Michael Connelly (152 page)

Newell nodded as if he agreed but said, “Thing is, I like to have the whole package, everything we can get, when I file a
case. That way we know how we are going to work the prosecution, right from the start. We know if we are going to go with
a plea bargain or go balls to the wall.”

Bosch got up and walked to the office’s open door. He stepped into the hall and looked at the plastic name plate affixed to
the wall outside. Then he came back in.

“Bosch, what are you doing?”

“It’s funny. I thought you were a filing deputy. I didn’t know you were a trial deputy, too.”

Newell dropped his pencil on his pad. His face got redder, the blotches spreading to his forehead.

“Look, I am a filing deputy. But it is part of my responsibility to make sure we have the best case possible from the get
go. Every case that comes through that door I could file on, but that’s not the point. The point is to have good, credible
evidence and a lot of it. Cases that don’t backfire. So I push, Bosch. I —”

“How old are you?”

“What?”

“How old?”

“Twenty-six. What’s that got to —”

“Listen to me, you little prick. Don’t you ever call me by my last name again. I was making cases like this before you cracked
your first law book and I’ll be making them long after you move your convertible Saab and your self-centered white-bread show
to Century City. You can call me Detective or Detective Bosch, you can even call me Harry. But don’t you ever call me just
Bosch again, understand?”

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 the
Times
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 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.”

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 the
Times
sports pages again, noting the statistical changes in team ranks and player performances.

And, occasionally, he’d read one of the many stories the
Times
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. The
Times
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.