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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.”
“Yes, normally, but in this case, it was apparently extracted from urine. You’ll have to get the full details when you pullthe book, but according to the few notes I have here, urine was swabbed at the crime scene because the hope was they would find swimmers. If the guy raped the victim before he used the toilet, then there might still be sperm in the urethra and that would come out in the urine. But they found no swimmers. But what they did find was blood.”
“Blood in the urine.”
“Correct. The extraction was handled quickly and they didn’t get a full profile, but they got enough to put on CODIS. They got no hits then but we just connected it with our case.”
CODIS was the national database containing millions of DNA samples collected by law enforcement across the country.
“How did they know the urine with the blood in it came from the killer?” Ballard asked.
“I wasn’t here then, so I don’t know the answer to that,” Troy said. “It’s not in the notes we have here. But hopefully it’s in the murder book.”
“Okay. You said it was not a full profile. Are you saying it’s not a full match to the Pearlman case?”
“No, it’s a match for sure. But as far as going into court with it, I will have to run the numbers, and that will take me some time. But it basically means fewer zeroes. We are not talking about this being a one in thirteen quadrillion match. Something less, but still encompassing the human population of the last hundred years.”
Ballard knew that Troy had the tendency to get lost in the wonder of the numbers. But she had handled enough DNA cases to be able to interpret what she was saying.
“So you’ll be able to testify that this DNA is unique.”
“Well, to be exact, I can testify that no other person on this planet in the last hundred years has had this DNA.”
“Got it. That’s all I need. Now we just have to find the guy. I’m going to go look for the book now. Thanks for the quickie, Darcy.”
“Glad to help. Let me know how it goes.”
“I will.”
Ballard put the phone down and got up.
“Good news?” Hatteras asked.
