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.