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.”
“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.
A summary statement from the lead investigator told the story. The victim was murdered in her home, where she lived alone. The crime scene investigators noticed that the toilet seat in the bathroom off the bedroom was up, indicating that a man had used it. While checking the toilet seat and flush handle for fingerprints, a criminalist noticed urine droplets on the rim of the bowl. These drops were reddish brown in color, indicating the possibility of blood cells in the urine. The droplets were collected on swabs, and DNA extraction was conducted the same day because of the fear of possible DNA decay. A partial profile was established and then entered into the CODIS database, drawing no matches.
The summary went on to state that further analysis and medical consultation by investigators determined that the urine had come from someone who had kidney or bladder disease, causing hematuria, the medical term for blood in the urine.
Ballard was excited by what she had read and eager to see whether the investigators used the confirmation of kidney disease as an angle of investigation. Had they looked for a suspect among men being treated for kidney disease? She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out two empty binders. She removed all the documents and plastic sleeves from the original murder book, split the stack, and slipped each half onto the rings of a new binder. She then got up and went to the kitchen to get coffee before she settled in to read the case’s investigative chronology.
Laura Wilson was a young African American woman trying to make it as an actress and living alone in an apartment paid for by her parents back in Chicago. She had moved out to L.A. two years before her death and was in the midst of a promise to herself and her supporters to make it and become self-supporting within five years or to turn around and go home. She was taking acting lessons and routinely auditioning for small parts in films and television shows. She had also joined an acting troupe that worked out of a twenty-seat theater in Burbank. Her apartment was on Tamarind Avenue near the Scientology Celebrity Center on Franklin. Wilson had joined the organization and was taking classes, also paid for by her parents, in hopes that she would make connections that would help her in the entertainment business.
She had been found murdered on Saturday morning, November 5, 2005, by a friend she was supposed to go with to a Scientology seminar. The friend found the door to her apartment ajar, entered, and found the victim dead in her bed. Cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation—a silk scarf was knotted around her neck. The body was mutilated postmortem.
“What is that?”
Ballard had been so immersed in her reading that she had not noticed that Rawls had come around the pod and was looking over her shoulder.
“The DNA we got on the Pearlman case was linked to this one from ’05,” she said.
“Wow, interesting,” Rawls said.
Ballard closed the binder and swiveled her chair so she could look up at him.
“What’s up, Lou?” she asked.
“I’m taking off,” Rawls said. “I gotta put out a fire at my store in Encino. Angry customer says we lost a package containing a priceless antiquity.”
“That’s gotta hurt. You coming back later this week?”
“Not sure. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Rawls walked off and Ballard immediately turned back to the binder, her mind already deeply embedded in the murder of Laura Wilson.