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  “I think he’s telling the truth,” she said.

  “What?” Bosch asked.

  “McShane,” Hatteras said. “I think he was telling the truth when he wrote that he was innocent but couldn’t prove it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bosch said. “You weren’t even read—”

  It hit Bosch then. But Ballard spoke before he could.

  “Harry, let’s sidebar this for the moment,” she said. “I think it would be best if everybody went back to their own cases now, and I’ll finish showing Harry around the facility.”

  Masser returned the brochure to Bosch, followed by Hatteras handing him the McShane letter, back in its protective sleeve.

  Ballard stood up.

  “Let’s start with our interview room,” she said.

  Ballard started walking toward the aisle that led to the archive room entrance. Bosch put the brochure and letter sleeve back on the binder rings, snapped them closed, and then followed her.

  8

  Ballard stepped into the interview room, bracing for what she knew would be coming from Bosch but acting like everything was routine and normal. Bosch closed the door after following her in.

  “You put a psychic on the team?” he said. “Are you kidding me? You brought me in to work with a psychic? Are we going to hold séances to talk to the dead and ask them who killed the Gallagher family?”

  “Harry, settle down,” Ballard said. “I knew you would lose your shit about Hatteras. I didn’t expect it to come out so fast. And for the record, she calls herself an ‘empath,’ not a psychic, okay?”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “Whatever,” he said. “It’s still kooky shit. You know you can never use her in court. She’ll get torn apart and it will shred the case. I don’t want her anywhere near Gallagher. She’ll taint it with this mumbo jumbo.”

  Ballard didn’t respond at first. She waited for Bosch to settle and be quiet. She then pulled out one of the chairs at the interview table and sat.

  “Sit down, Harry.”

  Bosch reluctantly did as he was told.

  “Look, I didn’t know anything about this empath stuff till after she was on the team,” Ballard said. “It’s not why she’s in the unit and it’s not what she does here. I told you, she’s on the genealogical work. And her people-reading skills—the so-called empathy—help with all the social engineering that is a necessary part of that work.”

  “Like I said, I don’t want her near Gallagher and McShane. Because I’m going to find McShane and nothing is going to taint the case when I do.”

  “Fine. I won’t let her near it.”

  “Good.”

  “So, can you cool off now?”

  “I’m cool, I’m cool.”

  “Good. You just steer clear of Colleen and I’ll make sure she steers clear of you. But you have to remember that, like you, these people are volunteers. They’re giving their time and talents to this, and Colleen does good work. I don’t want to lose her.”

  “I get it. She does her thing and I do mine.”

  “Thank you, Harry. Let’s go back.”

  Ballard got up. Bosch didn’t.

  “Wait,” he said. “Tell me about the palm print. It sounds like you told the whole team already.”

  “I did, because it’s the best break on the case we’ve gotten,” Ballard said. “Darcy Troy—our DNA tech—swabbed it and said there was enough for a full analysis. She’s pretty stoked. I think she just wants to be first to pull DNA off a print, so she’s put it to the front of the line. We’ll know something soon, but there isn’t much to say until she gets back to me. And when I hear from her, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Okay.”

  “So how are you going to attack the Gallagher Family case?”

  “Dig into the books, go through property and evidence, see if anything pops all these years later. Gallagher had four other employees besides McShane. I’ll probably interview them again. And now that I have some authority, I’ll see if I can find McShane. He had family in Belfast, not that they’d give him up. But maybe he’s surfaced. You never know what will fall when you shake a tree after a few years.”

  “Let me know how I can help. I’m not just the administrator here. I want to work cases. Especially this kind. Otherwise, I’ll just be babysitting the others.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  They returned to the pod and each silently sat down at their respective workstations. Bosch took the stack of murder books from the Gallagher Family case and spread them out in front of him so he could see the labels on the front covers. He knew that volume 1 contained the investigative chronology, which would be the bible of the case, a multipage listing of the moves he had made during the original investigation—each entry noted by date and time with an addendum reference to any larger report written in follow-up.

  He knew he would be working with the chrono now, getting his footing in the case again while also looking for any step that he had missed the first time or interpretation of the facts that bore rethinking. But what he first wanted was the 8 x 10 photo of Emma Gallagher in a plastic sleeve at the front of the book. He had put it there many years before so it would be unavoidable every time he and whoever might follow him on the case opened the first murder book to check the chrono.

