The Concrete Blonde hb-3 Read online

  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 theTimes 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 white but over the years had surrendered to a depressing off-yellow.

  Bosch and Edgar stood in the doorway to one of the bays where there were six beds and watched as Bremmer, who was lying in the sixth bed, was given a shot of sodium pentothal to make him more cooperative, more malleable. He had refused to give the court-ordered dental mold and samples of blood, saliva and hair.

  After the drug began to take effect, the doctor pulled open the reporter’s mouth, put two clamps in to hold it open and pushed a little square block of clay over the front upper teeth. He then followed the same procedure with the lower front teeth. When he was done, he relaxed the clamps and Bremmer appeared to be asleep.

  “If we asked him something now, he’d tell the truth, right?” Edgar asked. “That’s truth serum they’re givin’ him, right?”

  “Supposedly,” Bosch said. “But it’d prob’ly get the case thrown out of court.”

  The little gray blocks with teeth indentations were slid into plastic cases. The doctor closed them and handed them to Edgar. He then drew blood, wiped a cotton swab in Bremmer’s mouth and cut snippets of hair from the suspect’s head, chest and pubic area. He put these in envelopes which went into a small cardboard box like the kind chicken nuggets come in at fast-food restaurants.

  Bosch took the box and they left then, Bosch going to the coroner’s office to see Amado, the analyst, and Edgar going to Cal State Northridge to see the forensic archaeologist who had helped with the concrete blonde reconstruction.

  * * *

  By quarter to five, everyone was back in the conference room but Edgar. They were all milling about, waiting to watch Irving’s press conference. There had been no other progress since noon.

  “Where do you think he stashed everything, Harry?” Nixon asked as he was pouring coffee.

  “I don’t know. Probably has a storage locker somewhere. If he has tapes, I doubt he’d part with them. He probably has a drop somewhere. We’ll find them.”

  “What about the other women?”

  “They’re out there somewhere, under the city. Only way they’ll come up is by luck.”

  “Or if Bremmer talks,” Irving said. He had just come in.

  There was a good feeling in the room. Despite the day’s slow progress, everyone to a man had no doubt they finally had the right man. And that certainty validated what they were about. So they wanted to drink coffee and hang out. Even Irving.

  At five minutes before five, when Irving was going over some of the reports typed during the day for the last time before facing the media, Edgar came up on the rover. Rollenberger quickly picked up a radio and answered back.

  “What do you have, Team Five?”

  “Is Harry there?”

  “Yes, Team Five, Team Six is present. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got the package. Definite match between the suspect’s teeth and the impressions on the victim.”

  “Roger that, Team Five.”

  There was a whoop in the conference room and a lot of backslapping and high fives. “He is going down,” Nixon exclaimed.

  Irving picked up his papers and headed for the hallway door. He wanted to be on time. At the doorway he passed close to Bosch.

  “We’re gold, Bosch. Thanks.”

  Bosch just nodded.

  * * *

  A few hours later Bosch was back at the county jail. It was after lock-down so the deputies wouldn’t bring Bremmer out to see him. Instead, he had to go into the high-power module, the deputies watching him on remote cameras. He walked along the row of cells to 6-36 and looked through the wired one-foot-square window in the single-piece steel door.

  Bremmer was on “keep away” status, so he was in there alone. He didn’t notice Bosch watching. He lay on the bottom bunk on his back, his hands laced behind his head. His eyes were open and staring straight up. Bosch recognized the withdrawal state he had seen for a moment the night before. It was as if he wasn’t there. Bosch leaned his mouth to the screen.

  “Bremmer, you play bridge?”

  Bremmer looked over at him, only moving his eyes.

  “What?”

  “I said, do you play bridge? You know, the card game?”

  “What the fuck do you want, Bosch?”

  “I just dropped by to tell you a little while ago they added three more to the one this morning. Linkage. You just got the concrete blonde and the two from before, the ones we first gave to the Dollmaker. You also got an attempted murder on the survivor.”

  “Oh, well, what’s the difference? You got one, you got ‘em all. All I need to do is beat the Chandler case and the others fall like dominoes.”

