The Waiting

25

Ballard was twenty-one minutes late to the all-hands meeting that she had called for the night before. Everybody else was already there.

“Sorry I’m late, everyone,” she said as she put her bag down on her desk and stayed standing. “I had to go to the lab this morning, and everybody knows what a shitshow the traffic is from there to here. Thank you all for getting here. This could be a big day. We have two things in play. Most of you know about one of them, so let’s start there. Paul, anything on the DNA from the judge yet? Is he Nick Purcell’s biological father?”

Masser cleared his throat. “I talked to Darcy a few minutes ago and she’s still waiting on Sacramento,” he said.

There was a groan from Laffont.

“DOJ, man,” he said. “Taking their sweet-ass time. ‘Delay of Justice’ is what they should be called.”

“Darcy said she would call up there if she didn’t hear anything by ten,” Masser said.

“Guys, it’s only been three days,” Ballard said. “If it carries over to Monday, we’ll be fine.”

“Monday’s a holiday,” Hatteras said.

“Then Tuesday,” Ballard said. “So, until we hear from Darcy, we move on. We have another case I need you all on. But before we discuss it, I want to stress that what we talk about here does not leave this room. Not until we have this thing tied up in a bow. You don’t even tell your wife or your husband what you’re working on. Everybody get that?”

Ballard swept the room with her eyes, making sure she saw a nod of agreement from everyone on the squad.

“Maddie Bosch brought this case to us,” she said. “So I’m going to let her brief you.”

Maddie stood up and started at the beginning, with Mr. Waxman calling her into the storage unit that had belonged to Emmitt Thawyer. The others paid rapt attention to the story. There was no one in L.A. law enforcement who didn’t know about the Black Dahlia. Even among the public, there were very few citizens who had not heard of the woman who had been cut in two and found in an empty lot in Leimert Park.

Maddie finished by summarizing their findings in the basement of the house on Kellam Avenue. She then handed the briefing back to Ballard.

“We also attempted to talk to Nancy Porter, the owner of the storage facility,” Ballard said. “But no one was at her home when we checked last night. We’ll follow up with her when we can.”

She opened her bag on her desk and started removing the files taken from the Thawyer storage unit.

“Can we see these photos you found of the Black Dahlia?” Laffont asked.

“You can, but not at the moment,” Ballard said. “I gave most of them to the digital analysis team this morning so they can confirm my visual identification of the victim as Elizabeth Short. I also gave a couple of pictures to the photo lab to see if they can determine the age of the Kodak paper they were printed on. Over the years there have been hoaxes related to the Black Dahlia — false confessions and people claiming their father, son, brother, stepbrother, even their mother was the killer. We don’t go out with this until we nail down every aspect of it, and then Carol Plovc makes the final call.”

Plovc was a deputy district attorney. Although John Lewin was the unit’s assigned DA, he handled live cases — cases where there were suspects who could still be prosecuted, whether they were already incarcerated or not. Plovc handled dead cases. She had the final sign-off on closing and clearing cases in which the alleged culprit was beyond prosecution because he or she was deceased. It was LAPD policy not to close a case without the approval of the district attorney’s office.

“As soon as I get the photos back, I will share,” Ballard said. “But I warn you, they are graphic and horrible. They will stay with you.”

“If real,” Laffont said.

“If real,” Ballard agreed. “So, meantime, I’ve got the files with the photos of the other women here. I want everyone to take a file — a victim — and work it. You start with a first name and a photo, because that’s all we’ve got. Try to find out who she was, when she went missing, and if a body was ever found.”

“You’re talking about going back seventy-plus years?” Laffont said.

“That’s right, and there won’t be any records to go to unless they’re right here in our homicide archives,” Ballard said. “I checked with records this morn—”

“Um, there aren’t any in our archives,” Maddie interrupted.

“How do you know?” Ballard asked.

“I came in early and went through all the pre-1960 books,” Maddie said. “I checked all female victims against our list of first names. There was only one match, a victim named Elyse, but she was Black and our photo is of a white victim. So, no, nothing in archives.”

