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  “Hello, Detective,” he said. “I hear there is a major break in the Sarah Pearlman case. Is there anything I can share with the councilman?”

  “Who told you that?” Ballard asked.

  She knew it had been Rawls but she wanted to see how Hastings would answer. It would go into what Ballard called the matrix of trust. Details, actions, reactions, and statements of those she came into contact with combined to establish how much or how little trust she would invest in them. She was still gathering information on Hastings and his boss, the councilman.

  “I just happened to be talking to Ted Rawls on my drive home today, and he mentioned it,” Hastings said. “I was surprised that he knew but I had not been informed. I thought you agreed to keep me apprised on the case.”

  “Well, I think it’s premature to call it a major break and that’s why I haven’t ‘apprised’ you,” Ballard said. “We have connected Sarah’s killing to another murder that happened eleven years later. But the newer case remains open and unsolved, so it’s hard for me to consider it a break. We just have two victims now instead of one.”

  “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.

  “It also means our suspect might be dead,” Laffont cautioned.

  “That may be the case,” Ballard said. “But we still need to identify him and clear these cases. I don’t have to remind you all that Councilman Pearlman is our patron saint on the city council. If we can get answers as to what happened to his sister, we’re going to be able to keep this unit alive for years to come.”

  While Bosch didn’t like the political machinations inherent in the case, he wholly understood a family’s need for answers. It had taken him more than thirty years to get answers about his own mother’s killing when he was a boy. The answers did not provide closure but there was a resolution to his efforts. In that regard he fully understood what Jake Pearlman was looking for and needed. The fact that he was wielding his political power to get it was understandable. If he’d had that kind of juice, Bosch would have done the same in his mother’s case. Instead, he had used the power of his badge.

  Ballard had come in early and made individual packages of copies pertaining to each investigator’s assignment. She handed them out at the end of the meeting, including giv
ing Harry an inch-thick printout containing copies of the forensic reports and crime scene photos from the Wilson case.

  Before starting in on the assignment, Bosch wanted to do something that had nagged at him since interviewing Sheila Walsh. He had been awake most of the night with thoughts that he had blown the Gallagher Family case by missing something about the break-in at her home.

  Once Ballard was sitting down again at her station, Bosch got up and came around to the end of the pod.

  “I need to run a name for criminal history,” he said. “Can you do it?”

  “On the Wilson case?” she asked. “Already?”

  “No, on Gallagher.”

  “Harry, I want you working on Wilson and Pearlman. I thought we agreed on this last night, and I just finished telling everybody how important it is to us.”

  “I’m going to start on it today, but I stayed up all night thinking about this, so I just want to put it in motion and see what I’ve got to come back to after Wilson. Okay?”

  “What’s the name?”

  Bosch was holding the fingerprints report from the Sheila Walsh break-in. Ballard opened up the portal to the National Crime Information Center database and he read the name he wanted checked for a criminal record.

  “Jonathan Boatman, DOB July 1, ’87.”

  Ballard typed it in and waited while the database was searched for matches.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “Sheila Walsh’s son,” Bosch said. “Probably a son from an early marriage and she changed her name when she divorced or remarried.”

  “And you never ran him before?”

  “I did back in the day and he was clean. It’s in the murder book. But right now I want to see if he stayed clean.”

  “And what makes you think he didn’t?”

  “Because yesterday was the first time I got a look at the incident report on that burglary at Sheila Walsh’s house. McShane’s prints were found, and it was assumed that he was the one who broke in. I was retired by then and Devonshire handled it. I heard about it from Lucy Soto and even I took it as a sign that McShane was alive and still local. I changed my mind yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “The incident report. It says food was taken from the refrigerator, a purse was emptied, a cell phone and a collection of old record albums were stolen. It was amateur hour. Like the work of a hype making a quick hit: getting food and cash and something he could sell for a fix.”

  “The albums. I remember there were shops all over Hollywood that would buy vinyl. Amoeba and few others.”

  “The son’s prints were found but dismissed because the mother—Sheila Walsh—said he was a regular visitor to the house.”

  “I see where you’re going with this. Drug addicts usually rip off their families before they get into serious crime, because they know the family won’t prosecute. At least at first.”

  “Right.”

  “So if the son committed the burglary, McShane’s prints being there take on a whole new meaning.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Plus, the call she made after I left yesterday. I was hoping it might be McShane, but her son might make better sense.”

  “But why would she report the burglary if she thought her son might have done it?”

  “Maybe she didn’t realize it was him till later. A lot of people in that position don’t want to believe their son or their daughter would do such a thing.”

  The search results started printing out on Ballard’s screen.

  “Boatman’s got a history now,” Ballard said.

