The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

more interested in what you think about all of this, Harry. Where do we go from here? Bremmer’s book was a fuckin’ bestseller. Anybody who read it is a suspect.”
    Bosch said nothing until they got to the parking lot and stopped near the entrance booth before separating. Bosch looked down at the report in his hands and then up at Edgar.
    “Can I keep this? I might take a run by the guy.”
    “Be my guest... Another thing you should know, Harry.”
    Edgar reached in his inside coat pocket and pulled out another piece of paper. This one was yellow and Bosch knew it was a subpoena.
    “I got served at the coroner’s office. I don’t know how she knew I was there.”
    “When d’you have to be in court?”
    “Tomorrow at ten. I had nothing to do with the Dollmaker task force so we both know what she’s going to ask about. The concrete blonde.”

Chapter 12
    Bosch threw his cigarette into the fountain that was part of the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty and walked through the glass doors into Parker Center. He badged one of the cops behind the front desk and walked around to the elevators. There was a red line painted on the black tile floor. That was the route visitors were told to take if they were going to the Police Commission hearing room. There was also a yellow line for Internal Affairs and a blue for applicants who wanted to become cops. It was a tradition for cops standing around waiting for elevators to stand on the yellow line, thereby making any citizens who were going to IAD-usually to file complaints-walk around them. This maneuver was usually accompanied by a baleful stare from cop to citizen.
    Every time Bosch waited for an elevator he remembered the prank he had been partially responsible for while still in the academy. He and another cadet had come into Parker Center at four one morning, drunk and hiding paint brushes and cans of black and yellow paint in their windbreakers. In a quick and daring operation, his partner had used the black paint to obliterate the yellow line on the tile floor while Bosch painted a new yellow line which went past the elevators, down the hall, into a men’s room and right to a urinal. The prank had given them near legendary status in their class, even among the instructors.
    He got off the elevator on the third floor and walked back to the Robbery-Homicide Division. The place was empty. Most RHD cops worked a strict seven-to-three shift. That way the job didn’t get in the way of all the moonlighting gigs they had lined up. RHD dicks were the cream of the department. They got all the best gigs. Chauffeuring visiting Saudi princes, security work for studio bosses, body-guarding Vegas high rollers-LVPD did not allow its people to moonlight, so the high-paying jobs fell to LAPD.
    When Bosch had first been promoted to RHD there were still a few detective-threes around who had worked bodyguard duty for Howard Hughes. They had spoken of the experience as if that was what the RHD job was all about, a means to an end, a way to get a job working for some deranged billionaire who didn’t need any bodyguards because he never went anywhere.
    Bosch walked to the rear of the room and turned on one of the computers. He lit a cigarette while the tube warmed up and took the report Edgar had given him out of his coat pocket. The report was nothing. It had never been looked at, acted on, cared about.
    He noticed it was a walk-in-Tom Cerrone had come into the North Hollywood Division station and made the report at the front desk. That meant it had probably been written up by a probationary rookie or a burned-out vet who didn’t give a shit. In either case, it was not taken for what it was: a cover-your-ass report.
    Cerrone said he was Kaminski’s roommate. According to the brief summary, two days before the report was made she had told Cerrone she was going on a blind date, meeting an unnamed man at the Hyatt on the Sunset Strip and that she hoped the guy wasn’t a creep. She never came back. Cerrone got worried and went to the cops. The report was taken, passed through North Hollywood detectives where it didn’t make a blip on anyone’s screen and then sent to Missing Persons in downtown where four detectives are charged with finding the sixty people reported missing on average each week in the city.
    In reality, the report was put in a stack of others like it and was not looked at again until Edgar and his pal, Morg, found it. None of this bothered Bosch,