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“I see.”
“But that’s all we really have at the moment, so I would relax, Mr. Hastings. If something develops from this that Councilman Pearlman needs to know, I will call you first thing.”
“Thank you, Detective.”
Hastings disconnected and Ballard looked up to see Boschentering the restaurant. She caught his eye with a wave and he came over and slid into the corner booth.
“How was your interview?” Ballard asked.
“Nothing really new,” Bosch said. “But it was a good place to restart. She called somebody right after I left, so that’s curious.”
“This that trick you told me about, standing on the front step and eavesdropping?”
“It works sometimes. So what’s up?”
“Well, thanks to you and the DNA we pulled off the palm print, we now have a hit on another case.”
“Where? When?”
“Here in ’05. In fact, right around the corner on Tamarind.”
“I just parked on Tamarind.”
“I’m going to walk over after we leave to check the place out. Here is the chrono. You can take it with you if you want to read it tonight.”
“I thought no copies left Ahmanson.”
Ballard smiled.
“No copies leave with you. I’m the boss. I can make copies.”
“Got it. A double standard—you’ll go far in the LAPD.”
“That’s not as funny as you think it is.”
“Okay, so what else do you know about the case?”
Ballard started reviewing what she considered the important points gained from her read-through of the Wilson murder book.
“The bottom line is, if there wasn’t a genetic link between these cases, I wouldn’t have connected them,” she said. “One victim is white, one Black; one in her teens, one in her twenties; one strangled, one stabbed. One murdered in her house, whereshe lived with her parents and brother; the other killed in an apartment, where she lived alone.”
“But both were sexually assaulted and killed in their beds,” Bosch said. “Did you look at the crime scene? Did he cover the second victim’s face?”
“No, he didn’t. I guess eleven years after killing Sarah Pearlman, he was no longer ashamed of what he had done.”
Bosch nodded. A waiter came to the table and they both ordered rotisserie chicken plates and Bosch said he’d drink what Ballard was drinking. After the waiter took the order to the kitchen, Bosch spoke.
“Eleven years between cases,” he said. “That’s not likely.”
“I know,” Ballard said. “There’s got to be others out there.”
“These two were the mistakes.”
“Where he left DNA.”
“The other thing is: two cases eleven years apart and both in L.A.”
“Both in Hollywood.”
