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“Right,” Ballard said. “I remember seeing something in theTimesabout a privately funded site that tracked missing people in L.A. I forget the name.”
“Lost Angels,” Aghzafi said. “I used them on a case in Vegas. Unidentified DB we thought might be a guy from L.A. They were quite helpful but we never matched him up.”
“Any idea how far back they went with missing persons?” Laffont asked.
“I don’t remember,” Aghzafi said. “It was funded by some tech billionaire who was looking for his mother who disappeared when he was a kid.”
“That’s the story I remember from theTimes,” Ballard said. “That may be a useful site.”
Hatteras stood and came around the raft to Ballard.
“Colleen?” Ballard asked.
“Can I pick one?” Hatteras responded.
Ballard gave Hatteras the stack of files. But rather than looking through them to make her choice, Hatteras hugged the stack to her chest. She closed her eyes and held still for a long moment.
“Colleen?” Ballard said. “You told me you wouldn’t do this.”
“I know, I know,” Hatteras said. “But these women have waited so long for justice. I want to connect. It could help us.”
“Look, we talked about this. Just pick a file and pass the stack. Now.”
“Okay, this one. Willa.” She separated the Willa file from the others and held it up as if to the heavens. “God bless this young woman,” she said.
“It might be a little late for that,” Laffont said.
Seemingly annoyed by Laffont’s sarcasm, Hatteras walked past him and gave the remaining files to Masser.
“Just so you all know, I have edited the files,” Ballard said. “Each contains two photos. One in life, one in death. For now, you don’t need to see what happened in between. Another thing: The files don’t leave the raft. As I said before, nothing is discussed outside this room. Everybody good with that?”
She got a round of nods. The files were handed around the raft, with one coming back to Ballard. She checked the tab and saw that she had the Cecily file—the woman who had been strangled against the basement post. Ballard checked the two photos in the file. The victim’s eyes were open and staring down at the concrete floor between her legs. Ballard could see the hemorrhaging around the eyes. Cecily had died horribly, and Ballard knew that there was no one left alive to punish for it. Yet she felt a sense of duty to find out who Cecily was and make her story known.
26
IT WAS AFTERtwo p.m. when they got word about the judge’s DNA from Darcy Troy. By then the Open-Unsolved team had come up with two identifications of the women in the Thawyer files. Willa Kenyon was reported missing in 1950; her case was one of the oldest in the Lost-Angels.net database. And Elyse Ford was identified through a keyword search on the Library of Congress newspaper database. While her 1949 disappearance had apparently gotten no ink from the newspapers in Los Angeles, it had in her hometown. A search of the database using the wordsElyse, missing,andLos Angelesproduced three stories that had run in theWichita Eagle. It was a familiar story:Young woman from the Midwest went to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune, and now she’s missing without leaving a clue. The L.A. police are not too interested in chasing another one of these, but her parents back in Kechi are worried sick.Still, even the Wichita paper dropped the story after four months and three articles.
Both the newspaper accounts and the Lost Angels site provided photos of the missing women that clearly matched two of the women in the photos in Thawyer’s files. Ballard was convinced by her own comparison and believed that her team of volunteer investigators were close to having enough evidence to take to CarolPlovc at the DA’s office and ask for clearance and closure in those two cases.
But she put those thoughts aside when she saw Darcy Troy’s name on her cell phone.
“It’s her,” Ballard said.
She immediately drew an audience; Hatteras and Masser got up and came to her pod as she answered.
“Hey, Darcy, give me the good word.”
“Well, I don’t have good news. Purcell’s father, the Pillowcase Rapist, is not the judge. I’m sorry.”
Ballard was stunned. “I don’t—how can that be?”
“I don’t know what to tell you other than it’s no match. The woman is wrong too. No match. She’s not the mother. Obviously, it was an adoption.”
“No. We pulled the birth certificate. It was filed too fast for an adoption.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Renée. The science is the science.”
“It couldn’t be a screwup on the DOJ end, right?”