“Good initiative,” Ballard said. “That supports the theory that these women came after Elizabeth Short. He changed his MO. Rather than leave the victims on display, he hid them.”

“To avoid media and police attention,” Masser said.

“They’re probably buried in that basement,” Laffont said. “Like Gacy did in Chicago.”

“When we bring the crime scene techs into this, I’m sure they’ll look at that,” Ballard said. “But as I was about to say, our missing persons files don’t go back this far. What’s that leave us?”

“Newspaper archives,” Hatteras said.

“Definitely,” Ballard said. “That’s a starting point. What else?”

“There are many sites online that track missing women,” Persson said. “The question will be how far they go back.”

“Right,” Ballard said. “I remember seeing something in the Times about a privately funded site that tracked missing people in L.A. I forget the name.”

“Lost Angels,” Aghzafi said. “I used them on a case in Vegas. Unidentified DB we thought might be a guy from L.A. They were quite helpful but we never matched him up.”

“Any idea how far back they went with missing persons?” Laffont asked.

“I don’t remember,” Aghzafi said. “It was funded by some tech billionaire who was looking for his mother who disappeared when he was a kid.”

“That’s the story I remember from the Times,” Ballard said. “That may be a useful site.”

Hatteras stood and came around the raft to Ballard.

“Colleen?” Ballard asked.

“Can I pick one?” Hatteras responded.

Ballard gave Hatteras the stack of files. But rather than looking through them to make her choice, Hatteras hugged the stack to her chest. She closed her eyes and held still for a long moment.

“Colleen?” Ballard said. “You told me you wouldn’t do this.”

“I know, I know,” Hatteras said. “But these women have waited so long for justice. I want to connect. It could help us.”

“Look, we talked about this. Just pick a file and pass the stack. Now.”

“Okay, this one. Willa.” She separated the Willa file from the others and held it up as if to the heavens. “God bless this young woman,” she said.

“It might be a little late for that,” Laffont said.

Seemingly annoyed by Laffont’s sarcasm, Hatteras walked past him and gave the remaining files to Masser.

“Just so you all know, I have edited the files,” Ballard said. “Each contains two photos. One in life, one in death. For now, you don’t need to see what happened in between. Another thing: The files don’t leave the raft. As I said before, nothing is discussed outside this room. Everybody good with that?”

She got a round of nods. The files were handed around the raft, with one coming back to Ballard. She checked the tab and saw that she had the Cecily file — the woman who had been strangled against the basement post. Ballard checked the two photos in the file. The victim’s eyes were open and staring down at the concrete floor between her legs. Ballard could see the hemorrhaging around the eyes. Cecily had died horribly, and Ballard knew that there was no one left alive to punish for it. Yet she felt a sense of duty to find out who Cecily was and make her story known.

26

It was after two p.m. when they got word about the judge’s DNA from Darcy Troy. By then the Open-Unsolved team had come up with two identifications of the women in the Thawyer files. Willa Kenyon was reported missing in 1950; her case was one of the oldest in the Lost-Angels.net database. And Elyse Ford was identified through a keyword search on the Library of Congress newspaper database. While her 1949 disappearance had apparently gotten no ink from the newspapers in Los Angeles, it had in her hometown. A search of the database using the words Elyse, missing, and Los Angeles produced three stories that had run in the Wichita Eagle. It was a familiar story: Young woman from the Midwest went to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune, and now she’s missing without leaving a clue. The L.A. police are not too interested in chasing another one of these, but her parents back in Kechi are worried sick. Still, even the Wichita paper dropped the story after four months and three articles.

Both the newspaper accounts and the Lost Angels site provided photos of the missing women that clearly matched two of the women in the photos in Thawyer’s files. Ballard was convinced by her own comparison and believed that her team of volunteer investigators were close to having enough evidence to take to Carol Plovc at the DA’s office and ask for clearance and closure in those two cases.

But she put those thoughts aside when she saw Darcy Troy’s name on her cell phone.

“It’s her,” Ballard said.

She immediately drew an audience; Hatteras and Masser got up and came to her pod as she answered.

“Hey, Darcy, give me the good word.”

“Well, I don’t have good news. Purcell’s father, the Pillowcase Rapist, is not the judge. I’m sorry.”

