Canyon. It made the papers, TV. So the people up there organized search parties and all of that and a few days later one of the searchers, a teen-aged boy who was one of the girl's neighbors, found her body under a log near Lookout Mountain. It turned out he was the killer. I got him to confess in fifteen minutes. The whole time of the search I was just waiting for the one who would find the body. It was percentages. He was a suspect before I even knew who it was.'
'Irving found your mother's body.' 'Yes. And he knew her before that. He told me once.' 'It seems like a stretch to me.'
'Yeah. Most people probably thought that about Mittel, too. Right up until they fished him out of the hot tub.' 'Isn't there an alternative scenario? Isn't it possible that maybe the original detectives were correct in their assumption back then that there was a sex killer out there and that tracking him was hopeless?' 'There's always alternative scenarios.' 'But you always seem drawn toward finding someone of power, a person of the establishment, to blame. Maybe that's not the case here. Maybe it's a symptom of your larger desire to blame society for what happened to your mother ... and to you.'
Bosch shook his head. He didn't want to hear this.
'You know, all this psychobabble ... I don't ... Can we just talk about the photos?'
'I'm sorry.'
She looked down at the envelope as if she was seeing right through it to the photos inside it.
'Well, it was very difficult for me to look at them. As far as their forensic value goes, there wasn't a lot there. The photos show what I would call a statement homicide. The fact that the ligature, the belt, was still wrapped around her neck seems to indicate that the killer wanted police to know exactly what he did, that he had been deliberate, that he had had control over this victim. I also think the choice of placement is significant as well. The trash bin had no top. It was open. That suggests that placing the body there may not have been an effort to hide it. It was also a -'
'He was saying she was trash.'
'Right. Again, a statement. If he was just getting rid of a body, he could've put it anywhere in that alley, but he chose the open dumpster. Subconsciously or not, he was making a statement about her. So to make a statement such as that about a person, he would have to have known her to some degree. Known about her. Known she was a prostitute. Known enough to judge her.'
Irving came to Bosch's mind again but he said nothing.
'Well,' he said instead, 'couldn't it have been a statement about all women? Could it be some sick fuck who — excuse me — some nut who hated all women and thought all women were trash? That way he wouldn't have to have known her. Maybe somebody who simply wanted to kill a prostitute, any prostitute, to make a statement about them.'
'Yes, that's a possibility, but like you I'm going with the percentages. The kind of sick fuck you are talking about -
which, incidentally, in psychobabble we call a sociopath -is much rarer than the one who keys on specific targets, specific women.'
Bosch shook his head dismissively and looked out the window. 'What is it?'
'It's just frustrating, that's all. There wasn't much in the murder book about them taking a hard look at anybody in her circle, any of the neighbors, nothing like that. To do it now is impossible. It makes me feel like it's hopeless.'
He thought of Meredith Roman. He could go to her to ask about his mother's acquaintances and customers, but he didn't know if he had the right to reawaken that part of her life.
'You have to remember,' Hinojos said, 'in 1961 a case like this would probably have seemed impossible to solve. They wouldn't even have known how to start. It just didn't happen as often as today.'
'They're almost impossible to solve today, too.'
They sat in silence for a few moments. Bosch thought about the possibility that the killer was some hit- and-run nut. A serial killer who was long gone into the darkness of time. If that was the case, then his private investigation was over. It was a failure.
'Do you have anything else on the photos?'
'That's really all I had — no, wait. There was one thing. And you may already have this.'
She picked the envelope up and opened it. She reached in and began sliding out a photo.
'I don't want to look at that,' Bosch said quickly.
'It's not a photo of her. Actually, it's her clothing, laid out on a table. Is that okay to look at?'
She paused, her hand holding the photo half in and half out of the envelope. Bosch waved his hand, telling her to go ahead.
'I've already seen the clothes.'
'Then you've probably already considered this.'
She slid the photo to the edge of the desk and Bosch leaned forward to study it. It was a color photo that had yellowed with age, even inside the envelope. The same items of clothing he had found in the evidence box were spread out on a table in a formation that outlined a body, in the way a woman might put them out on a bed before dressing. It reminded Bosch of cutouts for paper dolls. Even the belt with the sea shell buckle was there, but it was between the blouse and the black skirt, not at the imaginary neck.
'Okay,' she said. 'What I found odd here was the belt.'
'The murder weapon.'
'Yes. Look, it has the large silver shell as the buckle and there are smaller silver shells as ornamentation. It's rather showy.'
'Right.'
'But the buttons on the blouse are gold. Also, the photos of the body, they show she was wearing gold teardrop earrings and a gold neck chain. Also a bracelet.'
'Right, I know that. They were in the evidence box, too.'
Bosch didn't understand what she was getting at.
'Harry, this is not a universal rule or anything, that's why I hesitate to bring it up. But usually people — women — don't mix and match gold and silver. And it appears to me your mother was well dressed on this evening. That she had jewelry on that matched the buttons of her blouse. She was coordinated and she had style. What I am saying is that I don't think she would have worn this belt with those other items. It was silver and it was showy.'
Bosch said nothing. Something was poking its way into his mind and its point was sharp.
'And lastly, this skirt buttons on the hip. It's a style that
is still around and I even have something similar to it myself. What's so functional about it is that because of the wide waistband it can be worn with or without a belt. There are no loops.'
Bosch stared at the photo.
'No loops.'
'Right.'
'So what you're saying is ...'
'This might not have been her belt. It might have -'
'But it was. I remember it. The sea shell belt. I gave it to her for her birthday. I identified it for the cops, for McKittrick the day he came to tell me.'
'Well ... then that shoots down everything I was going to say. I guess maybe when she came into the apartment the killer was already waiting with it.'
'No, it didn't happen in her apartment. They never found the crime scene. Listen, never mind whether it was her belt or not, what were you going to say?'
'Oh, I don't know, just a theory about it possibly being the property of another woman who may have been the motivating factor behind the killer's action. It's called aggression transference. It doesn't make sense now with this evidence but there are examples of what I was going to suggest. A man takes his ex-girlfriend's stockings and strangles another woman with them. In his mind, he's strangling the girlfriend. Something like that. I was going to suggest it could have happened in this case with the belt.'
But Bosch was no longer listening. He turned and looked out the window but wasn't seeing anything either. In his mind, he was seeing the pieces falling together. The silver and gold, the belt with two of the punch holes
