The Night Fire: A Ballard and Bosch thriller (Harry Bosch 22) (22 page)

“Yo, E—that you, n____?”

“What you want, boy? I ain’t putting up no bail on you, man. I’m out. You know that.”

“No, no, no, my n____. I ain’t want nothin’—they got me on a parole hold anyway. I just givin’ you a heads-up, man.”

“About what?”

Ballard grabbed the pad Bosch had written the name
Manley
on, scribbled a note, and slid it in front of Bosch.

D-squared = Dennard Dorsey. Talked to him Tuesday

Bosch nodded. He understood now who was calling Kidd. Kidd and Dorsey couldn’t hear them if Ballard and Bosch talked, but they maintained silence because they wanted not to miss anything.

“It’s ’bout that thing in the alley way back when, man. Some cop come in here asking all about that thing that happened with that white boy.”

“Asking what?”

“Like was I there and what was going on.”

“What you tell ’em?”

“I didn’t say shit. I wudn’t even there. But I thought, you know, I should tell you they still interested, you know what I mean? Keep your head down, n_____.”

“When was this?”

“She came up in here Tuesday. They put me in a room with her.”

“She?”

“A lady cop. Kind I’d like to see on my bone, too.”

“She got a name?”

“Something like Ballet or something. I didn’t properly catch it at the start ’cause I was like,
What you want with me, motherfucker?
But she knew some shit, man. She knew me and V-Dog worked that alley back in the day. You remember him? He died up in Folsom or some shit. It’s like one of them cold case things, you know?”

“Who told her about me?”

“I ’on’t know. She just got up in my shit and asked about you.”

“How’d you get this number?”

“I ain’t had no number. I had to call a couple OGs to get it. That’s why it took me a couple days to get to you.”

“Which OG?”

“Marcel. He had a number for—”

“Okay, dog, don’t call me no more. I’m outta the game.”

“I know that, but I still thought you’d—”

The call was disconnected by Kidd.

Ballard immediately got up from her seat and started pacing. “Holy shit,” she said. “Dorsey just did what I was going to drive out there and do tomorrow.”

“But Kidd didn’t give anything up,” Bosch cautioned. “He was careful.”

“True, but he asked a lot of questions. We got the right guy. It’s him and we were fucking lucky the wire got set up already. But now what? Do I still go out there tomorrow?”

“No way. He’ll be ready for you and you don’t want that.” Ballard nodded while she paced the living room. “Can you play it again?” Bosch asked.

Ballard came back to the table and replayed the call. Bosch listened closely for anything that might sound like a code passed between the two old gangbangers. But he concluded that Kidd had taken the call out of the blue and there had been no secret message or code imparted. As Dorsey had said, he was simply passing on a warning about a potentially threatening situation.

“What do you think?” Ballard asked.

Bosch thought a moment.

“I think we wait and see if Kidd makes a move,” he said.

“But now that he knows about the investigation he may go offline,” Ballard said. “He’ll go buy a burner. I would if I were him.”

“I could go out and watch him tonight.”

“I’m going with you.”

“That won’t work. It’s two hours out there easy with rush hour and you have your shift you said you can’t miss. You’d have to turn around almost as soon as we got there. I’ll go and you monitor the wire, just in case he’s stupid.”

The text-message tone sounded from Ballard’s laptop. “Speaking of which,” she said.

She pulled up the message. It was outgoing from Kidd’s phone.

Need to meet. Dulan’s at 1 tomoro. Important!!!!

They both stared at the screen, waiting for a reply.

“You think it’s the
Marcel
that Dorsey mentioned?” Ballard asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Probably.”

A short reply came through.

I’ll be there.

Bosch got up from the table to loosen his knee again.

“I guess if we figure out who Dulan is, we could set up on him tomorrow,” he said.

“Dulan’s is a soul food kitchen,” Ballard said. “Good stuff. But there’s at least three of them that I know of in South L.A.”

Bosch nodded, impressed by her knowledge.

“Any of them in Rolling 60s turf?” he asked.

“There’s one on Crenshaw in the fifties,” Ballard said.

“That’s probably it. You eat there? Will we stand out if we’re in there?”