Ballard was stunned. “I don’t — how can that be?”

“I don’t know what to tell you other than it’s no match. The woman is wrong too. No match. She’s not the mother. Obviously, it was an adoption.”

“No. We pulled the birth certificate. It was filed too fast for an adoption.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Renée. The science is the science.”

“It couldn’t be a screwup on the DOJ end, right?”

“Don’t go there. Highly unlikely.”

“Okay. I’m just...”

“Let me know what else I can do.”

“Sure. I will.”

Ballard disconnected and looked up. Now the whole team was gathered around her end of the raft.

“No match,” she said. “Nick Purcell isn’t related to the judge or his wife.”

“Fuck!” Persson yelled.

Masser snapped his head back and spun away from the group as if shot.

“I knew it,” Hatteras said.

“You knew it?” Laffont said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did — nobody listened,” Hatteras insisted. “I said the genetic tree I was building didn’t connect in any way to the judge.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Laffont said.

“It’s the truth,” Hatteras said. “But it doesn’t matter. What matters is what do we do now?”

“All right, let’s just calm down,” Ballard said. “I know this isn’t what we expected. But let’s think.”

Ballard knew that something had gone wrong as they built their case against the judge. That had started with the birth certificate indicating no adoption had taken place.

“Paul, can we take another look at the birth certificate?” she asked.

“Right here,” Masser said.

He grabbed a printout of the birth record off his desk and handed it over the wall to Ballard. She confirmed what she already knew: The birth certificate was filed with the county two days after the birth. Then she noticed a detail she had not seen the first time.

“Nicholas Purcell was born at County-USC,” Ballard said. “Maybe their birth records will tell a different story.”

“Not without a court order,” Masser said. “It’s a dead end.”

“But wait,” Ballard said. “The judge wasn’t a judge yet when the kid was born, but he must’ve been doing well, right? I mean, well enough to get appointed or elected judge.”

“I would say so,” Masser said. “Successful enough financially or reputation-wise or both to get a slot on the superior court.”

“So, County-USC back then or even now is not one of your high-end hospitals. It’s a public facility. It even provides indigent care. Is it the kind of hospital where the wife of up-and-coming lawyer, soon to be judge Jonathan Purcell would want to give birth to their child?”

“I should have seen this,” Masser said. He looked mortified at not noticing the inconsistency earlier.

“So what do we do?” Hatteras asked.

“Well, for the moment, I want you all to go back to what you were doing,” Ballard said. “Let’s try to run down more of the names from the Thawyer files. When you’re needed on Purcell, I’ll let you know. Maddie, when’s your roll call for tonight?”

“Five,” Maddie said.

“Okay, well, you should cut out, then,” Ballard said. “Get ready for your shift.”

Maddie looked crestfallen, like she was being cut out of her own case, and Ballard read it in her expression.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re still lead on this. It’s your case. We won’t make a move on it without you.”

“Let me know when you need me,” Maddie said.

As people reluctantly returned to their spots on the raft, Ballard stood up from her desk.

“Paul, let’s go get a coffee,” she said.

Ballard turned and headed toward the exit before any of the others could react to being left out of whatever discussion Ballard was about to have. She didn’t speak to Masser until they were in the cafeteria and sitting down at a table with to-go coffee cups in front of them. Before Ballard could begin, Masser spit out an apology.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “If I had put together the incongruity of the hospital, we’d be two days into a new direction.”

“Not necessarily,” Ballard said. “And I didn’t buy you coffee to set up an apology.”

“Then why did we come up here? The others think you took me to the woodshed.”

“I don’t care what they think. We need to figure out our next move on this. I’m already taking heat for putting the judge under surveillance. Now that it’s not him, this could really turn bad for the unit.”

“Well, I think it’s obvious. We have to go to the judge.”

Ballard nodded. “I was thinking that too. But he could blow us out of the water, especially if we tell him we collected his DNA.”

“His and his wife’s. He may blow a gasket, but he might also see that we had no choice. We did what we had to do.”

“Hopefully. But how are we going to get him to talk if he was involved in some sort of shady deal getting the kid?”

