Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (16)

“I’ll pick it up—if I’m allowed. I still don’t have any credentials.”

“I have the case number. I’ll order it and tell them you’ll be by in the morning to pick it up. Just show them your retired ID. That will work for now. You need to go to the front office here and make an appointment to give photo and prints. Then you’ll get an ID.”

“Okay. Thanks. Another question: Do I have access to the locker room here? I want to clean up, change my shirt.”

“You still carry backup clothes in your car?”

“I did today. I knew I was going out to the desert.”

“You have access to the locker room and showers. I can’t promise they’ll have a free locker for you.”

“Well, they’re police cadets in there, right? I don’t carry a gun, and who’s going to steal my wallet?”

The primary use of the Ahmanson Center was as a second academy for the training of police recruits. Most field training remained at the original academy at Elysian Fields. The Ahmanson was for classroom training—and retraining in some cases. The murder book archive occupied only a small part of the campus.

“You could leave your wallet here and come back for it after you clean up,” Ballard said.

“I’ll be fine,” Bosch said.

“Then, happy hunting.”

“You, too.”

Bosch headed for the door, walking along the endcaps of the murder-book shelves. Taped to the end of each row was a 3 x 5 card showing the range of files by case number, which always began with the year the crime took place. It was a Dewey decimal system of the dead.

Bosch ran a hand along the endcaps as he walked. He didn’t believe in ghosts or the dead reaching out from the dark beyond. But he felt a reverence and empathy as he passed by on his way out.





9


BALLARD WAS JUST finishing the case summary that she had compiled as part of a request to the Ahmanson Foundation for grant money for a genealogical case Tom Laffont had put together and would work with Hatteras.

“Colleen, Tom’s not here, so I’m sending you this grant app,” she said without taking her eyes off her screen. “Read the case summary and make sure I have it right.”

“Send it, I’ll read it,” Hatteras said.

“I want to get it in today. Maybe get a quick answer so you and Tom can go to work.”

“I’m ready. Send it.”

Just as Ballard closed the document, her desk phone buzzed. She saw on the ID screen that it was Darcy Troy from the DNA lab. She answered the phone while opening an email and sending the grant document to Hatteras.

“Darcy, whaddaya got for me?”

“Well, good and bad news on Sarah Pearlman.”

“Tell me.”

“The good news is we got a hit off the DNA from the palm print. The bad news is it’s a case-to-case hit.”

A case-to-case hit meant the DNA profile from the palm print was matched to the profile from another open case, one where the donor/suspect was unknown. Case-to-case hits were what led to genealogical investigations. This was disappointing in the moment for Ballard because she was looking for a street case, an investigation that took her out into the city and knocking on doors, looking for an identified individual whose DNA was in the law enforcement data banks. That was what Bosch was chasing now with McShane and she wanted the same for herself. It’s what true detectives lived for.

She grabbed a pen off the desk and got ready to write on a legal pad.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said. “What’s the name and case number?”

Troy recited the case number first. It was a homicide from 2005, which meant there were eleven years between the Sarah Pearlman murder and the linked case. The victim’s name was Laura Wilson and she was twenty-four years old at the time of her murder.

“Anything else on your end?” Ballard asked.

“Well, it’s unusual on the science side,” Troy said. “As far as how they even came up with the DNA on the 2005 case.”

“Yeah? Tell me.”

“You know the old saying, right? Secretions, not excretions. We extract DNA from bodily fluids—blood, sweat, and semen primarily. But not from bodily waste, because the enzymes destroy DNA.”

“No shit, no piss.”

“Yes, normally, but in this case, it was apparently extracted from urine. You’ll have to get the full details when you pull the book, but according to the few notes I have here, urine was swabbed at the crime scene because the hope was they would find swimmers. If the guy raped the victim before he used the toilet, then there might still be sperm in the urethra and that would come out in the urine. But they found no swimmers. But what they did find was blood.”

“Blood in the urine.”

“Correct. The extraction was handled quickly and they didn’t get a full profile, but they got enough to put on CODIS. They got no hits then but we just connected it with our case.”

CODIS was the national database containing millions of DNA samples collected by law enforcement across the country.

“How did they know the urine with the blood in it came from the killer?” Ballard asked.

“I wasn’t here then, so I don’t know the answer to that,” Troy said. “It’s not in the notes we have here. But hopefully it’s in the murder book.”