Even though on the face of it, the perpetrators of these crimes had escaped true justice, Ballard had found that those calls to the victims’ loved ones were still very much needed. To give final answers to the mystery and pain that had in many cases accompanied a family for decades was the noble calling of the unit. Ballard had told the people on her team that this was their mandate and duty and not to be taken lightly.

“Okay,” Ballard said, again moving on. “Colleen, where are we with Cortez?”

“Still working social,” Hatteras said. “Growing the tree. Getting close.”

Ballard nodded. Hatteras was working a genealogy case—a 1986 rape and murder with DNA extracted from swabs in the rape kit for which no match was found in the state and national databases. The next step was submitting the evidence to genealogy databases and attempting to identify relatives of the original DNA depositor. Hatteras called this process “watering the tree” and so far this had led to a young woman living in Las Vegas who Hatteras believed might be a distant relative of the killer. Before reaching out directly to the woman, Hatteras was now engaged in the social media sleuthing that would help grow the family tree, leading her from branch to branch and eventually to the identity of a suspect.

“When do you expect to make direct contact with the descendant?” Ballard asked.

“By the end of the week,” Hatteras said. “You get me a ticket to Vegas and I’ll go connect the dots.”

“When you’re ready, I’ll put in the request,” Ballard said.

She then started to end the meeting.

“Okay, everybody, good work,” she said. “Keep at it and remember to give me your hours. Even though you’re not getting paid for your work, we need to track hours for the bosses. They love knowing how much they’re getting for free.”

“So that’s it?” Rawls said. “We have to wait for the new guy to come in to get the download on this new lead the lab’s got on Pearlman?”

The question revealed that Rawls had already heard from Nelson Hastings, Councilman Pearlman’s chief of staff, whom Ballard had updated during her drive in from downtown. On the call, she had only told Hastings there was a new lead on the Pearlman case but couldn’t discuss it until she had results from the lab. She was tempted now to give a response that would lay out Rawls as a direct and unauthorized conduit to the councilman’s office. But she decided to hold back on that confrontation and wait for a better time.