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“Wait, what did you tell her, Colleen? I said nothing about this case should leave the raft. You were right here when I said that.”
“I know, I know. You don’t have to worry. I didn’t mention Elizabeth Short or Black Dahlia or anything that would lead her to make a connection. I simply said that while we were working a cold-case investigation, Willa Kenyon’s name came up on a genealogy tree, and we wanted to know what they had on her disappearance. That’s all.”
“Okay, fine. I’m sorry I jumped on you like that. So what did the site manager have?”
“Well, she got curious enough to go into the office even though it’s a holiday because she said they have physical files on many of the really old cases. Lost Angels was operating before there was an internet, so there are paper files. She pulled the Willa Kenyon file and it had some family names in it—the parents who reported her missing—and also a boyfriend. I was able to confirm that her parents have long passed and there were no siblings. The boyfriend is dead too, but his name was pretty unique: Adolfo Galvez. I plugged that in on Ancestry and found a son and grandson still here in L.A. Adolfo got married a long time after Willa disappeared, when it became clear she wasn’t coming back, and I think maybe there’s a chance he talked about Willa with his son or grandson. But I didn’t call anyone. I thought you’d want to weigh in, since we sort of jumped the gun with Elyse Ford’s sister today.”
“Okay, send me what you’ve got, but I’m okay with you taking it forward and talking to them. You and Maddie handled Elyse Ford’s family well. So—your lead, your move. But not today. I want you to start on that tomorrow.”
“Okay. Tomorrow.”
There was an excitement in her voice, although whether it wasdue to the compliment or the approval to continue with the lead, Ballard didn’t know.
“Was there anything else in the file besides the names?” Ballard asked.
“There was a copy of the police report the family made when she went missing,” Hatteras said. “She scanned it and sent it to me.”
“Anything stand out?”
“Not really. But, here, I’ll pull it up. It’s pretty short.”
Hatteras turned to her screen and opened a document. It was an LAPD missing person report dated June 21, 1950. The color scanner had picked up the yellowed edges of the seventy-three-year-old document. The missing individual was identified as Willa Kenyon, age twenty-two, and gave her address as an apartment on Selma in Hollywood. The summary said she had been missing two days at the time of the report. Her occupation was listed simply assinger.
“That’s interesting,” Ballard said. “She was a singer. Depending on what that actually means, she could have needed photos for promotion.”
“She could have somehow contacted Thawyer and gone to him,” Hatteras said.
Ballard nodded, more to herself than Hatteras. She was seeing possible connections coming together. It reminded her that she needed to get into the lockdown room and open Elizabeth Short’s suitcase. She had a hunch she wanted to follow up on.
“Send me that report too,” she said. “Then that’s enough for today, Colleen. I’ll see you tomorrow at the team meeting.”
“Are you sure you don’t need me for anything else?” Hatteras asked.
“Not today. It’s supposed to be a holiday, remember? I’m leaving too after I get some paperwork done.”
Ballard knew that if she went to the lockdown room now to retrieve the suitcase, Hatteras would never leave; she would stay andlook over Ballard’s shoulder. So instead Ballard went to her desk, opened her terminal, and started writing a summary of the interview with Jackie Todd to send to Captain Gandle.
It was a waiting game. Hatteras was taking her time finishing up her work and shutting down. Ballard wrote a two-page summary on the interview, and Hatteras was still at her desk. Ballard could hear her keyboard clicking on the other side of the partition.
Once she filed the report and sent a copy to Gandle, she started an email to the captain requesting his approval for a trip to Las Vegas to interview Rodney Van Ness. She carefully outlined his connection to the Pillowcase Rapist case. Van Ness could be a key witness, a person of interest, or even a suspect, and she explained that he had to be approached in person so his reactions and answers could be properly gauged. Ballard wrote that the trip was critical and that money from her unit’s NIJ grant would pay for her and Officer Bosch to make the likely two-day road trip to Nevada and back.
“What’s that?”
Hatteras had come around the raft and walked up behind her without Ballard’s noticing while she was doing a final read of the email. She immediately clicked the send button. She turned to look at Hatteras, who had car keys in her hand. Finally, she was leaving.
“An email to the captain,” Ballard said. “You’re going home now?”
“Yes,” Hatteras said. “But are you going to Las Vegas?”
She had obviously spied the subject line of the email before Ballard sent it.
“I don’t know yet, and it’s not something you need to worry about,” Ballard said.
“I was just going to say I could go with you,” Hatteras said. “To help.”
“Colleen, it’s fieldwork and we talked about that. You need additional training if you want to do anything in the field.”
“Then sign me up,” Hatteras said. “I’m tired of being a computer nerd.”
