The Concrete Blonde (4 page)

“I know, Sakai. Let's stay on this one.”

“Anyway, with this woman, the concrete apparently slowed things down for us. Sure didn't stop it, but slowed it down. It must've been like an airtight tomb in there.”

“You people going to be able to establish just how long she's been dead?”

“Probably not from the body. We get her ID'd, then you people might find out when she went missing. That'll be the way.”

Bosch looked at the fingers. They were dark sticks almost as thin as pencils.

“What about prints?”

“We'll get 'em, but not from those.”

Bosch looked over and saw Sakai smiling.

“What? She left them in the concrete?”

Sakai's glee was smashed like a fly. Bosch had ruined his surprise.

“Yeah, that's right. She left an impression, you could say. We're going to get prints, maybe even a mold of her face, if we can get what's left of that slab out of there. Whoever mixed this concrete used too much water. Made it very fine. That's a break for us. We'll get the prints.”

Bosch leaned over the gurney to study the knotted strip of leather that was wrapped around the corpse's neck. It was thin black leather and he could see the manufacturer's seam along the edges. It was a strap cut away from a purse. Like all the others. He bent closer and the cadaver's smell filled his nose and mouth. The circumference of the leather strap around the neck was small, maybe about the size of a wine bottle. Small enough to be fatal. He could see where it had cut into the now darkened skin and choked away life. He looked at the knot. A slipknot pulled tight on the right side with the left hand. Like all the others. Church had been left-handed.

There was one more thing to check. The signature, as they had called it.

“No clothes? Shoes?”

“Nothing. Like the others, remember?”

“Open it all the way. I want to see the rest.”

Sakai pulled the zipper on the black bag down all the way to the feet. Bosch was unsure if Sakai knew of the signature but was not going to bring it up. He leaned over the corpse and looked down, acting as if he was studying everything when he was only interested in the toenails. The toes were shriveled, black and cracked. The nails were cracked, too, and completely missing from a few toes. But Bosch saw the paint on the toes that were intact. Hot pink dulled by decomposition fluids, dust and age. And on the large toe on the right foot he saw the signature. What was still left of it to be seen. A tiny white cross had been carefully painted on the nail. The Dollmaker's sign. It had been there on all the bodies.

Bosch could feel his heart pounding loudly. He looked around the van's interior and began to feel claustrophobic. The first sense of paranoia was poking into his brain. His mind began churning through the possibilities. If this body matched every known specification of a Dollmaker kill, then Church was the killer. If Church was this woman's killer and is now dead himself, then who left the note at the Hollywood station front desk?

He straightened up and took in the body as a whole for the first time. Naked and shrunken, forgotten. He wondered if there were others out there in the concrete, waiting to be discovered.

“Close it,” he said to Sakai.

“It's him, isn't it? The Dollmaker.”

Bosch didn't answer. He climbed out of the van, pulled the zipper on his jumpsuit down a bit to let in some air.

“Hey, Bosch,” Sakai called from inside the van. “I'm just curious. How'd you guys find this? If the Dollmaker is dead, who told you where to look?”

Bosch didn't answer that one either. He walked slowly back underneath the tarp. It looked like the others still hadn't figured out what to do about removing the concrete the body had been found in. Edgar was standing around trying not to get dirty. Bosch signaled to him and Pounds and they gathered together at a spot to the left of the trench, where they could talk without being overheard.

“Well?” Pounds asked. “What've we got?”

“It looks like Church's work,” Bosch said.

“Shit,” Edgar said.

“How can you be sure?” Pounds asked.

“From what I can see, it matches every detail followed by the Dollmaker. Including the signature. It's there.”

“The signature?” Edgar asked.

“The white cross on the toe. We held that back during the investigation, cut deals with all the reporters not to put it out.”

“What about a copycat?” Edgar offered hopefully.

“Could be. The white cross was never made public until after we closed the case. After that, Bremmer over at the
Times
wrote that book about the case. It was mentioned.”

“So we have a copycat,” Pounds pronounced.

