“Did you get anything back? Deficiencies? What can we do?”
“Nothing, and I don’t expect there to be any feedback. It’s the photo analysis. Like I told you, there’s reasonable doubt in the numbers.”
“Okay, Carol. Thanks for the effort.”
“If it were up to me, I would have signed off.”
“I know.”
Ballard disconnected.
“If she would have signed off on it, why did she send it across the street?” Maddie asked.
“Politics,” Ballard said. “She was in a lose-lose situation. If she signed off on it, O’Fallon would probably have demoted her. So she sent it across the street to die.”
The frustration in the car was palpable. Ballard and Maddie fell into silence. They had a hundred miles to go and nothing more to say.
Thursday, 9:12 A.M
46
Everyone on the team had already fulfilled their weekly time commitments, but Ballard arrived at Ahmanson to find Hatteras at her desk. Hatteras could always be counted on for three to five days a week, but today Ballard had asked her to come in. She knew Hatteras had worked into the night Wednesday to locate Victor Best, Andrew Bennett, and Taylor Weeks. Ballard had been too tired after returning from Vegas to take her report and asked for a morning meeting instead.
“Colleen, sorry I’m late,” Ballard said. “I got hung up at the lab.”
“You took in the swab from Van Ness?” Hatteras asked.
Ballard put her bag down at her desk.
“I did,” she said. “I’m going to go up and get coffee, then we can talk. You want a cup?”
“No, I’m good,” Hatteras said.
Ballard opened a drawer at her desk and pulled out a coffee mug. It was a memento from her days in the Robbery-Homicide Division. Printed on it was a familiar slogan: LAPD HOMICIDE — OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOUR DAY ENDS.
She headed up to the coffee room on the second floor. While she was pouring, she got a call from Captain Gandle. Reluctantly, she accepted it. Any call with the captain these days felt adversarial.
This one started off no different.
“Ballard, I thought I’d have a report from you on Vegas in my email.”
“Sorry, Captain. We got back late yesterday and I was tired. I’m at the office now and I’ll be writing it up this morning. Right after an interview I’m in the middle of.”
She hoped the lie would keep the conversation short.
“Good,” Gandle said. “I want to see what you’ve got.”
“You’ll get it before lunch,” Ballard promised.
There was a silence, but Gandle didn’t hang up. Ballard guessed that another shoe was about to drop.
“Is there something else, Cap?” she asked.
“Yes, I need to talk to you about something,” Gandle said. “Something that I don’t want to blow up in my face.”
“What? Something in Vegas? Did Van Ness file a complaint?”
“No, nothing from Vegas. I got a call from a reporter at the Times first thing today. The FBI shoot-out at the beach — they won’t let that go because they know Harry Bosch was somehow involved.”
“Okay. What’s that got—”
“The reporter also sent me a video that was taken on an iPhone by one of the bystanders — some kid who was playing roller hockey. He wants me to ID the woman Bosch is talking to at the crime scene tape. He hugs her and puts something in her pocket. That woman looks a lot like you, Ballard, and I want to know what the fuck is going on.”
Ballard was stunned silent.
“Talk to me, Ballard,” Gandle said. “Right now.”
“Uh, I can’t at the moment, Captain,” Ballard said. “I’m in the middle of an interview. But I will.”
“When?”
“Uh, soon. I just need to finish this. How about I go downtown to see you?”
She was trying to buy time to come up with an explanation he’d accept.
“All I can say is this better not be something that detonates in my hands, Ballard.”
“Don’t worry, sir, it’s not,” Ballard said. “But could you send me the video? I’d like to see it before we talk.”
“I’ll send it. And I’ll see you today, Ballard. Today.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ballard disconnected. She was in a fog and felt a little dizzy. There was a single table in the coffee room with two chairs. She sat down, put her elbows on the table, and ran her hands through her hair. She had to come up with something to explain why she was in the video but could think of nothing to say other than the truth.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said to herself.
She felt a pit opening in her chest. It grew wider as she realized that she had recovered her badge only to possibly lose it again — permanently.
47
Still in a fog of misgivings, Ballard returned to the unit to find Maddie Bosch talking to Colleen Hatteras at her station. They both saw Ballard’s approach and judged that something was wrong.
“Are you all right?” Hatteras asked. “I thought you were going to get coffee.”
Ballard realized she had left her cup on the counter in the coffee room.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “I drank it up there while I took a phone call.”
“Well, if you left your cup there, someone’s going to steal it,” Hatteras said. “I’ll get it for you.”
“Uh, okay. Thank you, Colleen.”
Maddie waited until she was gone before speaking.
“Renée, what’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Ballard said. “Anyway, nothing to do with what we’re doing. But I thought you were taking today off.”
“There’s something I want to show you. I think it’s another way to take a run at the Black Dahlia case.”
“Okay. Show me.”
They went to Ballard’s desk and Maddie sat down, opened her terminal, waited for the Wi-Fi to connect, then went to a commercial site of something called the Film Forensics Institute.
“What am I looking at here?” Ballard asked.
“This company claims it has the world’s best experts in verifying film and video,” Maddie said. “They can do a comparison for us and confirm that the victim in the Thawyer photos is Elizabeth Short.”
“Or confirm it’s not.”
“Yes.”
“How do we know this place knows what they’re doing? Looks like some kind of a Hollywood thing.”
“They were recently contracted by CNN to ferret out deepfake videos and photos in the presidential campaigns. I called them and they would love this job. They’re getting more and more into law enforcement gigs, the guy said. He could give us police references if we want to check them out. He said that locally, they’ve worked for Beverly Hills PD.”
“And they’re located here?”
“The best film experts in the world are here.”
“How much would it cost?”
“Well, I tried to get the guy to do it gratis but he said we’d have to at least pay the hourly rate of their techs. Two techs separately evaluate ear images and determine if they belong to the same person, then see if they both reached the same conclusion. A hundred an hour each. We would also have to give them credit in any press release that goes out about the case.”
Ballard hesitated.
“I was thinking you could use my pay from the grant,” Maddie offered.
Ballard shook her head.
“No, I don’t want to get crosswise with the union,” she said.
Hatteras appeared and put Ballard’s coffee mug down on the desk. It was steaming with fresh coffee.