The Drop - Michael Connelly [4]
“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?”
“An eight-year-old boy snatches a nineteen-year-old girl off the street, rapes and strangles her and dumps the body four blocks away?” Chu asked. “Never happened.”
“Well, maybe he was there,” Dolan said. “Maybe this was how he got his start as a predator. You see his record. This guy fits—except for his age.”
Bosch nodded.
“Maybe,” he said. “Like I said, there are other possibilities. No reason to panic yet.”
His phone started to vibrate again. He pulled it and saw it was Kiz Rider again. Two calls in five minutes, he decided he’d better take it. This wasn’t about lunch.
“I have to step out for a second.”
He got up and answered the call as he stepped out of the conference room into the hallway.
“Kiz?”
“Harry, I’ve been trying to get to you with a heads-up.”
“I’m in a meeting. What heads-up?”
“You are about to get a forthwith from the OCP.”
“You want me to come up to ten?”
In the new PAB, the chief’s suite of offices was on the tenth floor, complete with a private courtyard balcony that looked out across the