The Concrete Blonde (10 page)

“Well, good luck. By the way, if you're looking for something to do. This press gig I'm holding will hit the TV news tonight. I'll be here waiting by the phones. If you want to answer a few, I could use the help.”

Bosch thought briefly about his plan for dinner with Sylvia. She'd understand.

“Yeah, I'll be there.”

The afternoon testimony was largely uneventful. Chandler's strategy, it seemed to Bosch, was to build a two-part question into the jury's eventual deliberation, giving her clients two shots at the prize. One would be the wrong-man theory, which held that Bosch had flat-out killed an innocent man. The second question would be the use of force. Even if the jury determined that Norman Church, family man, was the Dollmaker, serial killer, they would have to decide whether Bosch's actions were appropriate.

Chandler called her client, Deborah Church, to the witness stand right after lunch. She gave a tearful account of a wonderful life with a wonderful husband who fawned over everybody; his daughters, his wife, his mother and mother-in-law. No misogynistic aberrations here. No sign of childhood abuse. The widow held a box of Kleenex in her hand as she testified, going to a new tissue every other question.

She wore the traditional black dress of a widow. Bosch remembered how appealing Sylvia had been when he saw her at her husband's funeral dressed in black. Deborah Church looked downright scary. It was as if she reveled in her role here. The widow of the fallen innocent. The real victim. Chandler had coached her well.

It was a good show, but it was too good to be true and Chandler knew it. Rather than leave the bad things to be drawn out on cross-examination, she finally got around to asking Deborah Church how, her marriage being so wonderful, her husband was in that garage apartment—which was rented under an alias—when Bosch kicked the door open.

“We had been having some difficulty.” She stopped to dab an eye with a tissue. “Norman was going through a lot of stress—he had a lot of responsibility in the aircraft design department. He needed to expend it and so he took the apartment. He said it was to be alone. To think. I didn't know about this woman he brought there. I think it was probably his first time doing something like that. He was a naive man. I think she saw this. She took his money and then set him up by calling the police on him and giving the crazy story that he was the Dollmaker. There was a reward, you know.”

Bosch wrote a note on a pad he kept in front of him and slid it over to Belk, who read it and then jotted something down on his own pad.

“What about all of the makeup found there, Mrs. Church?” Chandler asked. “Can you explain that?”

“All I know is that I would have known if my husband was that monster. I would have known. If there was makeup found there, it was put there by somebody else. Maybe after he was already dead.”

Bosch believed he could feel the eyes of the courtroom burning into him as the widow accused him of planting evidence after murdering her husband.

After that, Chandler moved her questioning on to safer topics like Norman Church's relationship with his daughters and then ended her direct examination with a weeper.

“Did he love his daughters?”

“Very much so,” Mrs. Church said as a new production of tears rolled down her cheeks. This time she did not wipe them away with a tissue. She let the jury watch them roll down her face into the folds of her double chin.

After giving her a few moments to compose herself, Belk got up and took his place at the lectern.

“Again, Your Honor, I will be brief. Mrs. Church, I want to make this very clear to the jury. Did you say in your testimony that you knew about your husband's apartment but didn't know about any women he may or may not have brought there?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

Belk looked at his pad.

“Did you not tell detectives on the night of the shooting that you had never heard of any apartment? Didn't you emphatically deny that your husband even had such an apartment?”

Deborah Church didn't answer.

“I can arrange to have a tape of your first interview played in court if it will help refresh your—”

“Yes, I said that. I lied.”

“You lied? Why would you lie to the police?”

“Because a policeman had just killed my husband. I didn't—I couldn't deal with them.”

“The truth is you told the truth that night, correct, Mrs. Church? You never knew about any apartment.”

“No, that's not true. I knew about it.”

“Had you and your husband talked about it?”

“Yes, we discussed it.”

“You approved of it?”

“Yes … , reluctantly. It was my hope he would stay at home and we could work this stress out together.”

