The Drop(4)

“Where did the DNA come from?” he asked. “Semen?”

“No, the killer used a condom or didn’t ejaculate,” Dolan said. “No semen.”

“It came from a small smear of blood,” Shuler said. “It was found on her neck, right below the right ear. She had no wounds in that area. It was assumed that it had come from the killer, that he had been cut in the struggle or maybe was already bleeding. It was just a drop. A smear, really. She was strangled with a ligature. If she was strangled from behind, then his hand could have been against her neck there. If there was a cut on his hand . . .”

“Transfer deposit,” Chu said.

“Exactly.”

Bosch found the Polaroid that showed the victim’s neck and the smear of blood. The photo was washed out by time and he could barely see the blood. A ruler had been placed on the young woman’s neck so that the blood smear could be measured in the photo. It was less than an inch long.

“So this blood was collected and stored,” he said, a statement meant to draw further explanation.

“Yes,” Shuler said. “Because it was a smear it was swabbed. Back then, they typed it. O positive. The swab was stored in a tube and we found it still in Property when we pulled the case. The blood had turned to powder.”

He tapped the top of the archive box with a pen.

Bosch’s phone started to vibrate in his pocket. Normally, he would let the call go to message, but his daughter was home sick from school and alone. He needed to make sure she wasn’t calling. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. It wasn’t his daughter. It was a former partner, Kizmin Rider, now a lieutenant assigned to the OCP—Office of the Chief of Police. He decided he would return her call after the meeting. They had lunch together about once a month and he assumed she was free today, or calling because she’d heard about him getting approved for another four years on the DROP. He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Did you open the tube?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Shuler said.

“Okay, so four months ago you sent the tube containing the swab and what was left of the blood out to the regional lab, right?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Shuler said.

Bosch flipped through the murder book to the autopsy report. He was acting like he was more interested in what he was seeing than what he was saying.

“And at that time, did you submit anything else to the lab?”

“From the Price case?” Dolan asked. “No, that was the only biological evidence they came up with back at the time.”

Bosch nodded, hoping she would keep talking.

“But back then it didn’t lead to anything,” she said. “They never came up with a suspect. Who’d they come up with on the cold hit?”

“We’ll get to that in a second,” Bosch said. “What I meant was, did you submit to the lab from any other cases you were working? Or was this all you had going?”

“No, that was it,” Shuler said, his eyes squinting in suspicion. “What’s going on here, Harry?”

Bosch reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the hit sheet. He slid it across the table to Shuler.

“The hit comes back to a sexual predator who would look real good for this except for one thing.”

Shuler unfolded the sheet and he and Dolan leaned together to read it, just as Bosch and Chu had earlier.

“What’s that?” Dolan said, not picking up on the significance of the birth date yet. “This guy looks perfect.”

“He’s perfect now,” Bosch said. “But back then he was only eight years old.”

“You’re kidding,” Dolan said.

“What the fuck?” Shuler added.

Dolan pulled the sheet away from her partner as if to see it clearer and to double-check the birth date. Shuler leaned back and looked at Bosch with those suspicious eyes.

“So you think we fucked up and mixed up cases,” he said.

“Nope,” Bosch said. “The lieutenant asked us to check out the possibility but I don’t see any fuckup on this end.”

“So it happened at the lab,” Shuler said. “Do you realize that if they screwed things up at regional, every defense lawyer in the county is going to be able to raise doubt about DNA matches that come out of there?”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that,” Bosch said. “Which is why you should keep this under your hats until we know what happened. There are other possibilities.”

Dolan held up the hit sheet.

“Yeah, what if there is no fuckup anywhere in the line? What if it’s really this kid’s blood on that dead girl?”