Michael Connelly
Dark Sacred Night
For Detective Mitzi Roberts,
Renée’s inspiration
Ballard
1
The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene.
But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.
There were two black-and-whites parked along the curb in front of Ballard. Three blue suits were standing between them, waiting for her. Ballard didn’t really expect them to have stayed inside with the body.
Up above, an airship circled at three hundred feet, holding its beam on the street. It looked like a leash of light tethering the circling craft, keeping it from flying away.
Ballard killed the engine but sat in her city ride for a moment. She had parked in front of the gap between two houses and could look out at the lights of the city spreading in a vast carpet below. Not many people realized that Hollywood Boulevard wound up into the mountains, narrow and tight, to where it was strictly residential and far in all ways from the glitz and grime of the Hollywood Boulevard tourist mecca, where visitors posed with costumed superheroes and sidewalk stars. Up here it was money and power and Ballard knew that a murder in the hills always brought out the department’s big guns. She was just babysitting. She would not have this case for long. It would go to West Bureau Homicide or possibly even Robbery-Homicide Division downtown, depending on who was dead and what their social status was.
She looked away from the view and tapped the overhead light so she could see her notebook. She had just come from her day’s first callout, a routine break-in off Melrose, and had her notes for the report she would write once she got back to Hollywood Division. She flipped to a fresh page and wrote the time — 01:47 a.m. — and the address. She added a note about the clear and mild weather conditions. She then turned the light off and got out, leaving the blue flashers on. Moving to the back of the car, she popped the trunk to get to her crime scene kit.
It was Monday morning, her first shift of a week running solo, and Ballard knew she would need to get at least one more wear out of her suit and possibly two. That meant not fouling it with the stink of decomp. At the trunk she slipped off her jacket, folded it carefully, and placed it in one of the empty cardboard evidence boxes. She removed her crime scene coveralls from a plastic bag and pulled them on over her boots, slacks, and blouse. She zipped them up to her chin and, placing one boot and then the other up on the bumper, tightened the Velcro cuffs around her ankles. After she did the same around her wrists, her clothes were hermetically sealed.
Out of the kit she grabbed disposable gloves and the breathing mask she’d used at autopsies when she was formerly with RHD, closed the trunk, and walked up to join the three uniformed officers. As she approached, she recognized Sergeant Stan Dvorek, the area boss, and two officers whose longevity on the graveyard shift got them the cushy and slow Hollywood Hills beat.
Dvorek was balding and paunchy with the kind of hip spread that comes with too many years in a patrol car. He was leaning against the fender of one of the cars with his arms folded in front of his chest. He was known as the Relic. Anybody who actually liked being on the midnight shift and lasted significant years on it ended up with a nickname. Dvorek was the current record holder, celebrating his tenth year on the late show just a month before. The officers with him, Anthony Anzelone and Dwight Doucette, were Caspar and Deuce. Ballard, with just three years on graveyard, had no nickname bestowed upon her yet. At least none that she knew about.
“Fellas,” Ballard said.
“Whoa, Sally Ride,” Dvorek said. “When’s the shuttle taking off?”
Ballard spread her arms to display herself. She knew the coveralls were baggy and looked like a space suit. She thought maybe she had just been christened with a nickname.
“That would be never,” she said. “So whadda we got that chased you out of the house?”
“It’s bad in there,” said Anzelone.
“It’s been cooking,” Doucette added.
The Relic pushed off the trunk of his car and got serious.
“Female white, fifties, looks like blunt-force trauma and facial lacerations,” he said. “Somebody worked her over pretty good. Domicile in disarray. Could’ve been a break-in.”
“Sexual assault?” Ballard asked.
“Her nightgown’s pulled up. She’s exposed.”
“Okay, I’m going in. Which one of you brave lads wants to walk me through it?”
There were no immediate volunteers.
“Deuce, you’ve got the high number,” Dvorek said.
“Shit,” said Doucette.
Doucette was the newest officer of the three, so he had the highest serial number. He pulled a blue bandanna up from around his neck and over his mouth and nose.
“You look like a fucking Crip,” Anzelone said.
“Why, because I’m black?” Doucette asked.
“Because you’re wearing a fucking blue bandanna,” Anzelone said. “If it was red, I’d say you look like a fucking Blood.”
“Just show her,” Dvorek said. “I really don’t want to be here all night.”
Doucette broke off the banter and headed toward the open door of the house. Ballard followed.
“How’d we get this thing so late, anyway?” she asked.
“Next-door neighbor got a call from the victim’s niece back in New York,” Doucette said. “Neighbor has a key and the niece asked him to check because the lady wasn’t responding to social media or cell calls for a few days. The neighbor opens the door, gets hit with the funk, and calls us.”
“At one o’clock in the morning?”
“No, much earlier. But all of PM watch was tied up last night on a caper with a four-five-nine suspect and on a perimeter around Park La Brea till end of watch. Nobody got up here and then it got passed on to us at roll call. We came by as soon as we could.”
Ballard nodded. The perimeter around a robbery suspect sounded suspect to her. More likely, she thought, the buck had been passed shift to shift because nobody wants to work a possible body case that has been cooking in a closed house.
“Where’s the neighbor now?” Ballard asked.
“Back home,” Doucette said. “Probably taking a shower and sticking VapoRub up his nose. He’s never going to be the same again.”
“We gotta get his prints to exclude him, even if he says he didn’t go in.”
“Roger that. I’ll get the print car up here.”
Snapping on her latex gloves, Ballard followed Doucette over the threshold and into the house. The breathing mask was almost useless. The putrid odor of death hit her strongly, even though she was breathing through her mouth.
Doucette was tall and broad-shouldered. Ballard could see nothing until she was well into the house and had stepped around him. The house was cantilevered out over the hillside, making the view through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall a stunning sheath of twinkling light. Even at this hour, the city seemed alive and pulsing with grand possibilities.
“Was it dark in here when you came in?” Ballard asked.
“Nothing was on when we got here,” said Doucette.