The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

it were a mold into which plaster could be poured to make a cast, maybe to manufacture a mannikin. But it was empty inside.
    “Where’s the body?” Bosch asked.
    “They took what was left out already,” Edgar said. “It’s in the bag in the truck. We’re trying to figure out how to get this piece of the slab outta here in one piece.”
    Bosch looked silently into the hollow for a few moments before standing back up and making his way back out from beneath the tarp. Larry Sakai, the coroner’s investigator, followed him to the coroner’s van and unlocked and opened the back door. Inside the van it was sweltering and the smell of Sakai’s breath was stronger than the odor of industrial disinfectant.
    “I figured they’d call you out here,” Sakai said.
    “Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
    “‘Cause it looks like the fuckin’ Dollmaker, man.”
    Bosch said nothing, so as not to give Sakai any indication of confirmation. Sakai had worked some of the Dollmaker cases four years earlier. Bosch suspected he was responsible for the name the media attached to the serial killer. Someone had leaked details of the killer’s repeated use of makeup on the bodies to one of the anchors at Channel 4. The anchor christened the killer the Dollmaker. After that, the killer was called that by everybody, even the cops.
    But Bosch always hated that name. It said something about the victims as well as the killer. It depersonalized them, made it easier for the Dollmaker stories that were broadcast to be entertaining instead of horrifying.
    Bosch looked around the van. There were two gurneys and two bodies. One filled the black bag completely, the unseen corpse having been heavy in life or bloated in death. He turned to the other bag, the remains inside barely filling it. He knew this was the body taken from the concrete.
    “Yeah, this one,” Sakai said. “This other’s a stabbing up on Lankershim. North Hollywood’s working it. We were coming in when we got the dispatch on this one.”
    That explained how the media caught on so quickly, Bosch knew. The coroner’s dispatch frequency played in every newsroom in the city.
    He studied the smaller body bag a moment and without waiting for Sakai to do it he yanked open the zipper on the heavy black plastic. It unleashed a sharp, musty smell that was not as bad as it could have been had they found the body sooner. Sakai pulled the bag open and Bosch looked at the remains of a human body. The skin was dark and like leather stretched taut over the bones. Bosch was not repulsed because he was used to it and had the ability to become detached from such scenes. He sometimes believed that looking at bodies was his life’s work. He had ID’d his mother’s body for the cops when he wasn’t yet twelve years old, he had seen countless dead in Vietnam, and in nearly twenty years with the cops the bodies had become too many to put a number to. It had left him, most times, as detached from what he saw as a camera. As detached, he knew, as a psychopath.
    The woman in the bag had been small, Bosch could tell. But the deterioration of tissue and shrinkage made the body seem even smaller than it had certainly been in life. What was left of the hair was shoulder length and looked as if it had been bleached blonde. Bosch could see the powdery remains of makeup on the skin of the face. His eyes were drawn to the breasts because they were shockingly large in comparison to the rest of the shrunken corpse. They were full and rounded and the skin was stretched taut across them. It somehow seemed to be the most grotesque feature of the corpse because it was not as it should have been.
    “Implants,” Sakai said. “They don’t decompose. Could probably take ‘em out and resell them to the next stupid chick that wants ‘em. We could start a recycling program.”
    Bosch didn’t say anything. He was suddenly depressed at the thought of the woman-whoever she was-doing that to her body to somehow make herself more appealing, and then to end up this way. Had she only succeeded, he wondered, in making herself appealing to her killer?
    Sakai interrupted his thoughts.
    “If the Dollmaker did this, that means she’s been in the concrete at least four years, right? So if that’s the case, decomp isn’t that bad for that length of time. Still got the hair, eyes, some internal tissues. We’ll be able to work with it. Last week, I picked up a piece of work, a hiker they found out in Soledad Canyon. They