Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) (84)

“Tell you what,” she said. “While I go through this last case, why don’t you take this and see what you can find out.”

As she spoke, Ballard reached into the cardboard box and retrieved the bracelet that had been found in the sleeve of the nightgown. She had since encased it in a plastic evidence bag. She handed it to Hatteras.

“All right,” Hatteras said. “What are you looking for?”

“Anything and everything,” Ballard said. “Who made the bracelet? Where was it sold? There are initials on the charm. At least, I think they’re initials. I would love to know who did the engraving and whose initials they are. I already ran it through digitized property reports and got no hits. So what’s left is, we try to find out where it came from. I know it’s a long shot, but give it a try, okay?”

“You got it.”

“Thanks.”

Hatteras went away like a dog with a bone, even though Ballard believed it would be a failed mission. But it would be worth it in terms of covering all bases and not having Hatteras constantly interrupting her.

She read the initial summary of the 2002 case she had just retrieved from the archives. The victim’s name was Belinda King. She was only twenty years old when she was murdered. Her naked body was found on the floor of the bathroom of her apartment in the Oakwood section of Venice. She was a student at nearby Santa Monica Community College, studying creative writing. Ballard remembered that Rawls had gone to Santa Monica CC, and it would likely have been just a few years before Belinda King. But that might be no more than a coincidence.

Belinda King matched almost all the parameters Ballard had entered in her search of digital records. She had gleaned these from the items found in the box from the dumpster and the known elements of Ted Rawls’s kill patterns. Ballard believed she was looking for a victim who was young, female, and attacked at night in her home by an unknown intruder who left no DNA. The victim would also have been found naked—considering that Rawls had taken her nightgown—and cause of death was likely blunt force trauma, if not specifically attributed to blows from a hammer. The victim may have also had a boyfriend or fiancé who had given her a charm bracelet. The final box Ballard had to check on the search protocol was that the case had to be open and unsolved.

The search brought back seven hits and the King case was the seventh book Ballard had pulled. The first six were not completely dismissed, but they didn’t feel right to Ballard for various reasons. She was hoping the seventh case would be a conclusive hit, but as she moved on from the written summary to the crime scene photos, she quickly dismissed it as a possible Ted Rawls kill. The victim was found nude and had been beaten to death, but Ballard judged that she was too heavy in the torso to have worn the nightgown comfortably. Additionally, the circumstances of the case led investigators to believe she knew her killer and may have engaged in consensual sex with him before he turned violent. There were no indications of sexual assault.

Disappointed, Ballard leaned back in her chair. She flipped the murder book closed and put it on top of the stack of books from the other cases she had reviewed. She decided she would not return them to the shelves in the archive. She’d have Harry Bosch, with his long experience as a homicide detective, review the cases to confirm or deny her conclusions about each one.

She put the frustrations of a wasted day aside and decided to take one more run through the department’s digitized crime data, this time removing one of the descriptor filters to see if it brought up more matching cases.

The descriptor she dropped was the requirement that matching cases be unsolved. She checked the “All Cases” box, and the new search returned nine more case extracts with matching similarities. Because the Ahmanson archive contained only murder books from unsolved cases, Ballard stayed on the database and reviewed the digital case extracts, ready to write down any victims’ names and case numbers she thought might require a fuller look. This more exacting review would require her to go to the original investigators to pull murder books from closed case files and conduct interviews.

She moved through the nine extracts quickly and didn’t write down a single case citation in her notebook. Though all were similar in methodology to the murders of Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson, they were all closed by conviction following a jury verdict, or in two of the cases, a guilty plea. Ballard knew that any of these could have had a wrongful conviction or even a false confession, but with the abbreviated extracts alone, it was impossible for her to see anything suspicious about the cases. In extract form, they were all cut-and-dried case summaries and mug shots. Nothing else.

Ballard logged off the database and sighed, frustrated with the knowledge that she had been spinning her wheels all day.

She felt the need for Harry Bosch’s supportive words. She knew that she could complain to him about wasting her time and he would come back with wisdom and encouragement. He would remind her that there were always more dead ends in a homicide investigation than there were leads that panned out. To him, that was a basic equation of the job. He had once told her it was like baseball. The best hitters failed more than half the time. It was the same chasing leads in homicide work.

She pulled her phone and called Bosch, but it went straight to voice mail.

“Harry, it’s me. Call me back when you get a chance. I need to talk to you about how fucked up today has been. Bye.”

She stood up and put the phone in her pocket. She saw Hatteras hunched over her desk in the next station in the pod.