The Concrete Blonde (21 page)

“Sure.”

She walked him to the door and opened it. She told him to be careful and to call her the next day. He said he would. At the threshold he hesitated. He said, “You know, you were right.”

“About what?”

“What you said about men.”

14

Laurel Canyon is a winding cut through the Santa Monica Mountains that connects Studio City with Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. On the south side, where the road drops below Mulholland Drive and the fast four lanes thin to two crumbling invitations to a head-on collision, the canyon becomes funky L.A., where forty-year-old Hollywood bungalows sit next to multilevel glass contemporaries that sit next to gingerbread houses. Harry Houdini built a castle in here among the steep hillsides. Jim Morrison lived in a clapboard house near the little market that still serves as the canyon's only commercial outpost.

The canyon was a place where the new rich—rock stars, writers, film actors and drug dealers—came to live. They braved the mudslides and the monumental traffic tie-ups just to call Laurel Canyon home. Locke lived on Lookout Mountain Drive, a steep upward grade off Laurel Canyon Boulevard that made Bosch's department-issue Caprice work extra hard. The address he was looking for could not be missed because it blinked in blue neon from the front wall of Locke's house. Harry pulled to the curb behind a multicolor Volkswagen van that was at least twenty-five years old. Laurel Canyon was like that, a time warp.

Bosch got out, dropped his cigarette in the street and stepped on it. It was very quiet and dark. He heard the Caprice's engine ticking away its heat, the smell of burning oil wafting from the undercarriage. He reached in through the open window and grabbed the two binders.

It had taken most of an hour to get to Locke's and during that time Bosch had been able to refine his thoughts on the discovery of the pattern within a pattern. He also realized along the way that there was a key way of attempting to confirm it.

Locke answered with a glass of red wine in his hand. He was barefoot and wearing blue jeans and a surgeon's green shirt. Hanging from a leather thong around his neck was a large pink crystal.

“Good evening, Detective Bosch. Please come in.”

He led the way through an entry hall to a large living room/dining room area with a wall of French doors that opened onto a brick patio surrounding a lighted blue pool. Bosch noticed the pinkish carpet was dirty and worn but otherwise the place was not bad for a college sex professor and author. He noticed the water of the pool was choppy, as if someone had been swimming recently. He thought he smelled a trace of stale marijuana smoke.

“Beautiful place,” Bosch said. “You know we're almost neighbors. I live on the other side of the hill. On Woodrow Wilson.”

“Oh, really? How come it took you so long to get here?”

“Well, actually, I didn't come from home. I was at a friend's place up in Bouquet Canyon.”

“Ah, a girlfriend, that explains the forty-five-minute wait.”

“Sorry to hold you up, Doctor. Why don't we get on with this so I don't keep you any longer than necessary.”

“Yes, please.”

He signaled Bosch to put the binders down on the dining room table. He didn't ask if Harry wanted a glass of wine, an ashtray or even a pair of swimming trunks.

“I'm sorry to intrude,” Harry offered. “I'll be quick.”

“Yes, you said that. I'm sorry this came up now myself. Testifying put me back a day on my research and writing schedule and I was trying to recoup tonight.”

Bosch noticed his hair wasn't wet. Maybe he had been working while someone else had been in the pool.

Locke took a seat at the dining room table and Bosch told the story of the concrete blonde investigation in exact chronological order after starting by showing him the copy of the new note left at the station on Monday.

While telling the details of the latest death, Bosch saw Locke's eyes brighten with interest. When he was done, the psychologist folded his arms and closed his eyes and said, “Let me think about this before we go on.”

He sat perfectly still. Bosch wasn't sure what to make of it. After twenty seconds went by, he finally said, “If you're going to think, I'm going to borrow your phone.”

“In the kitchen,” Locke said without opening his eyes.

Bosch got Amado's phone number from the task force list in the binder and called him. He could tell he had awakened the coroner's analyst.

After identifying himself, Bosch said, “Sorry to wake you. But things are happening very quickly on this new Dollmaker case. Did you read about it in the paper?”

