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 fingerprints. 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.”

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.