“It all depends on when she died,” Bosch said. “His book came out a year after Church was dead. If she got killed after that, you probably got a copycat. If she got put in that concrete before, then I don't know …”

“Shit,” said Edgar.

Bosch thought a moment before speaking again.

“We could be dealing with one of a lot of different things. There's the copycat. Or maybe Church had a partner and we never saw it. Or maybe … I popped the wrong guy. Maybe whoever wrote this note we got is telling the truth.”

That hung out there in the momentary silence like dog-shit on the sidewalk. Everybody walks carefully around it without looking too closely at it.

“Where's the note?” Bosch finally said to Pounds.

“In my car. I'll get it. What do you mean, he may have had a partner?”

“I mean, say Church did do this, then where'd the note come from, since he is dead? It would obviously have to be someone who knew he did it and where he had hidden the body. If that's the case, who is this second person? A partner? Did Church have a killing partner we never knew about?”

“Remember the Hillside Strangler?” Edgar asked. “Turned out it was stranglers. Plural. Two cousins with the same taste for killing young women.”

Pounds took a step back and shook his head as if to ward off a potentially career-threatening case.

“What about Chandler, the lawyer?” Pounds said. “Say Church's wife knows where he buried bodies, literally. She tells Chandler and Chandler hatches this scheme. She writes a note like the Dollmaker and drops it off at the station. It's guaranteed to fuck up your case.”

Bosch replayed that one in his mind. It seemed to work, then he saw the fault lines. He saw that they ran through all the scenarios.

“But why would Church bury some bodies and not others? The shrink who advised the task force back then said there was a purpose to his displaying of the victims. He was an exhibitionist. Toward the end, after the seventh victim, he started dropping the notes to us and the newspaper. It doesn't make sense that he'd leave some of the bodies to be found and some buried in concrete.”

“True,” Pounds said.

“I like the copycat,” Edgar said.

“But why copy someone's whole profile, right down to the signature, and then bury the body?” Bosch asked.

He wasn't really asking them. It was a question he'd have to answer himself. They stood there in silence for a long moment, each man beginning to see that the most plausible possibility might be that the Dollmaker was still alive.

“Whoever did it, why the note?” Pounds said. He seemed very agitated. “Why would he drop us the note? He'd gotten away.”

“Because he wants attention,” Bosch said. “Like the Dollmaker got. Like this trial is going to get.”

The silence came back then for a long moment.

“The key,” Bosch finally said, “is ID'ing her, finding out how long she's been in the concrete. We'll know then what we've got.”

“So what do we do?” Edgar said.

“I'll tell you what we do,” Pounds said. “We don't say a damned thing about this to anyone. Not yet. Not until we are absolutely sure of what we've got. We wait on the autopsy and the ID. We find out how long this girl's been dead and what she was doing when she disappeared. We'll make—I'll make a call on which way we go after that.

“Meantime, say nothing. If this is misconstrued, it could be very damaging to the department. I see some of the media is already here, so I'll handle them. No one else is to talk. We clear?”

Bosch and Edgar nodded and Pounds went off, slowly moving through the debris toward a knot of reporters and cameramen who stood behind the yellow tape the uniforms had put up.

Bosch and Edgar stood silent for a few moments, watching him go.

“I hope he knows what the hell he is saying,” Edgar said.

“Does inspire a lot of confidence, doesn't he?” Bosch replied.

“Oh, yeah.”

Bosch walked back over to the trench and Edgar followed.

“What are you going to do about the impression she left in the concrete?”

“The jackhammers don't think it's movable. They said whoever mixed the concrete she was put in didn't follow the directions too well. Used too much water and small-grain sand. It's like plaster of paris. We try to lift the whole thing out in one piece it will crumble under its own weight.”

“So?”

“Donovan's mixing plaster. He's going to make a mold of the face. On the hand—we only got the left, the right side crumbled when we dug in. Donovan's going to try using rubber silicone. He says it's the best chance of pulling out a mold with prints.”

