The Night Fire (Harry Bosch #22) - Michael Connelly Page 0,68

door and opened it, then stepped out onto the deck. Ballard followed him.

“Amazing view,” she said.

“I like it best at night,” Bosch said. “The lights and everything. Even makes the freeway look pretty.”

Ballard laughed.

“You know, we still don’t know why John Jack had this murder book or why he sat on it for twenty years,” Bosch said.

Ballard came up to the deck railing next to him. “Does it matter? We have a bead on the doer. And we have opportunity and motive.”

“It matters to me,” Bosch said. “I want to know.”

“I think we’ll get there,” Ballard said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Bosch just nodded, but he was doubtful. They—Ballard mostly—had accomplished in a week what John Jack had not been able to do in two decades. Bosch was beginning to subscribe to Ballard’s theory that there was something sinister about it—that John Jack Thompson took the murder book because he didn’t want the case solved.

And that created a whole new mystery to think about. And a painful one at that.

BALLARD

30

Ballard started her shift at the Watch Three roll call. Nothing had been left in her inbox by day-watch detectives so she went upstairs to roll call to get a take on what was happening out on the street. Lieutenant Washington was holding forth at the podium, another sign that it was shaping up as a slow night. He usually had a sergeant handle roll call while he remained in the watch office monitoring what was happening outside.

Washington called out the teams and their assigned reporting districts.

“Meyer, Shuman: six-A-fifteen.”

“Doucette and Torborg: six-A-forty-five.”

“Travis and Marshall, you’ve got forty-nine tonight.”

And so on. He announced that State Farm was continuing its stolen-car program, awarding uniform pins to officers who recovered five stolen cars or more during the monthlong campaign. He mentioned that some of the officers in roll call had reached five already and some were stalled at three or four. He wanted shift-wide compliance. Otherwise there was not much out there to talk about. Roll call ended with a warning from the watch commander:

“I know these nights have been slow out there but it will pick up. It always does,” Washington said. “I don’t want anybody submarining. Remember, this isn’t like the old days. I’ve got your GPS markers on my screen. I see anybody circling the fort, they’re going to get the three-one for next DP.”

Submarining was a team leaving their assigned patrol area and cruising close to the station so they could return quickly when the shift was over, and the call went out that the first watch teams were down and heading out. Six-A-thirty-one, the patrol area farthest from the station, consisted mostly of East Hollywood, where nuisance calls—homeless and drunk and disorderly—were more frequent. Nobody wanted to work the three-one, especially for a twenty-eight-day deployment period (DP), so it was usually assigned to someone on the watch commander’s shit list.

“All right, people,” Washington said. “Let’s get out there and do good work.”

The meeting broke up but Renée stayed seated so she could speak to Washington after the uniformed officers left the room. He saw her waiting and knew the score.

“Ballard, what’s up?”

“L-T, you got anything for me?”

“Not yet. You got something going?”

“I got a couple leftover things from last night, a phone number I need to trace. Let me know when I’m needed.”

“Roger that, Ballard.”

Ballard went back down the stairs and into the detective bureau, where she set up in a corner as usual. She opened her laptop and pulled up the wiretap software on the off chance that Elvin Kidd decided to make a phone call or send a midnight tweet. She knew it was probably a long shot but the clock was ticking on the seventy-two-hour wiretap, so it couldn’t hurt to keep the channel open in case she got lucky again.

She set to work tracing the number that Kidd had sent the text to after receiving the jail call from Dennard Dorsey. Her first step was just to run it through a Google database containing a reverse phone directory. That produced nothing. A search on Lexis/Nexis was also fruitless, indicating the number was unlisted. She next signed into the department database and ran a search to see if the number had ever been entered into a crime report or other document collected by the department. This time she got lucky. The number had turned up on a field interview card four years earlier. It had been digitized in the department-wide database and she was able to call