47

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.

She must have heard the tail end of their conversation because she looked at Maddie and said, "You get paid?"

"Uh, well…" Maddie began.

"She gets a stipend," Ballard said. "I had to do that or the union would block it, and we needed another badge on the team."

"Oh," Hatteras said.

"I'd appreciate it, Colleen, if you kept that to yourself," Ballard said.

"Sure," Hatteras said. "I always said I would do this work for free."

"And the city and I owe you our thanks," Ballard said. "Let's get back to this. Maddie, what can this private company do with the photos that our own lab didn't do?"

"He said law enforcement lags behind in the use of identifiers that help in cases like these," Maddie said.

"Like what?" Ballard asked. "This just sounds like a sales pitch."

"Like ears," Maddie said. "There are a number of studies out there that say the lines of the external ear—you know, the lobe, the helix, something called the concha, and various other shapes—all combine to be as unique an identifier as a fingerprint. There is this thing called Cameriere's ear identification method that can be used to compare and confirm identity."

"Wow, interesting," Hatteras interjected.

Ballard realized that Hatteras was still standing behind her listening to the conversation.

"You showed me the file of photos you turned over to our lab," Maddie said. "It had photos of the Thawyer victim named Betty that showed her right ear, but all the known photos of Elizabeth Short you submitted were headshots that didn't show much of a side view of either ear. So I don't think the lab did this kind of comparison."

"I think I would have heard about it if they had," Ballard said.

"I went online," Maddie said. "Even the side-view mug shot of Short taken during her 1943 arrest in Santa Barbara didn't have it. Her hair is over her ear."

"So we have nothing to compare?" Ballard asked.

"No, we do," Maddie said excitedly. "I found several, actually. They're all from the crime scene on Norton Avenue where the killer left her body. In those photos, her face is turned to the side in the grass and you see her full right ear. But you didn't include any of those shots in the lab package."

"Because her face was bloodied and her cheeks were cut through like the Joker in that Batman movie," Ballard said. "Horrible. And I didn't think they were good photos for comparison."

"They weren't, not for normal facial comparison," Maddie said. "But now we have clear images of her right ear to compare. I really think it's worth a shot, and the guy said they would jump on it right away."

"I think it's worth a shot too," Hatteras said.

Ballard turned to take in Hatteras again.

"Colleen," she said, "why don't you go to your pod and get ready to walk us through what you found yesterday."

"No need," Hatteras said. "I'm ready to go. I was waiting for you."

"Well, go over there and we'll join you in a minute, okay?"

"Okay."

She said it like a child being sent to her room and walked away with her head down. Ballard turned her attention back to Maddie.

"Okay, go ahead with it," she said. "Quietly. And I want you to write up some kind of confidentiality agreement and get Camerero or whatever his name is to sign it. I don't want word of this leaking out."

"No, Cameriere is the guy who invented the comparison index. The guy I talked to at FFI is named Ortiz, first name Lukas."

"Okay, well, you can tell Mr. Lukas Ortiz to put a rush on it and that we'll pay his people by the hour."

"Okay, cool. I'm excited. I think it's going to work."

"That's only going to be half the battle. Even if they call it a complete match, we'll still need to convince the district attorney," said Ballard.

"If this is as good as fingerprints, he'll have to sign off."

"Maybe. But this was good, you coming up with this, Maddie. Get it going."

"I'll head there now."