The Concrete Blonde (11 page)

“Yes it was.”

“I am going to ask you a hypothetical question. Assuming that the attacker of eleven women used the same brand of lubricated condom, how could you account for lubrication being found in the vaginal sampling of only five victims?”

“I believe that a number of factors could be involved. Such as the intensity of the victim's struggle. But essentially it would be just a matter of how much of the lubricant came off the condom and stayed in the vagina.”

“When police officers brought you the various containers of makeup from the Hyperion apartment rented by Norman Church for analysis, did they bring anything else?”

“Yes they did.”

“What was that?”

“A box of Trojan-Enz lubricated condoms with special receptacle ends.”

“How many condoms did the box hold?”

“Twelve separately packaged condoms.”

“How many were still in the box when the police delivered it to you?”

“There were three left.”

“Nothing further.”

Belk returned to the defense table with a triumphant spring in his walk.

“A moment, Your Honor,” Chandler said.

Bosch watched her open a fat file full of police documents. She leafed through the pages and took out a short stack of documents held together with a paper clip. She read the top one quickly and then held it up to leaf through the rest. Bosch could see the top one was the protocol list from a rape kit. She was reading the protocols from all eleven victims.

Belk leaned over to him and whispered, “She's about to step into some deep shit. I was going to bring this up later, during your testimony.”

“Ms. Chandler?” the judge intoned.

She jumped up.

“Yes, Your Honor, I'm ready. I have a quick redirect of Mr. Amado.”

She brought the stack of protocols with her to the lectern, read the last two and then looked at the coroner's analyst.

“Mr. Amado, you mentioned that part of the rape kit consisted of combing for foreign pubic hairs, do I have that right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you explain that procedure a little more?”

“Well, basically, the comb is passed through the pubic hair of the victim and it collects unattached hairs. Oftentimes, this unattached hair is from the victim's attacker, or possibly other sexual partners.”

“How's it get there?”

Amado's face flushed to a crimson hue.

“Well, uh, it—uh, during sex … there is I guess what you call friction between the bodies?”

“I am asking the questions, Mr. Amado. You are answering.”

There was quiet tittering from the gallery seats. Bosch felt embarrassed for Amado and thought that his own face might be turning red.

“Yes, well, there is friction,” Amado said. “And this causes some transference. Loose pubic hair from one person can be transferred to that of the other.”

“I see,” Chandler said. “Now, you as coordinator of the Dollmaker evidence from the coroner's office were familiar with the rape kits of all eleven victims, correct?”

“Yes.”

“With how many of the victims did the findings include foreign pubic hair?”

Bosch understood what was happening now and realized that Belk was right. Chandler was walking into the buzz saw.

“All of them,” Amado answered.

Bosch saw Deborah Church raise her head and look sharply at Chandler at the lectern. Then she looked over at Bosch and their eyes met. She quickly looked away but Bosch knew. She, too, knew what was about to happen. Because she, too, knew her late husband the way Bosch had on that last night. She knew what he looked like naked.

“Ah, all of them,” Chandler said. “Now, can you tell the jury how many of these pubic hairs found on these women were analyzed and identified as having been from the body of Norman Church?”

“None of them were from Norman Church.”

“Thank you.”

Belk was up and moving to the lectern before Chandler had time to remove her pad and the rape kit protocols. Bosch watched her sit down and saw the widow Church lean to her and desperately begin whispering. Bosch saw Chandler's eyes go dead. She held up her hand to tell the widow she had said enough and then leaned back and exhaled.

“Now, let's clear something up first,” Belk said. “Mr. Amado, you said you found pubic hairs on all of the eleven victims. Were these hairs all from the same man?”

“No. We found a multitude of samples. In most cases, what looked like hair from possibly two or three men on each victim.”

“What did you attribute this to?”

“Their lifestyle. We knew these were women with multiple sexual partners.”

“Did you analyze these samples to determine if there were common hairs? In other words, whether hair from one man was found on each of the victims.”

