial sector lined with warehouses and fleet lots near the Van Nuys Airport.
Chemi-Cal Bio Services was in a warehouse park called the Saticoy Industry Center, where manufacturing and service businesses were lined side by side in duplicate duplex warehouses. Ballard drove down the center lane and by Dillon’s business and then out the other side of the industrial park. It looked like none of the businesses were open this late at night. She found parking on a side street and walked back.
Dillon had only a small sign on his warehouse. It wasn’t the kind of business that drew customers who were either walking or driving by. His was the kind of service you found through internet searches or recommendations from professionals in the same arena—detectives, coroners, forensic specialists. The sign was on the door next to the side-by-side garage doors. The building was freestanding but literally no more than two feet away from the identical structures on either side of it.
Ballard knocked on the door, though she did not expect any sort of response. She stepped back and looked up and down the access lane, checking to see if her knock on the hollow metal had aroused any interest.
It had not.
Ballard stepped over to the thin channel between CCB and its neighbor to the north, a building with no sign or other identifiers on it. The alley, if it was big enough to be classified as such, was unlit. Ballard poked a flashlight into the space and saw it was strewn with debris but passable. At the far end, which Ballard guessed was eighty feet away, there was no gate or other obstacle.
Ballard tentatively stuck one foot into the slim opening. She kicked away a pile of old and dusty breathing masks that she could only imagine had come from CCB.
Another step in and then there was no longer anything tentative about her advance. She moved quickly down the passage, concrete block walls on either side of her, toward the opening ahead. Remembering the old movie gag about the walls closing in on the hero, she thought herself into a bout of vertigo and had to put a hand out on one of the walls for support and to keep her balance.
She stumbled out of the narrow opening and into a rear alley and bent over, hands on knees, and waited for the dizziness to pass. When it did, she straightened up and looked around. It was the cleanest alley she had ever seen. No debris, no junk, no impromptu storage of old vehicles or anything else. Each unit had its own neatly kept and closed trash bin that was secured inside a concrete corral. Ballard opened the bin behind CCB and found it empty except for a couple of crumpled to-go bags and several empty coffee cups. Ballard expected there to be bloody mop heads and other debris from cleaning crime scenes, but nothing like that was here.
There was a single rear door with just CCB painted on it. Ballard checked it but it was locked with a deadbolt. She knocked anyway to complete the due diligence but did not wait by the door for a reply she was confident wasn’t coming. Moving back into the narrow passage between the buildings, she shone the light up the walls to the slim slice of night sky. The roofline was about twenty feet up. Because the warehouse was windowless, she knew there was a strong possibility that there would be a skylight on the roof to allow in natural light as well as ventilation.
Ballard put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and then a hand on each of the walls of the two buildings she stood between. She then raised her left foot and angled it against one wall, using the mortar line between two of the concrete blocks to find a shallow toehold. Pressing her hands against the wall and gripping the edges higher up, she raised herself up and brought her right foot against the opposite wall, angling it until it found purchase. She was wearing rubber-soled work shoes favored by professionals who worked a lot on their feet. They were chosen for comfort over style, and they grabbed the edges of the mortar lines well.
Ballard slowly started climbing up the walls of the passage between the two buildings, using her weight to counterbalance her body and to keep from falling. The ascent was slow and it was toward a complete unknown, but she pressed on, pausing once when she heard a car in the entrance lane of the industrial park. She quickly grabbed the flashlight out of her mouth and switched it off. She was halfway up the climb and could do nothing but hold still.
The car out in the lane drove by the passage without stopping. Ballard waited a moment, then turned the flashlight back on and started climbing again.
It took ten minutes to reach the top and then Ballard put her arm over the parapet around the roof of the CCB warehouse and carefully pulled her body over and onto the gravel rooftop. She stayed on her back for almost a minute, catching her breath and looking up at the dark sky.
She rolled onto her side and got up. Brushing off her clothes, she knew that she had burned through another suit. She was planning to take Monday and Tuesday off once her partner returned. She would complete all her laundry errands then.
Ballard looked around and saw that she had been wrong about there being a skylight on the roof. There were actually four of them—two over each garage bay—plastic bubbles shining in the moonlight. There was also a steel exhaust chimney that rose six feet above the roof line. The diffuser at the top was coated black by smoke and creosote.
Ballard inspected the skylights, moving from one to another with her flashlight, stepping around a pool of standing water that covered part of the roof. There were no lights on in the CCB warehouse below, but it didn’t matter. Visibility with the flashlight was limited. It appeared that each of the once-clear plastic bubbles had been haphazardly sprayed with white paint from the inside.
This was curious to Ballard. It appeared to be a move designed to keep anyone from looking down at activities below. But there were no taller buildings in the area with views through the skylights. Ballard thought about the boys caught earlier in the week attempting to glimpse naked women through the skylights of a strip club. Here, the attempt at skylight privacy seemed unwarranted.
Each of the skylights was hinged on one edge and could presumably be opened from within. This was the moment of decision. She had certainly already trespassed on private property but she would be crossing a more important line if she took things further. It was a line she had crossed before.
She had no direct evidence of anything but plenty of circumstantial facts that pointed the needle toward Dillon. She had the fact that the crime scene cleaner was in Hollywood with his van and his chemicals and cleansers on the night Daisy Clayton was taken. And she had the fact that he had ordered storage containers with the same brand mark that had ended up on the victim’s body, and in the size that would have been used to store and bleach it. The circumstances of the murder pointed to a killer who knew something about law enforcement and took the effort to rid the body of potential evidence to an extreme level.
She knew she could call Judge Wickwire, her go-to, and run these things by her in an effort to establish probable cause. But in her mind she could hear the judge’s voice saying, “Renée, I don’t think you have it.”
But Ballard thought she did have the right man. She decided she had come this far and was not turning around. She reached into a pocket and took out a pair of rubber gloves. Then she started checking the skylights.
Each of the rooftop bubbles was locked, but one of them felt loose on its frame. She moved around it, stepping in the water that had accumulated around its rear edge. The standing water was apparently a longtime problem. The moisture had worked its corrosive magic on the skylight’s hinges.
Ballard put the light in her mouth and reached down with both hands to the frame. She pulled up and the hinge screws gave way, coming out of the wet plaster abutment below the frame without protest. She pushed the skylight up until it rolled back on its rounded surface and into the water.
She pointed her light down and was looking at the flat white top of a box truck parked in the bay directly below the opening.
Ballard estimated that it was a drop of no more than eight feet.