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“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.”