“You will. But I can pass for high yellow.”

It was true. Ballard was mixed race—part Polynesian for sure, though Bosch had never asked about her ancestry.

“So, you inside and me outside,” he said. “Not sure I like that.”

“They’re not going to make a move in a crowded restaurant,” Ballard said. “At one o’clock that place will be hopping.”

“Then how would you even get close to them to hear anything?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“You gotta dress down.”

“What? Why?”

“Because of what D-squared told him on the call—that you were a looker.”

“Not exactly what he said. But I take the point. I’ll go get a couple hours on the beach after work and I’ll come dressed down. Don’t worry.”

“Maybe we should call in the troops. Go to your lieutenant, tell him what you’ve been doing, get more bodies on this.”

“I go in with a homicide and it will be taken off me faster than a pickpocket takes a wallet on the Venice boardwalk.”

Bosch nodded. He knew she was right. He pointed to her laptop.

“At work tonight, can you trace that number he texted to, find out who it is?”

“I can try but it’s probably a burner.”

“I don’t know. Kidd’s been out of the game. He used his own cell to text—that was a mistake. Out of the game might mean he’s got no burner. And people still in the game have burners and change them all the time. But this is a number Kidd had—that he knew. It might be a legit phone.”

Ballard nodded.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll see if I can run it down.”

Bosch moved to the sliding 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 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 it up on the workstation’s computer screen.

The field interview was conducted by a South Bureau gang intel team that had stopped to talk to a man loitering outside a closed restaurant at Slauson and Keniston Avenues. Ballard pegged this location as just on the border between Los Angeles and Inglewood—and firmly in Rolling 60s territory. The man’s name was Marcel Dupree. He was fifty-one years old and, though he denied membership in a gang, he had a tattoo of the Crips’ six-pointed star on the back of his left hand.

According to the FI card, Dupree told the officers who stopped him that he was waiting to be picked up by a girlfriend because he’d had too much to drink. Seeing that no crime had been committed, they filled in an FI card—including cell phone number, home address, birth date, and other details—and left the man where they had found him.

Ballard next entered Marcel Dupree’s name into the crime index computer and pulled up a record of numerous arrests and at least two convictions dating back thirty-three years. Dupree had served two prison terms, one for armed robbery and the other for discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling. What was more important than all of that was that there was a felony warrant out for Dupree for not paying child support. It wasn’t much, but Ballard now had something she could try to squeeze him with if necessary.

She spent the next hour pulling up individual arrest reports and more than once found descriptions of Dupree that called him a shot caller in the Rolling 60s Crips. The child support beef had gone to a felony warrant because Dupree owed more than $100,000 in child support to two different women going back three years.

Ballard was excited. She had just connected two of the dots in the Kidd investigation, and she had something on Dupree she might be able to use to further the investigation. She felt like telling Bosch but guessed he might be asleep. She downloaded the most recent DMV shot of Dupree, which was four years old, along with his last mug shot, which was a decade older. In both he had a perfectly round head and bushy, unkempt hair. Ballard included both photos in a text to Bosch. She wanted him to know what Dupree looked like before they set up their surveillance operation the next day.

She didn’t know whether Bosch had a text chime set on his phone but there was no reply after five minutes. She picked up the rover she had taken from a charger at the start of shift and radioed Lieutenant Washington that she was taking a code 7—a meal break—but would have her rover with her as usual. She walked through the station’s deserted back lot to her city car and headed out.

There was an all-night taco truck in a parking lot at Sunset and Western. Ballard ate there often and knew Digoberto Rojas, the man who operated it. She liked to practice her Spanish on him, more often than not confusing him with her mix of Spanish and English.

This night he was working alone and Ballard asked him in halting Spanish where his son was. The young man had worked with his father most nights until recently. The last two or three times Ballard had gone to the truck, Digoberto was working alone. This concerned her because it made him a more vulnerable target. They spoke through the truck’s counter window as Digoberto made her a pair of shrimp tacos.

“He lazy,” Digoberto said. “He want to hang out all day with his
vatos.
Then he say he too tired to come to work.”

“You want me to come talk to him,” Ballard said, dropping the Spanish. “I will.”