  “Except that isn’t going to happen. We got your teeth, Bremmer, just as good as fing
erprints. And we got the rest. I just came from the coroner’s. They matched your pubic hair to samples found on victims seven and eleven-the ones we gave the Dollmaker credit for. You ought to think about dealing, Bremmer. Tell where the others are and they’ll probably let you live. That’s why I asked about bridge.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I hear there’s some guys up at Q play a good bridge game. They’re always looking for new blood. You’ll probably like ‘em, have a lot in common.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone, Bosch?”

  “I will. I will. But just so you know it, man, they’re on death row. But don’t worry about that, when you get there you’ll get a lot of card playing in. What’s the average lead time? Eight, ten years before they gas somebody? That’s not bad. Unless, of course, you talk a deal.”

  “There is no deal, Bosch. Get out of here.”

  “I’m going. Believe me, it’s nice to be able to walk out of this place. I’ll see you then, okay? You know, in eight or ten years. I’m going to be there, Bremmer. When they strap you in. I’m going to be watching through the glass when the gas comes up. And then I’ll come out and tell the reporters how you died. I’ll tell them you went screaming, that you weren’t much of a man.”

  “Fuck you, Bosch.”

  “Yeah, fuck me. See you then, Bremmer.”

  Chapter 33

  After Bremmer’s arraignment Tuesday morning, Bosch got permission to take the rest of the week off in lieu of receiving all of the overtime he had built up on the case.

  He spent the time hanging around the house, doing odd jobs and taking it easy. He replaced the wood railing on the back porch with new lengths of weather-treated oak. And while he was at Home Depot getting the wood, he also picked up new cushions for the chairs and the chaise lounge on the porch.

  He began reading theTimes sports pages again, noting the statistical changes in team ranks and player performances.

  And, occasionally, he’d read one of the many stories theTimes ran in the Metro section about what was becoming known nationwide as the Follower case. But it didn’t really hold his fascination. He knew too much about the case already. The one interest he had in the stories was in the details about Bremmer that were coming out. TheTimes had sent a staffer to Texas, where Bremmer had been raised in an Austin suburb, and the reporter had returned with a story culled from old children’s-court files and neighborhood gossip. He’d been raised by his mother in a single-parent home; his father, an itinerant blues musician, he saw once or twice a year at the most. The mother was described by former neighbors as a disciplinarian and plain mean-spirited when it came to her son.

  The worst thing that the reporter came up with on Bremmer was that he was suspected but never charged in the arson of a neighbor’s toolshed when he was thirteen. It was said by neighbors that his mother punished him as if he had committed the crime anyway, not allowing him to leave their tiny house the rest of the summer. The neighbors said that around the same time the neighborhood began to experience a problem with pets disappearing but this was never attributed to young Bremmer. At least until now. Now the neighbors seemed engaged in blaming Bremmer for any malady that beset their street that year.

  A year after the fire Bremmer’s mother died of alcoholism and the boy was raised after that on a state boys’ farm, where the young charges wore white shirts and blue ties and blazers to classes, even when the thermometer went off the chart. The story said he worked as a reporter on one of the farm’s student newspapers, thus beginning a journalism career that would eventually take him to Los Angeles.

  His history was all grist for people like Locke to consider, to use as fuel for speculation on how the child Bremmer made the adult Bremmer do the things he did. It just made Bosch feel sad. He couldn’t help, however, but stare for a long time at the photo of the mother theTimes had dug up somewhere. In the picture she stood in front of the door to a sun-burned ranch-style house with her hand on a young Bremmer’s shoulder. She had bleached-blonde hair and a provocative figure and large chest. She wore too much makeup, Bosch thought as he stared at the picture.

  * * *

  Aside from the Bremmer articles, the story he read and reread several times was in the Metro section of Thursday’s paper. It was about the burial of Beatrice Fontenot. Sylvia was quoted in the article and it described how the Grant High teacher had read some of the girl’s schoolwork at the memorial service. There was a photo from the service but Sylvia wasn’t in it. It was of Beatrice’s mother’s stoic, tear-lined face at the funeral. Bosch kept the Metro page on the table next to the chaise lounge and read the story again every time he sat down there.

