Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (9)

Ballard decided to keep the review of the field interview cards close to the source. She brought Bosch to the storage room and set him up at one of the old desks, where it was less likely that other Hollywood officers would see him working with her and raise questions about it. She called Lieutenant Munroe on the private watch office number and told him where she would be if needed.

Bosch and Ballard decided to split reading duties rather than have Bosch back-read the cards Ballard had already gone through. It was the first sign of trust between them, a belief that each could rely on the other’s assessment of the cards. And it would make the process faster.

Ballard was at a desk positioned perpendicular to Bosch’s and this allowed her to watch him head-on, while he would have to turn and be more obvious about attempting to observe her. At first she surreptitiously kept an eye on him and in doing so ascertained that his process was different. His rate of putting cards aside for further consideration was far quicker than hers. At some point, he noticed that she was watching him.

“Don’t worry,” he said without looking up from his work. “I’m employing a two-step approach. First a big net, then a smaller net.”

Ballard just nodded, a bit embarrassed that she had been caught.

She soon started her own two-step process and stopped paying attention to Bosch, realizing that she was only slowing her own work down by watching him. After a long stretch of silence and after putting a large stack of cards into the no-interest pile, Ballard spoke.

“Can I ask you something?” she began.

“What if I said no?” Bosch replied. “You’d ask anyway.”

“How did Daisy’s mother end up living in your house?”

“It’s a long story, but she needed a place to stay. I had a room.”

“So this is not a romantic thing?”

“No.”

“But you let this stranger stay in your house.”

“Sort of. I met her on an unrelated case. I helped her out of a jam and then I found out about Daisy. I told her I’d look into the case and she could use the room I had while I investigated. She’s from Modesto. I assume that if we close this thing, I’ll get my room back and she’ll go home.”

“You couldn’t do that if you were with the LAPD.”

“There’s a lot I couldn’t do if I were still with the LAPD. But I’m not.”

They both went back to the cards but almost immediately Ballard spoke again.

“I still want to talk to her,” she said.

“I told her that,” Bosch said. “Anytime you like.”

A half hour went by and they both managed to finish off the cards in their respective boxes. Bosch went out into the hallway and brought a fresh box in for Ballard and then repeated the process for himself.

“How long can you do this?” Ballard asked.

“You mean tonight?” Bosch asked. “Till about five thirty. I have a thing at six up in the Valley. It may run through most of the day. If it does, I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“When do you sleep?”

“When I can.”

They were ten minutes into their next boxes when Ballard’s radio squawked. Ballard responded and Munroe told her that a detective was requested on the burglary of an occupied dwelling on Sunset Boulevard.

Ballard looked at the stack of FI cards in front of her and radioed back.

“You sure they need a detective, L-T?”

“They asked. You in the middle of something or what?”

“No, I’m rolling now.”

“Roger that. Lemme know what you’ve got out there.”

Ballard stood up and looked at Bosch.

“I need to go and I can’t leave you here,” she said.

“You sure?” he asked. “I’ll stay here and keep chopping wood.”

“No, you’re not LAPD. I can’t leave you here unsupervised. I’d take a hit for that if someone came in and found you here.”

“Whatever. So, what do I do, go with you?”

Ballard thought about that. It would work.

“You can do that,” she said. “Take a stack of those with you and sit in the car while I check this call out. Hopefully, it’s not a long one.”

Bosch reached down into the box next to his desk and used two hands to pull out a good-size stack of cards.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The burglary call was less than five minutes from the station. The address was familiar to Ballard but she did not place it until they arrived and saw that it was a strip bar called Sirens on Sunset. And it was still open, which made the question of burglary a bit baffling.

There was one patrol car blocking the valet zone. Ballard pulled in behind it. She knew two units had already responded and assumed the other car was in the alley behind the station.

“This should be interesting,” Bosch said.

“Not for you,” Ballard said. “You wait here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I hope this is just bullshit and I’ll be right back out. Start thinking about code seven.”

“You’re hungry?”

“Not right now but I’m gonna need a lunch break.”

Ballard grabbed the rover out of the console charger and got out of the car.

“What’s open?” Bosch asked.

“Almost nothing,” she said.

She closed the door and headed toward the front door of Sirens.

The interior entry area was dimly lit in red. There was a pay station with a bouncer and cashier, and a velvet-roped channel that led to an arched doorway to the dance floor. Ballard could see three small stages outlined in red below faux Tiffany atrium ceilings. There were women in various stages of undress on the stages but very few customers. Ballard checked her watch. It was 2:40 a.m. and the bar was open until 4. Ballard badged the bouncer.

“Where are the officers?” she asked.

