“I asked Pearlman’s chief of staff to look into it,” Ballard said. “He couldn’t find any records from his failed run for the council. Pearlman himself said he didn’t remember Laura, and none of his current staff go back that far. Hastings said he would let me know who Pearlman’s campaign manager was in ’05, and I’ll follow up on that. I got the idea that it was sort of a seat-of-the-pants operation, a way for Pearlman to get his name out there but he knew from the start that there wasn’t much of a chance he would win.”

“What about Wilson? Anything else in her place that showed she was politically involved or motivated?”

“In the apartment, no. But her father was listed in the murder book as a ward committee member in Chicago. So politics was in her upbringing. She could have taken an interest in it out here. Her apartment was in the district Pearlman was running in.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He took a sip of his coffee and thought about how to proceed with this angle and if it was worth the expenditure of time when there were other angles to follow. But like Ballard, he found something about the campaign button intriguing. Eleven years after Pearlman’s sister is murdered, his campaign button is in the home of a woman killed by the same perpetrator.

It could easily be a coincidence. Ballard said there were hundreds of such buttons distributed back then. But it didn’t feel like a coincidence, and Bosch understood Ballard’s hunch all too well.

“When you talk to the campaign manager, maybe he’ll remember how many of those things were made,” he said. “And since Wilson’s father was in politics, you might want to ask him if his daughter mentioned getting involved out here.”

“Her father’s dead,” Ballard said. “Covid. I talked to her mother but that was before this came up. I’ll call back and ask about politics. I’ll also ask who cleared out Laura’s apartment after her death. It’s pretty unlikely, but maybe somebody has all her stuff.”

Bosch nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. Parents who lose children often hold on to any reminder of them.

“Good idea,” he said. “Anything new on the blood angle and the DNA?”

“Nothing yet,” Ballard said. “But on my way back from lunch, I got an email from Darcy Troy in the lab. She checked the cold storage at serology, and the swabs from the Wilson case—from the toilet—are still there, and there’s enough left for further testing. She hopes to get back tomorrow with more on what exactly was wrong with our doer.”

“That’s good,” Bosch said.

“It wasn’t something they pursued back in the day.”

“They were probably just happy to get the DNA out of it.”