it was nearly white.
“All Snow Whites,” Mora said, an unneeded commentary that made Bosch look up from the photos to look at him. The vice cop just stared back and said, “You know, the hair. That’s what a producer calls them when he’s casting movies. He says he wants a Snow White for this part ’cause he already has a red or whatever. Snow White. It’s like the model name. These chicks are all interchangeable.”
Bosch looked back down at the photos, not trusting that his eyes would not give his suspicions away.
He realized, though, that much of what Mora had just said was true. The main physical differences between the women in the photos were the tattoos and their locations on each body. Each woman had a small tattoo of a heart or a rose or a cartoon character. Candi Cummings had a heart just to the left of her carefully trimmed triangle of pubic hair. Mood Indigo had some kind of cartoon just above her left ankle but Bosch couldn’t make it out because of the angle the photograph had been taken from. Dee Anne Dozit had a heart wrapped in a vine of barbed wire about six inches above the left nipple, which was pierced with a gold ring. And TeXXXas Rose had a red rose on the soft part of her right hand between the thumb and first finger.
Bosch realized they might all be dead now.
“No one’s heard from them?”
“No one in the biz, at least.”
“You’re right. Physically, they fit.”
“Yeah.”
“They did outcall?”
“I assume they did, but I’m not sure yet. The people I talked to dealt with them in the film biz so they didn’t know what these girls did when the cameras stopped rolling, so to speak. Or, so they said. My next step was to get some back issues of the sex rags and look for ads.”
“Any dates? You know, when they disappeared, stuff like that?”
“Just generally speaking. These people, the agents and the moviemakers, they don’t have minds for dates. We’re dealing with memories, so I’ve only got a general picture. If I find out they ran outcall ads, I’ll narrow it down pretty close to exact dates when I find out when they last ran. Anyway, let me give you what I got. You got your notebook?”
Mora told him what he had. No specific dates, just months and years. Adding in the approximate dates when Rebecca Kaminski, the concrete blonde, Constance Calvin, who became Gallery on film, and the seventh and eleventh victims originally attributed to Church had disappeared, there was a rough pattern of disappearances of the porno starlets about every six to seven months. The last disappearance was Mood Indigo, eight months earlier.
“See the pattern? He’s due. He’s out there hunting.”
Bosch nodded and looked up from his notebook at Mora and thought he saw a gleam in his dark eyes. He thought he could see through them into a black emptiness inside. In that one chilling moment Bosch thought he saw the confirmation of evil in the other man. It was as if Mora was challenging him to come farther into the dark with him.
24
Bosch knew he was stretching his leash by going down to USC, but it was two o’clock and his choice was to hang around the conference room with Rollenberger and wait for a verdict or do something useful with his time. He decided on the latter and got on the Harbor Freeway going south. Depending on how northbound traffic on the freeway was, he could conceivably get back to downtown in fifteen minutes if a verdict came in. Getting a parking space at Parker Center and walking over to the courthouse would be another matter.
The University of Southern California was located in the tough neighborhoods that surround the Coliseum. But once through the gate and into the general campus, it seemed as bucolic as Catalina, though Bosch knew this peace had been interrupted with a quickening frequency in recent years, to the point that even Trojan football practice could be dangerous. A couple of seasons back a stray bullet from one of the daily drive-by shootings in the nearby neighborhoods had struck a gifted freshman linebacker while he stood with teammates on the practice field. It was incidents like that that had administrators complaining on a routine basis to the LAPD and students longingly thinking about UCLA, which was cheaper and located in the relatively crime-free suburban milieu of Westwood.
Bosch easily found the psychology building with a map given to him at the entry gate, but once he was inside the four-story brick building there was no directory to help him find Dr. John Locke or the psychohormonal studies lab. He walked down one lengthy hallway and then took stairs to the second floor. The first female student he asked for directions to the lab laughed, apparently believing his question was a come-on, and walked away without answering. He finally was directed to the basement of the building.
He read the signs on the doors as he walked along the dimly lit corridor and finally found the lab at the second-to-last doorway at the end of the hall. A blonde student sat behind a desk in the entry. She was reading a thick textbook. She looked up and smiled and Bosch asked for Locke.
“I’ll call. Does he expect you?”
“You never know with a shrink.”
He smiled but she didn’t get it, then he wondered if it was even a joke.
“No, I didn’t say I was coming.”
“Well, Dr. Locke has student labs running all day. I shouldn’t disturb him if-”
She finally looked up and saw the badge he was holding.
“I’ll call right away.”
“Just tell him it’s Bosch and I need a few minutes if he can spare them.”
She spoke briefly on the phone to someone, reiterating what Bosch had just said. She then waited silently for a few moments, said “Okay” and hung up.
“The grad assistant said Dr. Locke said he will come get you. It should only be a few minutes.”
He thanked her and sat in one of the chairs by the door. He looked around the entry room. There was a bulletin board with handprinted announcements pinned to the cork. Mostly they were the roommate- wanted type of posting. There was an announcement of a party for psych undergrads this coming Saturday.
There was one other desk in the room in addition to the one the student occupied. But this one was empty at the moment.
“This part of the curriculum?” he asked. “You have to put in time here as the receptionist?”
She looked up from the textbook.
“No, it’s just a job. I’m in child psych but jobs in the lab there are hard to come by. Nobody likes working down here in the basement. So this was open.”
“How come?”
“All the creepy psychology is down here. Psychohormonal at this end. There is-”
The door opened on the other side of the room and Locke stepped through. He was wearing blue jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. He stuck his hand out to Bosch and Harry noticed the leather thong tied around his wrist.
“Harry, how goes it?”
“Fine. I’m fine. How’re you? I’m sorry to barge in on you like this but I was wondering if you have a few minutes. I have some new information on that thing I bothered you with the other night.”
“No bother at all. Believe me, it’s great to get my fingers on a real case. Student labs can be boring.”
He told Bosch to follow him and they went back through the door, down a hallway and into a suite of offices. Locke led him to the room in the back which was his office. Rows of textbooks and what Bosch guessed were collected theses lined shelves on the wall behind his desk. Locke dropped into a padded chair and put
