The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

signature. It’s there.”
    “The signature?” Edgar asked.
    “The white cross on the toe. We held that back during the investigation, cut deals with all the reporters not to put it out.”
    “What about a copycat?” Edgar offered hopefully.
    “Could be. The white cross was never made public until after we closed the case. After that, Bremmer over at the
Times
wrote that book about the case. It was mentioned.”
    “So we have a copycat,” Pounds pronounced.
    “It all depends on when she died,” Bosch said. “His book came out a year after Church was dead. If she got killed after that, you probably got a copycat. If she got put in that concrete before, then I don’t know...”
    “Shit,” said Edgar.
    Bosch thought a moment before speaking again.
    “We could be dealing with one of a lot of different things. There’s the copycat. Or maybe Church had a partner and we never saw it. Or maybe... I popped the wrong guy. Maybe whoever wrote this note we got is telling the truth.”
    That hung out there in the momentary silence like dogshit on the sidewalk. Everybody walks carefully around it without looking too closely at it.
    “Where’s the note?” Bosch finally said to Pounds.
    “In my car. I’ll get it. What do you mean, he may have had a partner?”
    “I mean, say Church did do this, then where’d the note come from, since he is dead? It would obviously have to be someone who knew he did it and where he had hidden the body. If that’s the case, who is this second person? A partner? Did Church have a killing partner we never knew about?”
    “Remember the Hillside Strangler?” Edgar asked. “Turned out it was stranglers. Plural. Two cousins with the same taste for killing young women.”
    Pounds took a step back and shook his head as if to ward off a potentially career-threatening case.
    “What about Chandler, the lawyer?” Pounds said. “Say Church’s wife knows where he buried bodies, literally. She tells Chandler and Chandler hatches this scheme. She writes a note like the Dollmaker and drops it off at the station. It’s guaranteed to fuck up your case.”
    Bosch replayed that one in his mind. It seemed to work, then he saw the fault lines. He saw that they ran through all the scenarios.
    “But why would Church bury some bodies and not others? The shrink who advised the task force back then said there was a purpose to his displaying of the victims. He was an exhibitionist. Toward the end, after the seventh victim, he started dropping the notes to us and the newspaper. It doesn’t make sense that he’d leave some of the bodies to be found and some buried in concrete.”
    “True,” Pounds said.
    “I like the copycat,” Edgar said.
    “But why copy someone’s whole profile, right down to the signature, and then bury the body?” Bosch asked.
    He wasn’t really asking them. It was a question he’d have to answer himself. They stood there in silence for a long moment, each man beginning to see that the most plausible possibility might be that the Dollmaker was still alive.
    “Whoever did it, why the note?” Pounds said. He seemed very agitated. “Why would he drop us the note? He’d gotten away.”
    “Because he wants attention,” Bosch said. “Like the Dollmaker got. Like this trial is going to get.”
    The silence came back then for a long moment.
    “The key,” Bosch finally said, “is ID’ing her, finding out how long she’s been in the concrete. We’ll know then what we’ve got.”
    “So what do we do?” Edgar said.
    “I’ll tell you what we do,” Pounds said. “We don’t say a damned thing about this to anyone. Not yet. Not until we are absolutely sure of what we’ve got. We wait on the autopsy and the ID. We find out how long this girl’s been dead and what she was doing when she disappeared. We’ll make-I’ll make a call on which way we go after that.
    “Meantime, say nothing. If this is misconstrued, it could be very damaging to the department. I see some of the media is already here, so I’ll handle them. No one else is to talk. We clear?”
    Bosch and Edgar nodded and Pounds went off, slowly moving through the debris toward a knot of reporters and cameramen who stood behind the yellow tape the uniforms had put up.
    Bosch and Edgar stood silent for a few moments, watching him go.
    “I hope he knows what the hell he is saying,” Edgar said.
    “Does inspire a lot of confidence, doesn’t he?” Bosch replied.
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Bosch walked back