The Waiting

19

Ballard and Bosch were squeezed into one side of a booth at Mary and Robbs Café in Westwood. The other side was empty.

Bosch checked his watch. “You sure this guy’s going to show?”

“He’s never stood me up before. He’s probably walking over.”

“You mean, like, stood you up for a date? That sort of thing?”

“No, Harry. It’s strictly a professional relationship.”

“You trust him?”

“I wouldn’t have called him if I didn’t trust him. Gordon is a good guy. He’s helped the unit on a lot of cases. The FBI obviously moves a lot faster on out-of-state warrants than we do because they’ve got agents everywhere. And it’s a fact that people who think they’ve gotten away with murder tend not to hang around. They split, and having a go-to guy in the Bureau is gold. I know your relationship with the FBI was... fraught, but that was then and this is now.”

“‘Fraught.’ Yeah, I think that might be a bit of an understatement.”

The waiter brought a mug of coffee for Ballard and black tea for Bosch.

“What’s with the tea?” Ballard asked. “You were always a black-coffee guy.”

“I don’t know,” Bosch said, shrugging. “People change.”

She nodded and watched him over the rim of her cup as she sipped. He looked beat, and once again she felt guilty for enlisting him in whatever this was.

“You doing okay, Harry?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look tired. Maybe we should—”

“I told you, I’m good. If I wasn’t, I’d say so. So what’s the plan here? We just hand this off to the guy and walk away from it?”

“We’ll see how he wants to handle it. But he’s got to promise me about the badge or it’s a no-go and he gets nothing. You good with that?”

“I’m good with it. I just thought that if there’s a way for you to get some credit for bagging this guy, that would help... you know, secure your position inside the department.”

Ballard shook her head. “You’d think, right?” she said. “But probably the exact opposite would happen. They’d ding me for going out of my lane.”

Ballard had a view of the front door but knew there was a back way into the restaurant that would be on a direct walking route from the FBI’s field office three blocks over on Wilshire Boulevard.

She flipped open the file folder on the table and looked at the photo of Thomas Dehaven she had pulled from Idaho DMV records. She closed the file when she looked up and saw Gordon Olmstead approaching the booth. She wasn’t sure which way he had come in.

Before he sat down, Olmstead held out his right hand to Renée.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

She shook his hand.

“Happy New Year to you, Gordon,” she said. “This is Harry Bosch, who I told you about. Harry, Agent Gordon Olmstead with the Bureau.”

The two men shook hands and Olmstead sat down across from them. He was a seasoned agent, a few years away from retirement. He worked in the fugitives division after a long career of postings in almost all sections in the Los Angeles field office.

“I have to say, I’m very intrigued,” Olmstead said. “We don’t get many of the insurrectionists out this way.”

That was how Ballard had baited him. She’d told him she could deliver a man wanted on a federal warrant for his activities during the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Ballard now slid the folder across the table to him. It was bad timing. Just as Olmstead started to open it, the waiter came to the table to ask if he wanted coffee. Olmstead declined any drink and waited for the server to walk away before opening the file.

There were two printouts inside. The top was a photocopy of Thomas Dehaven’s driver’s license issued four years earlier in Idaho. He had been thirty-nine at the time and clean-shaven. But Bosch had confirmed the ID. Dehaven was the man who had met Bosch in the beach parking lot to talk about machine guns.

Olmstead studied it briefly and then went to the second sheet, which was a printout of the FBI’s wanted poster for Dehaven. He was charged with murder, sedition, and assault on a law enforcement officer. The poster prominently featured the same photo from the Idaho driver’s license plus two other shots of Dehaven inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. One photo showed him posing at the speaker’s podium in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The other shot was a candid taken at the Capitol’s entrance that showed Dehaven in a highlighted circle spraying a chemical under the helmet shield of a Capitol Police officer.

“You’re telling me this guy is here in L.A.?” Olmstead said.

“Yes,” Ballard said.

“And you can lead me to him?”

“Yes.”

Olmstead studied the summary of crimes on the wanted poster.

“You guys want him bad,” Bosch said. “He killed his ex-wife because she called the FBI after seeing him on TV at the Capitol.”

“Somehow he found out,” Ballard said. “Killed her and has been in the wind ever since.”

“And how did you come across him?” Olmstead asked.

“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Ballard said.

“If I’m going to do anything with this, then I need to know,” Olmstead said.

Ballard turned to Bosch to make sure he was still with her. He nodded without hesitation.

“I could and should give this to LAPD counterterrorism,” she said. “So if I give it to you, I need two assurances.”

“Let’s hear them,” Olmstead said.

“First, my name is nowhere near it,” Ballard said. “You got this from a CI or a concerned citizen who saw the guy’s picture in a post office or online or something.”

“I can do that, but why?” Olmstead said.

“Because of condition number two,” Ballard said. “Dehaven has my badge. You arrest him, you get it, and you give it back to me. It does not get mentioned in any report.”

“Wait, what?” Olmstead said. “He’s got your badge? How?”

“That’s the story you wouldn’t believe if I told you,” Ballard said.

“Well, I think you’d better tell me anyway,” Olmstead said.

“My badge was stolen Monday while I was surfing up near Dockweiler Beach,” Ballard said. “There’s a surfing break called Staircases. While I was on the water, a couple of assholes broke into my car. I tracked them down but not before they got rid of the badge. They sold it to a fence, who then sold it to Dehaven.”

“You didn’t report it?” Olmstead asked. “It can’t be that big a deal, can it?”

“For me it would be,” Ballard said. “Suffice it to say there are people in the department who would use it against me. It would be my ticket to a transfer and freeway therapy. The bottom line is I love my job, Gordon, and I’m good at it. I want to keep it.”

“Okay, I get it,” Olmstead said. “And I know firsthand that you’re good at your job. Where does Dehaven have your badge?”

“On him, we think,” Ballard said.

“Why do you think that?” Olmstead asked.

Ballard glanced at Bosch. She wasn’t going to reveal any of the lines she had crossed, no matter how much she trusted Olmstead.

“We just do,” she said. “It will be on him or nearby. That’s all you need to know.”

Olmstead looked from Ballard to Bosch and then back to Ballard.

“Okay, we won’t go there,” he said. “But let me see if I’ve got this clear. I’m supposed to take this guy down, get the badge, and turn it over to you. That would be evidence I’m handing over.”

“Not evidence of anything he’s charged with,” Ballard said. “But there is something else. Dehaven wanted the badge because he’s planning something. He has guns and he’s looking to buy more — machine guns.”

“What is he planning?” Olmstead asked.

