Michael Connelly (104 page)

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 Doll-maker’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 copy-cat. 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.”