Desert Star Read online

  “Nice of him.”

  “Yeah, but let’s get back to your orientation. What I’m requiring of our reserves and volunteers is that they give me at least one day a week. Most of them are doing more than that but I stagger them so that we have at least one body in here Monday to Thursday. I’m here full-time and I have Tom and Lilia come on Monday, Paul Masser and Colleen Hatteras on Tuesday, Lou Rawls on Wednesday, and now you…I would say Thursday, but I know you’ll be here much more than that. Most of these guys are as well.”

  “Lou Rawls—really?”

  “No. And he’s not even Black. His name is Ted Rawls, and after he’d spent ten years as a cop, it would have been impossible not to come out of that with the obvious nickname. So some people still call him Lou and he seems to like it.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “You should know, though,” Ballard said, leaning forward and lowering her voice so it just barely made it over the privacy wall. “Rawls wasn’t my pick.”

  Bosch rolled his chair in closer to his desk to hear better and complete the confidentiality huddle.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “We have more applications than we have seats in the pod,” Ballard said. “The chief gave me the go-ahead to pick who I want and that’s what I’ve done, but Lou Rawls was a Pearlman pick.”

  “The councilman.”

  “He’s very proprietary about this, he and his chief of staff. It’s about his sister but it’s also about politics. He’s got higher aspirations than city council, and the success of this unit can help. So he put Rawls in and I had to take him.”

  “I’ve never heard of him and I think I would have with a name like that. He’s not LAPD, right?”

  “No, he’s retired Santa Monica, but that was fifteen years ago, so he doesn’t bring a lot to the table. A lot of hand-holding required, and the thing of it is, he’s a direct pipeline to Pearlman and Hastings.”

  “Hastings?”

  “Nelson Hastings, Pearlman’s chief of staff. The three of them are like best buds or something. Rawls quit Santa Monica PD after ten years to go into business. So to him this is just a side gig.”

  “What’s the business? Is he a PI?”

  “No, it’s a business business. He owns a bunch of those mail-drop places. Like UPS, FedEx, box-and-packaging stores. Apparently he’s got them all over the city and does pretty well. He drives a fancy car and has a house in Santa Monica in the college streets. And my guess is he’s one of Pearlman’s main campaign supporters.”

  Bosch nodded. He got the picture. A quid pro quo. Ballard leaned back and sat down after realizing that their whispering had been noticed by Laffont and Aghzafi. She could still see Bosch’s eyes over the partition. She continued in a regular tone.

  “You’ll meet Paul and Colleen tomorrow,” she said. “They’re solid. Masser is a retired deputy D.A. who worked in Major Crimes, so he’s helpful on the search warrants and legal questions and strategies. It’s good to have him in-house instead of needing to call the D.A.’s Office every time we have a question.”

  “I think I remember him,” Bosch said. “And Hatteras?”

  “No law enforcement experience. She’s our in-house genealogist and what they call a ‘citizen sleuth.’”

  “An amateur. For real?”

  “For real. She’s a great internet researcher, and that’s where it’s at with the genetic stuff. IGG—you know what that is, don’t you?”

  “Uh…”

  “Investigative genetic genealogy. You upload your suspect’s DNA to GEDmatch, which accesses a number of databases, and you sit back and wait for a hit. You must know about this. It was trending big time in cold case investigations until the privacy police arrived, and now it’s a limited resource but still worth pursuing.”

  “How they caught the Golden State Killer, right?”

  “Exactly. You put in the DNA, and if you’re lucky, you get connections to relatives. A fourth cousin here, a brother nobody knew about there. Then it becomes social engineering. Making contact online, building a family tree with the hope that one branch leads to your guy.”

  “And you have a private citizen doing this.”

  “She’s an expert, Harry. Just give her a chance. I like her and I think she’s going to work out for us.”

  She could see full skepticism in Bosch’s eyes as he looked away from her.

  “What?”

  “Is this all going to end up in a podcast? Or are we going to make cases?”

  Ballard shook her head. She knew he would act this way.

  “You’ll see, Harry,” Ballard said. “You don’t have to work with her but I’m betting you will want to eventually. That’s how sure I am. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Bosch said. “I’m not trying to cause trouble. I’m just happy to be here. You’re the boss and I never question the boss.”

  “Yeah, right. That’ll be the day.”

  Bosch looked around the room and the pod.

  “So, I’m the last guy in,” he said.

  “But the first I wanted,” Ballard said. “I just needed to have everything in place before I visited you.”

  “And you had to make sure I was cleared.”

  “Well, that, too.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “So, where’s somebody get a cup of coffee around here?” he asked.

  “There’s a kitchen with coffee and a fridge,” Ballard said. “You go out through—”

  “I’ll take him,” Laffont said. “I need a jolt myself.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Ballard said.

  Laffont stood up and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. Ballard and Aghzafi declined, and Bosch followed Laffont to the front of the archive room.

  Ballard watched them go, hoping Bosch would play nice with the former FBI agent and not cause a clash on his first day on the job.

  3

  Bosch was used to being alone in his house when he went through old files and murder books and tried to think of case moves not thought of before. It was largely silent work. He now had to get used to working in a squad room again and relearn the skill of tuning out conversations around him so he could focus on the job at hand.

  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 one-time 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.”

