In 2001, Holes’s department receives a grant to update its DNA testing equipment. Holes is given permission to apply the funds to the EAR investigation, and the lab nets a match between the EAR DNA profile and the serial killer from Southern California known as the Original Night Stalker (ONS). Holes is elated and learns from Orange County’s department that they have linked four homicides of the EAR to the ONS perpetrator via DNA. Holes provides them with the information from the EAR cases in the hopes that Orange County will be able to use this and the testimony of survivors to determine the rapist-killer’s identity.

In 2003, Giacomelli asks Holes for help on a case because his partner, Conary, has been called away due to the death of his mother. The case involves the death of a 21-year-old man named Eric Louis Huffman. His sister reported that he arrived on her doorstep beaten and then died inside her house. Suspicion arose when no blood was found outside of her home and when it was discovered that Huffman died not of a beating but of a gunshot wound.

Giacomelli seeks Holes’s advice on how to look for traces of blood after the crime scene has already been cleaned.