The concrete blonde - By Michael Connelly Page 0,18

understand that the homicide squad wasn't a job. It was a mission. As surely as murder was an art for some who committed it, homicide investigation was an art for those on the mission. And it chose you, you didn't choose it.

With that in mind it was hard for Bosch to accept that Edgar was busting ass on the case for the right reasons.

“What're you looking at?” Edgar asked without looking up from the IBM or stopping his typing.

“Nothing. I was just thinking about stuff.”

“Harry, don't worry. It's going to work out.”

Bosch dumped his cigarette butt in a Styrofoam cup of dead coffee and lit another.

“Did the priority Pounds put on the case open up the OT?”

“Absolutely,” Edgar said, smiling. “You're looking at a man who has his head fully in the overtime trough.”

At least he was honest about it, Bosch thought. Content that his original take on Edgar was still intact, Bosch went back to the murder book and ran his fingers along the edge of the thick sheaf of reports on its three rings. There were eleven divider tabs, each marked with a name of one of the Dollmaker's victims. He began leafing from section to section, looking at the crime scene photographs from each killing and the biographical data of each victim.

The women had all come from similar backgrounds; street prostitutes, the higher-class escort outfits, strippers, porno actresses who did outcall work on the side. The Dollmaker had moved comfortably along the underside of the city. He had found his victims with the same ease that they had gone into the darkness with him. There was a pattern in that, Bosch remembered the task force's psychologist had said.

But looking at the frozen faces of death in the photographs, Bosch remembered that the task force had never gotten a fix on common physical aspects of the victims. There were blondes and brunettes. Heavy-set women and frail drug addicts. There were six white women, two Lati-nas, two Asians and a black woman. No pattern. The Dollmaker had been indiscriminate in that respect, his only identifiable pattern being that he sought only women on the edge—that place where choices are limited and they go easily with a stranger. The psychologist had said each of the women was like an injured fish, sending off an invisible signal that inevitably drew the shark.

“She was white, right?” he asked Edgar.

Edgar stopped typing.

“Yeah, that's what the coroner said.”

“They already did the cut? Who?”

“No, the autopsy's tomorrow or the next day but Corazón took a look when we brought it in. She guessed that the stiff had been white. Why?”

“Nothing. Blonde?”

“Yeah, at least when she died. Bleached. If you're going to ask if I checked missing persons on a white blonde chick who went into the wind four years ago, fuck you, Harry. I can use the OT but that description wouldn't narrow it down to but three, four hundred. I ain't going to wade into that when I'll probably pull a name on the prints tomorrow. Waste of time.”

“Yeah, I know. I just wish …”

“You just wish you had some answers. We all do. But things take time sometimes, my man.”

Edgar started typing again and Harry looked down into the binder. But he couldn't help but think about the face in the box. No name, no occupation. They knew nothing about her. But something about the plaster cast told him she had somehow fit into the Dollmaker's pattern. There was a hardness there that had nothing to do with the plaster. She had come from the edge.

“Anything else found in the concrete after I left?”

Edgar stopped typing, exhaled loudly and shook his head.

“How do you mean; like the cigarette package?”

“With the other ones the Dollmaker left their purses. He'd cut the straps off to strangle them, but when he dumped the bodies we always found the purses and clothes nearby. Only thing missing was their makeup. He always kept their makeup.”

“Not this time—at least in the concrete. Pounds left a uniform on the site while they finished tearing it up. Nothing else was found. That stuff might've been stashed in the storage room and got burned up or looted. Harry, what're you thinking, copycat?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Bosch nodded and told Edgar he was sorry he kept interrupting. He went back to studying the reports. After a few minutes Edgar rolled the form out of the typewriter and brought it back to the homicide table. He snapped it into a new binder with the thin