The Concrete Blonde

by Michael Connelly

  Judge Keyes began his thank-you speech to the jury, telling them how they had performed their Constitutional duties and should be proud to have served and to be Americans. Bosch tuned it out and just sat there. Sylvia came to mind and he wished he could tell her.

  The judge banged down the gavel and the jury filed out for the last time. Then he left the bench and Bosch thought he might have had an annoyed look on his face.

  “Harry,” Belk said. “It’s a damn good verdict.”

  “Is it? I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s a mixed verdict. But essentially the jury found what we already admitted to. We said you made mistakes going in like you did but you already had been reprimanded by your department for that. The jury found as a matter of law that you should not have kicked down the door like that. But in awarding only two dollars they were saying they believed you. Church made the furtive move. And Church was the Dollmaker.”

  He patted Bosch’s back. He was probably waiting for Harry to thank him but it didn’t come.

  “What about Chandler?”

  “Well, there’s the rub, so to speak. The jury found for the plaintiff so we are going to have to pick up her tab. She’ll probably ask for about one-eighty, maybe two hundred. We’ll probably settle it for ninety. It’s not bad, Harry. Not at all.”

  “I gotta go.”

  Bosch stood up and waded through a clot of people and reporters to get out of the courtroom. He moved quickly to the escalator and once on started fumbling to get the last cigarette out of his pack. Bremmer jumped on the step behind him, his notebook out and ready.

  “Congrats, Harry,” he said.

  Bosch looked at him. The reporter seemed sincere.

  “For what? They said I’m some kind of a Constitutional goon.”

  “Yeah, but you walk away two bucks light. That ain’t bad.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “Well, any comment on the record? I take it ‘Constitutional goon’ was off, right?”

  “Yeah, I’d appreciate that. Uh, tell you what, let me think for a while. I’ve gotta go but I’ll call you later. Why don’t you go back up and talk to Belk. He needs to see his name in the paper.”

  Outside he lit the cigarette and pulled the rover out of his pocket.

  “Edgar, you up?”

  “Here.”

  “How is it?”

  “Better come on out, Harry. Everybody’s rolling on it.”

  Bosch threw the cigarette in the ash can.

  • • •

  They had done a bad job of keeping it contained. By the time Bosch got to the house on Carmelina, there was already one news copter circling overhead and two other channels were there on the ground. It would not be long until it was a circus. The case would have two big draws: the Follower and Honey Chandler.

  Bosch had to park two houses away because of the glut of official cars and vans lining both sides of the street. Parking control officers were just beginning to put down flares and close the street to traffic.

  The property had been preserved by yellow plastic police lines. Bosch signed an attendance log held by a uniform officer at the tape and slipped underneath. It was a two-story Bauhaus-style home set on a hillside. Standing outside, Bosch knew the floor-to-ceiling windows of the upstairs rooms would offer sweeping views of the flats below. He counted two chimneys. It was a nice house in a nice neighborhood filled with nice lawyers and UCLA professors. Not anymore, he thought. He wished he had a cigarette as he headed in.

  Edgar was standing just inside the door in a tiled entryway. He was talking on a mobile phone and it sounded as if he was telling the media relations unit to send people out to handle this. He saw Bosch and pointed up the stairs.

  The staircase was right off the entry and Bosch went up. There was a wide hallway that passed four doorways upstairs. A group of detectives milled about outside the farthest door and occasionally they looked inside at something. Bosch walked over.

  In a way, Bosch knew, he had trained his mind to be almost like that of a psychopath. He practiced the psychology of objectification when at a death scene. Dead people weren’t people, they were objects. He had to look at bodies as corpses, as evidence. It was the only way to deal with it and get the job done. It was the only way to survive. But this, of course, was always easier said or thought about than done. Often Bosch stumbled.

  As a member of the original Dollmaker task force, he had seen the last six of the victims attributed to the serial killer. He saw them “in situ,” as it was called—in the situation in which they were found. None of them was easy. There was something that seemed so helpless about these victims that it overwhelmed his best efforts at objectification. And knowing that they came from street backgrounds had made it all the worse. It was as if the torture visited upon each one by her killer was only the last in a life of indignities.

  Now he looked down at the naked and tortured body of Honey Chandler and no manner of mental tricks or deception could prevent the horror he saw from burning into his soul. For the first time in his years as a homicide investigator, he wanted to close his eyes and just go away.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he stood with the other men who looked down with dead eyes and nonchalant poses. Like a gathering of serial killers. Something made him think of the bridge game at San Quentin that Locke had mentioned. A foursome of psychopaths sitting around the table, more killings to their credit than cards on the table.

  Chandler was faceup, her arms outstretched at her sides. Her face was garishly painted with makeup. It hid much of the purplish discoloration which spread from her neck up. A leather strap, cut from a purse which lay spilled on the floor, was tied tightly around her neck, knotted on the right side as if pulled closed with a left hand. In keeping with the prior cases, whatever restraints and gag the killer used had been taken away with him.