“Okay, Mrs. Church, then if you knew of the apartment, had discussed it and given your approval, reluctantly or not, why then did your husband rent it under a false name?”

She didn't answer. Belk had nailed her. Bosch thought he saw the widow glance in Chandler's direction. He looked at the lawyer but she made no move, no change in facial expression to help her client.

“I guess,” the widow finally said, “that was one of the questions you could have asked him if Mr. Bosch had not murdered him in cold blood.”

Without Belk's prompting, Judge Keyes said, “The jury will disregard that last characterization. Mrs. Church, you know better than that.”

“I'm sorry, Your Honor.”

“Nothing further,” Belk said as he left the lectern.

The judge called a ten-minute recess.

During the break, Bosch went out to the ash can. Money Chandler didn't come out but the homeless man made a pass. Bosch offered him a whole cigarette, which he took and put in his shirt pocket. He was unshaven again and the slight look of dementia was still in his eyes.

“Your name is Faraday,” Bosch said, as if speaking to a child.

“Yeah, what about it, Lieutenant?”

Bosch smiled. He had been made by a bum. All except for the rank.

“Nothing about it. I just heard that's what it was. I also heard you were a lawyer once.”

“I still am. I'm just not practicing.”

He turned and watched a jail bus go by on Spring, heading to the courthouse. It was full of angry faces looking out through the black wire windows. Somebody by one of the back windows made Bosch as a cop, too, and stuck his middle index finger up through the wire. Bosch smiled back at him.

“My name was Thomas Faraday. But now I prefer Tommy Faraway.”

“What happened to make you stop practicing law?”

Tommy looked back at him with milky eyes.

“Justice is what happened. Thanks for the smoke.” He walked away then, cup in hand, and headed toward City Hall. Maybe that was his turf, too.

After the break, Chandler called a lab analyst from the coroner's office named Victor Amado. He was a very small and bookish-looking man with eyes that shifted from the judge to the jury as he walked to the witness chair. He was balding badly, though he seemed to be no more than twenty-eight. Bosch remembered that four years earlier he had all his hair and members of the task force referred to him as The Kid. He knew Belk was going to call Amado as a witness if Chandler didn't.

Belk leaned over and whispered that Chandler was following a good guy–bad guy pattern by alternating police witnesses with her sympathetic witnesses.

“She'll probably put one of the daughters up there after Amado,” he said. “As a strategy, it is completely unoriginal.”

Bosch didn't mention that Belk's trust-us-we're-the-cops defense had been around as long as the civil suit.

Amado testified in painstaking detail about how he had been given all of the bottles and compacts containing makeup that were found in Church's Hyperion apartment and had then traced them to specific victims of the Dollmaker. He said he had come up with nine separate lots or groupings of makeup—mascara, blush, eyeliner, lipstick, etc. Each lot was connected through chemical analysis to samples taken from the faces of the victims. This was further corroborated by detectives who interviewed relatives and friends to determine what brands the victims were known to use. It all matched up, Amado said. And in one instance, he added, an eyelash found on a mascara brush in Church's bathroom cabinet was identified as having come from the second victim.

“What about the two victims no matching makeup was found for?” Chandler asked.

“That was a mystery. We never found their makeup.”

“In fact, with the exception of the eyelash that was allegedly found and matched to victim number two, you can't be one hundred percent sure that the makeup police did supposedly find in the apartment came from the victims, correct?”

“This stuff is mass produced and sold around the world. So there is a lot of it out there, but I would guess that the chances of nine different exact combinations of makeup being found like that by mere coincidence are astronomical.”

“I didn't ask you to guess, Mr. Amado. Please answer the question I asked.”

After flinching at being dressed down, Amado said, “The answer is we can't be one hundred percent sure, that is correct.”

“Okay, now tell the jury about the DNA testing you did that connected Norman Church to the eleven killings.”

“There wasn't any done. There—”

“Just answer the question, Mr. Amado. What about serology tests, connecting Mr. Church to the crimes?”

“There were none.”

