After all, I don’t get to make it that often. In a nutshell, what we try to do here is apply new technology and techniques to old cases. The technology is essentially threefold. You have DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics. In all three areas the advancements in comparative analysis have been phenomenal in the last ten years. The problem with this department is that it never took any of these advances and looked backward at old cases. Consequently, we have an estimated two thousand cases in which there is DNA evidence that has never been typed and compared. Since nineteen sixty we have four thousand cases with fingerprints that have never been run through a computer. Ours, the FBI’s, DOJ’s, anybody’s computer. It’s almost laughable but it’s too fucking sad to laugh about. Same with ballistics. We are finding the evidence is still there in most of these cases but it has been ignored.”

Bosch shook his head, already feeling the frustration of all the families of the victims, the cases swept away by time, indifference and incompetence.

“You will also find that techniques are different. Today’s homicide copper is just plain better than one from, say, nineteen sixty or seventy. Even nineteen eighty. So even before you get to the physical evidence and you review these cases you are going to see things that seem obvious to you now, but that weren’t obvious to anyone back at the time of the kill.”

Pratt nodded. His speech was finished.

“Now, the cold hit,” he said, pushing the faded blue murder book across the desk. “Run with that baby. It’s all yours. Close it down and put somebody in jail.”

3

AFTER LEAVING PRATT’S office they decided that Bosch would go get the next round of coffee while Rider started in on the murder book. They knew from prior experience that she was the faster reader and it didn’t make sense to split the book up. They both needed to read it front to back, to have the investigation presented to them in the linear fashion in which it occurred and was documented.