The Concrete Blonde

2

Bosch took Wilshire out of downtown and cut up to Third after he made it through what was left of MacArthur Park. Turning north on Western he could see up on the left the grouping of patrol cars, detective cars and the crime-scene and coroner’s vans. In the distance the HOLLYWOOD sign hung over the northern view, its letters barely legible in the smog.

Bing’s was three blackened walls cradling a pile of charred debris. No roof, but the uniforms had hung a blue plastic tarp over the top of the rear wall and strung it to the chain-link fence that ran along the front of the property. Bosch knew it hadn’t been done because the investigators wanted shade where they worked. He leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. He saw them up there, circling. The city’s carrion birds: the media helicopters.

As Bosch pulled to a stop at the curb he saw a couple of city workers standing next to an equipment truck. They had sick looks on their faces and dragged hard and deep on cigarettes. Their jackhammers were on the ground near the back of the truck. They were waiting-hoping-that their work here was done.

On the other side of their truck Pounds was standing next to the coroner’s blue van. It looked as though he was composing himself, and Bosch saw that he shared the same sick expression with the civilians. Though Pounds was commander of Hollywood detectives, including the homicide table, he had never actually worked homicide himself. Like many of the department’s administrators, his climb up the ladder was based on test scores and brownnosing, not experience. It always pleased Bosch to see someone like Pounds get a dose of what real cops dealt with every day.

Bosch looked at his watch before getting out of his Caprice. He had one hour before he had to be back in court for openers.

“Harry,” Pounds said as he walked up. “Glad you made it.”

“Always glad to check out another body, Lieutenant.”

Bosch slipped off his suit coat and put it inside his car on the seat. Then he moved to the trunk and got out a baggy blue jumpsuit and put it on over his clothes. It would be hot, but he didn’t want to come back into court covered with dirt and dust.

“Good idea,” Pounds said. “Wish I had brought my stuff.”

But Bosch knew he didn’t have any stuff. Pounds ventured to a crime scene only when there was a good chance TV would show up and he could give a sound bite. And it was only TV he was interested in. Not print media. You had to make sense for more than two sentences in a row with a newspaper reporter. And then your words became attached to a piece of paper and were there all the next day and possibly forever to haunt you. It wasn’t good department politics to talk to the print media. TV was a more fleeting and less dangerous thrill.

Bosch headed toward the blue tarp. Beneath it he saw the usual gathering of investigators. They stood next to a pile of broken concrete and along the edge of a trench dug into the concrete pad that had been the building’s foundation. Bosch looked up as one of the TV helicopters made a low flyover. They wouldn’t get much usable video with the tarp hiding the scene. They were probably dispatching ground crews now.

There was still a lot of debris in the building’s shell. Charred ceiling beams and timber, broken concrete block and other rubble. Pounds caught up with Bosch and they began carefully stepping through to the gathering beneath the tarp.

“They’ll bulldoze this and make another parking lot,” Pounds said. “That’s all the riots gave the city. About a thousand new parking lots. You want to park in South Central these days, no problem. You want a bottle of soda or to put gas in your car, then you got a problem. They burned every place down. You drive through the South Side before Christmas? They got Christmas tree lots every block, all the open space down there. I still don’t understand why those people burned their own neighborhoods.”

Bosch knew that the fact people like Pounds didn’t understand why “those people” did what they did was one reason they did it, and would have to do it again someday. Bosch looked at it as a cycle. Every twenty-five years or so the city had its soul torched by the fires of reality. But then it drove on. Quickly, without looking back. Like a hit-and-run.

Suddenly Pounds went down after slipping on the loose rubble. He stopped his fall with his hands and jumped up quickly, embarrassed.

“Damn it!” he cried out, and then, though Bosch hadn’t asked, he added, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

He quickly used his hand to carefully smooth back the strands of hair that had slipped off his balding cranium. He didn’t realize that he was smearing black char from his hand across his forehead as he did this and Bosch didn’t tell him.

They finally picked their way to the gathering. Bosch walked toward his former partner, Jerry Edgar, who stood with a couple of investigators Harry knew and two women he didn’t. The women wore green jumpsuits, the uniform of the coroner’s body movers. Minimum-wage earners who were dispatched from death scene to death scene in the blue van, picking up the bodies and taking them to the ice box.

“Whereyat, Harry?” Edgar said.

“Right here.”

Edgar had just been to New Orleans for the blues festival and had somehow come back with the greeting. He said it so often it had become annoying. Edgar was the only one in the detective bureau who didn’t realize this.

Edgar was the standout amidst the group. He was not wearing a jumpsuit like Bosch-in fact, he never did because they wrinkled his Nordstrom suits-and somehow had managed to make his way into the crime scene area without getting so much as a trace of dust on the pants cuffs of his gray double-breasted suit. The real estate market-Edgar’s onetime lucrative outside gig-had been in the shithouse for three years but Edgar still managed to be the sharpest dresser in the division. Bosch looked at Edgar’s pale blue silk tie, knotted tightly at the black detective’s throat, and guessed that it might have cost more than his own shirt and tie combined.