“I’ll walk you back,” the bouncer said.

He opened a door that matched the walls in red-velvet paisley and led her down a dark hallway to the open door of a well-lit office. He then headed back to the front.

Three officers were crowded into the small room in front of a desk where a man sat. Ballard nodded. The blue suiters were Dvorek in charge and Herrera and Dyson, whom Ballard knew well because they were a rare female team, and the women on the late show often took code seven together. Herrera was the senior lead officer and had four hash marks on her sleeves. Her partner had one. Both women wore their hair short to avoid having it grabbed and pulled by suspects. Ballard knew that most days they worked out in the gym after their shifts and their shoulders and upper arms showed the results. They could hold their own in a confrontation and the word on Dyson was that she liked to start them.

“Detective Ballard, glad you could make it,” Dvorek said. “This is Mr. Peralta, manager of this fine establishment, and he requested your services.”

Ballard looked at the man behind the desk. He was in his fifties, overweight, with slicked-back hair and long, sharply edged sideburns. He wore a garish purple vest over a black collared shirt. On the wall behind his chair was a framed poster of a naked woman using a stripper pole to strategically cover her privates, but not quite enough to hide that her pubic hair had been trimmed to the shape of a small heart. To his right was a video monitor that showed sixteen camera angles of the stages, bars, and exits of the club. Ballard saw herself in one of the squares from a camera over her right shoulder.

“What can I do for you, sir?” she asked.

“This is like a dream come true,” Peralta said. “I didn’t realize the LAPD was almost all women. You want a part-time job?”

“Sir, do you have a problem that requires police involvement or not?” Ballard replied.

“I do,” Peralta said. “I’ve got a problem—someone is going to break in.”

“Going to? Why would someone break in when they can walk in the front door?”

“You tell me. All I’m saying is, it’s going down. Look at this.”

He turned to the video monitor and pulled out a drawer beneath it, revealing a keyboard. He hit a few keys and the camera angles were replaced with a schematic of the premises.

“I’ve got every opening in the building wired,” Peralta said. “Somebody’s on the roof fucking with the skylights. They’re going to come down through there.”

Ballard leaned across the desk so she could see the screen better. It was showing breaches at two of the skylights over the stages.

“When did this happen?” she asked.

“Tonight,” Peralta said. “Like an hour ago.”

“Why would they break in?”

“Are you kidding me? This is a cash business, and I don’t walk out of here at four-thirty in the fucking morning with a cash bag under my arm. I’m not that stupid. Everything goes into the safe and then once, maybe twice, a week—in daylight—I come in to do the banking, and I have two guys you don’t want to fuck with watching my back the whole time.”

“Where’s the safe?”

“You’re standing on it.”

Ballard looked down. The officers moved back toward the walls of the room. There was an outline cut in the planked wood floor and a fingerhold for pulling open the trap door.

“Is it removable?” Ballard asked.

“Nope,” Peralta said. “Set in concrete. They’d have to drill it—unless they knew the combo, and there are only three people who know that.”

“So how much is in there?”

“I did the banking after the weekend, so it’s going to be light tonight. About twelve thou in there right now and we’ll get it up to sixteen when I close out the registers tonight.”

Ballard assessed things, looked up, and caught Dvorek’s eye and nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to take a look around. Any cameras on the roof?”

“No,” Peralta said. “Nothing up there.”

“Any access?”

“Nothing from inside. You’d need a ladder on the outside.”

“All right. I’ll be back in after we check around. Where’s the door to the alley?”

“Marv will take you.”

Peralta reached under the desk and pushed a button to call his bouncer. Soon the big man from the velvet rope was back.

“Take them out the back, Marv,” Peralta said. “To the alley.”

A few minutes later Ballard was standing in the alley, assessing the roofline of the club. The building was freestanding with a flat roof about twenty feet up. There was no approach from the business on either side and no ladders or obvious means of getting up. Ballard checked behind her. The other side of the alley was contained by wood and concrete fences and bordered on a residential neighborhood.

“Can I borrow a light?” Ballard asked.

Dyson pulled her Pelican off her equipment belt and handed it to Ballard. It was a small but powerful flashlight. Ballard walked the length of the building, looking for upward access. She found a possible ascension point by the west corner. A cinder-block enclosure had been built to contain a row of city trash containers. It was about six feet high and was next to the downspout of a gutter that ran along the edge of the roofline. Ballard shone the light up the downspout and saw that it was secured to the exterior wall with brackets every few feet.

Dvorek came up behind her.

“There’s your ladder,” Ballard said.

“You going up?” Dvorek asked.