“We’re not sure,” Bosch said. “But we’re four days out from Presidents’ Day and he and one of his pals have been casing the Malibu pier. In their words, on Monday they’re going to ‘make that thing in Vegas look like child’s play.’”

“You mean a mass shooting,” Olmstead said.

Bosch and Ballard both nodded.

“Jesus Christ, you actually heard this said?” Olmstead asked.

They nodded again.

“And I’ll be your confidential informant,” Bosch said.

The skin around Olmstead’s eyes tightened as the weight of everything they had told him landed.

“Okay, where is Thomas Dehaven right now?” Olmstead asked.

“You don’t need to know that,” Bosch said. “What you need to know is that he wants to buy machine guns from me. I set up the meet, and that’s where you take him. Before Monday.”

“Wait, no,” Ballard said.

That had not been part of the plan she and Bosch discussed before she contacted Olmstead. The plan was to tell the agent about the caravan out on the coast highway.

“That’s way too dangerous, Harry,” she said. “We need to set up a controlled takedown where he—”

“You want your badge, right?” Bosch said. “He’ll have it when he comes for the guns. He’ll use it to rip me off. He’ll pull it, say he’s LAPD, and take the minis.”

Ballard realized that Bosch might have solved the riddle of why Dehaven needed a badge. The moment he said it, she knew that it fit and that his plan was the best way to recover the badge and take down Dehaven.

“Harry, are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s going to work,” Bosch said.

“Okay, fine,” Ballard said, looking hard at Olmstead. “But this has got to be somewhere out in the open, somewhere safe, where nothing goes wrong.”

“We can do that,” Olmstead said.

“Can you get us four SIG Sauer MPX mini machine guns with the firing pins removed?” Bosch asked.

Olmstead paused a moment on that question.

“Come on, you’re the FBI,” Bosch prompted.

“No promises,” Olmstead said. “But we can try.”

20

Lilia Aghzafi, Paul Masser, and Colleen Hatteras were in their places on the raft when Ballard arrived at the unit. Ballard felt compelled to explain her long absences during the week, though without revealing what she had actually been up to. She stood at the end of the raft and addressed the group.

“Hey, everybody,” she began. “I just want to say that I have not been here a lot this week because I’ve been involved in a case that doesn’t come out of this unit. I got pulled into it and it’s about to wrap up and things should get back to normal.”

“What’s the case?” Hatteras asked. “Maybe we can help.”

“It’s a sensitive case, Colleen, so I can’t really talk about it,” Ballard said. “Basically, I got a tip from a CI who’d fed me intel before we started the unit. I had to run with it but now it’s been handed off and I’m back here. And speaking of being here, we have a new team member who was supposed to come in today. Has anybody seen Maddie Bosch?”

“She’s here,” Masser said. “She’s in the lockdown room looking at the old cases.”

The lockdown room was what they called the interview room that had been converted to a storage room for murder books and evidence from sensitive cases. It was locked but everyone in the unit knew where Ballard hid the key — beneath the calendar on her desk.

“Who let her in there?” Ballard asked.

“She wanted to see the old cases,” Hatteras said. “I thought it would be okay, so I gave her the key.”

“That’s fine,” Ballard said. “Why don’t you go get her, Colleen, and we’ll go over the boards. I know it’s not Monday but we won’t be meeting Monday because of the holiday and I think it will be good for Maddie to see how we track cases.”

Ballard knew that it was also a way for her to spend time with the unit, make everyone feel like it was business as usual, when her mind was elsewhere and business was anything but usual.

Hatteras went to get Maddie. Ballard turned her attention to Masser. “Paul, I don’t suppose we’ve heard anything from Darcy or the DOJ?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Masser said. “Hopefully tomorrow. It’s like that old Tom Petty song.”

“What song?”

“‘The Waiting.’ You know, the bit about it being the hardest part.”

He sang the lyrics but Ballard shook her head like she didn’t recognize it.

“Oh, come on,” Masser said. “It was a huge hit.”

He sang some more, then stopped when he realized Ballard was playing him.

“Ah, fuck you,” he said.

Ballard and Aghzafi started laughing.

“You know they have an all-unit talent show every year in the auditorium at the PAB,” Ballard said. “I think you’d have a shot at a trophy.”

“Like I said, F you,” Masser said.

His face was turning red and Ballard decided to lay off and change the subject.

“I was talking to this guy on the Maui fire task force,” she said. “You know, about the fires and all the unidentified dead they have. He told me they have this mobile DNA lab that they take into the fields of ash that is all that’s left of Lahaina. They put in what they can find of the human remains and they get DNA comparisons done in ninety minutes.”

“Oh, wow,” Masser said.

“And here we are, and it takes days or weeks to get anything done,” Ballard said. “I’m going to apply for a grant to get one of those labs to use right here.”

“That would be cool,” Aghzafi said. “We’d really start kicking ass.”

“Well, I think we already do kick ass,” Masser said.

Ballard nodded as she realized that Masser probably wanted to ask her about why she was talking to an investigator in Maui. He was the only one in the unit she had confided in about her missing mother.

The awkward moment ended when Hatteras returned with Maddie.

“Hey, Maddie,” Ballard said. “Welcome to the unit.”

“Glad to be here,” Maddie said. “Exciting.”

“You see anything in the lockdown room you can solve?”

“Uh, not yet.”

“Okay, well, did you pick a desk yet? We’ve got two openings on the raft.”

“Uh, not yet. The raft?”

Ballard pointed to the interconnected desk modules. “That’s what we call the setup here,” she said. “All the desks joined together like a raft.”

“Floating on a sea of cold cases,” Masser said.

Ballard walked Maddie around to the side of the raft where there were two unused desks.

“Either one of these,” she said. “Your dad used this one when he was here. You’d be across from Colleen, who is going to teach you the IGG work we do.”

“Okay,” Maddie said.

She looked down at the two chairs and hesitated. Ballard understood what that was about and pointed to the desk that Harry had not used.

“Why don’t you start your own path?” she said.

Maddie nodded, and the decision was made. She stepped into the pod and pulled the chair back so she could sit down.

“The terminal is old but basically the same program you use at Hollywood Station,” Ballard said. “Use the same password. In these first few weeks, coordinate with Colleen on when you’ll both be in so she can start you with the IGG procedures. I think having two people with those skills, especially one with a badge, will be great.”

“Good,” Maddie said. “Um, I also wanted to ask you about something.”

“Sure.”

“Well, I was just in the lockdown room and I noticed that the Elizabeth Short case has its own file cabinet but it’s locked.”

Ballard smiled and nodded. It wasn’t the first time a member of the unit had asked about the Black Dahlia case. The savage 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short was the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles.

