The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

three-to-midnight shift with the B squad, but there next to his name in Bosch’s own writing was the word “sick.”
    Bosch quickly pulled out the schedule for the week of September twenty-second. The nude body of Shirleen Kemp had been found at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu at four in the morning on Friday, September twenty-eighth. He realized that wasn’t enough information and looked for the file that contained the investigation of her death.
    He quickly read through the file and learned that Kemp had a phone service that had logged a call for her services at the Malibu Inn at 12:55A.M. When detectives went there they learned from phone records that at 12:55A.M. a call had been placed by the occupant of room 311. The front desk staff could not provide a good description of the man in 311 and the identification he gave proved to be false. He had paid in cash. The one thing the desk people could say with absolute accuracy was that he checked in at 12:35A.M. Each registration card was punched with the time. The man had called for Heather Cumhither twenty minutes after he checked in.
    Bosch referred back to the work schedule. On the Thursday night before Kemp was murdered, Mora had worked. But he had apparently come in and left early. He had signed in at 2:40P.M. and out at 11:45P.M.
    That gave him fifty minutes to get from the Hollywood station to the Malibu Inn and checked into room 311 at 12:35A.M., Friday. Bosch knew that it could be done. Traffic would be light on the PCH that late at night.
    It could be Mora.
    He noticed that the cigarette he had set on the edge of the table had burned down to the butt and it had discolored the Formica edge. He quickly dropped the cigarette into a pot containing a ficus plant in the corner of the room and turned the table around so the burn mark was positioned at the spot where Rollenberger had been sitting. He waved one of the files in the air to disperse the smoke and then opened the door to Irving’s office.

    * * *

    “Raymond Mora.”
    Irving had said the name out loud apparently to see how it sounded. He said nothing else when Bosch was finished telling what he knew. Bosch watched him and waited for more but the assistant chief only sniffed at the air, identified the cigarette smoke and frowned.
    “Another thing,” Bosch said. “Locke wasn’t the only one I talked to about the follower. Mora knows just about everything I just told you. He was on the task force and we went to him this week for help on the ID of the concrete blonde. I was over at Ad-Vice when you paged me. He had called me last night.”
    “What did he want?” Irving asked.
    “He wanted to let me know that he thought the follower might’ve done the two porno queens from the original eleven. He said it had just come to him, that maybe the follower had started way back then.”
    “Shit,” Sheehan said, “this guy is playing with us. If he-”
    “What did you tell him?” Irving interrupted.
    “I told him I was thinking that, too. And I asked him to check with his sources to see if he could find out if there were other women who disappeared or dropped out of the business like Becky Kaminski did.”
    “You asked him to go to work on this?” Rollenberger said, his eyebrows arched in astonishment and outrage.
    “I had to. It was the obvious thing for me to ask him. If I didn’t, he’d know I was suspicious.”
    “He’s right,” Irving said.
    Rollenberger’s chest seemed to deflate a little bit. He couldn’t get anything right.
    “Yes, now I see,” he dutifully responded. “Good work.”
    “We’re going to need more people,” Opelt said, since everybody was being so agreeable.
    “I want to begin surveillance on him by tomorrow morning,” Irving said. “We’re going to need at least three teams. Sheehan and Opelt will be one. Bosch, you’re involved in court and Edgar, I want you working on tracking down the survivor, so you two are out. Lieutenant Rollenberger, who else can you spare?”
    “Well, Yde is sitting around since Buchert is on vacation. And Mayfield and Rutherford are in court on the same case. I can shake one of them loose to pair with Yde. That’s all I’ve got, unless you want to pull back on some ongoing-”
    “No, I don’t want that. Get Yde and Mayfield in on this. I’ll go to Lieutenant Hilliard and see what she can spare from the Valley. She’s had three teams on the catering truck case for a month and they’re at the wall. I’ll