  Jackson was a retired LAPD homicide detective of Bosch’s era.

  “How’s Rick doing?” Bosch asked.

  “Sounds like he’s closing cases right and left,” Ballard said. “What I hope we start doing down here.”

  “Don’t worry. We will.”

  “So, listen. On Mondays I go to the PAB to meet with the captain and update him on the work, the budget, and all of that. I’ll probably be downtown till I go home for the day. Are you good? Tom and Lilia can help if you need anything.”

  “I’m good. What are the rules about taking stuff home?”

  “You can’t take the books out of here. Sort of defeats the purpose of having all the unsolveds in the same place, you know?”

  “Got it. Is there a copier?”

  “Don’t copy files, Harry. I don’t want to get into a thing with the captain about that.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Okay?” Ballard said. “I really mean it.”

  “Got it,” Bosch said.

  “Okay, then, happy hunting. Think you’ll be back tomorrow? No pressure.”

  “I think I’ll be back.”

  “Good, I’ll see you then.”

  “Right.”

  Bosch watched Ballard head out, then glanced to the end of the pod to check on Laffont and Aghzafi. He could see only the tops of their heads over the privacy walls. He went back to work, paging through the crime scene photos again so the images would be permanently seared into memory. Once he was through with the photos, he pulled volume 1 back over and started his review at the beginning.

  The original investigators on the case were Dexter Kilmartin and Philip Rossler. Bosch knew the names but not the men. They were assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division, which handled the major cases citywide. He turned to the chronological log they had kept. It showed that detectives from the Hollywood Division homicide unit initially responded to the case on the morning of June 11, but it was quickly turned over to the RHD heavies because, as a sex crime against a sixteen-year-old minor in the Hollywood Hills, it was bound to draw significant media attention.

  Bosch was working Hollywood Homicide at the time but was not on the initial callout because it was not his and his partner Jerry Edgar’s turn on the rotation. But he had vague memories of the case and its quick acquisition by RHD. Little did they know that the case would hold media interest for just one day. The next night, the ex-wife of football great and not-so-great actor O. J. Simpson would be found murdered along with an acquaintance in Brentwood, and that would suck all media attention away from the Pearlman case as well as everything else in the city. The Brentwood murders would garner intense media scrutiny for the next year and beyond, and there would be none left for Sarah Pearlman.

  Except for Kilmartin and Rossler. The chrono showed that they made all the right moves, in Bosch’s estimation. Most important, they held back from making an early determination about whether this was a stranger murder. The fact that the killer had entered through an unlocked or open window in the victim’s bedroom suggested that the intruder was likely unknown to the victim, but it did not dissuade the detectives from conducting a full field investigation. They pursued an extensive background check on the victim and questioned numerous friends and family members. Sarah attended a private all-girls school in Hancock Park. Though school was out for the summer, the investigators spent several days locating and interviewing classmates, friends, and faculty in a full-scale attempt to draw a picture of the young girl’s world and social life. The week before the murder, Sarah had started a summer job as a greeter at a restaurant on Melrose Avenue called Tommy Tang’s. She had worked at the popular Thai restaurant the summer before and was already known and liked by several employees. They were questioned, and the detectives went so far as to study the restaurant’s credit-card receipts for the days Sarah had worked. They traced and questioned several customers, but none rose to the level of suspect.

  The investigation also included the victim’s parents. Sarah’s father was a lawyer who specialized in large real-estate transactions. The detectives interviewed many in his practice and business dealings, including clients who might have been unhappy with his work, as well as some of those on the other side of his more difficult negotiat
ions. No one emerged as a suspect.

  Finally, there was Sarah’s ex-boyfriend. Four months before her death, she had broken up with a short-term boyfriend named Bryan Richmond, whom she had met at an annual social between her school and an all-boys school also in Hancock Park. He was extensively questioned and investigated but ultimately cleared. He had moved on from the relationship and had been dating someone new.

  At the time of the murder, Sarah’s parents were on a golfing vacation in Carmel, playing the courses at and around Pebble Beach. Sarah was staying at home with her brother, Jake, two years older. On the Friday night of the murder, Sarah had worked at the restaurant and then returned home at about 10 p.m. to the house on Maravilla. She was licensed and had use of her mother’s car while she was gone. Jake Pearlman was out with his girlfriend and didn’t return home till midnight. His mother’s car was in the garage and his sister’s bedroom door was closed. He chose not to disturb her because he could see no light on beneath the door and assumed she was asleep.

  In the morning, Sarah’s mother called home to check on her children. Jake told her he had not seen Sarah yet. As it was approaching 11 a.m., she told Jake to go to his sister’s room and wake her so she could talk on the phone. That was when he discovered that Sarah had been brutally murdered in her own bed, and the family’s nightmare began.

  Bosch took no notes as he reviewed the many interview summaries in volume 1. The original investigation was thorough and seemed complete. Bosch saw nothing overlooked or needing follow-up. When he had previously worked in the Open-Unsolved Unit, it had not been unusual for him to review a case and see the poor or even lazy quality of a murder investigation. Such was not the case with Sarah Pearlman. It appeared to Bosch that Kilmartin and Rossler had taken the case to heart and had left no stone unturned. And what made this even more impressive to Bosch was the fact that at the time of their investigation, the victim was not related to a powerful politician. That would come many years later.