“Yeah, it’s locked because those cabinets are almost empty,” Ballard said. “Over the years a lot of the files have disappeared. Most of the evidence is gone too. I guess it doesn’t matter. That one will never be solved.”

“The evidence is gone how?” Maddie asked.

“Pilfered by cops who had access to the files. The original letters, witness statements — they’re all gone. No physical evidence except the suitcase in there that was hers — she kept it in a locker at the bus station. But you can find most of the missing information on the internet. More there than what’s in that file cabinet.”

“Oh.”

“If you still want to look, I’ll give you the key. But be prepared for disappointment.”

“I’ll take a look anyway. I’ve always been fascinated by that case. My dad has too.”

“Really? Harry never mentioned it.”

“I think it sort of reminds him of his mother.”

“Got it. I should have thought about that.”

An awkward silence ensued as Maddie realized she had overshared about her father in front of the group. Ballard broke it.

“Well, we’re going to start going over our active cases,” she said. “I thought it might be good for you to see how we do it. Usually we do it on Mondays, but you’re here for the first time and this coming Monday is a holiday, so I thought we’d do it now.”

“Sounds good,” Maddie said.

Ballard took her position in front of the whiteboards and started the review of the cases the team was working on. They brought Maddie up to date on the Pillowcase Rapist case, but after that there was not much new to report, largely because Ballard’s pursuit of her stolen badge had hijacked most of the week. The one high point of the round-robin came from Masser.

“I just heard from John Lewin at the DA’s office, and Maxine Russell’s lawyer has reached out,” Masser said. “She wants to deal.”

“And she’ll give up her ex on the convenience-store shooting?” Ballard asked.

“I assume so,” Masser said. “There’s no deal if she doesn’t. They’re meeting tomorrow morning.”

“Good,” Ballard said. “Let us know.”

The rest of the review went quickly after that. “We’re expecting results from the DOJ tomorrow on our DNA capture from Monday,” Ballard said. “If it goes the way we expect it to, we’re going to have to set up a surveillance on the judge while I go to the PAB and get the okay for an arrest. Who’s coming in?”

All hands rose in response. Everybody wanted to be in on the kill, so to speak. Even Maddie Bosch raised a hand, although she would be working her patrol shift Friday night. Ballard appreciated the team’s enthusiasm but told them that it was highly unlikely that they would be involved in the arrest.

“For something like this — big case and big suspect — they’ll tell us to stand down, and SIS will come in, take over surveillance, and make the arrest,” she said.

That got a round of boos. SIS was the Special Investigation Section, which handled major-case arrests.

“Don’t worry, we’ll still get the credit for it,” Ballard said. “It’s still our case.”

She went on to thank the team for their dedication and hard work. As the meeting broke up, she invited Maddie to have a cup of coffee.

The cafeteria was largely empty except for a table full of men Ballard knew were academy instructors. Ballard got a coffee and Maddie got a bottle of sparkling water.

“Your dad is switching from coffee to tea,” Ballard said.

“Really?” Maddie said. “You saw him recently?”

Ballard realized her mistake.

“Uh, yeah, I asked him for some help on a case,” she said. “Advice. Did you tell him about joining the unit?”

“Not yet,” Maddie said. “Now that it’s official, I’ll call him.”

“Good. You should. But I sort of sense that there’s something else going on with you. Something in play you haven’t told me about. And so I just wanted to give you the chance to tell me now rather than later.”

“Wow. I guess you can really read people.”

“Comes with the territory. So what’s going on, Maddie?”

“Well — you have to hear me out, because this is going to sound... weird, I guess. And don’t laugh, but I think I might have solved the Black Dahlia case.”

Ballard had no urge to laugh at all. The fervency with which Maddie had said this told her that she was deadly serious.

“Tell me about it,” Ballard said.

21

Ballard was early pulling into the parking lot of Echo Park Storage. She thought about her activities at the You-Store-It in Santa Monica. The coincidence of it was not lost on her. Unrelated but similar things seemed to be happening in twos.

She parked and left the car running while she made another call to the number Gordon Olmstead had told her was his direct line. As before, it went straight to voicemail.

“It’s Renée,” Ballard said. “Again. Just wondering what’s happening. Give me a call.”

She disconnected. She wondered if her tone sounded too pleading. There was a hollow feeling building in her chest as she second-guessed herself for bringing Olmstead and the FBI into the Thomas Dehaven investigation. She tried to push the feeling aside by calling Harry.

He answered right away.

“Just checking to see if you’ve heard anything from Olmstead.”

“Yeah, he called a little while ago. He said they want to set up the gun buy for Saturday morning.”

Ballard was immediately annoyed that Bosch was in the loop but she wasn’t. At the same time, she understood that Bosch had to be in the loop since he would be the tethered goat they’d use as bait in taking down Dehaven.

“Are you good with that?” she asked.

“The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned,” Bosch said. “But they need the time to set it all up and pick their spots.”

“Where is it going down?”

“They want the same place the first meeting was at, the parking lot at the beach. I told them Saturday morning, that lot will fill up fast. It’s a beach day for people. But they like that because, you know, they can get their people in there in cars and whatnot.”

“I get it. So have you texted the arrangements to Dehaven?”

“No, Olmstead and the Bureau people have sort of hijacked the texting. There’s a way they can do it without my phone.”

“Right. So when was the last time you talked to Olmstead or anybody with the Bureau?”

“Olmstead told me all of this a couple hours ago. He’ll probably call you once they have it set up.”

“Are they getting the plugged minis for you?”

“He said they’ll have them. They want the deal to go down because it will be an added case against him. Dehaven will never breathe free air again.”

“You’d think killing his ex would be enough for that, but I get it. They want more federal charges. They want to bury him in that supermax out in Colorado.”

Ballard saw a car glide into the open space next to her. It was Maddie Bosch.

“Okay, well, it looks like Olmstead doesn’t have me on the need-to-know list,” Ballard said. “So let me know what you know.”

“I will,” Bosch said. “This is your case whether you want credit for it or not.”

“Not anymore. But that’s the way it goes. Talk to you later, Harry.”

“Wait. I was going to call you. Did Maddie start with the unit today?”

“She did, yeah. It was good. I think she’s going to fit right in.”

“Okay. Good.”

“She told me she was going to call you today to tell you.”

“She hasn’t yet, but good.”

“Yeah. See ya, Harry.”

“Bye.”

Bosch clicked off and Ballard killed the engine. She put her phone in her pocket as she got out. Maddie was waiting behind her car, checking her phone.

“So,” Ballard said. “Storage Wars, huh? I would have had you down as a Kardashians girl.”

“What? Kardashians? No. And I don’t think I’ve ever watched Storage Wars either.”

