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.