While Bosch didn’t like the political machinations inherent in the case, he wholly understood a family’s need for answers. It had taken him more than thirty years to get answers about his own mother’s killing when he was a boy. The answers did not provide closure but there was a resolution to his efforts. In that regard he fully understood what Jake Pearlman was looking for and needed. The fact that he was wielding his political power to get it was understandable. If he’d had that kind of juice, Bosch would have done the same in his mother’s case. Instead, he had used the power of his badge.

Ballard had come in early and made individual packages of copies pertaining to each investigator’s assignment. She handed them out at the end of the meeting, including giving Harry an inch-thick printout containing copies of the forensic reports and crime scene photos from the Wilson case.

Before starting in on the assignment, Bosch wanted to do something that had nagged at him since interviewing Sheila Walsh. He had been awake most of the night with thoughts that he had blown the Gallagher Family case by missing something about the break-in at her home.

Once Ballard was sitting down again at her station, Bosch got up and came around to the end of the pod.

“I need to run a name for criminal history,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“On the Wilson case?” she asked. “Already?”

“No, on Gallagher.”

“Harry, I want you working on Wilson and Pearlman. I thought we agreed on this last night, and I just finished telling everybody how important it is to us.”

“I’m going to start on it today, but I stayed up all night thinking about this, so I just want to put it in motion and see what I’ve got to come back to after Wilson. Okay?”

“What’s the name?”

Bosch was holding the fingerprints report from the Sheila Walsh break-in. Ballard opened up the portal to the National Crime Information Center database and he read the name he wanted checked for a criminal record.

“Jonathan Boatman, DOB July 1, ’87.”

Ballard typed it in and waited while the database was searched for matches.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Sheila Walsh’s son,” Bosch said. “Probably a son from an early marriage and she changed her name when she divorced or remarried.”

“And you never ran him before?”

“I did back in the day and he was clean. It’s in the murder book. But right now I want to see if he stayed clean.”

“And what makes you think he didn’t?”