The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

briefly flashed from a parking lot behind an old gas station that was now a taco stand, featuring a sign that said HOME OF THE KOSHER BURRITO-PASTRAMI! He saw two figures in the car, which was a gray Eldorado, and just looked away.
    Mora was at his desk eating a burrito that looked disgusting to Bosch because he could see it was filled with pastrami. It looked unnatural.
    “Harry,” he said with his mouth full.
    “How is it?”
    “It’s okay. I’ll go back to plain beef after this. I just tried it ‘cause I saw a couple guys from RHD over across the street. One of ‘em said they come all the way over from Parker to get these kosher things there. Thought I’d give it a try.”
    “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that place.”
    “Well, you ask me, it ain’t worth coming over from Parker Center for.”
    He wrapped what was left in the oil-stained paper it came in and then got up and walked out of the squad room. Bosch heard the package hit the bottom of a trash can in the hallway and then Mora was back.
    “Don’t want it to stink up my trash can.”
    “So, you buzzed?”
    “Yeah, that was me. How’s the trial?”
    “Waiting on a verdict.”
    “Shit, that’s scary.”
    Bosch knew from experience that if Mora wanted to tell you something, he would tell you in his own time. It would do him no good to keep asking the vice cop why he beeped him.
    Back in his chair, Mora swiveled around to the filing cabinets behind him and began opening drawers. Over his shoulder, he said, “Hang on, Harry. I gotta get some stuff together for you here.”
    It took him two minutes during which Bosch saw him open several different files, take out photos and create a short stack. Then he turned back around.
    “Four,” he said. “I’ve come up with four more actresses that dropped out under what might be termed suspicious circumstances.”
    “Only four.”
    “Yeah. Actually, there were more than four chicks that people mentioned. But only four fit that profile we talked about. Blonde and built. There is also Gallery, who we already knew about, and your concrete blonde. So we’ve got six altogether. Here are the new ones.”
    He handed the group of photos across the desk to Bosch. Harry slowly looked through them. They were color publicity glossies with each woman’s name printed in the white border at the bottom of the photo. Two of the women were naked and posing indoors on chairs, their legs apart. The other two were photographed at the beach and were wearing bikinis that would probably be illegal on most public beaches. To Bosch, the women in the photos almost looked interchangeable. Their bodies were similar. Their faces had the same fake pouts that were intended to show mystery and sexual abandonment at the same time. Each of the women had hair so blonde it was nearly white.
    “All Snow Whites,” Mora said, an unneeded commentary that made Bosch look up from the photos to look at him. The vice cop just stared back and said, “You know, the hair. That’s what a producer calls them when he’s casting movies. He says he wants a Snow White for this part ‘cause he already has a red or whatever. Snow White. It’s like the model name. These chicks are all interchangeable.”
    Bosch looked back down at the photos, not trusting that his eyes would not give his suspicions away.
    He realized, though, that much of what Mora had just said was true. The main physical differences between the women in the photos were the tattoos and their locations on each body. Each woman had a small tattoo of a heart or a rose or a cartoon character. Candi Cummings had a heart just to the left of her carefully trimmed triangle of pubic hair. Mood Indigo had some kind of cartoon just above her left ankle but Bosch couldn’t make it out because of the angle the photograph had been taken from. Dee Anne Dozit had a heart wrapped in a vine of barbed wire about six inches above the left nipple, which was pierced with a gold ring. And TeXXXas Rose had a red rose on the soft part of her right hand between the thumb and first finger.
    Bosch realized they might all be dead now.
    “No one’s heard from them?”
    “No one in the biz, at least.”
    “You’re right. Physically, they fit.”
    “Yeah.”
    “They did outcall?”
    “I assume they did, but I’m not sure yet. The people I talked to dealt with them in the film biz so they didn’t know what these girls did when the cameras stopped rolling, so to speak. Or, so they said. My next