“Hey, Bosch,” Sakai called from inside the van. “I’m just curious. How’d you guys find this? If the Dollmaker is dead, who told you where to look?”

Bosch didn’t answer that one either. He walked slowly back underneath the tarp. It looked like the others still hadn’t figured out what to do about removing the concrete the body had been found in. Edgar was standing around trying not to get dirty. Bosch signaled to him and Pounds and they gathered together at a spot to the left of the trench, where they could talk without being overheard.

“Well?” Pounds asked. “What’ve we got?”

“It looks like Church’s work,” Bosch said.

“Shit,” Edgar said.

“How can you be sure?” Pounds asked.

“From what I can see, it matches every detail followed by the Dollmaker. Including the signature. It’s there.”

“The signature?” Edgar asked.

“The white cross on the toe. We held that back during the investigation, cut deals with all the reporters not to put it out.”

“What about a copycat?” Edgar offered hopefully.

“Could be. The white cross was never made public until after we closed the case. After that, Bremmer over at theTimes wrote that book about the case. It was mentioned.”

“So we have a copycat,” Pounds pronounced.

“It all depends on when she died,” Bosch said. “His book came out a year after Church was dead. If she got killed after that, you probably got a copycat. If she got put in that concrete before, then I don’t know…”

“Shit,” said Edgar.

Bosch thought a moment before speaking again.

“We could be dealing with one of a lot of different things. There’s the copycat. Or maybe Church had a partner and we never saw it. Or maybe… I popped the wrong guy. Maybe whoever wrote this note we got is telling the truth.”

That hung out there in the momentary silence like dogshit on the sidewalk. Everybody walks carefully around it without looking too closely at it.

“Where’s the note?” Bosch finally said to Pounds.

“In my car. I’ll get it. What do you mean, he may have had a partner?”

“I mean, say Church did do this, then where’d the note come from, since he is dead? It would obviously have to be someone who knew he did it and where he had hidden the body. If that’s the case, who is this second person? A partner? Did Church have a killing partner we never knew about?”

“Remember the Hillside Strangler?” Edgar asked. “Turned out it was stranglers. Plural. Two cousins with the same taste for killing young women.”

Pounds took a step back and shook his head as if to ward off a potentially career-threatening case.

“What about Chandler, the lawyer?” Pounds said. “Say Church’s wife knows where he buried bodies, literally. She tells Chandler and Chandler hatches this scheme. She writes a note like the Dollmaker and drops it off at the station. It’s guaranteed to fuck up your case.”

Bosch replayed that one in his mind. It seemed to work, then he saw the fault lines. He saw that they ran through all the scenarios.

“But why would Church bury some bodies and not others? The shrink who advised the task force back then said there was a purpose to his displaying of the victims. He was an exhibitionist. Toward the end, after the seventh victim, he started dropping the notes to us and the newspaper. It doesn’t make sense that he’d leave some of the bodies to be found and some buried in concrete.”

“True,” Pounds said.

“I like the copycat,” Edgar said.

“But why copy someone’s whole profile, right down to the signature, and then bury the body?” Bosch asked.

He wasn’t really asking them. It was a question he’d have to answer himself. They stood there in silence for a long moment, each man beginning to see that the most plausible possibility might be that the Dollmaker was still alive.

“Whoever did it, why the note?” Pounds said. He seemed very agitated. “Why would he drop us the note? He’d gotten away.”

“Because he wants attention,” Bosch said. “Like the Dollmaker got. Like this trial is going to get.”

The silence came back then for a long moment.

“The key,” Bosch finally said, “is ID’ing her, finding out how long she’s been in the concrete. We’ll know then what we’ve got.”

“So what do we do?” Edgar said.

“I’ll tell you what we do,” Pounds said. “We don’t say a damned thing about this to anyone. Not yet. Not until we are absolutely sure of what we’ve got. We wait on the autopsy and the ID. We find out how long this girl’s been dead and what she was doing when she disappeared. We’ll make-I’ll make a call on which way we go after that.

“Meantime, say nothing. If this is misconstrued, it could be very damaging to the department. I see some of the media is already here, so I’ll handle them. No one else is to talk. We clear?”

Bosch and Edgar nodded and Pounds went off, slowly moving through the debris toward a knot of reporters and cameramen who stood behind the yellow tape the uniforms had put up.

Bosch and Edgar stood silent for a few moments, watching him go.

“I hope he knows what the hell he is saying,” Edgar said.

“Does inspire a lot of confidence, doesn’t he?” Bosch replied.

“Oh, yeah.”

Bosch walked back over to the trench and Edgar followed.

“What are you going to do about the impression she left in the concrete?”

“The jackhammers don’t think it’s movable. They said whoever mixed the concrete she was put in didn’t follow the directions too well. Used too much water and small-grain sand. It’s like plaster of paris. We try to lift the whole thing out in one piece it will crumble under its own weight.”

“So?”

“Donovan’s mixing plaster. He’s going to make a mold of the face. On the hand-we only got the left, the right side crumbled when we dug in. Donovan’s going to try using rubber silicone. He says it’s the best chance of pulling out a mold with prints.”

Bosch nodded. For a few moments he watched Pounds talking to the reporters and saw the first thing worth smiling about all day. Pounds was on camera but apparently none of the reporters had told him about the dirt smeared across his forehead. He lit a cigarette and turned his attention back to Edgar.

“So, this area here was all storage rooms for rent?” he asked.

“That’s right. The owner of the property was here a little while ago. Said that all this area back in here was partitioned storage. Individual rooms. The Dollmaker-er, the killer, whoever the fuck it was-could’ve had one of the rooms and had his privacy to do what he wanted. The only problem would be the noise he made breaking up the original flooring. But it could’ve been night work. Owner said most people didn’t come back into the storage area at night. People who rented the rooms got a key to an exterior door off the alley. The perp could’ve come in and done the whole job in one night.”

The next question was obvious, so Edgar answered before Bosch asked.

“The owner can’t give us the name of the renter. Not for sure, at least. The records went up in the fire. His insurance company made settlements with most people that filed claims and we’ll get those names. But he said there were a few who never made a claim after the riots. He just never heard from them again. He can’t remember all the names, but if one was our guy then it was probably an alias anyway. Leastwise, if I was going to rent a room and dig through the floor to bury a body, you wouldn’t find me giving no real name.”

Bosch nodded and looked at his watch. He had to get going soon. He realized that he was hungry but probably wouldn’t get the chance to eat. Bosch looked down at the excavation and noticed the delineation of color between the old and newer concrete. The old slab was almost white. The concrete the woman had been encased in was a dark gray. He noticed a small piece of red paper protruding from a gray chunk at the bottom of the trench. He dropped down into the excavation and picked the chunk up. It was about the size of a softball. He pounded it on the old slab until it broke apart in his hand. The paper was part of a crumpled and empty Marlboro cigarette package. Edgar pulled a plastic evidence bag from his suit pocket and held it open for Bosch to drop the discovery in.