Storage Wars was a reality-television show in which people bid at auction on storage units whose renters were more than three months delinquent in their payments. Under California law, the contents of these storage units could be discarded or put up for auction by the business owner. The show was basically a treasure hunt, with winning bidders hoping to find valuable contents in the storage units they bought.

Maddie had explained to Ballard that she had a unit at Echo Park Storage that she’d rented when she moved into her boyfriend’s apartment and had to store the furniture and other belongings from her place. She wanted to keep her furniture in case the relationship didn’t work out. One day while on her way to work, she had stopped by her unit to retrieve a lamp she wanted to bring to her new home. She was not in uniform but had her badge on her belt. The manager saw the badge and told her he was cleaning out a storage unit that was delinquent on payments and had found some disturbing things inside. He wanted Maddie to take a look. What Maddie found in the unit made her rent it on the spot and pay the manager five hundred dollars for its contents. Maddie had been going through those contents in her spare time. She decided to volunteer for the Open-Unsolved Unit after opening a file labeled Betty.

“Well,” Ballard said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The storage facility was an old brick warehouse that had somehow withstood the test of time and earthquakes. Ballard guessed that it had once been a manufacturing plant of some kind. She could see where windows had been removed and walled, creating a hodgepodge facade of cinder block, concrete, and brick.

“How old is this place?” Ballard asked.

“Built almost a hundred years ago,” Maddie said. “I asked the guy who runs it — Mr. Waxman. He said they originally made parts here for the Ford plant that was down on Terminal Island. In the sixties they moved in all these old shipping containers, and it became a storage facility. Most of the containers have separating walls inside, so you get half a container. There are doors on both ends.”

“The guy who rented the unit we’re talking about — how long did he have it?”

“Since the sixties — he supposedly got it then and kept it.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He died, like, seven years ago but the rent had always been paid through a trust fund. It was in his will to keep it going, and it paid for the year ahead every November first. But I guess the money ran out, and last November no payment came. After three months, Mr. Wax-man went in to clean it out and I happened to come by that day.”

Another coincidence, Ballard thought. They entered through a garage door that had been rolled open. Inside, the large space once used for manufacturing was filled with freestanding rows of shipping containers with an office at the front of one of the rows. Lights hung from the rafters above, but there was not enough illumination to keep back the shadows. The place felt eerie to Ballard. Ominous.

“It’s back here,” Maddie said. As they passed the office, Maddie waved through a window to a man sitting behind a desk.

“Is that the guy who told you about it?” Ballard asked.

“Yeah, Mr. Waxman,” Maddie said.

“He’s not the owner?”

“No, he’s just the manager. The owner is an old lady who lives up by the Greek. He told me she might remember the guy who rented it.”

“Aren’t you creeped out by this place?”

“Definitely. But it’s close by and cheap. I don’t spend much time here — I mean, I didn’t before this thing came up.”

“Tell me about the guy who rented the unit.”

“Emmitt Thawyer. I ran him through our databases and got nothing.”

“Sawyer?”

“No, it’s like Sawyer but with a T-h. Not a lot of Thawyers out there. I googled him but couldn’t find anything. Mr. Waxman says Mrs. Porter — she’s the owner — ran the place before she hired him and probably met Emmitt Thawyer. Back in the day, he was some kind of photographer.”

The individual storage units had not been updated in years. Rather than roll-up metal doors like they had at the You-Store-It in Santa Monica, these units had the original shipping container double doors secured with locking bars and padlocks. Maddie stopped in front of a door marked 17 and pulled a key ring off her belt.

“This is it,” she said.

Maddie removed a thick padlock, pulled the locking bar up, and swung open the heavy metal doors. The container was pitch-black inside. Maddie reached in and flipped a switch, and a line of caged bulbs down the center of the ceiling lit the space. Ballard was expecting a hoarder’s pile of junk and debris, but the container was neatly ordered with a row of metal file cabinets on one side and old photography equipment on the other. There were light stands and wooden-legged tripods. At the back of the space was a worktable on which stood pans, beakers, and other film-developing equipment.

“At first I thought it was like a meth lab or something,” Maddie said. “But it’s a photo lab. And these file cabinets are full of negatives and photos, contracts for jobs, and invoices. It looks like he did a lot of work for catalogs, shooting products and things like that. It’s all legit work except for what’s in the last cabinet. That was the one Mr. Waxman opened.”

“Let’s see.”

“It’s pretty bad.”

Maddie reached down to the bottom drawer of a file cabinet but Ballard stopped her.

“Wait,” she said. “Did you wear gloves when you went through this place before?”

“Uh, no,” Maddie said. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You didn’t know what you’d find. Here.” Ballard reached into her pocket for latex gloves. “I only have one pair,” she said. “Let’s each put a glove on.”

They did, and then Maddie opened the file drawer. It made a sharp screech, which somehow seemed appropriate to Ballard.

The drawer was filled with hanging files with the names of women on the tabs. They were alphabetized and the first one said Betty. Maddie pulled it out with a gloved hand and gave it to Ballard, who opened it on the worktable.

The file contained eight black-and-white photos, several showing the body of a woman who had been horribly tortured and killed. In an instant Ballard recognized Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

“Oh my God,” she said under her breath.

“Yeah,” Maddie said.

22

“Is it her?” Maddie asked.

“Sure looks like it,” Ballard said.

She stacked two film-development pans to make room to spread out the eight photos on the worktable. Their white borders were yellowed despite having been in a file cabinet for decades. They depicted various stages of the defilement, torture, and murder of a young woman. They had not been in chronological order but Ballard was able to put them in order on the table by the appearance of injuries and wounds. The first photo showed the woman before she realized what was about to befall her. She was sitting on a stool, a come-hither smile on her lips, wearing just a bra and panties. The next shot was a close-up of her face, both cheeks slashed from the corners of her mouth, her eyes wild with fear and pain.

It got worse from there. The seventh photo showed her full body lying bloody on a concrete floor next to a drain. She was clearly dead. The injuries to the body matched the autopsy photo long ago stolen from the Black Dahlia files and posted on the internet, an image Ballard had seen online and that was seared into her memory. In the last photo, the body on the concrete had been cleanly severed across the abdomen, blood flowing into the drain.

Nausea hit Ballard, and she put both hands on the worktable and leaned down.

“Are you all right?” Maddie asked.

Ballard didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and waited for the feeling to pass.

She finally found her voice. “You see things on this job and can’t understand how they could happen,” she said.

She straightened up and looked at Maddie.

“Are the other files in there...” she began.

“Yes,” Maddie said. “Not as bad, but bad.”

“How many?”

“Seven.”

“Who the hell was this guy?”

