Ballard cranked the shelves just wide enough apart for her to slip in and move down to the 2002 cases. She ran her finger along the case numbers on the spines of the murder books and then pulled the binder she was looking for.
When she got back to her workstation, Colleen Hatteras was standing there waiting for her.
“What’s up, Colleen?”
“Not much. I was wondering if you need any help with what you’re doing.”
She gestured toward the box on Ballard’s desk. It was the one recovered from the dumpster in the alley behind Ted Rawls’s business in Santa Monica.
“I think I’ve got it,” Ballard said. “There’s not really an IGG angle on this yet.”
“I could make calls if you want me to,” Hatteras said.
“There’s no call to make yet. This is the seventh of seven possible cases. The first six didn’t match up—in my opinion.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“A case that matches a missing white nightgown, bunny slippers, and a bracelet. There is also probably going to be blunt force trauma as a cause of death.”
Ballard sat down and opened the murder book she had just retrieved. She then flipped over the table of contents to the initial incident report.
“You want me to back-read?” Hatteras said. “I’m not really doing much. The IGG stuff on Rawls has dried up. I’m just waiting on responses. I could go back to what I was working on before, but I feel bad dropping off Rawls when there are so many unanswered questions.”
“What about the souvenirs? Aren’t you working on those?”
“I was, but I hit a wall. I found no connects to open cases.”
Ballard knew that if she didn’t give Hatteras something to do, she would probably hover over her all day.
“Tell you what,” she said. “While I go through this last case, why don’t you take this and see what you can find out.”
As she spoke, Ballard reached into the cardboard box and retrieved the bracelet that had been found in the sleeve of the nightgown. She had since encased it in a plastic evidence bag. She handed it to Hatteras.
“All right,” Hatteras said. “What are you looking for?”
“Anything and everything,” Ballard said. “Who made the bracelet? Where was it sold? There are initials on the charm. At least, I think they’re initials. I would love to know who did the engraving and whose initials they are. I already ran it through digitized property reports and got no hits. So what’s left is, we try to find out where it came from. I know it’s a long shot, but give it a try, okay?”
“You got it.”
“Thanks.”
Hatteras went away like a dog with a bone, even though Ballard believed it would be a failed mission. But it would be worth it in terms of covering all bases and not having Hatteras constantly interrupting her.
She read the initial summary of the 2002 case she had just retrieved from the archives. The victim’s name was Belinda King. She was only twenty years old when she was murdered. Her naked body was found on the floor of the bathroom of her apartment in the Oakwood section of Venice. She was a student at nearby Santa Monica Community College, studying creative writing. Ballard remembered that Rawls had gone to Santa Monica CC, and it would likely have been just a few years before Belinda King. But that might be no more than a coincidence.
Belinda King matched almost all the parameters Ballard had entered in her search of digital records. She had gleaned these from the items found in the box from the dumpster and the known elements of Ted Rawls’s kill patterns. Ballard believed she was looking for a victim who was young, female, and attacked at night in her home by an unknown intruder who left no DNA. The victim would also have been found naked—considering that Rawls had taken her nightgown—and cause of death was likely blunt force trauma, if not specifically attributed to blows from a hammer. The victim may have also had a boyfriend or fiancé who had given her a charm bracelet. The final box Ballard had to check on the search protocol was that the case had to be open and unsolved.
The search brought back seven hits and the King case was the seventh book Ballard had pulled. The first six were not completely dismissed, but they didn’t feel right to Ballard for various reasons. She was hoping the seventh case would be a conclusive hit, but as she moved on from the written summary to the crime scene photos, she quickly dismissed it as a possible Ted Rawls kill. The victim was found nude and had been beaten to death, but Ballard judged that she was too heavy in the torso to have worn the nightgown comfortably. Additionally, the circumstances of the case led investigators to believe she knew her killer and may have engaged in consensual sex with him before he turned violent. There were no indications of sexual assault.
Disappointed, Ballard leaned back in her chair. She flipped the murder book closed and put it on top of the stack of books from the other cases she had reviewed. She decided she would not return them to the shelves in the archive. She’d have Harry Bosch, with his long experience as a homicide detective, review the cases to confirm or deny her conclusions about each one.
She put the frustrations of a wasted day aside and decided to take one more run through the department’s digitized crime data, this time removing one of the descriptor filters to see if it brought up more matching cases.
The descriptor she dropped was the requirement that matching cases be unsolved. She checked the “All Cases” box, and the new search returned nine more case extracts with matching similarities. Because the Ahmanson archive contained only murder books from unsolved cases, Ballard stayed on the database and reviewed the digital case extracts, ready to write down any victims’ names and case numbers she thought might require a fuller look. This more exacting review would require her to go to the original investigators to pull murder books from closed case files and conduct interviews.
She moved through the nine extracts quickly and didn’t write down a single case citation in her notebook. Though all were similar in methodology to the murders of Sarah Pearlman and Laura Wilson, they were all closed by conviction following a jury verdict, or in two of the cases, a guilty plea. Ballard knew that any of these could have had a wrongful conviction or even a false confession, but with the abbreviated extracts alone, it was impossible for her to see anything suspicious about the cases. In extract form, they were all cut-and-dried case summaries and mug shots. Nothing else.
Ballard logged off the database and sighed, frustrated with the knowledge that she had been spinning her wheels all day.