“You mean like a black-market baby?”

“Maybe. I still don’t see how the birth was recorded so quickly. That means somebody at the hospital was somehow involved in making this work.”

“There’s something we don’t know here. Even if we could get into adoption records, I have a feeling there wouldn’t be any for Nicholas Purcell.”

“So when do we go to the judge?”

“That’s your call. That’s why you get a salary and we don’t.”

“Right.”

Ballard went silent as she mulled the question. Intruding into these thoughts was the reminder that Captain Gandle had directly ordered her to keep him in the loop. She knew she should inform him of the DOJ results and the plan to brace the judge. But by doing so she risked Gandle telling her to stand down until he got clarity from the tenth floor. That move could take days and maybe even weeks. Ballard was not interested in stalling the case while the command staff considered the political gain or fallout from asking the presiding judge of the superior court questions about the possibly illegal adoption of his son.

“What are you thinking?” Masser finally asked.

“I’m thinking if we left now, we could get to the CCB before the judge takes off for the weekend,” Ballard said.

“So you want to do it today?”

“Why not?”

“Because if the judge gets mad and throws us in jail, we probably won’t get out till Monday.”

“More like Tuesday because of the holiday.”

“Yes, Tuesday.”

“Fuck it. Let’s go.”

“I’ll drive. My keys are on my desk.”

“Let’s not tell the others what we’re doing. I don’t want Colleen calling every ten minutes.”

“She’ll do that whether she knows what we’re doing or not.”

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot. Go get your keys.”

As Ballard walked out of the building toward the row of parking spaces assigned to the unit, she pulled her phone to call Captain Gandle. Then she thought better of it. Calling him now before the hour’s drive into downtown was too risky. He could shut down her plan before it even started.

Instead, she used the phone to google a phone number for the clerk of the superior court. By the time Masser showed up at his car with the keys, she had already called the courthouse and been transferred to Purcell’s clerk, who confirmed that the judge was still working.

“Purcell’s still in chambers,” Ballard said.

“Good,” Masser said. “I think.”

27

Ballard and Masser parked in the garage at the PAB and walked the block up Spring Street to the courthouse. Along the way, Ballard pulled her phone and called Ashley Fellows, who was one of the last friends she had in the Robbery-Homicide Division.

“Hey, girl, whatcha doin’?” Fellows said.

“Biding my time till it’s time,” Ballard said.

It was their routine greeting.

“You still in the same desk over there?” Ballard asked.

“Sure am,” Fellows said. “What’s up?”

“You’ve got eyes on the captain’s office, right?”

“I do.”

“Is he in there at the moment?”

“No, but he’s right outside it talking to Broom-Hilda.”

That was the name they used for Captain Gandle’s bully of an adjutant, who sat at a desk outside the captain’s glass-walled office and guarded it like it was Checkpoint Charlie. Her name was actually Hildy McManus.

“I need to call him but I don’t want him to answer,” Ballard said.

“One of those,” Fellows said. “Well, he asked me this morning for an update on a case I’m working. I told him to give me a few hours. I could call him over to look at what I got spread all over my desk. But you still got Hilda to worry about. She could pick up.”

“He gave me his direct line once. I think she doesn’t have that on her phone.”

“Then give me three minutes before you call. I’ll get him over here.”

“Thanks, Ash.” Ballard disconnected.

“What was that about?” Masser asked.

“If we confront the judge without approval from the captain, there could be hell to pay. But I don’t want to wait for him to take it to command staff. So I’m going to call him and leave a message to cover my ass.”

They got up to Temple Street, and Ballard made the call. She held her breath until it went through to voicemail.

“Captain, it’s Renée. The analysis on the judge’s DNA came back negative — Nick Purcell’s not a match to him or his wife. That leaves us no alternative but to talk to the judge about his son. I need to do that before he goes off for a three-day weekend. Heading to the CCB now. Just keeping you in the loop like you asked.”

She disconnected, hoping that her casual tone implied that this was a routine interview, even though she knew there was nothing routine about an interview with the presiding judge of Los Angeles Superior Court.