Bosch nodded. For a few moments he watched Pounds talking to the reporters and saw the first thing worth smiling about all day. Pounds was on camera but apparently none of the reporters had told him about the dirt smeared across his forehead. He lit a cigarette and turned his attention back to Edgar.

“So, this area here was all storage rooms for rent?” he asked.

“That's right. The owner of the property was here a little while ago. Said that all this area back in here was partitioned storage. Individual rooms. The Dollmaker—er, the killer, whoever the fuck it was—could've had one of the rooms and had his privacy to do what he wanted. The only problem would be the noise he made breaking up the original flooring. But it could've been night work. Owner said most people didn't come back into the storage area at night. People who rented the rooms got a key to an exterior door off the alley. The perp could've come in and done the whole job in one night.”

The next question was obvious, so Edgar answered before Bosch asked.

“The owner can't give us the name of the renter. Not for sure, at least. The records went up in the fire. His insurance company made settlements with most people that filed claims and we'll get those names. But he said there were a few who never made a claim after the riots. He just never heard from them again. He can't remember all the names, but if one was our guy then it was probably an alias anyway. Leastwise, if I was going to rent a room and dig through the floor to bury a body, you wouldn't find me giving no real name.”

Bosch nodded and looked at his watch. He had to get going soon. He realized that he was hungry but probably wouldn't get the chance to eat. Bosch looked down at the excavation and noticed the delineation of color between the old and newer concrete. The old slab was almost white. The concrete the woman had been encased in was a dark gray. He noticed a small piece of red paper protruding from a gray chunk at the bottom of the trench. He dropped down into the excavation and picked the chunk up. It was about the size of a softball. He pounded it on the old slab until it broke apart in his hand. The paper was part of a crumpled and empty Marlboro cigarette package. Edgar pulled a plastic evidence bag from his suit pocket and held it open for Bosch to drop the discovery in.

“It's got to've been put in with the body,” he said. “Good catch.”

Bosch climbed out of the trench and looked at his watch again. It was time to go.

“Let me know if you get the ID,” he said to Edgar.

He dumped his jumpsuit back in the trunk and lit a fresh cigarette. He stood next to his Caprice and watched Pounds, who was wrapping up his skillfully planned impromptu press conference. Harry could tell by the cameras and the expensive clothes that most of the reporters were from TV. He saw Bremmer, the
Times
guy, standing at the edge of the pack. Bosch hadn't seen him in a while and noticed he had put on weight and a beard. Bosch knew that Bremmer was standing on the periphery of the circle waiting for the TV questions to end so he could hit Pounds with something solid that would take some thought to answer.

Bosch smoked and waited for five minutes before Pounds was done. He was risking being late for court but he wanted to see the note. When Pounds was finally done with the reporters he signaled Bosch to follow him to his car. Bosch got in the passenger side and Pounds handed him a photocopy.

Harry studied the note for a long time. It was written in the recognizable printed scrawl. The analyst in Suspicious Documents had called the printing Philadelphia block style and had concluded that its right-to-left slant was the result of its being the work of an untrained hand; possibly a left-handed person printing with his right hand.

Newspaper says the trial's just begun

A verdict to return on the Dollmaker's run

A bullet from Bosch fired straight and true

But the dolls should know me work's not through

On Western is the spot where my heart doth sings

When I think o the dolly laid beneath at Bing's

Too bad, good Bosch, a bullet of bad aim

Years gone past, and I'm still in the game

Bosch knew style could be copied but something about the poem ground into him. It was like the others. The same bad schoolboy rhymes, the same semiliterate attempt at high-flown language. He felt confusion and a tugging in his chest.

It's him, he thought. It's him.

3

“Ladies and gentlemen,” U.S. District Judge Alva Keyes intoned as he eyed the jury, “we begin the trial with what we call opening statements by the attorneys. Mind you, these are not to be construed by you as evidence. These are more or less blueprints—road maps, if you will, of the route each attorney wants to take with his or her case. You do not consider them evidence. They may make some highfalutin allegations, but just because they say it doesn't make it true. After all, they're lawyers.”