  Bosch put a hand on her desk for support as he leaned down to read the screen. Jonathan Boatman had a record for drug possession, DUI, loitering, and disorderly conduct. All the arrests came after the murders of the Gallagher family, when Bosch would have routinely run his name, as well as after the burglary. Since then, Boatman had gone down the path of addiction and crime. The drug possession charge led to a plea agreement in which he escaped jail time by entering a six-month drug rehab program at County-USC Medical Center. The NCIC report came complete with mug shots from the arrests, and in them it was clear that Jonathan Boatman had been on a downward spiral. His face grew thin across the array of photos to the point of gauntness. The last shot showed skin blotches and a festering sore on his lower lip and, most telling of all, a dead-eyed look that showed no reaction to the fact that he was being sucked into the criminal justice system.

  “Looking at the mug shots. I’m guessing meth,” Ballard said.

  “Yeah,” Bosch said, pointing at the screen. “All the arrests came after the break-in. Maybe if I was still working the case back then, I would have picked up on it.”

  “But you weren’t. You were retired. So don’t beat yourself up about it. Maybe it leads to something now.”

  “Maybe.”

  But Bosch still felt like he had somehow dropped the ball and let the Gallagher family down. If he had stuck with the case instead of retiring, he would have seen that the burglary and McShane were not linked and there was another reason for his prints to be on the glass paperweight.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ballard tried to give Bosch further absolution.

  “Just remember,” she said. “Sheila Walsh didn’t see it for what it was and called the police. So you’re not alone.”

  “She’s a mother,” Bosch said. “I’m a cop. Was a cop.”

  “I’m telling you not to—”

  “Can you just send that report to me? Including mug shots.”

  “Harry, come on. This is exactly why we review cases. To see with new eyes. To see what was not seen before. So take the win here. You have a whole new angle to work.”

  “Will you send it to me?”

  “Yes, I’m sending. But don’t go running off on this. I need you on Pearlman and Wilson. I mean it.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll have my take on the crime scene and forensics by the end of the day.”

  Bosch went back to his station to await her email. Once he had the NCIC report pulled up on his screen, he sent it to the printer. He noted that Boatman’s last arrest was two years before. He might have cleaned up since then and kept himself right—with the law, at least. The fact that he reportedly had a job as a greenskeeper was a strong indication of recovery.

  He looked at the booking photos that were part of the package and committed Boatman’s face to memory. He then googled an address for the Sand Canyon Country Club and entered it in his phone’s GPS app.

  Bosch closed his laptop and got up to go to the printer and then his car.

  “Harry, are you leaving?” Ballard asked as he crossed behind her.

  “Printer,” Bosch said. “Then I’m going to take a drive.”

  “A drive? Where?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”

  He could feel Ballard staring at him as he kept going.

  While buckling up in the Cherokee a few minutes later, he got a text from Ballard. She was upset.

  You undercut my authority when you walk away like that. Please don’t do it again.

  Bosch felt both contrite and annoyed. He was trying to solve the murder of a family, and to him that took precedence over everything else in the world. He texted her back but restrained himself from saying anything that would inflame the situation any further.

  Sorry about that. You know how I get on a case. Won’t happen again.

  He waited to see if there was a reply. When there wasn’t, he started the car and headed for the parking lot exit.

  A few minutes later, Bosch was on the northbound 405 in moderate midmorning traffic. The freeway was elevated here and he had a good view of the towers of Century City coming up on his right and the Santa Monica Mountains dead ahead. His GPS app told him it was going to be fifty-eight minutes before he arrived at the Sand Canyon Country Club. He turned KJazz on the radio and caught the Shelly Berg Trio’s take on “Blackbird,” the old Beatles song.

  He turned it up. It was good driving
music.

  13

  Ballard told herself not to be annoyed with Bosch. She knew that putting him on a team did not make him a team player. That was not in his DNA. She got up and went to his workstation. The package from the Wilson case that she had put together for him was sitting on the desk. He had said she’d have his review by the end of the day, but not if he did not have the records with him to review. She picked up the stack and went back to her station. She would do the work on it if Bosch wouldn’t.

  In the breakout of team assignments on the case, Ballard had given herself the digital media associated with Laura Wilson. Data from the victim’s laptop and cell phone had been downloaded by the original investigators onto thumb drives that were slipped into the pocket on the inside cover of the murder book. Ballard had gone through the material on each drive earlier and had planned for a deeper dive. But she decided to put that digital work aside and to first review the materials she had given Bosch.

  Since she had already studied the forensic reports and crime scene photos at length after connecting the Wilson and Pearlman cases, she decided to approach this new review differently. Whether in person at a crime scene or when looking at photos, the investigator always focuses on the center—the body. These photos were as horrible to look at as those of Sarah Pearlman. A young woman’s body violated in many ways. A still life of stolen hopes and dreams. Ballard decided to put these aside and work her way from the outside in.

  The crime scene photographer had been thorough and had taken dozens of “environmental” shots depicting the victim’s entire home—inside and out—at the time of the murder. These included shots of the contents of closets and cabinets and drawers and of photos framed and hung on the walls. All of this allowed the case investigators ready access to the entire environment of the killing location. It also allowed them to better understand the victim by seeing how she had set up her home. It gave them an idea of the things that were important to her in life.