The Concrete Blonde Read Online Free Page A

forehead as he did this and Bosch didn't tell him.
    They finally picked their way to the gathering. Bosch walked toward his former partner, Jerry Edgar, who stood with a couple of investigators Harry knew and two women he didn't. The women wore green jumpsuits, the uniform of the coroner's body movers. Minimum-wage earners who were dispatched from death scene to death scene in the blue van, picking up the bodies and taking them to the ice box.
    “Whereyat, Harry?” Edgar said.
    “Right here.”
    Edgar had just been to New Orleans for the blues festival and had somehow come back with the greeting. He said it so often it had become annoying. Edgar was the only one in the detective bureau who didn't realize this.
    Edgar was the standout amidst the group. He was not wearing a jumpsuit like Bosch—in fact, he never did because they wrinkled his Nordstrom suits—and somehow had managed to make his way into the crime scene area without getting so much as a trace of dust on the pants cuffs of his gray double-breasted suit. The real estate market—Edgar's onetime lucrative outside gig—had been in the shithouse for three years but Edgar still managed to be the sharpest dresser in the division. Bosch looked at Edgar's pale blue silk tie, knotted tightly at the black detective's throat, and guessed that it might have cost more than his own shirt and tie combined.
    Bosch looked away and nodded to Art Donovan, the SID crime scene tech, but said nothing else to the others. He was following protocol. As at any murder scene a carefully orchestrated and incestuous caste system was in effect. The detectives did most of the talking amongst themselves or to the SID tech. The uniforms didn't speak unless spoken to. The body movers, the lowest on the totem pole, spoke to no one except the coroner's tech. The coroner's tech said little to the cops. He despised them because in his view they were whiners—always needing this or that, the autopsy done, the tox tests done, all of it done by yesterday.
    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