She felt the need for Harry Bosch’s supportive words. She knew that she could complain to him about wasting her time and he would come back with wisdom and encouragement. He would remind her that there were always more dead ends in a homicide investigation than there were leads that panned out. To him, that was a basic equation of the job. He had once told her it was like baseball. The best hitters failed more than half the time. It was the same chasing leads in homicide work.
She pulled her phone and called Bosch, but it went straight to voice mail.
“Harry, it’s me. Call me back when you get a chance. I need to talk to you about how fucked up today has been. Bye.”
She stood up and put the phone in her pocket. She saw Hatteras hunched over her desk in the next station in the pod.
“Colleen,” she said, “I’m going to take a walk to clear my head and then get a coffee from upstairs. You want anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” Hatteras said. “You knew this was a locket, right?”
Ballard had already started walking away from the pod when she heard the question. She turned on her heel and moved back toward Hatteras.
“What?” she asked.
“The charm,” Hatteras said. “It has a hinge. It opens and there’s a little photo inside.”
Ballard leaned over Hatteras’s shoulder and saw that the painter’s palette charm did indeed have a hinge that allowed it to be opened like a tiny book. There was a face shot photo of a young man with jet-black hair and a struggling mustache above a wide smile.
“You shouldn’t have taken that out of the evidence bag,” she said.
“I had to,” Hatteras said. “I wouldn’t have gotten it open if it was still in the plastic.”
“I know, but I hadn’t had it processed for prints and DNA.”
“I’m so sorry. I thought you said everything had been run through forensics.”
“But not that. We just recovered it today.”
Hatteras dropped the bracelet on her desk as if it were red hot.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Ballard said. “You’ve handled it.”
Ballard was staring at the small photo. She leaned down to see it closer. The young man looked familiar to her but she couldn’t quite place him.
“Do you by any chance have a magnifying glass, Colleen?”
“No, but Harry does. I saw him using it the other day.”
Ballard went around the pod to Bosch’s station. There was a small magnifying glass on top of a stack of printouts. She grabbed it and returned to Hatteras’s desk.
“Let me look at it,” she said.
Hatteras got up and Ballard sat down. She used the glass to magnify the image in the open locket.
“That’s got to be G-O,” Hatteras said. “Don’t you think?”
Ballard was silent. The young man in the photo she was looking at was clearly Latino, with brown skin, dark eyes, and a full head of swept-back black hair. She now identified the familiarity. She realized she had seen a version of that face just minutes before.
“I think I know this guy,” she said.
She got up and went back to her station, handing Hatteras the magnifying glass as she passed.
“You know him?” Hatteras asked.
“I think I just saw him,” Ballard said.
She sat down and quickly rebooted the department’s crime data bank on her screen. She pulled up the last search and quickly scanned through the case extracts she had just finished reviewing. With each one, she went immediately to the mug shot of the defendant convicted in the murder. The seventh extract contained the mug shot of a man convicted of killing his girlfriend in 2009.
“Let me see the locket and the magnifier,” she said.
“Can I touch it?” Hatteras asked.
“You already have. Bring it to me.”
Hatteras brought both items to her. Ballard used the magnifier again to look closely at the face in the locket photo and then turned back to the computer to make the comparison.
She was sure she was looking at different photos of the same young man. In one shot he was smiling, in the other, looking grim. She stood up and signaled Hatteras to switch into her seat. She held out the magnifying glass.
“Colleen, look at the mug shot on the screen and compare it to the photo in the locket,” Ballard said. “Tell me it’s not the same guy.”
Hatteras went back and forth from computer screen to locket three times before rendering a verdict.
“They’re the same,” she said. “Definitely.”
“Okay, let me get to the computer,” Ballard said.
Hatteras jumped up and Ballard quickly took her seat back. She clicked off the photo on the screen and pulled up the details of the convicted killer. His name was Jorge Ochoa, he was thirty-six years old, and he was serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend, Olga Reyes.
“Jorge Ochoa,” Ballard said. “He could have Americanized it. Used the name George.”
“G-O,” Hatteras said. “I think you’re right.”
Ballard scribbled down the case number and the names of the victim and suspect. The extract also contained the location of the crime on Riverside Drive in Valley Village. It was a North Hollywood Division case.
The extract had no crime scene photos, and details were limited. The victim’s cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma but that was a wide catchall classification. Ballard needed the murder book from the case to confirm that it was connected to the items found in the discarded box.
“Colleen, I’m going up to the Valley to pull this case,” Ballard said. “I won’t be coming back today.”
“Can I go with you?” Hatteras said. “I feel like I had something to do with this—whatever it is.”
“You did have something to do with it. You did good work. But this is field work and your job is the IGG work. I’ll see you tomorrow if you’re coming in. I’ll update you then.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Okay, good. And great work, Colleen. Thank you.”
Ballard quickly loaded her laptop and files into her backpack, grabbed her Van Heusen jacket off the back of her chair, and moved toward the exit, leaving Hatteras watching her go.
When she got to the parking lot, Ballard pulled her phone and called Harry Bosch again. She was once more greeted with his outgoing greeting telling all callers to leave a message.
“Harry, me again. Where are you? I think I know who the white nightgown belonged to. Call me back as soon as you get this.”
She put the phone away and jumped into her car.