  But there was something outside of the program. Bosch saw that the Follower was improvising, now that he was no longer operating under the camouflage of the Dollmaker. Chandler’s body was riddled with cigarette burns and bite marks. Some of them had bled and some were purplish with bruising, meaning the torture had taken place while she was still alive.

  Rollenberger was in the room and was giving orders, even telling the photographer what angles he wanted. Nixon and Johnson were also in the room. Bosch realized, as probably Chandler had, that the final indignity was that her uncovered body would be left on display for hours in view of men who had despised her in life. Nixon looked up and saw Bosch in the hallway and stepped out of the room.

  “Harry, what made you tumble to her?”

  “She didn’t show up for court today. Thought it was worth checking out. Guess she was the blonde. Too bad I didn’t see it right away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Got a TOD yet?”

  “Yeah, an estimate. Coroner’s tech says time of death was at least forty-eight hours ago.”

  Bosch nodded. It meant she was dead before he even found the note. It made it a little easier.

  “Hear anything on Locke?”

  “Nada.”

  “You and Johnson on point on this one?”

  “Yeah, Hans Off put us on it. Edgar discovered it but he’s primary on last week’s case. I know it was your tumble but I guess Hans Off figured with court and—”

  “Don’t worry about it. What do you need me to do?”

  “You tell me. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to stay out of there. I didn’t like her but I liked her, you know what I mean?”

  “I think so. Yeah, this one’s bad. You notice he’s changing? He’s biting now. Burning.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Anything else new?”

  “Not that we can tell.”

  “I’m going to have a look around the rest of the house. Is it clean?”

  “We haven’t had time to dust. Just a quick look through. Use gloves and let me know what you find.”

  Bosch went to one of the equipment boxes lined along
the wall in the hallway and pulled a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser that looked like a Kleenex box.

  Irving passed by him wordlessly on the staircase, their eyes barely holding each other’s for a second. When he got down to the entry, he saw two deputy chiefs standing out on the front steps. They weren’t doing anything, just standing where they would be sure to be seen on the TV footage looking serious and concerned. Bosch could see that a growing number of reporters and cameramen were gathering at the plastic line.

  He looked around and found Chandler’s home office in a small room off the living room. Two of the walls contained built-in shelves that were lined with books. The room had one window that looked out onto the commotion just beyond the front lawn. He pulled on the gloves and began looking through the drawers of the desk. He didn’t find what he was looking for but he could tell the desk had been rifled by someone else. Things were scattered in the drawers, papers from files were outside of files. It wasn’t as neat as Chandler had kept her things on the plaintiff’s table.

  He checked underneath the blotter. The note from the Follower wasn’t there. There were two books on the desk, Black’s Law Dictionary and the California Penal Code. He fanned the pages of both but there was no note. He leaned back in the leather desk chair and looked up at the two walls of books.

  He figured it would take two hours to go through all the books and he still might not find the note. Then he noticed the cracked green spine of a book on the second-to-the-top shelf nearest the window. He recognized the book. It was the one Chandler had read from during closing arguments. The Marble Faun. He got up and pulled the book out of its slot.

  The note was there, folded into the center of the book. So was the envelope it came in. And Bosch quickly learned he had guessed correctly about her. The note was a photocopy of the page dropped at the police station last Monday, the day of opening statements. What was different about this one was the envelope. It hadn’t been dropped off. It had been mailed. The envelope was stamped and then canceled in Van Nuys on the Saturday before opening statements.

  Bosch looked at the postmark and knew it would be impossible to try any kind of trace on it. There would also be numerous prints on it from the many postal employees who handled it. He decided the note would be of little evidentiary value.

  He left the office, carrying the note and envelope by the corners with his gloved hands. He had to go upstairs to find a tech with plastic evidence bags to place them in. He looked through the doorway into the bedroom and saw the coroner’s tech and two body movers spreading open a plastic bag on a gurney. The public display of Honey Chandler was about to end. Bosch stepped back so he did not have to watch. Edgar walked over after reading the note, which the tech was labeling.

  “He sent the same note to her? How come?”

  “Guess he wanted to make sure we didn’t sit on the one he dropped off for us. If we did, he could count on her bringing it up.”

  “If she had the note all along, how come she wanted to subpoena ours? She could’ve just taken this one into court.”

  “I think maybe she thought she’d get more mileage out of ours. Making the police turn it over gave it more legitimacy in the eyes of the jury. If she had just presented her own, my lawyer could’ve gotten it shot down. I don’t know. It’s just a guess.”

  Edgar nodded.

  “By the way,” Bosch said, “how’d you get in when you got here?”

  “Front door was unlocked. No scratches on the lock or other signs of break-in.”

  “The Follower came here and was let in. . . . She wasn’t lured to him. Something’s going on. He’s changing. He’s biting and burning. He’s making mistakes. He’s letting something get to him. Why’d he go for her, rather than stick to his pattern of ordering victims from the sex tabs?”

  “Too bad Locke’s the fucking suspect. It’d be nice to ask him what all this means.”

  “Detective Harry Bosch!” a voice called from downstairs. “Harry Bosch!”

