“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.