The concrete blonde - By Michael Connelly Page 0,144

looked at Deborah Church just as the triumph dropped out of her smile and her eyes turned dead. It all seemed surrealistic to Bosch, as if he were observing a play but was actually on the stage with the actors. The verdict meant nothing to him. He just watched everybody.

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 field 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