“No problem. I’m making progress.”
He held up the handful of cards he had put to the side for closer study later. She was about to say that there was a problem in him coming into the station and working the case alone, but she let it go. She pulled out a seat and sat down at a desk in the same pod as Bosch.
After logging into the computer, Ballard started writing an incident report that she would send to the team that took over the Cady case.
“What was the case?” Bosch asked. “The homicide.”
“It’s a no-body case,” she said. “So far, at least. Started as a missing persons and that’s why I was called in. Got a guy who admits killing the man, cutting up the body, and putting it all in a dumpster. Oh, and he says it was self-defense.”
“Of course, he does.”
“We checked with the building manager — the dumpster got picked up yesterday, so they’ll be going out to the landfill today as soon as they figure out who the trash hauler was and which dump they use. One of the few times I’m glad I don’t get to see a case all the way through. The two guys that caught it were not too happy.”
“I had a no-body case once. Same thing. We had to go to the dump but we were a week behind it. So we spent about two weeks out there. And we found a body but it was the wrong one. Only in L.A., I guess.”
“You mean you found a murder victim but not the one you were looking for?”
“Yeah. We never found the one we were looking for. We went out there on a tip anyway. So maybe it never happened. The one we found was a mob case and we eventually cleared it. But those two weeks out there, I didn’t get the smell out of my nose for months. And forget about the clothes. I threw everything away.”
“I’ve heard it can be pretty ripe at those places.”
She went back to work, but less than five minutes went by before Bosch interrupted again.
“Did you ever get a chance to check on the GRASP files?” he asked.
“Matter of fact, I did,” Ballard said. “Supposedly they were all purged, but I got a line on the USC professor who designed the program and helped implement it. I’m hoping he kept the data. I have an appointment at eight with him, if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested. I’ll buy you breakfast on the way.”
“I won’t have time for breakfast if I don’t get the paperwork filed.”
“Got it. I’ll shut up.”
Ballard smiled as she went back to work on the report. She was in the summary section, where she was typing out Tyldus’s self-serving statements — he was being booked under his current legal name — after he was arrested and realized that he needed to try to talk his way out of a murder. His fervent plea of self-defense lost credibility when the forensics team called to the apartment pulled up the bathtub drain trap and found blood and tissue. Then Tyldus admitted cutting the body up and bagging the parts in plastic trash bags — an extreme measure for a self-defense killing.
It made Ballard feel bad for Cady’s parents and family. In the next hours and days they would learn that their son was presumed dead, dismembered, and buried somewhere amid the garbage at a landfill. And Bosch’s story about an unsuccessful search for a body in a landfill concerned her. It was critical that they find Cady’s body so that injuries aside from dismemberment could be analyzed in concert with the details provided by Tyldus. If the injuries on the body told a different story, it would be Jacob’s way of helping to convict his killer.
Despite what Ballard had said about being glad she was not seeing the case through to the end, she intended to volunteer to help look for Jacob. She felt the need to be there.
Ballard’s shift ended at seven but she got her reports emailed to the West Bureau detectives an hour before that and she and Bosch headed downtown early. They ate breakfast at the Pacific Dining Car, an expensive LAPD tradition across the street from the Rampart Division station. They didn’t talk much about the current case. Instead, they filled each other in on their histories in the LAPD. Bosch had bounced around a lot in the early years before spending several years in Hollywood homicide and finishing his career at RHD. He also revealed that he had a daughter who went to college down in Orange County.
Mention of the daughter prompted Bosch to pull out his phone.
“You’re not going to text her now, are you?” Ballard asked. “No college kid is awake this early.”
“No, just checking her location,” Bosch said. “Seeing if she’s at home. She’s twenty-one now and I thought that would lessen the worry, but it’s only made it worse.”
“Does she know you can track her?”
“Yeah, we made a deal. I can track her and she can track me. I think she worries about me as much as I worry about her.”
“That’s nice, but you know that she can just leave her phone in her room and you’d think she was there.”
Bosch looked up from the phone to Ballard.
“Really?” he said. “You had to plant that seed in my head?”
“Sorry,” Ballard said. “Just saying if I was a college kid and my dad could track my phone, I don’t think I’d carry it all the time.”
Bosch put his phone away and changed the subject.
As promised, Bosch picked up the tab, and they headed south toward USC. Along the way, Ballard told Bosch about Dennis Eagleton and his being picked up by the Moonlight Mission bus on the same night as Daisy Clayton. She said there wasn’t much of a tie between the two beyond that, but Eagleton was a dirtbag criminal and she wanted to interview him if he could be located.
“Tim Farmer talked to him,” she said. “He wrote a shake in 2014, said ‘Eagle’ was filled with hate and violence.”
“But no real record of violence?” Bosch asked.
“Just the one assault that got pled down. The dirtbag only did a month in county for splitting a guy’s head open with a bottle.”
Bosch didn’t respond. He just nodded as if the story about Eagleton’s light punishment was par for the course.
By eight a.m. they were at the office door of Professor Scott Calder at the University of Southern California. Calder was in his late thirties, which told Ballard he had been in his twenties when he designed the crime tracking program adopted by the police department.
“Professor Calder?” Ballard said. “I’m Detective Ballard. We spoke on the phone. And this is my colleague Detective Bosch.”
“Come in, please,” Calder said.
Calder offered his visitors seats in front of his desk and then sat down himself. He was casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt with USC in gold over the left breast. He had a shaved head and a long beard in the steampunk style. Ballard guessed that he thought it helped him fit in better with the students on campus.
“LAPD should never have disbanded GRASP,” he said. “It would have been paying dividends right now if they had kept it in place.”
Neither Ballard nor Bosch jumped to agree with him and Calder began a brief summary of how the program arose from his studies of crime patterns in and around USC after a spate of assaults and robberies of students just blocks from campus. After collecting data, Calder used statistics to project the frequency and locations of future crimes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university. The LAPD got wind of the project and the police chief asked Calder to take his computer modeling to the city, starting with three test areas: Hollywood Division because of the transient nature of its inhabitants and the variety of crimes that occurred there; Pacific Division because of the unique nature of crimes in Venice; and Southwest Division because it included USC. A city grant financed the project, and Calder and several of his students went to work collecting the data after a training period with officers in the three divisions. The project lasted two and a half years, until the chief’s five-year term was up. The police commission did not retain Calder afterward. A new chief was named and he killed the program, announcing a return to good old-fashioned community policing.