The concrete blonde - By Michael Connelly Page 0,28

question would be the use of force. Even if the jury determined that Norman Church, family man, was the Dollmaker, serial killer, they would have to decide whether Bosch's actions were appropriate.

Chandler called her client, Deborah Church, to the witness stand right after lunch. She gave a tearful account of a wonderful life with a wonderful husband who fawned over everybody; his daughters, his wife, his mother and mother-in-law. No misogynistic aberrations here. No sign of childhood abuse. The widow held a box of Kleenex in her hand as she testified, going to a new tissue every other question.

She wore the traditional black dress of a widow. Bosch remembered how appealing Sylvia had been when he saw her at her husband's funeral dressed in black. Deborah Church looked downright scary. It was as if she reveled in her role here. The widow of the fallen innocent. The real victim. Chandler had coached her well.

It was a good show, but it was too good to be true and Chandler knew it. Rather than leave the bad things to be drawn out on cross-examination, she finally got around to asking Deborah Church how, her marriage being so wonderful, her husband was in that garage apartment—which was rented under an alias—when Bosch kicked the door open.

“We had been having some difficulty.” She stopped to dab an eye with a tissue. “Norman was going through a lot of stress—he had a lot of responsibility in the aircraft design department. He needed to expend it and so he took the apartment. He said it was to be alone. To think. I didn't know about this woman he brought there. I think it was probably his first time doing something like that. He was a naive man. I think she saw this. She took his money and then set him up by calling the police on him and giving the crazy story that he was the Dollmaker. There was a reward, you know.”

Bosch wrote a note on a pad he kept in front of him and slid it over to Belk, who read it and then jotted something down on his own pad.

“What about all of the makeup found there, Mrs. Church?” Chandler asked. “Can you explain that?”

“All I know is that I would have known if my husband was that monster. I would have known. If there was makeup found there, it was put there by somebody else. Maybe after he was already dead.”

Bosch believed he could feel the eyes of the courtroom burning into him as the widow accused him of planting evidence after murdering her husband.

After that, Chandler moved her questioning on to safer topics like Norman Church's relationship with his daughters and then ended her direct examination with a weeper.

“Did he love his daughters?”

“Very much so,” Mrs. Church said as a new production of tears rolled down her cheeks. This time she did not wipe them away with a tissue. She let the jury watch them roll down her face into the folds of her double chin.

After giving her a few moments to compose herself, Belk got up and took his place at the lectern.

“Again, Your Honor, I will be brief. Mrs. Church, I want to make this very clear to the jury. Did you say in your testimony that you knew about your husband's apartment but didn't know about any women he may or may not have brought there?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

Belk looked at his pad.

“Did you not tell detectives on the night of the shooting that you had never heard of any apartment? Didn't you emphatically deny that your husband even had such an apartment?”

Deborah Church didn't answer.

“I can arrange to have a tape of your first interview played in court if it will help refresh your—”

“Yes, I said that. I lied.”

“You lied? Why would you lie to the police?”

“Because a policeman had just killed my husband. I didn't—I couldn't deal with them.”

“The truth is you told the truth that night, correct, Mrs. Church? You never knew about any apartment.”

“No, that's not true. I knew about it.”

“Had you and your husband talked about it?”

“Yes, we discussed it.”

“You approved of it?”

“Yes … , reluctantly. It was my hope he would stay at home and we could work this stress out together.”

“Okay, Mrs. Church, then if you knew of the apartment, had discussed it and given your approval, reluctantly or not, why then did your husband rent it under a false name?”

She didn't answer. Belk had nailed her. Bosch thought he saw