“Then it was the makeup comparison that was the clincher—the linchpin in the determination that Mr. Church was the Dollmaker?”

“Well, it was for me. I don't know about the detectives. My report said—”

“I'm sure for the detectives it was the bullet that killed him that was the clincher.”

“Objection,” Belk yelled angrily as he stood. “Your Honor, she can't—”

“Ms. Chandler,” Judge Keyes boomed. “I have warned you both about exactly this sort of thing. Why would you go and say something you know full well is prejudicial and out of order?”

“I apologize, Your Honor.”

“Well, it's a little late for apologies. We'll discuss this matter after the jury goes home for the day.”

The judge then instructed the jurors to disregard her comment. But Bosch knew it had been a carefully thought out gambit by Chandler. The jurors would now see her even more as the underdog. Even the judge was against her—which he really wasn't. And they might be distracted, thinking about what just happened, when Belk stepped up to repair Amado's testimony.

“Nothing further, Your Honor,” Chandler said.

“Mr. Belk,” the judge said.

Don't say just a few questions again, Bosch thought as his lawyer moved to the lectern.

“Just a few questions, Mr. Amado,” Belk said. “Plaintiff's counsel mentioned DNA and serology tests and you said they had not been done. Why is that?”

“Well, because there was nothing to test. No semen was ever recovered from any of the bodies. The killer had used a condom. Without samples to attempt to match to Mr. Church's DNA or blood, there was not much point in running tests. We would have the victims' but nothing to compare it to.”

Belk drew a line with his pen through a question written on his pad.

“If there was no recovery of semen or sperm, how do you know these women were raped or even had engaged in consensual sexual activity?”

“The autopsies of all eleven of the victims showed vaginal bruising, much more than is considered usual or even possible from consensual sex. On two of the victims there was even tearing in the vaginal wall. The victims were brutally raped, in my estimation.”

“But these women came from walks of life where sexual activity was common and frequent, even ‘rough sex,’ if you will. Two of them performed in pornographic videos. How can you be sure they were sexually assaulted against their will?”

“The bruising was such that it would have been very painful, especially for the two with vaginal tears. Hemorrhaging was considered perimortem, meaning at the time of death. The deputy coroners who performed these autopsies unanimously concluded these women were raped.”

Belk drew another line on his pad, flipped the page and came up with a new question. He was doing well with Amado, Bosch thought. Better than Money had. It may have been a mistake for her to have called him as a witness.

“How do you know that the killer used a condom?” Belk asked. “Couldn't these women have been raped with an object and that account for the lack of semen?”

“That could have happened and it could account for some of the damage. But there was clear evidence in five of the cases that they had had sex with a man wearing a condom.”

“And what was that?”

“We did rape kits. There was—”

“Hold it a second, Mr. Amado. What is a rape kit?”

“It's a protocol for collecting evidence from bodies of people that may have been the victims of rape. In the case of a woman, we take vaginal and anal swabs, we comb the pubic area looking for foreign pubic hair, procedures such as that. We also take samples of blood and hair from the victim in case there is a call for comparison to evidence found on a suspect. It's collected together in an evidence kit.”

“Okay. Before I interrupted there, you were going to tell us about the evidence found in five of the victims that was indicative of sex with a man who wore a condom.”

“Yes, we did the rape kits each time we got a Dollmaker victim. And there was a foreign substance found in vaginal samplings in five of the victims. It was the same material in each of the women.”

“What was it, Mr. Amado?”

“It was identified as a condom lubricant.”

“Was this material something that could be identified to a specific brand and style of condom?”

Looking at Belk, Bosch could see the heavy man was champing at the bit. Amado was answering each question slowly and each time Bosch could see that Belk could barely wait for the answer before plowing ahead with a new question. Belk was on a roll.

“Yes,” Amado said. “We identified the product. It was from a Trojan-Enz lubricated condom with special receptacle end.”

Looking at the court reporter, Amado said, “That's spelled E-N-Z.”

“And that was the same for all five samples received from the five bodies?” Belk asked.