Bosch looked away and nodded to Art Donovan, the SID crime scene tech, but said nothing else to the others. He was following protocol. As at any murder scene a carefully orchestrated and incestuous caste system was in effect. The detectives did most of the talking amongst themselves or to the SID tech. The uniforms didn’t speak unless spoken to. The body movers, the lowest on the totem pole, spoke to no one except the coroner’s tech. The coroner’s tech said little to the cops. He despised them because in his view they were whiners-always needing this or that, the autopsy done, the tox tests done, all of it done by yesterday.

Bosch looked into the trench they stood above. The jackhammer crew had broken through the slab and dug a hole about eight feet long and four feet deep. They had then excavated sideways into a large formation of concrete that extended three feet below the surface of the slab. There was a hollow in the stone. Bosch dropped to a crouch so he could look closer and saw that the concrete hollow was the outline of a woman’s body. It was as if it were a mold into which plaster could be poured to make a cast, maybe to manufacture a mannikin. But it was empty inside.

“Where’s the body?” Bosch asked.

“They took what was left out already,” Edgar said. “It’s in the bag in the truck. We’re trying to figure out how to get this piece of the slab outta here in one piece.”

Bosch looked silently into the hollow for a few moments before standing back up and making his way back out from beneath the tarp. Larry Sakai, the coroner’s investigator, followed him to the coroner’s van and unlocked and opened the back door. Inside the van it was sweltering and the smell of Sakai’s breath was stronger than the odor of industrial disinfectant.

“I figured they’d call you out here,” Sakai said.

“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

“’Cause it looks like the fuckin’ Dollmaker, man.”

Bosch said nothing, so as not to give Sakai any indication of confirmation. Sakai had worked some of the Dollmaker cases four years earlier. Bosch suspected he was responsible for the name the media attached to the serial killer. Someone had leaked details of the killer’s repeated use of makeup on the bodies to one of the anchors at Channel 4. The anchor christened the killer the Dollmaker. After that, the killer was called that by everybody, even the cops.

But Bosch always hated that name. It said something about the victims as well as the killer. It depersonalized them, made it easier for the Dollmaker stories that were broadcast to be entertaining instead of horrifying.

Bosch looked around the van. There were two gurneys and two bodies. One filled the black bag completely, the unseen corpse having been heavy in life or bloated in death. He turned to the other bag, the remains inside barely filling it. He knew this was the body taken from the concrete.

“Yeah, this one,” Sakai said. “This other’s a stabbing up on Lankershim. North Hollywood’s working it. We were coming in when we got the dispatch on this one.”

That explained how the media caught on so quickly, Bosch knew. The coroner’s dispatch frequency played in every newsroom in the city.

He studied the smaller body bag a moment and without waiting for Sakai to do it he yanked open the zipper on the heavy black plastic. It unleashed a sharp, musty smell that was not as bad as it could have been had they found the body sooner. Sakai pulled the bag open and Bosch looked at the remains of a human body. The skin was dark and like leather stretched taut over the bones. Bosch was not repulsed because he was used to it and had the ability to become detached from such scenes. He sometimes believed that looking at bodies was his life’s work. He had ID’d his mother’s body for the cops when he wasn’t yet twelve years old, he had seen countless dead in Vietnam, and in nearly twenty years with the cops the bodies had become too many to put a number to. It had left him, most times, as detached from what he saw as a camera. As detached, he knew, as a psychopath.

The woman in the bag had been small, Bosch could tell. But the deterioration of tissue and shrinkage made the body seem even smaller than it had certainly been in life. What was left of the hair was shoulder length and looked as if it had been bleached blonde. Bosch could see the powdery remains of makeup on the skin of the face. His eyes were drawn to the breasts because they were shockingly large in comparison to the rest of the shrunken corpse. They were full and rounded and the skin was stretched taut across them. It somehow seemed to be the most grotesque feature of the corpse because it was not as it should have been.

“Implants,” Sakai said. “They don’t decompose. Could probably take ’em out and resell them to the next stupid chick that wants ’em. We could start a recycling program.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He was suddenly depressed at the thought of the woman-whoever she was-doing that to her body to somehow make herself more appealing, and then to end up this way. Had she only succeeded, he wondered, in making herself appealing to her killer?

Sakai interrupted his thoughts.

“If the Dollmaker did this, that means she’s been in the concrete at least four years, right? So if that’s the case, decomp isn’t that bad for that length of time. Still got the hair, eyes, some internal tissues. We’ll be able to work with it. Last week, I picked up a piece of work, a hiker they found out in Soledad Canyon. They figure it was a guy went missing last summer. Now he was nothing but bones. ’Course out in the open like that, you got the animals. You know they come in through the ass. It’s the softest entry and the animals-”

“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 theTimes 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 dogshit 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, theTimes 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.

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.