Suicide Run

these women, check their apartments, see if anybody has any of their belongings still. I can tell you right now my lieutenant isn’t going to let me go off and do that. I’ll have to work it like a hobby.”
    “Who’s the lieutenant in Hollywood? Is that Pounds?”
    “Yep. Pounds. He’s not much of an expansive thinker.”
    Rider smiled and nodded.
    “Look, I’m sorry I wasted your lunch break,” Bosch said.
    “Not at all,” she said. “Besides, I’m not finished yet.”
    She held up the five remaining files she needed to look through. He smiled and nodded. He liked her confidence. They dropped into silence and dove back into the files.
    In ten minutes Bosch was finished with the files and had found nothing that would bump the case up higher than a hobby. He asked Rider if she wanted a cup of coffee but she said no. He got up to get a cup for himself. The cafeteria was thinning out and getting quiet after the lunch rush. When he got back to their table Rider was standing. Bosch thought she had finished and was about to go. But she was standing because she was excited.
    “I think I found something,” she said.
    Bosch put his coffee down on the table and looked at what she had. She was holding two headshot photographs. They were of two different women.
    “This first one is from a case last year,” Rider said. “Her name was Nancy Crowe. Lived on Kester Avenue in Sherman Oaks. This other one is Marcie Conlon. Died five months ago. Also an overdose. Lived up in Whitley Heights.”
    “Okay.”
    Bosch looked at the headshots. The women had entirely different looks. Crowe had short dark hair and pale white skin. Conlon was blond and tan. Just by looking at the photos Bosch would have guessed that Crowe was a serious actress and Conlon was not. He knew that he was subscribing to a sweeping generalization so it was not something he would say out loud.
    “Look,” Rider said.
    She put the photos down on the table side by side.
    “What’s the same?”
    Bosch immediately saw what had been there all along and simply gone unnoticed in his survey of everything contained in the files. In the Crowe photo the subject was posed, looking around the corner of a brick wall. Bosch guessed that she was supposed to look mysterious, the photo showing depth of character and perhaps making up for her not being a knockout beauty. In the Conlon photo the woman was posed with her back leaning against a brick wall. Her pose was meant to be alluring, even sexually intriguing, and it counterposed the soft beauty of her features against the hard brick wall.
    “The brick wall,” Bosch said.
    Using her finger, Rider pointed out bricks in each photo that were the same. They were either chipped or scuffed in some way that made them unique. It was clear that both actresses had posed at the same brick wall.
    “But now look,” she said.
    She flipped the photos over, and below the listing of credits was the name of the photographer. The names were different but each name was followed by a matching location. Hollywood & Vine Studios.
    “So you have different photographers using the same studio,” Bosch said.
    He was thinking out loud, trying to take it to the next step.
    “Did you look through the other files where there are headshots?” he asked.
    “No, I just discovered this connection.”
    “Good work.”
    Bosch quickly went back to the stack of files and soon they were pulling the headshot photos out of files where they found them.
    “Every actress in the city needs headshots,” Rider said as she worked. “It’s like death and taxes. You walk down Hollywood Boulevard and there are ads for photographers on every light pole.”
    In five minutes they had six headshot photos of dead actresses with photo credits from six different photographers but all from Hollywood & Vine Studios. Lizbeth Grayson’s photo—the shot Bosch had borrowed from the acting coach—was one of the six.
    Bosch spread the six shots out side by side and stared at them.
    “Could this just be a coincidence?” Rider asked. “Maybe Hollywood and Vine Studios is a place all the photographers use.”
    “Maybe,” Bosch said, continuing to stare at the photos.
    “I guess we could check out wheth—”
    “Wait a minute,” Bosch said excitedly.
    He picked up one of the photos and looked at it closely. It was a shot of an actress named Marnie Fox. She had supposedly committed suicide by overdose six weeks earlier. He nodded and put it back down. He then