AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ballard started working the pump, sending a fine mist of the chemical over the concrete around the floor drain.
“Don’t we need an ultraviolet light?” Maddie asked.
“Only on TV,” Ballard said.
She stopped spraying and waited, eyes down on the concrete. A bluish-white glow began to spread across the floor. She heard Maddie’s breath catch. She started working the pump again.
The glow around the drain was too spread out and too uniform to be from a blood trail.
“He mopped with bleach,” Ballard said.
“Wait, look how intense it’s getting,” Maddie said. “You’re saying that was from mopping with bleach?”
“Exactly. Probably.”
“Well, shit.”
“It doesn’t help us, but it also doesn’t hurt us. Luminol is just a presumptive test. In and of itself, signs that someone mopped upblood from the concrete floor in a basement are just as suspicious as blood spatter. But wait. Sometimes it takes a while.”
Ballard waved her arm in a straight line, putting down another layer of luminol mist, then started to lock down the pump.
“What about this side of the drain?” Maddie pointed to an area Ballard had not sprayed.
“I don’t want to cover the floor in case we come back for DNA,” Ballard said.
“There’s DNA from the Black Dahlia available?” Maddie asked.
“Not in evidence. But you never know. If it becomes important, we could conceivably exhume her body to get it. She’s buried up in Oakland.”
“How do you know that? I mean, where she’s buried.”
“Because it was one of the first cases I reviewed when I started the unit. Like you, I guess, I was fascinated by the case and I had to see why it had never been solved. Since there was no DNA in evidence in 1947—DNA hadn’t even been discovered yet—I researched where Elizabeth Short was buried. Mountain View Cemetery. People still put flowers on her grave.”
“You went there?”
“Yeah. I had to go up that way for a meeting at the DOJ in Sacramento. I flew into Oakland and checked it out before driving up.”
The chemical reaction on the concrete continued, and a deeper shade of blue manifested on the floor. It was a long, thin shape that looked like a meandering stream on a map.
“Turn on your phone light,” Ballard said. She opened the Betty file. The final picture of the body was on top of the stack. Maddie put the light on it, and Ballard compared the flow of blood to the drain in the photo to the meandering stream of deep blue on the floor. It was almost an exact match.
“It’s the same,” Maddie said excitedly.
“It’s close,” Ballard said. “Give me the other files and go hit the lights.”
Ballard waited as Maddie trudged up the steps again and flicked on the lights. She then flipped through the files to the one markedCecily. As with the photo chronology in the Betty file, the Cecily file contained eight glossy eight-by-tens that ranged from a shot of a fully clothed woman they assumed was Cecily to a pair of tasteful, unrevealing nudes to photos of the woman’s degradation, torture, and death. In the final photo, the victim was sitting on a concrete floor, her back to a square wooden post. Like the Dahlia’s, her cheeks were slashed open from the corners of her mouth. It was the commonality in the photos of all the victims: the horrible clown smile cut into the skin.
Cecily’s arms were tied behind the post, and a length of rope with a slipknot was around her neck and the post. Cecily had been slowly strangled by the makeshift garrote.
Maddie came down the stairs and rejoined Renée.
“Look at this,” Ballard said.
She ran her finger up the wooden post in the photo. “It’s been painted but you can still see the grain pattern,” she said. “There’s a knot in the wood.”
“I see it,” Maddie said. “We can find it.”
They separated, and each went to one of the four posts supporting the house’s primary crossbeams. Using their phone lights, they studied the graining of the wood at about the three-foot mark, moving around the post to check all four sides.