“A monster.”

Ballard shook off the fog of horror and put her game face on. “All right, we need to pull those files and take them back to the raft,” she said. “We seal this place for now.”

“Okay,” Maddie said.

“Let’s go talk to Mr. Waxman.”

Maddie gathered the other file folders from the cabinet. They stepped out of the container, and Maddie handed Ballard the files while she locked the door. Ballard reluctantly leafed through them, seeing photos of the other women in life and death, all of them having met agonizing ends. Ballard was still grappling with the idea that the most famous and hideous killing in Los Angeles history was not a one-time-only crime. The Black Dahlia was just one flower in a black bouquet of murder.

They walked silently to the office, where the man Ballard had seen before was sitting behind a desk stacked with paperwork.

“Mr. Waxman, this is Detective Ballard,” Maddie said.

He nodded at the files Ballard held. “Are they real?” Waxman asked.

“You mean the photos?” Maddie asked.

“We’re not sure yet,” Ballard said quickly. “We’ll have them analyzed. But we would like to see any records you have on the person who rented that storage unit.”

“Emmitt Thawyer was his name,” Waxman said. “But he’s dead.”

“You must have a file with contact information, billing, things like that,” Ballard said.

“Yes, but he didn’t pay,” Waxman said. “He had a trust fund that paid. I hope it’s Hollywood stuff, you know. Fake stuff from the movies.”

Ballard realized he might not have recognized the woman in the first file as Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

“Possibly,” she said. “Hopefully. But you must have records of the payments from the trust fund. Can we see those?”

“Okay. I have to go back to storage to get it,” Waxman said.

“We can wait,” Ballard said.

Waxman stood up and left the office.

“Who did you say owned this place?” Ballard asked.

“Nancy Porter,” Maddie said.

“We’ll need an address for her too.”

“I already have it.”

“From Waxman?”

“Yes, I thought I — we — might need it, so I got it from him after he showed me the storage unit.”

“That was smart. Maybe we’ll go see her after this. If you have time.”

“I’m in. This is so much more interesting than patrol.”

For a moment Ballard considered warning her about vicarious trauma but decided not to get into it now.

Waxman came back a few minutes later with a file; he handed it to Ballard and went back behind his desk. The file contained several documents, starting with a yellowed information sheet apparently filled out by Emmitt Thawyer and dated November 1, 1966. It listed a home address on Kellam Avenue.

“Kellam Avenue,” Maddie said. “That’s in Angeleno Heights. I remember when I was a kid, my dad and I used to drive around in there and look at the old houses. I love that neighborhood.”

“Well, it looks like a serial killer might have lived there,” Ballard said.

“He was probably there when we drove by his house.”

“Maybe.”

The information sheet also included Thawyer’s driver’s license number and a birth date of January 7, 1924.

“He just had a birthday last month,” Ballard said. “He’d be a hundred years old.”

Ballard did the math and determined that Thawyer would have been twenty-three when Elizabeth Short was abducted and murdered. It was a little young for a serial killer, but maybe she was his first victim.

“You think he did that on purpose?” Maddie said. “Put enough money in his trust fund to pay for storage till he was a hundred?”

“Who knows,” Ballard said. “But I like the way you’re thinking.”

Ballard didn’t know if telling Maddie she reminded her of her father would be taken as a compliment or not. She kept it to herself and went back to the documents in hand.

The rest of the pages in the file were annual invoices stamped PAID with a handwritten date of payment. All the dates were in late October or the first day of November, corresponding with when Thawyer first rented the storage unit.

“Mr. Waxman, we’re going to need to keep this file for a while,” Ballard said.

“It’s yours,” Waxman said. “I’m done with it.”

“Do you speak to Mrs. Porter often?”

“No, we don’t need to speak. I run the business for her and she’s happy being hands-off.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know. Very old. She inherited this business from her father. He did what I do — ran the business. She did too, but then she got tired and turned to me.”

“Did you tell her about this — what you saw in the unit?”

“I told her, yes.”

“Did she remember Mr. Thawyer?”

“She wasn’t sure. She said the name was familiar but she couldn’t remember the man.”

“How about you, Mr. Waxman. Do you remember him?”

“I don’t believe we ever met.”

“Did you tell anyone else about what you saw in that storage container?”

“Only Mrs. Porter.”

“Please tell no one else, Mr. Waxman.”

“Believe me, it’s not a story I would enjoy sharing. I saw the photos. I’ll never forget them. Horrible.”

Outside, as they walked to their cars, Ballard carried the files. Her phone buzzed. It was Olmstead finally calling back.

“I need to take this in private,” she said to Maddie. “Let’s go to Kellam first. I’ll meet you in front of the house where Thawyer lived.”

“See you there,” Maddie said.

Ballard took the call as she slipped behind the wheel of the Defender and put the files on the seat next to her.

“Gordon, where you been?”

“Sorry I haven’t been able to call back till now. Have you talked to Bosch?”

Ballard knew she would get more information if she acted like she had none. “No, what’s going on?” she said.

“We’re set for Saturday,” Olmstead said.

“Where?”

“Same place Bosch met the guy before.”

“You’ll have it squared away?”

“Totally. We already have a tactical team on Dehaven. We’ll be watching every move he makes till the exchange.”

“What about Harry?”

“What about him?”

“I’m worried that he’s not an agent.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He can’t get hurt, Gordon. He’s not expendable.”

“I should be offended you’d say that, but I’ll let it go. I know he’s not expendable, Renée. But we’ve got it covered. He’ll be fine.”

“You’re not making him wear a wire, right?” It was the most dangerous part of undercover work. Things could easily go wrong with a wire.

“Not a body wire. We’ll rig his car. He’ll have the guns in the back, and that’s where the bug will be. If he senses danger, he’s got a go word. But he’ll be fine.”

“I told you they’re not planning to pay for the guns.”

“We know that. But this will be in a busy parking lot. They won’t want to make a scene.”

“How can you be sure? I don’t like this, Gordon. You have Dehaven on murder and sedition. You don’t need more charges.”

“Look, Renée, it’s not about the charges on him. He’s not in this alone if he needs four machine guns. We let him take the guns back to the group, then we get the group. You know how it works. The weapons are like ant bait. He takes it back and poisons the nest. We grab him and all the others involved.”

Ballard knew the strategy and knew it was right, but too many things could go wrong.

“I still don’t like it,” she said.

“Well, Bosch does,” Olmstead said. “He’s agreed and he’s ready to go. He wanted to go tomorrow, in fact, but we need another day for the setup. We’re going to have cameras hidden all over that lot. We’ll have snipers on the roof of the condo across from it. Bosch says the word and they’ll drop Dehaven in his tracks.”