In the Criminal Courts Building, they took the law enforcement — only elevator up to save time. Purcell’s courtroom was on the sixth floor in Division 101. The courtroom was literally dark when Ballard and Masser entered. There was one overhead light on and it was shining down on the clerk’s corral, where a woman with short brown hair sat. She looked up when she heard them enter.

“We’re dark today,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“We’re with the LAPD Open-Unsolved Unit,” Ballard said. “We’d like to talk to Judge Purcell.”

“He’s on a deadline writing orders before the weekend,” the clerk said. “You need an appointment, and he has no room on his calendar this afternoon. If you need a search warrant signed, I would suggest that you go see Judge Coen for that. He handles criminal matters.”

“It’s about his son, Nicholas,” Ballard said. “I think you should ask him if he wants to see us.”

Without responding to Ballard, the clerk picked up a phone, hit one button, and then whispered behind a hand cupped around her mouth. Ballard made out the word Nicholas but otherwise could not pick up on the conversation. The clerk put down the phone and got up. She walked to a half door in the corral and pulled it open.

“The judge will see you,” she said. “Come through here and then go through that door and down the hallway. His chambers are the first door on the right.”

Ballard led the way. The clerk’s directions were not needed because the judge was standing in the doorway of his chambers. He was wearing a white shirt and tie but no jacket or robe. Ballard watched his eyes for any hint of recognition of Masser or herself from the surveillance at the Parkway Grill.

She saw nothing.

They followed Purcell into the office. He sat down behind a desk covered with legal documents. He pointed to the two chairs across from him, and Ballard and Masser sat.

“Thank you for seeing us, Judge,” Ballard began.

“Never mind that,” Purcell asked. “What’s my son done this time?”

“Uh, nothing, sir. As far as we know.”

“Then if this is about the DA dropping those charges against him, I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even make a call.”

“It’s not about that, sir.”

“Then why are you here on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend? What is so important about my son?”

“Well, sir, we are from the Open-Unsolved Unit and we think your son is key to identifying and arresting a serial rapist and murderer.”

Purcell drew his head back as if he’d been slapped.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said. “Nick’s had his difficulties but nothing that even approaches an involvement in—”

“We are not suggesting he is in any way involved, Judge,” Ballard said quickly. “It’s his father we’re looking for. His real father. His biological father.”

That stunned the judge into silence. Ballard studied him for any sign that he knew about the Pillowcase Rapist’s connection to Nicholas Purcell. She saw none.

Ballard felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She guessed it was Captain Gandle calling her back, probably to tell her not to approach the judge without the command staff’s approval. But she had a perfect excuse not to answer. You didn’t take calls when you were talking to the presiding judge of the superior court. You didn’t even look to see who was calling.

“What do you mean, his real father?” Purcell said.

Ballard nodded. This was the moment.

“Judge, do you remember the Pillowcase Rapist case?” she asked.

“Of course,” Purcell said. “But that was before my son was even born.”

“Not quite, but that’s the case we’re working. And I need you to know that that is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about anything else, what you may have done in adopting your son or—”

“Are you suggesting that Nicholas is not my son?”

“Judge, we know he’s not your son.”

“This is incredible. How could you—”

He stopped mid-sentence as a thought occurred to him.

“You talked to my wife?” he said. “You talked to Vivian?”

“No, sir, we didn’t,” Ballard said. “We got your DNA from a spoon you left on a table at a restaurant.”

In her peripheral vision, Ballard saw Masser turn toward her, questioning her decision to reveal to the judge that they had followed him. Ballard kept her eyes on Purcell, who seemed incredulous as he grasped what had gone down.

“You thought it was me,” he said. “You thought I was the Pillowcase Rapist?”

“Judge, when your son was arrested last year, his DNA was collected and sent to the state’s Department of Justice database. That produced a familial match to DNA collected from several crime scenes involving the Pillowcase Rapist. The science told us that Nicholas Purcell’s father was the rapist. We pulled his birth certificate, and you and your wife are listed as the birth parents. You can understand why we then placed you under surveillance so we could make a surreptitious DNA capture. We did that at the Parkway Grill on Monday night. We got DNA from your wife too and sent the samples through our lab to the DOJ. We received results today that confirm that neither of you are birth parents of Nicholas Purcell.”

