Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (17)
“Okay. You said it was not a full profile. Are you saying it’s not a full match to the Pearlman case?”
“No, it’s a match for sure. But as far as going into court with it, I will have to run the numbers, and that will take me some time. But it basically means fewer zeroes. We are not talking about this being a one in thirteen quadrillion match. Something less, but still encompassing the human population of the last hundred years.”
Ballard knew that Troy had the tendency to get lost in the wonder of the numbers. But she had handled enough DNA cases to be able to interpret what she was saying.
“So you’ll be able to testify that this DNA is unique.”
“Well, to be exact, I can testify that no other person on this planet in the last hundred years has had this DNA.”
“Got it. That’s all I need. Now we just have to find the guy. I’m going to go look for the book now. Thanks for the quickie, Darcy.”
“Glad to help. Let me know how it goes.”
“I will.”
Ballard put the phone down and got up.
“Good news?” Hatteras asked.
“Think so,” Ballard said. “Might be another case for you. Did you read that grant app?”
“Read it and sent it back to you. Good to go.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll send it out in a few.”
Ballard headed down the aisle that ran along the endcaps, looking for the 2005 row. She found it and turned the wheel to move the shelves and open the row. She ticked a fingernail along the spines of the murder books until she found case 05-0243 and slid it out. The Laura Wilson case was contained in one overstuffed binder, which Ballard knew she would immediately reinstall in two binders to make flipping through the documents easier. She double-checked that there was not a second binder misplaced nearby during the shelving and saw that none of the other binders on the shelf carried the same case number.
She stepped out of the row and cranked it closed again, thinking all the while about how Bosch called the archives the “library of lost souls.” If that was true, she had one of those lost souls in her hand.
Back at her workstation, Ballard emailed the grant app first, then opened the thick binder she had brought from the archives. Because the origin of the DNA in the case was so unusual, she went straight to the forensics section to see how it came to be that DNA was extracted from urine.
A summary statement from the lead investigator told the story. The victim was murdered in her home, where she lived alone. The crime scene investigators noticed that the toilet seat in the bathroom off the bedroom was up, indicating that a man had used it. While checking the toilet seat and flush handle for fingerprints, a criminalist noticed urine droplets on the rim of the bowl. These drops were reddish brown in color, indicating the possibility of blood cells in the urine. The droplets were collected on swabs, and DNA extraction was conducted the same day because of the fear of possible DNA decay. A partial profile was established and then entered into the CODIS database, drawing no matches.
The summary went on to state that further analysis and medical consultation by investigators determined that the urine had come from someone who had kidney or bladder disease, causing hematuria, the medical term for blood in the urine.
Ballard was excited by what she had read and eager to see whether the investigators used the confirmation of kidney disease as an angle of investigation. Had they looked for a suspect among men being treated for kidney disease? She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out two empty binders. She removed all the documents and plastic sleeves from the original murder book, split the stack, and slipped each half onto the rings of a new binder. She then got up and went to the kitchen to get coffee before she settled in to read the case’s investigative chronology.
Laura Wilson was a young African American woman trying to make it as an actress and living alone in an apartment paid for by her parents back in Chicago. She had moved out to L.A. two years before her death and was in the midst of a promise to herself and her supporters to make it and become self-supporting within five years or to turn around and go home. She was taking acting lessons and routinely auditioning for small parts in films and television shows. She had also joined an acting troupe that worked out of a twenty-seat theater in Burbank. Her apartment was on Tamarind Avenue near the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin. Wilson had joined the organization and was taking classes, also paid for by her parents, in hopes that she would make connections that would help her in the entertainment business.
She had been found murdered on Saturday morning, November 5, 2005, by a friend she was supposed to go with to a Scientology seminar. The friend found the door to her apartment ajar, entered, and found the victim dead in her bed. Cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation—a silk scarf was knotted around her neck. The body was mutilated postmortem.
“What is that?”
Ballard had been so immersed in her reading that she had not noticed that Rawls had come around the pod and was looking over her shoulder.
“The DNA we got on the Pearlman case was linked to this one from ’05,” she said.
“Wow, interesting,” Rawls said.
Ballard closed the binder and swiveled her chair so she could look up at him.
“What’s up, Lou?” she asked.
“I’m taking off,” Rawls said. “I gotta put out a fire at my store in Encino. Angry customer says we lost a package containing a priceless antiquity.”