The concrete blonde - By Michael Connelly Page 0,29
the widow glance in Chandler's direction. He looked at the lawyer but she made no move, no change in facial expression to help her client.
“I guess,” the widow finally said, “that was one of the questions you could have asked him if Mr. Bosch had not murdered him in cold blood.”
Without Belk's prompting, Judge Keyes said, “The jury will disregard that last characterization. Mrs. Church, you know better than that.”
“I'm sorry, Your Honor.”
“Nothing further,” Belk said as he left the lectern.
The judge called a ten-minute recess.
During the break, Bosch went out to the ash can. Money Chandler didn't come out but the homeless man made a pass. Bosch offered him a whole cigarette, which he took and put in his shirt pocket. He was unshaven again and the slight look of dementia was still in his eyes.
“Your name is Faraday,” Bosch said, as if speaking to a child.
“Yeah, what about it, Lieutenant?”
Bosch smiled. He had been made by a bum. All except for the rank.
“Nothing about it. I just heard that's what it was. I also heard you were a lawyer once.”
“I still am. I'm just not practicing.”
He turned and watched a jail bus go by on Spring, heading to the courthouse. It was full of angry faces looking out through the black wire windows. Somebody by one of the back windows made Bosch as a cop, too, and stuck his middle index finger up through the wire. Bosch smiled back at him.
“My name was Thomas Faraday. But now I prefer Tommy Faraway.”
“What happened to make you stop practicing law?”
Tommy looked back at him with milky eyes.
“Justice is what happened. Thanks for the smoke.” He walked away then, cup in hand, and headed toward City Hall. Maybe that was his turf, too.
After the break, Chandler called a lab analyst from the coroner's office named Victor Amado. He was a very small and bookish-looking man with eyes that shifted from the judge to the jury as he walked to the witness chair. He was balding badly, though he seemed to be no more than twenty-eight. Bosch remembered that four years earlier he had all his hair and members of the task force referred to him as The Kid. He knew Belk was going to call Amado as a witness if Chandler didn't.
Belk leaned over and whispered that Chandler was following a good guy–bad guy pattern by alternating police witnesses with her sympathetic witnesses.
“She'll probably put one of the daughters up there after Amado,” he said. “As a strategy, it is completely unoriginal.”
Bosch didn't mention that Belk's trust-us-we're-the-cops defense had been around as long as the civil suit.
Amado testified in painstaking detail about how he had been given all of the bottles and compacts containing makeup that were found in Church's Hyperion apartment and had then traced them to specific victims of the Dollmaker. He said he had come up with nine separate lots or groupings of makeup—mascara, blush, eyeliner, lipstick, etc. Each lot was connected through chemical analysis to samples taken from the faces of the victims. This was further corroborated by detectives who interviewed relatives and friends to determine what brands the victims were known to use. It all matched up, Amado said. And in one instance, he added, an eyelash found on a mascara brush in Church's bathroom cabinet was identified as having come from the second victim.
“What about the two victims no matching makeup was found for?” Chandler asked.
“That was a mystery. We never found their makeup.”
“In fact, with the exception of the eyelash that was allegedly found and matched to victim number two, you can't be one hundred percent sure that the makeup police did supposedly find in the apartment came from the victims, correct?”
“This stuff is mass produced and sold around the world. So there is a lot of it out there, but I would guess that the chances of nine different exact combinations of makeup being found like that by mere coincidence are astronomical.”
“I didn't ask you to guess, Mr. Amado. Please answer the question I asked.”
After flinching at being dressed down, Amado said, “The answer is we can't be one hundred percent sure, that is correct.”
“Okay, now tell the jury about the DNA testing you did that connected Norman Church to the eleven killings.”
“There wasn't any done. There—”
“Just answer the question, Mr. Amado. What about serology tests, connecting Mr. Church to the crimes?”
“There were none.”
“Then it was the makeup comparison that was the clincher—the linchpin in the determination that Mr. Church was the Dollmaker?”