The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

were closed, the mouth slightly open and irregular. The hairline was almost unnoticeable. The face seemed swollen by the right eye. It was like a classical frieze Bosch had seen in a cemetery or a museum somewhere. But it wasn’t beautiful. It was a death mask.
    “Looks like the guy popped her on the eye. It swelled up.”
    Bosch nodded but didn’t speak. There was something unnerving about looking at the face in the box, more so than looking at an actual dead body. He didn’t know why. Edgar finally put the top back on the box and carefully put it back on top of the file cabinet.
    “What are you going to do with it?”
    “Not sure. If we don’t get anything from the prints it might be our only way of getting an ID. There’s an anthropologist at Cal State Northridge that contracts with the coroner to make facial recreations. Usually, he’s working from a skeleton, a skull. I’ll take this to him and see if he can maybe finish the face, put a blonde wig on it or something. He can paint the plaster, too, give it a skin color. I don’t know, it’s probably just pissing in the wind but I figure it’s worth a try.”
    Edgar returned to the typewriter and Bosch sat down in front of the murder books. He opened the binder markedBIOS but then sat there and watched Edgar for a few moments. He did not know whether he should admire Edgar’s hustle on the case or not. They had been partners once and Bosch had essentially spent a year training him to be a homicide investigator. But he was never sure how much of it took. Edgar was always going off to look at real estate, taking two-hour lunches to go to closings. He never seemed to understand that the homicide squad wasn’t a job. It was a mission. As surely as murder was an art for some who committed it, homicide investigation was an art for those on the mission. And it chose you, you didn’t choose it.
    With that in mind it was hard for Bosch to accept that Edgar was busting ass on the case for the right reasons.
    “What’re you looking at?” Edgar asked without looking up from the IBM or stopping his typing.
    “Nothing. I was just thinking about stuff.”
    “Harry, don’t worry. It’s going to work out.”
    Bosch dumped his cigarette butt in a Styrofoam cup of dead coffee and lit another.
    “Did the priority Pounds put on the case open up the OT?”
    “Absolutely,” Edgar said, smiling. “You’re looking at a man who has his head fully in the overtime trough.”
    At least he was honest about it, Bosch thought. Content that his original take on Edgar was still intact, Bosch went back to the murder book and ran his fingers along the edge of the thick sheaf of reports on its three rings. There were eleven divider tabs, each marked with a name of one of the Dollmaker’s victims. He began leafing from section to section, looking at the crime scene photographs from each killing and the biographical data of each victim.
    The women had all come from similar backgrounds; street prostitutes, the higher-class escort outfits, strippers, porno actresses who did outcall work on the side. The Dollmaker had moved comfortably along the underside of the city. He had found his victims with the same ease that they had gone into the darkness with him. There was a pattern in that, Bosch remembered the task force’s psychologist had said.
    But looking at the frozen faces of death in the photographs, Bosch remembered that the task force had never gotten a fix on common physical aspects of the victims. There were blondes and brunettes. Heavy-set women and frail drug addicts. There were six white women, two Latinas, two Asians and a black woman. No pattern. The Dollmaker had been indiscriminate in that respect, his only identifiable pattern being that he sought only women on the edge-that place where choices are limited and they go easily with a stranger. The psychologist had said each of the women was like an injured fish, sending off an invisible signal that inevitably drew the shark.
    “She was white, right?” he asked Edgar.
    Edgar stopped typing.
    “Yeah, that’s what the coroner said.”
    “They already did the cut? Who?”
    “No, the autopsy’s tomorrow or the next day but Corazon took a look when we brought it in. She guessed that the stiff had been white. Why?”
    “Nothing. Blonde?”
    “Yeah, at least when she died. Bleached. If you’re going to ask if I checked missing persons on a white blonde chick who went into the wind four years ago, fuck you,