The Concrete Blonde Read Online Free Page B

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, de-comp 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 figure it was a guy went missing last summer. Now he was nothing but bones. 'Course out in the open like that, you got the animals. You know they come in through the ass. It's the softest entry and the animals—”
    “I know, Sakai. Let's stay on this one.”
    “Anyway, with this woman, the concrete apparently slowed things down for us. Sure didn't stop it, but slowed it down. It must've been like an airtight tomb in there.”
    “You people going to be able to establish just how long she's been dead?”
    “Probably not from the body. We get her ID'd, then you people might find out when she went missing. That'll be the way.”
    Bosch looked at the fingers. They were dark sticks almost as thin as pencils.
    “What about prints?”
    “We'll get 'em, but not from those.”
    Bosch looked over and saw Sakai smiling.
    “What? She left them in the concrete?”
    Sakai's glee was smashed like a fly. Bosch had ruined his surprise.
    “Yeah, that's right. She left an impression, you could say. We're going to get prints, maybe even a mold of her face, if we can get what's