The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

and walked to the office’s open door. He stepped into the hall and looked at the plastic name plate affixed to the wall outside. Then he came back in.
    “Bosch, what are you doing?”
    “It’s funny. I thought you were a filing deputy. I didn’t know you were a trial deputy, too.”
    Newell dropped his pencil on his pad. His face got redder, the blotches spreading to his forehead.
    “Look, I am a filing deputy. But it is part of my responsibility to make sure we have the best case possible from the get go. Every case that comes through that door I could file on, but that’s not the point. The point is to have good, credible evidence and a lot of it. Cases that don’t backfire. So I push, Bosch. I-”
    “How old are you?”
    “What?”
    “How old?”
    “Twenty—six. What’s that got to-”
    “Listen to me, you little prick. Don’t you ever call me by my last name again. I was making cases like this before you cracked your first law book and I’ll be making them long after you move your convertible Saab and your self-centered white-bread show to Century City. You can call me Detective or Detective Bosch, you can even call me Harry. But don’t you ever call me just Bosch again, understand?”
    Newell’s mouth had dropped open.
    “Do you understand?”
    “Sure.”
    “Another thing, we’re going to get more evidence and we’re going to get it as soon as we can. But, in the meantime, you’re going to file one charge of first-degree murder on Bremmer with a no-bail hold because we are going to make sure-from the get go, Mr. Newell-that this scumbag never sees the light of day again.
    “Then, when we have more evidence, if you are still attached to this case, you will file multiple counts under theories of linkage between the deaths. At no time will you worry about the so-called package you will hand off to the trial attorney. The trial attorney will make those decisions. Because we both know that you are really just a clerk, a clerk who files what is brought to him. If you knew enough to even sit in court next to a trial attorney you would not be here. Do you have any questions?”
    “No,” he said quickly.
    “No, what?”
    “No ques—No, Detective Bosch.”

    * * *

    Bosch went back to Irving’s conference room and used the rest of the morning to work up an application for a search warrant to collect hair, blood and saliva specimens along with a dental mold from Bremmer.
    Before taking it to the courthouse, he attended a brief meeting of the task force where they all reported on their respective assignments.
    Edgar said he had been to Sybil Brand and had shown Georgia Stern, who was still being held there, a photo of Bremmer but she could not identify him as her attacker. She could not rule him out, either.
    Sheehan said he and Opelt had shown the mug shot of Bremmer to the manager of the storage facility at Bing’s and the man said Bremmer might have been one of the renters of the storage rooms two years earlier but he couldn’t be sure. He said it was too long ago to remember well enough to send a man to the gas chamber.
    “The guy’s a wimp,” Sheehan said. “My feeling was he recognized Bremmer but was too scared to stick it in all the way. We’re going to hit him again tomorrow.”
    Rollenberger called the presidents up on the rover and they reported from Bremmer’s house that there was nothing yet. No tapes, no bodies, nothing.
    “I say we go for a warrant to dig up the yard, under the foundation,” Nixon said.
    “We might go to that,” Rollenberger radioed back. “Meantime, keep at it.”
    Lastly, Yde reported by rover that he and Mayfield were getting the runaround from the
Times
lawyers and had not yet been able to so much as approach Bremmer’s desk in the newsroom.
    Rollenberger reported that Heikes and Rector were out of pocket, running down background on Bremmer. After that, he said that Irving had scheduled a five o’clock press conference to discuss the case with the media. If anything new was discovered, let Rollenberger know before then.
    “That’s it,” Rollenberger said.
    Bosch got up to head out.

    * * *

    The medical clinic on the high-power floor of the county jail reminded Bosch of Frankenstein’s laboratory. There were chains on every bed and rings bolted to the tile walls to tether patients to. The pull-down lights over each bed were caged in steel so patients couldn’t get to the light bulbs and use them as weapons. The tile was supposed to be