  He slipped the photo of the nine-year-old girl out of the sleeve. It was a school photo. She wore a green plaid jumper that announced Catholic school, and a smile that showed a second tooth just beginning to fill a gap in the bottom row. The photo made him sad. He had attended her autopsy and knew that the tooth never got the chance to come all the way in.

  He pinned the photo with a tack on the half wall that separated his cubicle from the work space of Colleen Hatteras. As he leaned forward to do it, she looked over the partition.

  “Detective Harry?” she asked.

  “Don’t call me that,” Bosch said. “Just Harry is fine.”

  “Harry, then. I just wanted to say, I didn’t want to upset you with what I said.”

  “Don’t worry, you didn’t. Everything’s fine.”

  “Well, then I just want to add that I don’t think you’ll find Finbar McShane. I don’t think he’s alive.”

  Bosch looked at her for a long moment before responding.

  “Why do you think that?” he asked.

  “I can’t explain it,” Hatteras said. “I just get these feelings. Most of the time they’re true. Do you know for a fact he’s still alive?”

  Bosch cut his eyes over the wall to Ballard’s station. She was sitting and looking at her computer screen, but Bosch could tell she was listening. He looked back at Hatteras.

  “For a fact, no,” Bosch said. “The last confirmation that he was alive was three years after the murders.”

  “What was it?” Hatteras asked.

  “Stephen Gallagher had an office manager, his first and longest-serving employee, named Sheila Walsh. Her home out in Chatsworth got broken into three years after the murders. Somebody rifled through her home office files and desk. They moved a paperweight and left fingerprints.”

  “Finbar McShane.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I was retired from the LAPD by then and was working cold cases for San Fernando,” he said. “But I got word about the burglary from my old partner Lucy Soto. It was being handled by Devonshire Division detectives. Sheila Walsh told them that she had no idea what McShane might have been looking for. She didn’t think anything of real value had been taken from her office.”

  “Weird,” Hatteras said.

  “Yeah. So he was alive then. Whether he is now is just a guess.”

  “I trust my instincts. I don’t think you’ll find him alive.”

  “What are you getting now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Behind you is the library of lost souls. Six thousand unsolved murders. Aren’t th
ey talking to you, sending messages?”

  Before Hatteras could muster a response, Ballard broke in.

  “Harry,” she said.

  That was all she said, his name in a tone that sounded like a mother warning a child to stop whatever it was he was doing.

  Bosch looked at her and then back at Hatteras.

  “I have work to do,” he said.

  He then hunched down over his desk and out of her eyeline as well as Ballard’s. He opened volume 1 of the murder books and looked at the table of contents. Witness interviews and statements were in volume 3. He went there and found the summaries he had written after three separate interviews with Sheila Walsh.

  Sheila Walsh was the first employee Stephen Gallagher hired when he started his equipment rental company in 2002, and she had been with the company through its expansion over the next several years. She had become a key part of the investigation in terms of telling Bosch how the business operated, opening its books, and tracing equipment that had been sold off by McShane.

  There were three other employees at Shamrock but Walsh was the most important to the investigation. The other three were men who worked in the warehouse and equipment yard. Walsh was an insider, working in the same suite of offices as Gallagher and McShane.

  Bosch reread the summaries of the Walsh interviews and wrote her name, birth date, and address down on a page in a pocket notebook. He then looked over the partition at Ballard.

  “Do I have access to the DMV?” he asked.

  “Uh, no,” she said. “Only sworn officers. What do you need?”

  Bosch tore the page out of the notebook and handed it over the partition to Ballard.

  “Can you run her?” he asked. “I want to see if she’s still at that address.”

  “Yeah, hold on,” Ballard said.

  Bosch heard her fingers on her keyboard as she pulled up the DMV database and ran Sheila Walsh’s name and birth date.

  “Her current license has the same address,” she reported.

  “Thanks,” Bosch said.

  He got up and leaned over the partition.

  “You going to go see her?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d start there.”

  “You okay going alone?”

  “Of course. But I have a question. Back in the day, I sent a lot of stuff we collected at the family’s house and at the office to property. Do I have the authority to have it sent out here, or do you need to do that?”

  “Probably me. But it will be faster if we tell them to pull it and then you or I go pick it up. Depends on how soon you want it. Picking up, you can probably get it tomorrow. Delivery out here may take up to a week.”