“No, we did not. There was a huge amount of evidence collected in these cases and manpower dictated that we focus on evidence that would help identify a killer. Because we had so many different samples, it was determined that this was evidence that would be held and then used to link or clear a suspect, once that suspect was in custody.”

“I see, well, then once Norman Church had been killed and was identified as the Dollmaker, did you then match any of the hairs from the victims to him?”

“We did not.”

“And why is that?”

“Because Mr. Church had shaved his body hair. There was no pubic hair to match.”

“Why would he have done that?”

Chandler objected on the grounds that Amado could not answer for Church and the judge sustained it. But Bosch knew it didn't matter. Everybody in the courtroom knew why Church had shaved himself—so he wouldn't leave pubic hairs behind as evidence.

Bosch looked at the jury and he saw two of the women writing in the notebooks the marshals had given them to help them keep track of important testimony. He wanted to buy Belk—and Amado—a beer.

7

It looked like a cake in a box, one of those novelty things custom-made to look like Marilyn Monroe or something. The anthropologist had painted on a beige skin tone and red lipstick to go with blue eyes. It looked like frosting to Bosch. A wavy blonde wig was added. He stood in the squad room looking down at the plaster image, wondering if it really looked like anybody at all.

“Five minutes till show time,” Edgar said.

He was sitting in his chair, which was turned toward the TV on the file cabinets. He was holding the channel changer. His blue suit coat was hung neatly on a hanger, which was hooked on the coatrack at the end of the table. Bosch took his jacket off and hung it on one of the coat-rack pegs. He checked his slot in the message box and sat down at his spot at the homicide table. There had been a call from Sylvia, nothing else important. He dialed her number as the Channel 4 news began. He knew enough about the news priorities in this town to know the report on the concrete blonde wouldn't be a lead story.

“Harry, we're gonna need that line clear once they show it,” Edgar said.

“I'll only be a minute. They won't show it for a while. If they show it at all.”

“They'll show it. I made secret deals with all of them. They all think they'll be getting the exclusive if we get an ID. They all want to get a boo-hoo story with the parents.”

“You're playing with fire, man. You make a promise like that and then they find out you fucked them around—”

Sylvia picked up the phone.

“Hey, it's me.”

“Hi, where are you?”

“The office. We have to watch the phones a while. They're putting the face of the victim from yesterday's case on TV tonight.”

“How was court?”

“It's the plaintiff's case at the moment. But I think we scored a couple punches.”

“I read the
Times
today at lunch.”

“Yeah, well, they got about half of it right.”

“Are you coming out? Like you said.”

“Well, eventually. Not right now. I've got to help answer phones on this and then it's depending on what we get. If we're skunked I'll be out early.”

He noticed he had lowered his voice so Edgar wouldn't hear his conversation.

“And if you get something good?”

“We'll see.”

An indrawn breath, then silence. Harry waited.

“You've been saying ‘we'll see’ too much, Harry. We've talked about this. Sometimes—”

“I know that.”

“—I think that you just want to be left alone. Stay in your little house on the hill and keep the whole world out. Including me.”

“Not you. You know that.”

“Sometimes, I don't. I don't feel like I know it right now. You push me away just at the time when you need me—somebody—to be close.”

He had no answer. He thought of her there on the other end. She was probably sitting on the stool in the kitchen. She had probably already begun making a dinner for both of them. Or maybe she was getting used to his ways and had waited for the call.

“Look, I'm sorry,” he said. “You know how it is. What are you doing about dinner?”

“Nothing, and I'm not going to do anything, either,”

Edgar made a low, quick whistle. Harry looked up at the TV and saw it was showing the painted face of the victim. The TV was on Channel 7 now. The camera showed a long close-up of the face. It looked all right on the tube. At least, it didn't look much like a cake. The screen flashed the detective bureau's two public numbers.

“They're showing it now,” Bosch said to Sylvia. “I need to keep this line clear. Let me call you back later, when I know something.”

“Sure,” she said coldly and hung up.