“Where will you be?”

“We’ll have a command post up on Ocean. A van. It looks like an Amazon delivery van.”

“I’ll be there too.”

“Renée, you can’t do that.”

“I’m there or I’m parking in the lot where I can put eyes on Bosch. Your choice.”

“You want this to go down, right? You want your badge back?”

“Fuck my badge. I don’t want Bosch to get hurt and I don’t think you guys really care about him.”

“And, what, you being in the command post is going to keep him safe? Your logic doesn’t add—”

“I’ll be able to make sure you guys don’t screw up.”

There was a long silence, and when Olmstead’s voice came back, it was angry but tight and controlled.

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll make room in the CP for you.”

“Thank you, Gordon,” Ballard said. “What time?”

“We set the meet for oh-eight-hundred. Before the parking lot gets too crowded with civilians but still busy enough to get our cars and people in there. We’ll be on-site at six.”

“Then so will I. Have you picked up Lionel Boden?”

Olmstead had said that Boden had to be taken out of circulation to ensure he didn’t reach out to Dehaven and warn him. After using Boden’s phone to set up the initial meeting between Dehaven and Bosch, Ballard had deleted the contact from the device and allowed Boden to return to the Eldorado. She knew it would be bad for business and his personal safety for him to warn Dehaven, since it was Boden who had snitched him off. But Olmstead had said that wasn’t good enough for operational integrity. Boden had to be kept under wraps.

“Yes, we quietly picked him up and moved him to our luxurious accommodations downtown,” Olmstead said. “We’ll keep him till this goes down. And probably then some.”

“Good,” Ballard said. “What else?”

“You covered it all. But one other thing.”

“What?”

“Thank you for dropping this in my lap. After we take these guys down, are you sure you don’t want to be there when we hold the press conference? We’re happy to share the credit.”

“I appreciate that, Gordon, but no, thanks. I’ll just see you Saturday at six.”

“You got it.”

Ballard disconnected and started the engine.

23

From the warehouse, Ballard took Sunset Boulevard over to Angeleno Heights. The two neighborhoods were five minutes apart by car and a century apart in design. Atop a steep hill at the edge of downtown, Angeleno Heights was the oldest unchanged neighborhood in Los Angeles. Only Bunker Hill was older, but that was all glass and concrete now, the future having plowed the past under.

Angeleno Heights was the same as it ever was. The neighborhood had long been designated a historic preservation zone by the city, so the place was frozen in time, its streets lined with pristine examples of the evolving architectures of early Los Angeles. Queen Anne and Victorian homes 150 years old stood side by side with turn-of-the-twentieth-century Craftsman and bungalow masterpieces. Ballard was counting on nothing having changed because of the strict rules regarding any modifications to homes in the neighborhood. She pulled in behind Maddie Bosch’s car in front of the house at the Kellam Avenue address Emmitt Thawyer had given, a one-story Craftsman with a driveway running down the left side to a garage in the back.

Maddie was leaning against her car, checking messages on her phone. She put the phone away when Ballard got out.

“You’ve already done some good detective work,” Ballard said. “Let’s keep it going. You do the door knock, show your badge, see if you can talk our way in.”

“Really?” Maddie said. “But you’re the real detective.”

“I’ll back you up. If needed.”

“So, we’re looking for information on the man who used to live here, but we’re not sure when he moved.”

“That’s a start. We want to get in, look around, see if anybody knew or remembers Thawyer. And I want to get into the garage in the back.”

“The garage? Why?”

“To see if there’s a drain.”

“Oh. Got it.”

As they went up the steps to the wide porch that ran the length of the front of the house, Ballard pulled her phone and opened the Zillow app. She had used the real estate database when looking for her place in Malibu. She plugged in the address of the Kellam Avenue house and scrolled down to the sales history. It showed that the house had not changed hands since 1996. The app did not provide the identity of current or previous owners.

Maddie knocked forcefully on the front door’s glass.

“The owner’s had it since ’96,” Ballard said, showing Maddie her phone.

“Got it,” Maddie said.

Through the glass they could see a woman slowly approaching. Maddie held up her badge. The woman cautiously opened the door. She was at least eighty, with gray hair, and she was wearing a baggy housedress.

“Yes?” she said.

“Hello, ma’am, we’re investigators with the LAPD,” Maddie said. “Can we ask you a few questions?”

“Did something happen?”

“Uh, no. We’re investigating an old case, a crime that may have happened in this neighborhood. Have you lived here very long?”

“Almost thirty years.”

“That’s a long time. Did you buy this house?”

“My husband did. He’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you happen—”

“It was a long time ago.”

“I see. Uh, do you happen to know who the previous owner was?”

“Uh... I used to but I can’t remember. It’s been too long.”

“Does the name Emmitt Thawyer sound familiar?”

“Yes, that’s it. I remember because we got his mail for a long time after that. My husband used to take it to him.”

“Where was that?”

“The retirement home.”

“Do you remember which one?”

“I don’t know if I ever knew. I remember he’d go over to Boyle Heights to deliver the mail.”

“Can I get your name, ma’am?”

“Sally Barnes. My husband was Bruce.”

Ballard recognized the name and thought Sally Barnes might have been a midlevel actress at one time. She also thought that Maddie was doing well, but they weren’t inside yet. It was doubtful anything would be gained by that, but Ballard wanted to get a sense of the place and maybe learn some information about its previous occupant.

“Do you know if Mr. Thawyer had a family when he lived here?” Maddie asked.

“No, he lived alone,” Sally said. “He was a photographer and he traveled for work. It wasn’t good for a family.”

“Did your husband ever say anything about him after he dropped off the mail?”

“He just said Mr. Thawyer was grateful but said that we didn’t need to do it. He said we could throw his mail away. Eventually, we did. I need to get to my chair. Standing isn’t good for me. I fall.”

“Well, let me help you to your chair.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll be fine. I could move into the motion picture home in the Valley but it’s too hot up there. I won’t go there till I have to.”

“If it’s all right with you, can we come in? Our captain tells us that whenever we do a home visit, we should offer to do a security check of the house.”

“Well... sure, okay. Can’t be too careful these days with all the follow-home robberies you see on the news.”

“Exactly.”

Sally stepped back and they entered the house. To the right was a living room with a large stone fireplace, to the left a dining room. Bosch put her hand on the old lady’s elbow and led her to a chair in the living room.

“Okay, we’ll take a look around now,” Bosch said.

Ballard and Bosch split up and checked the windows and locks in each of the front rooms as Sally Barnes sat watching.

“What kind of crime was it?” she asked.

“A homicide,” Ballard said.

