Ballard got to Birds before Bosch. He was coming all the way from the far corner of the San Fernando Valley and it would take a while, even in reverse rush-hour traffic. She ordered a beer but held off on a food order. She was going through the chrono from the Laura Wilson murder book that she had copied before leaving. She knew she was breaking the no-copying rule, but she felt it was her rule to break.
This was her third read-through of the forty-five-page case chronology. Now that the Wilson murder had been connected to the Pearlman case, Ballard needed to know it like it was her own. The place to get that knowledge was the chrono, which was a meticulously detailed account of the original investigators’ work. Though their investigation did not lead to an arrest and prosecution, the path they took would be very informative.
As a young would-be actress, Laura Wilson had myriad interactions with people across the city as she went to one cattle-call audition after another at studios and production facilities from Culver City to Hollywood to Burbank. It was her job to build a social network in the entertainment industry that could alert her to possible jobs in her chosen profession. In addition to that pattern, she was a frequent visitor to Scientology facilities and events in Hollywood. She was also attending a twelve-student acting class twice a week, and once a month her acting troupe put on shows at its theater in Burbank. These activities added to her many personal interactions, any one of which could have been with her killer.
As expected, the chrono detailed the investigators’ efforts to get some kind of handle on the young woman’s life. The detectives broke her interactions into groups they dubbed Hollywood, Scientology, and Other. Two former boyfriends, one in L.A. and one back in Chicago, were questioned and cleared by alibis. The investigators spent weeks and then months on the interviews, running records checks, and leaning hard on acquaintances who had criminal records. Still, no person of interest ever emerged and the case eventually went cold.
The last inputs to the chrono were annual due diligence entries that simply stated that the case remained open pending new information.
Ballard clipped the pages of the chrono back together and left it on the table. She was sure Bosch would want to take it with him to read when he got home. She was pulling her phone to call him and see how far out he still was, when she received a call from Nelson Hastings.
“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.”