Edgar had the TV on 4 now and they were showing the face. He then flipped to 2 and caught the last few seconds of their report on it. They had even interviewed the anthropologist.

“Slow news day,” Bosch said.

“Shit,” Edgar replied. “We're banging on all cylinders now. All we—”

The phone rang and he grabbed it up.

“No, it just went out,” he said after listening for a few moments. “Yeah, yeah, I will. Okay.”

He hung up and shook his head.

“Pounds?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah. Thinks we're going to have her name ten seconds after the broadcast went out. Christ, whadda nitwit.”

The next three calls were pranks, all testifying to the glaring lack of originality and the mental health of the TV viewing audience. All three callers said “Your mother!” or words to that effect and hung up laughing. About twenty minutes later Edgar got a call and started taking notes. The phone rang again and Bosch took it.

“This is Detective Bosch, who am I speaking with?”

“Is this being taped?”

“No, it's not. Who is this?”

“Never mind, just thought you'd like to know the girl's name is Maggie. Maggie something or other. It's Latin. I seen her on videos.”

“What videos? MTV?”

“No, Sherlock. Adult videos. She fucked on film. She was good. She could put a rubber on a prick with her mouth.”

The line went dead. Bosch wrote a couple of notes down on the pad he had in front of him. Latin? He didn't think the way the face had been painted gave any indication that the victim was a Latina.

Edgar hung up then and said his caller had said her name was Becky, that she had lived in Studio City a few years back.

“What'd you get?”

“I got a Maggie. No last name. Possibly a Latin last name. He said she was in porno.”

“That would fit, except she don't look Mexican to me.”

“I know.”

The phone rang again. Edgar picked up and listened a few moments and then hung up.

“Another one that recognizes my mom.”

Bosch took the next one.

“I just wanted to tell you that the girl they were showing on TV was in porno,” the voice said.

“How do you know she was in porno?”

“I can tell by that thing they showed on TV. I rented a tape. Only once. She was in it.”

Only once, Bosch thought, but he remembered. Yeah, sure.

“You know her name?”

The other phone rang and Edgar picked it up.

“I don't know names, man,” Bosch's caller said. “They all use fake ones anyway.”

“What was the name of the tape?”

“Can't remember. I was, uh, intoxicated when I saw it. Like I said, it was the only time.”

“Look, I'm not taking your confession. You got anything else?”

“No, smartass, I don't.”

“Who is this?”

“I don't have to say.”

“Look, we're trying to find a killer here. What was the name of the place you rented it?”

“I'm not telling you, you might be able to get my name from them. Doesn't matter, they have those tapes all over, every adult place.”

“How would you know if you only rented one once?”

The caller hung up.

Bosch stayed another hour. By the end they had five calls saying the painted face belonged to a porno starlet. Only one of the callers said her name was Maggie, the other four men saying they didn't pay much attention to names. There was one call naming her Becky of Studio City, and one saying she was a stripper who had worked for a while at the Booby Trap on La Brea. One man who called said the face belonged to his missing wife, but Bosch learned through further questioning that she had been missing only two months. The concrete blonde had been dead too long. The hope and desperation in the caller's voice seemed genuine to Bosch, and he didn't know whether he was telling the man good news by explaining that it could not be his wife or bad news because he was left in the void again.

There were three callers who gave vague descriptions of a woman they thought might be the concrete blonde, but after a few questions into each conversation Bosch and Edgar identified the callers as cop geeks, people who got a thrill from talking to the police.

The most unusual call was from a Beverly Hills psychic who mentioned that she had placed her hand on the TV screen while it showed the face and felt the dead woman's spirit cry out to her.

“What did it cry?” Bosch asked patiently.

“Praise.”

“Praise for what?”

“Jesus our savior, I would assume but I don't know. That was all I received. I might receive more if I could touch the actual plaster cast of the—”

“Well, did this spirit that was giving praise identify itself? See, that's what we're doing here. We're more interested in a name than cries of praise.”