“Here, in this house?” Sally asked.

“We’re not sure, but probably not.”

“Emmitt Thawyer’s dead — if he’s your man.”

“Yes, we know. How did you know?”

“I think it was Mr. Mann from the historical society who told me. But that was many years ago.”

“You don’t seem shocked or surprised that Thawyer might be our suspect. Why?”

“Oh, the neighbors. When we first moved in, they told us they were happy to have a regular couple here. They said Mr. Thawyer was a strange man with his cameras and lights. He kept odd hours, sometimes worked all night. They’d see the flashes from the camera, you see.”

“From inside the house?”

“Well, of course. I’m going to move back to the kitchen, where I have my work.”

“Do you need help?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Okay, and we’ll finish our security survey. We won’t take long.”

Ballard and Bosch quickly moved through the house, checking doors and windows, finally ending up in the kitchen, where Sally Barnes sat at a table with a spread of eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photos. She was signing them with a felt-tip pen. Ballard stepped over and recognized a much younger Sally Barnes in the photos. They were old publicity shots.

“I thought I recognized you,” she said. “Were you in the movies?”

“Television,” Barnes said. “I was on Police Woman in a recurring role. I did Baretta, Rockford Files, Barnaby Jones, McMillan & Wife, all of them.”

“Police Woman — that’s where I recognized you from. I went back and watched that whole series recently. Angie Dickinson kicked butt.”

“In more ways than one. I played a prostitute and I was her snitch. I got killed by my pimp when Angie thought I was getting too much fan mail. Written out.”

“Wow, that wasn’t fair.”

“Hollywood was never meant to be fair. Bruce wrote for TV, and when we got married, I retired. I became like that joke about the blonde who married the writer. But Bruce did well in TV and took good care of us. He bought this place with his residuals. We raised two sons here.”

Ballard nodded and gestured toward the photos on the table. “Well, people obviously remember you.”

“They do. And I thank them for it. I only charge for postage and handling.”

“Those neighbors who said Emmitt Thawyer was strange — are any of them still around?”

“No, they all died or moved away.”

Ballard nodded again and Maddie joined them in the kitchen. She shook her head, telling Ballard that she had noticed nothing of import. Ballard looked back at Sally.

“Well, Mrs. Barnes, your house is pretty solid,” Ballard said. “You’ve done a good job of keeping it secure. All right if we check your garage? Then we’ll get out of your hair.”

“Go ahead,” Sally said. “I don’t keep a car anymore. My eyes are bad.”

“Is there an automatic opener?” Maddie asked.

“There’s a button by the back door,” Sally said.

Ballard and Maddie found the button by the door and pressed it. They went out and crossed a small sunburned lawn as the double-wide garage door creaked open. The space was mostly bare. No car, no workbench. Just cardboard boxes marked CHRISTMAS stacked in the middle of one of the bays.

Ballard scanned the concrete floor but saw no drain. She went over to the boxes and shoved the stack aside to see if they were covering one; they weren’t.

“Damn,” Ballard said. “And this was looking so good too.”

“Well, maybe he had an office or a lab somewhere,” Maddie suggested.

“With a concrete floor and an iron-grated drain? I doubt it.”

“Well, shit.”

“Yeah. Go back in and tell the old lady thanks. Remind her to keep her doors locked. I’ll meet you on the street.”

“Okay.”

They split up; Maddie went to the back door while Ballard walked down the driveway toward the street. She pulled her phone to check for messages. There were none. As she put the phone away she noticed the three trash cans lined up between the house and the driveway. Behind them she saw a casement window. Her first thought was that a flash from there could have been seen by the neighbors next door.

Ballard turned and trotted around the corner to the back of the house. The door was already locked but she saw Maddie in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Barnes. She knocked rapidly on the glass. Maddie opened the door.

“There’s a basement,” Ballard said. “Mrs. Barnes, where are the stairs to the basement?”

Sally looked up from her autographing.

“Right behind you,” she said.

Ballard and Maddie turned. The wall behind them was composed of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. Ballard reached out and pulled on the handle of one of the cabinet doors. It was a false front. The whole assembly opened, top to bottom, revealing a doorway and a set of stairs going down into murky darkness.

24

Ballard reached through the doorway and swept her hand up and down to find a light.

“I forgot to mention the basement,” Sally said. “The light is on the left.”

Ballard switched sides and found the light, and the stairs down were illuminated.

“Did you and your husband put in this cabinet?” Maddie asked.

“Oh, no, it came that way with the house,” Sally said. “Mr. Thawyer built that, and Bruce thought it was pretty unique, so we kept it. Not many houses in Los Angeles have basements, you know.”

“Almost none,” Ballard said.

“I can’t do the stairs anymore,” Sally said. “Watch for spiderwebs down there.”

“We will,” Maddie said.

Ballard locked eyes with Maddie, and they shared a look of excitement and dread. Then Ballard started down the steps with Maddie right behind her.

Some of the lights attached to the rafters were dead. Gray light came in at angles from four casement windows, two on the driveway side, two on the opposite side. There were pull-down shades that were rolled up. The basement was wide open, no partitions or storage rooms. Four thick oak pillars supported the main crossbeams of the house.

The floor was concrete, poured and smoothed at a barely discernible down angle toward an iron-grated drain in the middle.

“Maddie, go back to my car and get those files,” Ballard said. “Here.” She handed over her key fob. Maddie turned and headed up the steps without a word.

“Also, in the back of my car, there’s a crime scene kit that has a pump bottle with luminol in it. Says it on the label. Bring that too.”

“You got it,” Maddie said.

Left alone, Ballard crouched next to the drain. She believed that horrible things had happened here. It was a long time ago but there were ghosts here, waiting for someone — waiting for her — to set them free.

She felt a solemn duty to them. As with the library of lost souls in the archives at Ahmanson, she carried the burden.

Maddie was soon back with the files and luminol. Ballard opened the file marked Betty and held the photos up under a bulb to compare them to the room they were in. The drain grate was a match. The rough surface of the concrete and the sweep patterns left by a trowel were a match.

“No doubt,” Maddie said. “Those were shot down here.”

“Can you go up the steps and turn off the lights?” Ballard asked. “And be careful coming back down in the dark.”

While Maddie went up the stairs, Ballard went to one of the casement windows and pulled the string knot on a long-furled shade. The string broke; the shade unrolled and fell over the glass as a cloud of dust descended on Ballard. She waved her hand and coughed. Then she went to the next shade as the overhead lights went off.

After all the shades were down, Ballard took the spray bottle of luminol from Maddie and tried to use her nails to break through the plastic seal.

“Will it work after so many years?” Maddie asked.