  * * *

  When he grew restless around the house he would drive. Down out of the hills, he’d head across the Valley with no place in particular to go. He’d drive forty minutes to have a hamburger at an In ‘N’ Out stand. Having grown up in the city, he liked to drive it, to know every one of its streets and corners. Once on Thursday and again on Friday morning his drives took him past Grant High but he never saw Sylvia through the windows of the classrooms as he went by. He felt sick at heart when he thought of her but he knew the closest he could come to her was to drive by the school. It was her move and he must wait for her to make it.

  On Friday afternoon, when he came back from his drive, he saw the message light flashing on his phone machine and his hopes rushed into his throat. He thought maybe she had seen his car and was calling because she knew how his heart hurt. But when he played the message it was just Edgar asking him to call.

  Eventually, he did.

  “Harry, you’re missing everything?”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Well, we hadPeople magazine in here yesterday.”

  “I’ll watch for you on the cover.”

  “Just kidding. Actually, we’ve got big developments.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “All this publicity was bound to do us good. Some lady over in Culver City called up and said she recognized Bremmer, that he had a storage locker at her place, but under the name Woodward. We got a warrant and popped it first thing this morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Locke was right. He videotaped. We found the tapes. His trophies.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. If there was ever a doubt there ain’t now. Got seven tapes and the camera. He must not have taped the first two, the ones we thought were the Dollmaker’s. But we got tapes of seven others including Chandler and Maggie Cum Loudly. Bastard taped everything. Just horrible stuff. They’re working up formal IDs on the other five victims on the tapes, but it looks like it’s going to be the ones on the list Mora came up with. Gallery and the other four porno chicks.”

  “What else was in the locker?”

  “Everything. We’ve got everything. We’ve got cuffs, belts, gags, a knife and a Glock nine. His whole killing kit. He must’ve used the gun to control them. That’s why there was no sign of a struggle at Chandler’s. He used the gun. We figure he’d hold it on them until he could cuff ‘em and gag ‘em. From the tapes, it looks like all the kills took place in Bremmer’s house, the rear bedroom. Except Chandler, of course. She got it at home... Those tapes, Harry, I couldn’t watch.”

  Bosch could imagine. He envisioned the scenes and felt an unexpected flutter in his heart, as if it had torn loose inside of him and was banging against his ribs like a bird trying to break out of its cage.

  “Anyway, the DA’s got it and the big development is Bremmer’s going to talk.”

  “He is?”

  “Yeah, he heard we had the tapes and everything else. I guess he told his lawyer to deal. He’s going to get life without the possibility of parole in exchange for leading us to the bodies and letting the shrinks have at him, study what makes him tick. My vote is they squash him like a fly, but I guess they are considering the families and science.”

  Bosch was silent. Bremmer would live. At first he didn’t know what to think. Then he
realized he could live with the deal. It had bothered him that those women might never be found. That was why he had visited Bremmer at the jail the day charges were first filed. Whether the victims had families who cared or not, he didn’t want to leave them down there in the black chasm of the unknown.

  It wasn’t a bad deal, Bosch decided. Bremmer would be alive, but he wouldn’t be living. It might even be worse for him than the gas chamber. And that would be justice, he thought.

  “Anyway,” Edgar said, “thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a weird fuckin’ thing, you know? It being Bremmer. It’s weirder than if it was Mora, man. A reporter! And, man, I knew the guy, too.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of us did. I guess nobody knows anybody like they think.”

  “Yeah. Seeya, Harry.”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, he stood on the back deck, leaning forward on his new oak railing, looking out into the pass and thinking about the black heart. Its rhythm was so strong it could set the beat of a whole city. He knew it would always be the background beat, the cadence, of his own life. Bremmer would be banished now, hidden away forever, but he knew there would be another after him. And another after him. The black heart does not beat alone.

  He lit a cigarette and thought about Honey Chandler, crowding his last view of her from his mind with the vision of her holding forth in court. That would always be her place in his mind. There had been something so pure and distilled about her fury-like the blue flame on a match before it burns out on its own. Even directed at him he could appreciate it.

  His mind wandered to the statue at the courthouse steps. He still couldn’t think of her name. A concrete blonde, Chandler had called her. Bosch wondered what Chandler had thought about justice at the end. At her end. He knew there was no justice without hope. Did she still have any hope left at the end? He believed that she did. Like the pure blue flame dimming to nothing, it was still there. Still hot. It was what allowed her to beat Bremmer.