“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It’s the damages that count.”
The clerk continued.
“The jury hereby awards to the plaintiff in compensatory damages the amount of one dollar.”
Bosch heard Belk whisper a gleeful “Yes!” under his breath.
“In the matter of punitive damages, the jury awards the plaintiff the amount of one dollar.”
Belk whispered it again, only this time loud enough to be heard in the gallery. Bosch looked at Deborah Church just as the triumph dropped out of her smile and her eyes turned dead. It all seemed surrealistic to Bosch, as if he were observing a play but was actually on the stage with the actors. The verdict meant nothing to him. He just watched everybody.
Judge Keyes began his thank-you speech to the jury, telling them how they had performed their Constitutional duties and should be proud to have served and to be Americans. Bosch tuned it out and just sat there. Sylvia came to mind and he wished he could tell her.
The judge banged down the gavel and the jury filed out for the last time. Then he left the bench and Bosch thought he might have had an annoyed look on his face.
“Harry,” Belk said. “It’s a damn good verdict.”
“Is it? I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s a mixed verdict. But essentially the jury found what we already admitted to. We said you made mistakes going in like you did but you already had been reprimanded by your department for that. The jury found as a matter of law that you should not have kicked down the door like that. But in awarding only two dollars they were saying they believed you. Church made the furtive move. And Church was the Dollmaker.”
He patted Bosch’s back. He was probably waiting for Harry to thank him but it didn’t come.
“What about Chandler?”
“Well, there’s the rub, so to speak. The jury found for the plaintiff so we are going to have to pick up her tab. She’ll probably ask for about one-eighty, maybe two hundred. We’ll probably settle it for ninety. It’s not bad, Harry. Not at all.”
“I gotta go.”
Bosch stood up and waded through a clot of people and reporters to get out of the courtroom. He moved quickly to the escalator and once on started fumbling to get the last cigarette out of his pack. Bremmer jumped on the step behind him, his notebook out and ready.
“Congrats, Harry,” he said.
Bosch looked at him. The reporter seemed sincere.
“For what? They said I’m some kind of a Constitutional goon.”
“Yeah, but you walk away two bucks light. That ain’t bad.”
“Yeah, well…”
“Well, any comment on the record? I take it ‘Constitutional goon’ was off, right?”
“Yeah, I’d appreciate that. Uh, tell you what, let me think for a while. I’ve gotta go but I’ll call you later. Why don’t you go back up and talk to Belk. He needs to see his name in the paper.”
Outside he lit the cigarette and pulled the rover out of his pocket.
“Edgar, you up?”
“Here.”
“How is it?”
“Better come on out, Harry. Everybody’s rolling on it.”
Bosch threw the cigarette in the ash can.
They had done a bad job of keeping it contained. By the time Bosch got to the house on Carmelina, there was already one news copter circling overhead and two other channels were there on the ground. It would not be long until it was a circus. The case would have two big draws: the Follower and Honey Chandler.
Bosch had to park two houses away because of the glut of official cars and vans lining both sides of the street. Parking control officers were just beginning to put down flares and close the street to traffic.
The property had been preserved by yellow plastic police lines. Bosch signed an attendance log held by a uniform officer at the tape and slipped underneath. It was a two-story Bauhaus-style home set on a hillside. Standing outside, Bosch knew the floor-to-ceiling windows of the upstairs rooms would offer sweeping views of the flats below. He counted two chimneys. It was a nice house in a nice neighborhood filled with nice lawyers and UCLA professors. Not anymore, he thought. He wished he had a cigarette as he headed in.
Edgar was standing just inside the door in a tiled entryway. He was talking on a mobile phone and it sounded as if he was telling the media relations unit to send people out to handle this. He saw Bosch and pointed up the stairs.
The staircase was right off the entry and Bosch went up. There was a wide hallway that passed four doorways upstairs. A group of detectives milled about outside the farthest door and occasionally they looked inside at something. Bosch walked over.
In a way, Bosch knew, he had trained his mind to be almost like that of a psychopath. He practiced the psychology of objectification when at a death scene. Dead people weren’t people, they were objects. He had to look at bodies as corpses, as evidence. It was the only way to deal with it and get the job done. It was the only way to survive. But this, of course, was always easier said or thought about than done. Often Bosch stumbled.
As a member of the original Dollmaker task force, he had seen the last six of the victims attributed to the serial killer. He saw them “in situ,” as it was called-in the situation in which they were found. None of them was easy. There was something that seemed so helpless about these victims that it overwhelmed his best efforts at objectification. And knowing that they came from street backgrounds had made it all the worse. It was as if the torture visited upon each one by her killer was only the last in a life of indignities.
Now he looked down at the naked and tortured body of Honey Chandler and no manner of mental tricks or deception could prevent the horror he saw from burning into his soul. For the first time in his years as a homicide investigator, he wanted to close his eyes and just go away.
But he didn’t. Instead, he stood with the other men who looked down with dead eyes and nonchalant poses. Like a gathering of serial killers. Something made him think of the bridge game at San Quentin that Locke had mentioned. A foursome of psychopaths sitting around the table, more killings to their credit than cards on the table.
Chandler was faceup, her arms outstretched at her sides. Her face was garishly painted with makeup. It hid much of the purplish discoloration which spread from her neck up. A leather strap, cut from a purse which lay spilled on the floor, was tied tightly around her neck, knotted on the right side as if pulled closed with a left hand. In keeping with the prior cases, whatever restraints and gag the killer used had been taken away with him.
But there was something outside of the program. Bosch saw that the Follower was improvising, now that he was no longer operating under the camouflage of the Dollmaker. Chandler’s body was riddled with cigarette burns and bite marks. Some of them had bled and some were purplish with bruising, meaning the torture had taken place while she was still alive.
Rollenberger was in the room and was giving orders, even telling the photographer what angles he wanted. Nixon and Johnson were also in the room. Bosch realized, as probably Chandler had, that the final indignity was that her uncovered body would be left on display for hours in view of men who had despised her in life. Nixon looked up and saw Bosch in the hallway and stepped out of the room.
“Harry, what made you tumble to her?”
“She didn’t show up for court today. Thought it was worth checking out. Guess she was the
