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“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.
