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“Right behind you,” she said.
Ballard and Maddie turned. The wall behind them was composed of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. Ballard reached out and pulled on the handle of one of the cabinet doors. It was a false front. The whole assembly opened, top to bottom, revealing a doorway and a set of stairs going down into murky darkness.
24
BALLARD REACHED THROUGHthe doorway and swept her hand up and down to find a light.
“I forgot to mention the basement,” Sally said. “The light is on the left.”
Ballard switched sides and found the light, and the stairs down were illuminated.
“Did you and your husband put in this cabinet?” Maddie asked.
“Oh, no, it came that way with the house,” Sally said. “Mr. Thawyer built that, and Bruce thought it was pretty unique, so we kept it. Not many houses in Los Angeles have basements, you know.”
“Almost none,” Ballard said.
“I can’t do the stairs anymore,” Sally said. “Watch for spiderwebs down there.”
“We will,” Maddie said.
Ballard locked eyes with Maddie, and they shared a look of excitement and dread. Then Ballard started down the steps with Maddie right behind her.
Some of the lights attached to the rafters were dead. Gray light came in at angles from four casement windows, two on the driveway side, two on the opposite side. There were pull-down shades thatwere rolled up. The basement was wide open, no partitions or storage rooms. Four thick oak pillars supported the main crossbeams of the house.
The floor was concrete, poured and smoothed at a barely discernible down angle toward an iron-grated drain in the middle.
“Maddie, go back to my car and get those files,” Ballard said. “Here.” She handed over her key fob. Maddie turned and headed up the steps without a word.
“Also, in the back of my car, there’s a crime scene kit that has a pump bottle with luminol in it. Says it on the label. Bring that too.”
“You got it,” Maddie said.
Left alone, Ballard crouched next to the drain. She believed that horrible things had happened here. It was a long time ago but there were ghosts here, waiting for someone—waiting for her—to set them free.
She felt a solemn duty to them. As with the library of lost souls in the archives at Ahmanson, she carried the burden.
Maddie was soon back with the files and luminol. Ballard opened the file markedBettyand held the photos up under a bulb to compare them to the room they were in. The drain grate was a match. The rough surface of the concrete and the sweep patterns left by a trowel were a match.
“No doubt,” Maddie said. “Those were shot down here.”
“Can you go up the steps and turn off the lights?” Ballard asked. “And be careful coming back down in the dark.”
While Maddie went up the stairs, Ballard went to one of the casement windows and pulled the string knot on a long-furled shade. The string broke; the shade unrolled and fell over the glass as a cloud of dust descended on Ballard. She waved her hand and coughed. Then she went to the next shade as the overhead lights went off.
After all the shades were down, Ballard took the spray bottle ofluminol from Maddie and tried to use her nails to break through the plastic seal.
“Will it work after so many years?” Maddie asked.
“I don’t know,” Ballard said. “I had a case once where it showed blood on concrete twenty-three years after the murder. The tech who did the test said the older the blood, the more intense the reaction. But I don’t think he was talking about a seventy-seven-year-old case.”
She started peeling the plastic collar from the bottle. “The problem is the cleanup,” she said.
“The cleanup?” Maddie said.
Ballard dropped to a crouch again.
“The luminol reacts with phosphors in blood—the iron in hemoglobin. But bleach contains some chemicals that will light up as well. If Elizabeth Short was cut in half on this floor, there would have been a lot of blood, and that would mean a lot of cleanup, most likely with bleach.”