“Not on your life. I’m calling an airship. They’ll light it up and if anybody’s up there, we’ll grab them coming down.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Put the sisters on the other corner just in case they have a ladder up there with them and decide to come down the other side. I’ll get the air unit offline.”

“Gotcha.”

Ballard didn’t want to radio for the airship, because a burglar could be monitoring LAPD frequencies. She had a working relationship with the tactical flight officer on the chopper that covered the city’s west side on most nights. They often responded to the same calls. Ballard on the ground, Heather Rourke, the spotter, in the air with her pilot partner Dan Sumner. Ballard shot a text to Rourke.

Two minutes went by before there was a response.

Ballard knew that the Rourke-Sumner team would have high adrenaline after chasing down a car involved in a hit-and-run. She was glad they were free.

In the event they had to speak by radio for expediency, the tactical channel was an unpublished frequency that wasn’t readily obtained on the internet.

Ballard still had Dyson’s light. She waved it to get the attention of the three officers at the other corner of the building. She put the light on her free hand and held up three fingers and twirled her hand in the air.

They waited. Ballard was pretty sure it was a fruitless exercise. If there had actually been someone up there, they most likely would have noticed the lights from the arrival of the patrol cars and made their escape when the officers entered the building. But checking out the roof with the airship should give some measure of satisfaction to Peralta. Ballard would then write up a recommendation to the detective commander to send out someone from the commercial burglary unit to check the roof in daylight for any signs of an attempted break-in.

Ballard heard the helicopter’s approach and tucked in close to the rear wall of the building, next to the trash enclosure. She raised the rover and switched it to the tactical 5 frequency.

She waited. The alley smelled like booze and cigarettes. She breathed through her mouth.

Soon the powerful beam of the chopper washed over everything, turning night into day. Ballard raised the rover.

“Anything, Air six?”

She held the radio to her ear, hoping to hear the response over the sound of the airship rotor. She partially heard it. The tenor of Heather Rourke’s voice told her more than the words she could make out. There was somebody on the roof.

“…suspects. Heading…corner…”

Ballard dropped the rover and pulled her weapon. She backed into the alley, raising her gun toward the roofline. The light from the chopper was blinding. Soon she saw movement and heard yelling, but she could not make out the words over the sound of the rotor. She saw someone sliding down the gutter’s downspout. Halfway down he lost his grip and fell to the ground. Soon another body was coming down the pipe, and then another.

Ballard tracked the movement with her gun. Soon all three of the suspects started running down the alley.

“Police! Freeze it right there!”

Two of the fleeing figures stopped in their tracks. The third kept going and after reaching the end, turned left into the neighborhood.

Ballard started approaching the two who had stopped and already raised their hands. As she ordered them to their knees, Dyson blew by her, running, and continued down the alley after the third suspect. Herrera followed her younger partner but at a much slower pace.

As Ballard approached, her gun at the ready, she saw—

The two suspects kneeling on the ground were just kids.

“What the fuck?” Dvorek said as he came up next to her.

Ballard holstered her weapon and put her hand on Dvorek’s arm to make him lower his. She walked around and shone the beam of Dyson’s light on their faces. They were no older than fourteen. Both were white, both looked scared. They were wearing T-shirts and blue jeans.

She realized she had dropped her rover to the ground near the trash enclosure.

“I can’t hear myself think,” she called to Dvorek. “Advise the airship on tac five that we have a code four here and they can stay with A twenty-five’s pursuit.”

Dvorek went to his rover to make the call and soon the chopper headed south in the direction the third boy had run. Ballard held the light on the young faces in front of her. One boy lowered one of his hands to try to block the blinding light.

“Keep your hands up,” Ballard ordered.

He complied.

Ballard looked at the two boys in front of her and had a good idea why they had been on the roof.

“You two almost just got yourselves killed, you know that?” she barked.

“We’re sorry, we’re sorry,” one of them said meekly.

“What were you doing up there?”

“We were just looking around. We didn’t—”

“Looking around? You mean looking down at naked women?”

In the cold, hard light of her beam Ballard could see their cheeks turn red with shame. But she knew it was shame at being caught and called on it by a woman, not shame at climbing onto a roof to look down through a skylight at women’s bodies.

She glanced at Dvorek and saw a small smile on his face. She realized that on some level he admired their ingenuity—boys will be boys—and she knew that in the world of men and women, there would never be a time when women were viewed and treated completely as equals.

“Are you going to have to tell our parents?” one of the boys asked.

Ballard lowered the light and headed back to pick up her rover.

“What do you think?” Dvorek asked her quietly as she passed him.

The question further revealed him.

“Your call,” Ballard said. “I’m out of here.”