  “I’ll pick it up—if I’m allowed. I still don’t have any credentials.”

  “I have the case number. I’ll order it and tell them you’ll be by in the morning to pick it up. Just show them your retired ID. That will work for now. You need to go to the front office here and make an appointment to give photo and prints. Then you’ll get an ID.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Another question: Do I have access to the locker room here? I want to clean up, change my shirt.”

  “You still carry backup clothes in your car?”

  “I did today. I knew I was going out to the desert.”

  “You have access to the locker room and showers. I can’t promise they’ll have a free locker for you.”

  “Well, they’re police cadets in there, right? I don’t carry a gun, and who’s going to steal my wallet?”

  The primary use of the Ahmanson Center was as a second academy for the training of police recruits. Most field training remained at the original academy at Elysian Fields. The Ahmanson was for classroom training—and retraining in some cases. The murder book archive occupied only a small part of the campus.

  “You could leave your wallet here and come back for it after you clean up,” Ballard said.

  “I’ll be fine,” Bosch said.

  “Then, happy hunting.”

  “You, too.”

  Bosch headed for the door, walking along the endcaps of the murder-book shelves. Taped to the end of each row was a 3 x 5 card showing the range of files by case number, which always began with the year the crime took place. It was a Dewey decimal system of the dead.

  Bosch ran a hand along the endcaps as he walked. He didn’t believe in ghosts or the dead reaching out from the dark beyond. But he felt a reverence and empathy as he passed by on his way out.

  9

  Ballard was just finishing the case summary that she had compiled as part of a request to the Ahmanson Foundation for grant money for a genealogical case Tom Laffont had put together and would work with Hatteras.

  “Colleen, Tom’s not here, so I’m sending you this grant app,” she said without taking her eyes off her screen. “Read the case summary and make sure I have it right.”

  “Send it, I’ll read it,” Hatteras said.

  “I want to get it in today. Maybe get a quick answer so you and Tom can go to work.”

  “I’m ready. Send it.”

  Just as Ballard closed the document, her desk phone buzzed. She saw on the ID screen that it was Darcy Troy from the DNA lab. She answered the phone while opening an email and sending the grant document to Hatteras.

  “Darcy, whaddaya got for me?”

  “Well, good and bad news on Sarah Pearlman.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The good news is we got a hit off the DNA from the palm print. The bad news is it’s a case-to-case hit.”

  A case-to-case hit meant the DNA profile from the palm print was matched to the profile from another open case, one where the donor/suspect was unknown. Case-to-case hits were what led to genealogical investigations. This was disappointing in the moment for Ballard because she was looking for a street case, an investigation that took her out into the city and knocking on doors, looking for an identified individual whose DNA was in the law enforcement data banks. That was what Bosch was chasing now with McShane and she wanted the same for herself. It’s what true detectives lived for.

  She grabbed a pen off the desk and got ready to write on a legal pad.

  “Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said. “What’s the name and case number?”

  Troy recited the case number first. It was a homicide from 2005, which meant there were eleven years between the Sarah Pearlman murder and the linked case. The victim’s name was Laura Wilson and she was twenty-four years old at the time of her murder.

  “Anything else on your end?” Ballard asked.

  “Well, it’s unusual on the science side,” Troy said. “As far as how they even came up with the DNA on the 2005 case.”

  “Yeah? Tell me.”

  “You know the old saying, right? Secretions, not excretions. We extract DNA from bodily fluids—blood, sweat, and semen primarily. But not from bodily waste, because the enzymes destroy DNA.”

  “No shit, no piss.”

  “Yes, normally, but in this case, it was apparently extracted from urine. You’ll have to get the full details when you pull the book, but according to the few notes I have here, urine was swabbed at the crime scene because the hope was they would find swimmers. If the guy raped the victim before he used the toilet, then there might still be sperm in the urethra and that would come out in the urine. But they found no swimmers. But what they did find was blood.”

  “Blood in the urine.”

  “Correct. The extraction was handled quickly and they didn’t get a full profile, but they got enough to put on CODIS. They got no hits then but we just connected it with our case.”

  CODIS was the national database containing millions of DNA samples collected by law enforcement across the country.

  “How did they know the urine with the blood in it came from the killer?” Ballard asked.

  “I wasn’t here then, so I don’t know the answer to that,” Troy said. “It’s not in the notes we have here. But hopefully it’s in the murder book.” br />
  “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.