After dropping off the property boxes at the pod, Ballard and Bosch went up to the break room on the second floor. Over black coffee Ballard updated Bosch on what was happening on the Wilson case. She showed him the photo of the junk drawer in the victim’s walk-in closet and asked for his take on it. Bosch saw through her reserve as she mentioned this. He knew that beneath her neutral delivery of the information, there was something exciting to her about this angle of investigation.
“Well, I don’t believe in coincidences until there is no other explanation,” he said. “It needs to be checked out. Have you—”
“I asked Pearlman’s chief of staff to look into it,” Ballard said. “He couldn’t find any records from his failed run for the council. Pearlman himself said he didn’t remember Laura, and none of his current staff go back that far. Hastings said he would let me know who Pearlman’s campaign manager was in ’05, and I’ll follow up on that. I got the idea that it was sort of a seat-of-the-pants operation, a way for Pearlman to get his name out there but he knew from the start that there wasn’t much of a chance he would win.”
“What about Wilson? Anything else in her place that showed she was politically involved or motivated?”
“In the apartment, no. But her father was listed in the murder book as a ward committee member in Chicago. So politics was in her upbringing. She could have taken an interest in it out here. Her apartment was in the district Pearlman was running in.”
Bosch didn’t respond. He took a sip of his coffee and thought about how to proceed with this angle and if it was worth the expenditure of time when there were other angles to follow. But like Ballard, he found something about the campaign button intriguing. Eleven years after Pearlman’s sister is murdered, his campaign button is in the home of a woman killed by the same perpetrator.
It could easily be a coincidence. Ballard said there were hundreds of such buttons distributed back then. But it didn’t feel like a coincidence, and Bosch understood Ballard’s hunch all too well.
“When you talk to the campaign manager, maybe he’ll remember how many of those things were made,” he said. “And since Wilson’s father was in politics, you might want to ask him if his daughter mentioned getting involved out here.”
“Her father’s dead,” Ballard said. “Covid. I talked to her mother but that was before this came up. I’ll call back and ask about politics. I’ll also ask who cleared out Laura’s apartment after her death. It’s pretty unlikely, but maybe somebody has all her stuff.”
Bosch nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. Parents who lose children often hold on to any reminder of them.
“Good idea,” he said. “Anything new on the blood angle and the DNA?”
“Nothing yet,” Ballard said. “But on my way back from lunch, I got an email from Darcy Troy in the lab. She checked the cold storage at serology, and the swabs from the Wilson case—from the toilet—are still there, and there’s enough left for further testing. She hopes to get back tomorrow with more on what exactly was wrong with our doer.”
“That’s good,” Bosch said.
“It wasn’t something they pursued back in the day.”
“They were probably just happy to get the DNA out of it.”
“Well, their oversight could be to our benefit. Obviously, the technology has advanced since 2005, and we might be able to detect things they couldn’t.”
“Let me know about that.”
“Roger that, I will. Shit—now I said it!”
Bosch smiled while Ballard got up and dumped her empty cup in the trash. They went down the stairs and back to the pod. As they approached, Bosch saw that the property box Ballard had left on her desk had been opened and Colleen Hatteras was standing over it, holding up what looked like a pink nightgown. There was no one else in the pod.
“Colleen, what are you doing?” Ballard asked.
“I just needed to see it,” Hatteras said. “To feel it.”
“First of all, you shouldn’t have done that after what we talked about before. And second, and most important of all, you should have worn gloves.”
“Gloves don’t work.”
“What?”
“I need to be able to feel her.”
“Put it back in the box. Now.”
Hatteras did as instructed.
“Go back to your workstation,” Ballard ordered.
Hatteras sullenly stepped back from Ballard’s station. She turned and went back to her own.
Ballard threw a glance at Bosch. She looked as upset as he had ever seen her. He moved to his workstation, checked the red tape on the boxes from the Gallagher Family case, and saw that they had not been tampered with. He sat down but noticed that Ballard was still too agitated to sit down.
“Colleen, I want you to go home,” she said.
“What?” Hatteras said. “I’m right in the middle of the ancestry search on this.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to see you anymore today. You need to go and I need to think about this.”
“Think about what?”
“I told you this morning I didn’t want to go down that road, but you went there anyway. This is a team, but I’m in charge of the team, and you directly ignored my order.”
“I didn’t think it was an order.”
“It was. So, go. Now.”
Ballard dropped out of Bosch’s sight as she sat down. He couldn’t see Hatteras but heard her open and sharply close a desk drawer and then roughly pull a zipper closed on what he assumed was a purse. She then popped up into view and headed toward the exit. Ballard said nothing as she passed the end of the pod.
Hatteras was halfway to the aisle that led to the exit when she pirouetted and came back toward Ballard.
“For what it’s worth, he’s close,” she said. “Her killer is very close.”
“Yeah, you said that about McShane, too,” Ballard said. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“I didn’t say McShane was close. This is so typical.”
“Just go home, Colleen. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Hatteras pirouetted again and headed to the exit. Once she was gone, Ballard sat up straight in her seat so she could look over the partition at Bosch.
“What do I do about her?” she asked.
Bosch shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how valuable the heritage stuff she does is.”
“Very valuable,” Ballard said.
“Can you get anybody else? What about Lilia?”
“Colleen knows it like the back of her hand. But this psychic shit is a problem. Did she open your boxes?”
“No, they’re safe.”
“This is heading toward a bad end. This whole being-in-charge thing is a pain. I just want to follow cases.”
“I get it.”
She slumped down out of sight but before long she stood up again.
“I have to get out of here, Harry,” she said. “I’m going up to the Valley and I need a partner.”
Bosch stood up, ready to go.