“Come on, we gotta get these in,” she said at the end of his report. “We all know the lab is backed up. We need to get cases in the pipeline. The department and the city council are not going to wait around forever. This is a results-based unit. Saying we’re waiting on lab results is a lot better than saying we’re working on it.”

“Well, if we made some progress on Sarah Pearlman, I think we’d all feel less pressure,” Rawls countered.

“We are making progress,” Ballard said. “We’ll talk about that later when Bosch is here. Anything else, Lou?”

“No, that’s it from me,” Rawls said.

He sounded annoyed that Ballard had called him out on his report.

“Okay, who wants to go next?” Ballard said, moving on.

“Just a quick one from me,” Masser said. “I have an appointment this afternoon with Vickie Blodget at the D.A. As you all know, she’s the cold case liaison, and I’ll be asking her to sign off on the Robbins and Selwyn cases. Hopefully you’ll have those in your next report to management and council.”

The cases Masser mentioned were DNA cases that led to suspects who were guilty but would never be prosecuted because of extenuating circumstances, such as the suspect being deceased or already serving a life sentence for other crimes. The cases could not be officially classified as solved or closed without the review and approval of the District Attorney’s Office and their designated reviewer. With Vickie Blodget as their go-to, this had become a rubber-stamp process, but it was still a protocol that had to be followed. These cases would be classified as “cleared other” because of the lack of prosecution involved.

The DNA match in the Robbins case led to a man who had died in prison in Colorado, where he had been serving a life sentence for another murder. The Selwyn case was also a DNA match but the suspect was still alive. He was seventy-three years old and on death row at San Quentin. He was never going to see freedom. Though Ballard had gone up to San Quentin to interview him and get a confession, the killer denied his involvement. Since his DNA had been found inside the body of his thirteen-year-old victim, Ballard was undeterred. She had no doubt he was the killer, and she was asking the D.A. to file charges but defer the prosecution. It was the most efficient way to proceed, given that the killer would never get off death row—at least not alive. This decision was agreed to by the family of the victim, who were not interested in rehashing the horrible death of their loved one forty-one years later.

“As soon as Blodget signs off, I want the families informed,” Ballard said. “Will you handle that, Paul?”

“Gladly,” Masser said. “I have the contacts in the files.”