  Bosch walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. A young patrolman, the one who was keeping the scene attendance log at the tape, stood in the entry area looking up.

  “Guy at the tape wants to come in. Said he’s a shrink who’s been working with you.”

  Bosch looked over at Edgar. Their eyes locked. He looked back down at the patrolman.

  “What’s his name?”

  The patrolman looked down at his clipboard and read off, “John Locke, from USC.”

  “Send him in.”

  Bosch started down the stairs and beckoned to Edgar with his hand. He said, “I’m taking him into her office. Tell Hans Off and then come down.”

  Bosch told Locke to sit in the chair behind the desk while he chose to stay standing. Through the window behind the psychologist, Bosch saw the press gathering into a tight group in preparation for a briefing by someone from media relations.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Bosch said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I came as soon as I heard,” Locke said. “But I thought you said you had the suspect under surveillance.”

  “We did. It was the wrong guy. How did you hear?”

  “It’s all over the radio. I heard it while I was driving in and came right here. They didn’t put out the exact address but once I got to Carmelina this wasn’t hard to find. Just follow the helicopters.”

  Edgar slipped into the room then and closed the door.

  “Detective Jerry Edgar, meet Dr. John Locke.”

  Edgar nodded but made no move to shake his hand. He stayed back, leaning against the door.

  “Where’ve you been? We’ve been trying to find you since yesterday.”

  “Vegas.”

  “Vegas? Why’d you go to Vegas?”

  “Why else, to gamble. I’m also thinking about a book project on the legal prostitutes that work in the towns north of—look, aren’t we wasting time here? I’d like to view the body in situ. Then I could give you a read on it.”

  “Body’s already moved, Doc,” Edgar said.

  “It is? Shit. Maybe I could survey the scene and—”

  “We’ve already got too many people up there right now,” Bosch said. “Maybe later. What do you make of bite marks? Cigarette burns?”

  “Are you saying that’s what you’ve found this time?”

  “Plus, it wasn’t a bimbo from the sex tabs,” Edgar added. “He came here, she didn’t come to him.”

  “He is changing quickly. It appears to be complete disassembling. Or some unknown force or reason compelling his actions.”

  “Such as?” Bosch asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We tried to call you in Vegas. You never checked in.”

  “Oh, the Stardust? Well, coming in I saw the new MGM had just opened and decided to see if they had a room. They did. I was there.”

  “Anyone with you?” Bosch asked.

  “The whole time?” Edgar added.

  A puzzled look came over Locke’s face.

  “What is going—”

  He understood now. He shook his head.

  “Harry, are you kidding?”

  “No. Are you, coming here like this?”

  “I think you—”

  “No, don’t answer that. Tell you what, it would probably be best for all of us if you know your rights before we go any further. Jerry, you got a card?”

  Edgar pulled out his wallet and from it took a white plastic card with the Miranda warning printed on it. He started reading it to Locke. Both Bosch and Edgar knew the warning by heart but a departmental memo that was distributed with the plastic card said it was best practice to read directly from a card. This made it difficult for a defense attorney to later attack in court how the police administered the rights warning to a client.

  As Edgar read the card, Bosch looked out the window at the huge clot of reporters standing around one of the deputy chiefs. He saw that Bremmer was there now. But the deputy chief’s words must not have meant mu
ch; the reporter was not writing anything down. He was just standing to the side of the pack and smoking. He was probably waiting for the real info from the real guns, Irving and Rollenberger.

  “Am I under arrest?” Locke asked when Edgar was done.

  “Not yet,” said Edgar.

  “We just need to clear some things up,” Bosch said.

  “I resent the hell out of this.”

  “I understand. Now, do you want to clear this trip to Vegas up? Was there anyone with you?”

  “From six o’clock Friday until I got out of my car down the block ten minutes ago, there has been a person with me every minute of every day except when I was in the bathroom. This is ridic—”

  “And that is who, this person?”

  “It’s a friend of mine. Her name is Melissa Mencken.”

  Bosch remembered the young woman named Melissa who was in Locke’s front office.

  “The child-psych major? From your office? The blonde?”

  “That’s right,” Locke answered reluctantly.

  “And she will tell us you were together the whole time? Same room, same hotel, same everything, right?”

  “Yes. She’ll confirm it all. We were just coming back when we heard about this on the radio. KFWB. She’s out there waiting for me in the car. Go talk to her.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “It’s the blue Jag. Look, Harry, you go talk to her and clear this up. If you don’t make noise about me being with a student, I won’t make a sound about this . . . this interrogation.”

  “This is no interrogation, Doctor. Believe me, if we interrogate you, you’ll know it.”

  He nodded to Edgar, who slipped out the door to go find the Jag. When they were alone, Bosch pulled a high-backed chair away from the wall and sat down in front of the desk to wait.

  “What happened to the suspect you were following, Harry?”

  “We did.”

  “What’s that supposed to—”

  “Never mind.”

  They sat in silence for nearly five minutes until Edgar stuck his head in the door and signaled Bosch to come out.