“I don’t know,” Ballard said. “I had a case once where it showed blood on concrete twenty-three years after the murder. The tech who did the test said the older the blood, the more intense the reaction. But I don’t think he was talking about a seventy-seven-year-old case.”

She started peeling the plastic collar from the bottle. “The problem is the cleanup,” she said.

“The cleanup?” Maddie said.

Ballard dropped to a crouch again.

“The luminol reacts with phosphors in blood — the iron in hemoglobin. But bleach contains some chemicals that will light up as well. If Elizabeth Short was cut in half on this floor, there would have been a lot of blood, and that would mean a lot of cleanup, most likely with bleach.”

Ballard started working the pump, sending a fine mist of the chemical over the concrete around the floor drain.

“Don’t we need an ultraviolet light?” Maddie asked.

“Only on TV,” Ballard said.

She stopped spraying and waited, eyes down on the concrete. A bluish-white glow began to spread across the floor. She heard Maddie’s breath catch. She started working the pump again.

The glow around the drain was too spread out and too uniform to be from a blood trail.

“He mopped with bleach,” Ballard said.

“Wait, look how intense it’s getting,” Maddie said. “You’re saying that was from mopping with bleach?”

“Exactly. Probably.”

“Well, shit.”

“It doesn’t help us, but it also doesn’t hurt us. Luminol is just a presumptive test. In and of itself, signs that someone mopped up blood from the concrete floor in a basement are just as suspicious as blood spatter. But wait. Sometimes it takes a while.”

Ballard waved her arm in a straight line, putting down another layer of luminol mist, then started to lock down the pump.

“What about this side of the drain?” Maddie pointed to an area Ballard had not sprayed.

“I don’t want to cover the floor in case we come back for DNA,” Ballard said.

“There’s DNA from the Black Dahlia available?” Maddie asked.

“Not in evidence. But you never know. If it becomes important, we could conceivably exhume her body to get it. She’s buried up in Oakland.”

“How do you know that? I mean, where she’s buried.”

“Because it was one of the first cases I reviewed when I started the unit. Like you, I guess, I was fascinated by the case and I had to see why it had never been solved. Since there was no DNA in evidence in 1947 — DNA hadn’t even been discovered yet — I researched where Elizabeth Short was buried. Mountain View Cemetery. People still put flowers on her grave.”

“You went there?”

“Yeah. I had to go up that way for a meeting at the DOJ in Sacramento. I flew into Oakland and checked it out before driving up.”

The chemical reaction on the concrete continued, and a deeper shade of blue manifested on the floor. It was a long, thin shape that looked like a meandering stream on a map.

“Turn on your phone light,” Ballard said. She opened the Betty file. The final picture of the body was on top of the stack. Maddie put the light on it, and Ballard compared the flow of blood to the drain in the photo to the meandering stream of deep blue on the floor. It was almost an exact match.

“It’s the same,” Maddie said excitedly.

“It’s close,” Ballard said. “Give me the other files and go hit the lights.”

Ballard waited as Maddie trudged up the steps again and flicked on the lights. She then flipped through the files to the one marked Cecily. As with the photo chronology in the Betty file, the Cecily file contained eight glossy eight-by-tens that ranged from a shot of a fully clothed woman they assumed was Cecily to a pair of tasteful, unrevealing nudes to photos of the woman’s degradation, torture, and death. In the final photo, the victim was sitting on a concrete floor, her back to a square wooden post. Like the Dahlia’s, her cheeks were slashed open from the corners of her mouth. It was the commonality in the photos of all the victims: the horrible clown smile cut into the skin.

Cecily’s arms were tied behind the post, and a length of rope with a slipknot was around her neck and the post. Cecily had been slowly strangled by the makeshift garrote.

Maddie came down the stairs and rejoined Renée.

“Look at this,” Ballard said.

She ran her finger up the wooden post in the photo. “It’s been painted but you can still see the grain pattern,” she said. “There’s a knot in the wood.”

“I see it,” Maddie said. “We can find it.”

They separated, and each went to one of the four posts supporting the house’s primary crossbeams. Using their phone lights, they studied the graining of the wood at about the three-foot mark, moving around the post to check all four sides.

“Here we go,” Maddie said.

Ballard walked over and confirmed by comparison to the photo that this was the spot where Cecily had been murdered.

“This place,” Maddie said. “He killed them all here.”

“Maybe,” Ballard said. “Let’s go through the rest of the files.”

It took a half hour to do the comparison of photos from the other files — Elyse, Sandy, Debra, Willa, Siobhan, and Lorraine — to physical markers in the basement.

They were on the Lorraine file when Mrs. Barnes called from the top of the stairs, “Are you two all right?”

“We’re fine, Mrs. Barnes,” Ballard said. “We’re just about finished. Thank you for your patience.”

“I don’t know what you could be doing down there,” Mrs. Barnes responded.

“When we come up, we’ll explain everything,” Ballard said.

In the death photos, Lorraine’s body was propped against a concrete-block wall. Her throat had been cut, and the killer had used her blood to paint the letters BDA across her abdomen. Working together, Ballard and Maddie were able to match inconsistencies in the concrete blocks and grouting in the photo to a spot below one of the casement windows.

“That’s all eight,” Ballard said.

Her tone was somber; she no longer sounded excited by what the discoveries in the basement meant. It was a grim discovery from grim work. Ballard wanted to get out of the house and into the sunshine. She wanted to be on her board in the water, waiting for the next set.

“BDA,” Maddie said. “What do you think it means?”

“Black Dahlia Avenger,” Ballard said. “That’s what he called himself in one of the letters he sent to the newspapers back in the day. It’s actually a key piece of the picture he gave us.”

“How so?”

“It means that Lorraine, at least, came after Betty. I would have pegged the Black Dahlia as last because of the heightened brutality and figured the other deaths were steps toward that kind of hatred, mutilation — all of it. But his putting BDA on Lorraine says otherwise. Maybe Elizabeth Short was the first and the others followed, with him controlling his rage better.”

“Elizabeth Short got so much attention,” Maddie said. “Maybe he refined his kill patterns because he was afraid of getting caught.”

Ballard nodded, impressed by Maddie’s thinking.

“So, do we call in FSD?” Maddie asked.

Ballard knew that the techs from the Forensic Science Division would be able to process the basement and come up with confirmations of what the luminol and photos indicated, but she was reluctant to go wide with the investigation.

“Not yet. There’s still work to do. We’ll bring them here when we know more.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We find out more about Emmitt Thawyer. We take the Betty file to somebody who can verify it’s Elizabeth Short. And we try to put full names to the other women in the files.”

“What about Nancy Porter?”

“Yes. Let’s go see her.”