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

While Ballard worked the phones and the political demands of her job on the other side of a useless privacy wall, he opened the first of three murder books containing the records of the so-far-unsuccessful Sarah Pearlman investigation.

He started with the binder marked VOLUME 1 and immediately went to the table of contents. All crime scene and forensic photos were listed as located in the third volume. He moved to that binder. He wanted to start with the photos, knowing nothing about the case but seeing what the investigators saw on the morning of June 11, 1994, when Sarah’s mutilated body was found in her bed at her family’s home on Maravilla Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

The third murder book contained several clear plastic sleeves clipped to its rings, each holding two 5 x 7 color photos front and back. The pictures were standard harshly lit color photos in which blood looked purple-black, white skin was turned alabaster, and the victim was robbed of her humanity. Sarah Pearlman was just sixteen when her life was brutally ended by a rapist who had choked and stabbed her. In the first photos, Sarah’s body was splayed on the bed with a flannel nightgown pulled up over the exposed torso to cover her face. Bosch initially took the positioning of the nightgown as an effort by the killer to keep the victim from seeing his features. But as he flipped through the photo sleeves, it became clear that the nightgown was pulled up after she had been attacked and killed. Bosch now recognized it as an action of regret. The killer covered his victim’s face so he would no longer have to see it.

There were multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck of the victim, and blood had soaked the sheets and comforter and coagulated around the body. It was also clear from bruising around the neck that the victim had been choked at some point during the ordeal. Counting the years of war and police work, Bosch had been looking at the unnatural cause of death for more than half a century. To say he got used to seeing the depravity and cruelty that humans inflict upon each other would be wrong, but he had long ago stopped thinking of these explosions of violence as aberrations. He had lost much of his faith in the goodness of people. To him the violence wasn’t the departure from the norm. It was the norm.

He knew this was a pessimistic view of the world, but fifty years of toiling in the fields of blood had left him without much hope. He knew that the dark engine of murder would never run low on fuel. Not in his lifetime. Not in anyone’s.

He continued to flip through the photos, to imprint them permanently on his mind. He knew this was the way for him. It was the way to enrage him, to inextricably bind him to a victim he had seen only in photos. It would ignite the fire he needed.

After the crime scene photos came forensic photos, individual shots of evidence and possible pieces of evidence. These included shots of blood spatter on the wall above the headboard and the ceiling over the victim, photos of her torn underwear discarded on the floor, an orthodontic retainer found in the folds of the bed’s comforter.

There were several photos of fingerprints that had been identified by latent techs, dusted and then taped. Bosch knew that these would likely match the victim, since she had inhabited the bedroom. Notations made on these by the original investigators bore this out. But one photo of what appeared to be the bottom half of a palm print had UNK marked on it. Unknown. Its location was a windowsill and its positioning on the sill indicated that it was left by someone climbing in through the window.

In 1994 the partial palm print would have been useless unless directly compared to a suspect’s. Bosch was working homicides then and knew there were no palm-print databases at the time. Even now, almost three decades later, there were few palm prints on file or in databases for comparison.

Bosch looked over the partition at Ballard. She had just hung up from a call with a local businessman known for building hundreds of apartments in downtown. She had been asking him to join the cause and financially support the work of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“How’d that go?” he asked.

“I’ll find out,” Ballard said. “We’ll see if he strokes out a check. The Police Foundation gave me a list of previous donors. I try to call two or three a day.”

“Did you know you’d be doing that when you signed up for this?”

“Not really. But I don’t mind. I kind of like guilting people into giving us money. You’d be surprised how many knew somebody who was a victim of an unsolved crime.”

“I don’t think I would be.”

“Yeah, I guess probably not. How’s Pearlman looking?”

“Still on the photos.”

“I knew you’d start there. It was a bad one.”

“Yeah.”

“Any initial impressions?”

“Not yet. I want to look again. But the palm print—the partial. I take it you ran it through present-day databases?”

“Yep. First thing. Got nothing.”

Bosch nodded. It wasn’t a surprise.

“And ViCAP?”

“Nada—no matches.”

ViCAP was an FBI program that included a database of violent crimes and serial offenders. But it was widely known for not being a complete database. Many law enforcement agencies did not require detectives to enter cases because of the time it took to fill out the ViCAP surveys.

“Looking at the photos, it’s hard to believe this was a onetime thing.”

“Agreed. Besides ViCAP, I put calls out to cold case squads from San Diego to San Francisco. No hits, no similars. I even called your old pal Rick Jackson. He’s working cold cases for San Mateo County. He called around for me up there, but no dice.”