Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (21)

“How was the connection made?”

“DNA.”

“I didn’t think there was DNA in Sarah’s case.”

“There wasn’t until yesterday, but we found it and it led to this new case.”

“What is that victim’s name?”

“Laura Wilson. She was older than Sarah by a few years. But there are case similarities. She was also sexually assaulted and murdered in her bed.”

“I see.”

“But that’s all we really have at the moment, so I would relax, Mr. Hastings. If something develops from this that Councilman Pearlman needs to know, I will call you first thing.”

“Thank you, Detective.”

Hastings disconnected and Ballard looked up to see Bosch entering the restaurant. She caught his eye with a wave and he came over and slid into the corner booth.

“How was your interview?” Ballard asked.

“Nothing really new,” Bosch said. “But it was a good place to restart. She called somebody right after I left, so that’s curious.”

“This that trick you told me about, standing on the front step and eavesdropping?”

“It works sometimes. So what’s up?”

“Well, thanks to you and the DNA we pulled off the palm print, we now have a hit on another case.”

“Where? When?”

“Here in ’05. In fact, right around the corner on Tamarind.”

“I just parked on Tamarind.”

“I’m going to walk over after we leave to check the place out. Here is the chrono. You can take it with you if you want to read it tonight.”

“I thought no copies left Ahmanson.”

Ballard smiled.

“No copies leave with you. I’m the boss. I can make copies.”

“Got it. A double standard—you’ll go far in the LAPD.”

“That’s not as funny as you think it is.”

“Okay, so what else do you know about the case?”

Ballard started reviewing what she considered the important points gained from her read-through of the Wilson murder book.

“The bottom line is, if there wasn’t a genetic link between these cases, I wouldn’t have connected them,” she said. “One victim is white, one Black; one in her teens, one in her twenties; one strangled, one stabbed. One murdered in her house, where she lived with her parents and brother; the other killed in an apartment, where she lived alone.”

“But both were sexually assaulted and killed in their beds,” Bosch said. “Did you look at the crime scene? Did he cover the second victim’s face?”

“No, he didn’t. I guess eleven years after killing Sarah Pearlman, he was no longer ashamed of what he had done.”

Bosch nodded. A waiter came to the table and they both ordered rotisserie chicken plates and Bosch said he’d drink what Ballard was drinking. After the waiter took the order to the kitchen, Bosch spoke.

“Eleven years between cases,” he said. “That’s not likely.”

“I know,” Ballard said. “There’s got to be others out there.”

“These two were the mistakes.”

“Where he left DNA.”

“The other thing is: two cases eleven years apart and both in L.A.”

“Both in Hollywood.”

“He’s not a traveler.”

“He’s still here.”

Bosch nodded.

“Most likely,” he said.

After eating, they left the restaurant and walked down to Tamarind Avenue. They turned right and walked up the street, which was lined on both sides by two-story postwar apartment buildings with names like the Capri and the Royale. Ballard located Laura Wilson’s apartment building—the Warwick—halfway up the block on the east side.

She and Bosch stood side by side and looked silently at the facade of the structure. It was a Streamline Moderne design and painted in shades of aqua and cream. It looked aerodynamic and safe. There was no hint of the violence that had occurred there so many years before.

Ballard pointed up at the windows on the left side of the second floor.

“Her place was second floor at the front,” she said. “That corner.”

Bosch just nodded.

“I’m going to put everybody on the team on this tomorrow,” Ballard said. “We need to get this guy.”

Bosch nodded again.

“You okay putting McShane on hold for a bit?” Ballard asked.

“No,” Bosch said. “But I’ll do it.”





12


FROM HIS POD, Bosch watched Ballard rally the team into focusing on the Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson cases. She had told him the night before at Birds that she planned to call in everyone but Rawls because she didn’t want him leaking everything they were doing to Nelson Hastings. Instead, she would text Rawls and tell him to take the day off if he still needed time to put out the fire at his business. Based on what she knew of his work ethic as an investigator, Ballard predicted the response from Rawls would be a thumbs-up emoji and he would not show up. So far she had been right.

Ballard gave assignments to each investigator in the pod, hoping that with many fresh eyes, they would break new ground in terms of finding the nexus where the two victims crossed paths with the same killer. The two young women were separated by age, race, financial status, and experience but somewhere in their lives there was a connection. Ballard put Bosch on crime scene review, while others on the team were assigned to review statements from family, friends, and witnesses. Tom Laffont would handle the medical lead. It did not seem that the original detectives had pursued the potential angle of investigation that the blood in the urine gave them. Blood in the urine was an indication of possible kidney or bladder disease that was either being treated or would reach a point that it needed to be treated.