“Yeah. But they said it wasn't known for sure if it was the Dollmaker.”

“Right. That's what I'm working on. I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“You testified yesterday about the rape kits taken from each victim. Where are they now? The evidence, I mean.”

There was a long silence before Amado said, “They're probably still in evidence storage. The coroner's policy is to keep evidence seven years after resolution of a case. You know, in case of appeals or something. Now, since your perp is dead, there would be no reason to keep the stuff even that long. But it takes an order from the medical examiner to clear out an evidence locker. The chances are the ME at the time would not have thought or remembered to do this after you, uh, killed Church. It's too big of a bureaucracy to run that well. My guess is the kits would still be there. The evidence custodian would only request a disposal order after seven years.”

“Okay,” Bosch said, excitement evident in his voice. “What about the condition? Would it still be usable as evidence? And for analysis?”

“Should be no deterioration, I would think.”

“How full's your plate?”

“It's always full. But you've got me hooked here. What's up?”

“I need someone to pull the kits from victims seven and eleven. That's Nicole Knapp and Shirleen Kemp. Got it? Seven and eleven, like the store.”

“I got it. Seven eleven. Then what?”

“Cross-reference the pubic combs. Look for the same foreign hair in both places, on both women. How long will it take?”

“Three, four days. We have to send that to the DOJ lab. I can put a rush on it, maybe get it sooner. Can I ask you something? Why are we doing this?”

“I think there was someone else besides Church. A copycat. He did seven, eleven and the one this week. And I'm thinking he might not have been smart enough to shave himself like Church. If you find similar hair in the combs, I think that will clinch it.”

“Well, I can tell you something right off that is interesting about those two. Seven and eleven.”

Bosch waited.

“I reviewed everything before I testified, so it's still fresh, you know? Remember I testified that two of the victims had extreme damage, vaginal tears? Well, it was those two, seven and eleven.”

Bosch thought about this for a few moments. From out in the dining room he heard Locke say, “Harry?”

“Be right there,” he called out. To Amado, he said, “That's interesting.”

“It means this second guy, whoever he is, he's rougher trade than Church. Those two women were hurt the most.”

Something came together in Bosch's mind then. Something that had not seemed right about Amado's testimony the day before. Now it was clear.

“The condoms,” he said.

“What about them?”

“You testified that it was a box of twelve, only three left.”

“That's right! Nine used. You subtract victims seven and eleven from the list and you have nine victims. It fits, Harry. Okay, first thing tomorrow, I'm on this. Give me three days, max.”

They hung up and Bosch wondered if Amado would get any sleep tonight.

Locke had replenished his wineglass but still did not ask Bosch if he wanted a glass when he returned to the dining room. Bosch sat down across the table from him.

“I'm ready to go on,” Locke said.

“Let's do it.”

“You're saying that the body found this week exhibited every known detail ascribed to the Dollmaker?”

“Right.”

“Except now we have a new method of disposal. A private disposal as opposed to the public challenge of the others. It's all very interesting. What else?”

“Well, from trial testimony I think we can eliminate Church as the perp in the eleventh killing. A wit produced a tape in—”

“A wit?”

“A witness. In court. He was a friend of Church's. He came in with a video that showed Church at a party at the time number eleven got abducted. The tape is convincing.”

Locke nodded his head and was silent. At least he didn't close his eyes, Bosch thought. The psychologist thoughtfully rubbed the graying whiskers on his chin, which made Bosch do the same thing.

“Then there is number seven,” Bosch said.

He told Locke about the information he got from Cerrone, about the voice the pimp had recognized.

“Voice identification wouldn't pass as evidence but say for the sake of argument he is right. That connects the concrete blonde to our seventh victim. The videotape eliminates Church from the eleventh case. Amado, the guy from the coroner's office, I don't know if you remember him, he says numbers seven and eleven had similar injuries, injuries that stood out if compared with those of the others.

“Another thing I just remembered is the makeup. After Church was dead they found the makeup in the Hyperion apartment, remember? They matched it to nine of the victims. The two victims there was no makeup for were—”

“Seven and eleven.”