Ballard stopped there to let Purcell digest what had happened. The skin around his eyes darkened, and she suspected his blood pressure was rising.

“Were these actions approved by your superiors?” he asked, his voice tightly controlled.

“I run the unit, sir,” Ballard said. “We like to say the cases go where they go. I did not need approval, though I did make my captain aware of it.”

“I should jail you both for contempt of court,” Purcell said. “That you would—”

“You could do that, Judge, but it would get messy and very public,” Ballard said. “I didn’t think you’d want that for your son, your family. There is a way for us to keep Nicholas out of this, especially when it hits the media. But that would entail you cooperating with us and explaining how he became your son.”

It hit Purcell then, the threat of public exposure. Nicholas could be branded as the son of a rapist-murderer.

Ballard waited, stealing a quick glance at Masser. Color was just coming back to Masser’s face after the threat of jail from the judge had bleached it printer-paper white. She realized that she should have let him in on how she was going to play it.

“We tried to have children of our own,” the judge said. “It wasn’t happening. Then an opportunity presented itself.”

He stopped there. Ballard sensed that he needed to be prompted to continue revealing a secret he had kept for almost twenty-five years.

“You were offered a baby?” Ballard asked.

“Not exactly,” Purcell said. “There was a girl in the neighborhood. A high school girl. She got pregnant. The family — her family — they were very religious. They believed she had to have the child. And her parents, they knew us from down the street. They knew about... our struggles. We were open about it. They came and said there was a way for — you see, they didn’t want their daughter’s life to be forever changed by this. They had an unwanted child coming and we wanted a child so very badly...”

“You agreed to take the child.”

Purcell nodded.

“Did you know who the real father was?” Ballard asked.

Purcell shook his head. “No, she never told her parents or us,” he said. “She was protecting him. I wanted to know so we could protect ourselves, you understand. I wanted everyone’s approval... but she wouldn’t tell.”

“How did you register the birth so quickly?” Ballard asked.

“That wasn’t a problem. I had a former client in a divorce case who worked in the registrar’s office take care of it. I didn’t want there to be any kind of stigma, you know? For the boy to grow up with that, knowing he was adopted, not knowing who his father was.”

“And the mother, she was never involved?”

“No, not after the birth. The family had a place in the desert. Out at Smoke Tree. They moved to that house. Kept the house on Arroyo, but the whole family started over out there. It worked. No one ever knew about the baby... except us. Till now.”

“We need to reach out to her, Judge. What’s her name?”

“You can’t. It’s too late. She killed herself a year after. Took a lot of pills, sat in a car in the garage, and started the engine. It was a terribly sad thing. We thought that, having lost their daughter, the parents would come to us for the child. We were prepared — legally — to fight it. But it never came to that.”

Ballard glanced at Masser. The DNA door they thought had swung open for them was now swinging shut. She saw her own dismay playing on Masser’s face.

She looked back at the judge.

“Judge, what about those parents?” she asked. “Are they still around?”

“Robin is,” Purcell said. “Edward passed, and now she’s selling the place on Arroyo.”

Ballard thought about the house with the IN ESCROW sign she had parked in front of while following the judge Monday night.

“What is Robin’s last name?” she asked.

“Richardson,” Purcell said. “Robin Richardson.”

“Do you have a phone number or an email for her?”

“Vivian has that. I can get it.”

“One last thing. What was the daughter’s name?”

“Mallory. She was a great kid. One mistake changed all of that. Like I said, it was sad. Very sad.”

Ballard nodded and realized she had one last question. “What school did she go to when she lived on Arroyo?”

“That would have been St. Vincent’s in South Pasadena. That was their church too. We also sent Nick to St. Vincent’s for a few years.”

“Thank you, Judge. If you can get us Robin Richardson’s contact info, we’ll let you get back to work.”

Purcell looked at her with worried eyes.

“Keep Nick out of this. He’s a good kid. If he knew who... where he came from, he wouldn’t take it well.”

“We understand, sir,” Ballard said. “We’ll do our best.”