BALLARD WAS JUST finishing the case summary that she had compiled as part of a request to the Ahmanson Foundation for grant money for a genealogical case Tom Laffont had put together and would work with Hatteras.

“Colleen, Tom’s not here, so I’m sending you this grant app,” she said without taking her eyes off her screen. “Read the case summary and make sure I have it right.”

“Send it, I’ll read it,” Hatteras said.

“I want to get it in today. Maybe get a quick answer so you and Tom can go to work.”

“I’m ready. Send it.”

Just as Ballard closed the document, her desk phone buzzed. She saw on the ID screen that it was Darcy Troy from the DNA lab. She answered the phone while opening an email and sending the grant document to Hatteras.

“Darcy, whaddaya got for me?”

“Well, good and bad news on Sarah Pearlman.”

“Tell me.”

“The good news is we got a hit off the DNA from the palm print. The bad news is it’s a case-to-case hit.”

A case-to-case hit meant the DNA profile from the palm print was matched to the profile from another open case, one where the donor/suspect was unknown. Case-to-case hits were what led to genealogical investigations. This was disappointing in the moment for Ballard because she was looking for a street case, an investigation that took her out into the city and knocking on doors, looking for an identified individual whose DNA was in the law enforcement data banks. That was what Bosch was chasing now with McShane and she wanted the same for herself. It’s what true detectives lived for.

She grabbed a pen off the desk and got ready to write on a legal pad.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said. “What’s the name and case number?”

Troy recited the case number first. It was a homicide from 2005, which meant there were eleven years between the Sarah Pearlman murder and the linked case. The victim’s name was Laura Wilson and she was twenty-four years old at the time of her murder.

“Anything else on your end?” Ballard asked.

“Well, it’s unusual on the science side,” Troy said. “As far as how they even came up with the DNA on the 2005 case.”

“Yeah? Tell me.”

“You know the old saying, right? Secretions, not excretions. We extract DNA from bodily fluids—blood, sweat, and semen primarily. But not from bodily waste, because the enzymes destroy DNA.”

“No shit, no piss.”