“Right. So what we have are multiple ties between these two cases—seven and eleven. Then you have a tangential connection to number twelve, this week's victim, based on the pimp recognizing the customer's voice. The connection gets stronger if you look at the lifestyles of the three women. All were in porno, all worked outcall.”

“I see the pattern within the pattern,” Locke said.

“Gets better. Now, we add in our lone survivor, she was also in porno and did outcall work.”

“And she described an attacker who looked nothing like Church.”

“Exactly. That's because I don't think it was Church. I think the three, plus the survivor, make up one set of victims of one killer. The remaining nine are another set with another killer. Church.”

Locke got up and began pacing back and forth on one side of the dining room table. He kept his hand to his chin.

“Anything else?”

Bosch opened one of the binders and took out the map and a folded piece of paper on which he had earlier written a series of dates. He carefully unfolded the map and spread it on the table. He leaned in and over it.

“Okay, look. Let's call the nine Group A and the three Group B. On the map I have circled the locations where Group A victims were found. You see, if you take the Group B victims out of the picture, you have a nice geographic concentration. Group B vics were found in Malibu, West Hollywood, South Hollywood. But the A list was concentrated here in eastern Hollywood and Silverlake.”

Bosch ran his finger in a circle on the map, showing the dumping zone Church had used.

“And here in almost the center of this zone is Hyperion Street—Church's killing pad.”

He straightened up and dropped the folded paper on the map.

“Now here is a list of dates of the eleven killings originally attributed to Church. You see there is an interval pattern at the start—thirty days, thirty-two days, twenty-eight, thirty-one, thirty-one. But then the pattern goes to hell. Remember that? How it confused us back then?

“Yes, I do.”

“We have twelve days, then sixteen, then twenty-seven, thirty and eleven. The pattern disintegrates into no pattern. But now separate the dates of Group A and Group B.”

Bosch unfolded the paper. There were two columns of dates. Locke leaned over the table into the light to study the columns. Bosch could see a thin line, a scar, on the top of his bald and freckled crown.

“On Group A we now have a pattern,” Bosch continued. “A clearly discernible pattern of intervals. We have thirty days, thirty-two, twenty-eight, thirty-one, thirty-one, twenty-eight, twenty-seven and thirty. On Group B we have eighty-four days between the two killings.”

“Better stress management.”

“What?”

“The intervals between the acting out of these fantasies is dictated by the buildup of stress. I testified about this. The better the actor handles it, the longer the interval between killings. The second killer has better stress management. Or, at least, had it back then.”

Bosch watched him pace the room. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Locke said nothing.

“What I want to know is, is this possible?” Bosch asked. “I mean, is there any precedent for this that you know of?”

“Of course, it's possible. The black heart does not beat alone. You don't even have to look outside the boundaries of your own jurisdiction to find ample evidence it is possible. Look at the Hillside Stranglers. There was even a book written about them called
Two of a Kind.

“Look at the similarities in the method of operation employed by the Nightstalker and the Sunset Strip Strangler in the early eighties. The short answer is, yes, it's possible.”

“I know about those cases but this is different. I worked some of those and I know this is different. The Hillside Stranglers worked together. They were cousins. The other two were similar but there were major differences. Here, someone came along and copied the other exactly. So closely that we missed it and he got away.”

“Two killers working independently of each other but using exactly the same methodology.”

“Right.”

“Again, I say anything is possible. Another example: remember in the eighties there was the Freeway Killer in Orange and LA counties?”

Bosch nodded. He had never worked those cases so he knew little about them.

“Well, one day they got lucky and caught a Vietnam vet named William Bonin. They tied him to a handful of the cases and believed he was good for the rest. He went to death row but the killings kept happening. They kept right on happening until a highway patrol officer pulled over a guy named Randy Kraft who was driving down the freeway with a body in his car. Kraft and Bonin didn't know each other but for a while they secretly shared the nom de plume. ‘The Freeway Killer’. Each working independently of the other, out there killing. And being mistaken for the same person.”