“You’re playing with fire, man. You make a promise like that and then they find out you fucked them around-”

Sylvia picked up the phone.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, where are you?”

“The office. We have to watch the phones a while. They’re putting the face of the victim from yesterday’s case on TV tonight.”

“How was court?”

“It’s the plaintiff’s case at the moment. But I think we scored a couple punches.”

“I read theTimes today at lunch.”

“Yeah, well, they got about half of it right.”

“Are you coming out? Like you said.”

“Well, eventually. Not right now. I’ve got to help answer phones on this and then it’s depending on what we get. If we’re skunked I’ll be out early.”

He noticed he had lowered his voice so Edgar wouldn’t hear his conversation.

“And if you get something good?”

“We’ll see.”

An indrawn breath, then silence. Harry waited.

“You’ve been saying ‘we’ll see’ too much, Harry. We’ve talked about this. Sometimes-”

“I know that.”

“-I think that you just want to be left alone. Stay in your little house on the hill and keep the whole world out. Including me.”

“Not you. You know that.”

“Sometimes, I don’t. I don’t feel like I know it right now. You push me away just at the time when you need me-somebody-to be close.”

He had no answer. He thought of her there on the other end. She was probably sitting on the stool in the kitchen. She had probably already begun making a dinner for both of them. Or maybe she was getting used to his ways and had waited for the call.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “You know how it is. What are you doing about dinner?”

“Nothing, and I’m not going to do anything, either,”

Edgar made a low, quick whistle. Harry looked up at the TV and saw it was showing the painted face of the victim. The TV was on Channel 7 now. The camera showed a long close-up of the face. It looked all right on the tube. At least, it didn’t look much like a cake. The screen flashed the detective bureau’s two public numbers.

“They’re showing it now,” Bosch said to Sylvia. “I need to keep this line clear. Let me call you back later, when I know something.”

“Sure,” she said coldly and hung up.

Edgar had the TV on 4 now and they were showing the face. He then flipped to 2 and caught the last few seconds of their report on it. They had even interviewed the anthropologist.

“Slow news day,” Bosch said.

“Shit,” Edgar replied. “We’re banging on all cylinders now. All we-”

The phone rang and he grabbed it up.

“No, it just went out,” he said after listening for a few moments. “Yeah, yeah, I will. Okay.”

He hung up and shook his head.

“Pounds?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah. Thinks we’re going to have her name ten seconds after the broadcast went out. Christ, whadda nitwit.”

The next three calls were pranks, all testifying to the glaring lack of originality and the mental health of the TV viewing audience. All three callers said “Your mother!” or words to that effect and hung up laughing. About twenty minutes later Edgar got a call and started taking notes. The phone rang again and Bosch took it.

“This is Detective Bosch, who am I speaking with?”

“Is this being taped?”

“No, it’s not. Who is this?”

“Never mind, just thought you’d like to know the girl’s name is Maggie. Maggie something or other. It’s Latin. I seen her on videos.”

“What videos? MTV?”

“No, Sherlock. Adult videos. She fucked on film. She was good. She could put a rubber on a prick with her mouth.”

The line went dead. Bosch wrote a couple of notes down on the pad he had in front of him. Latin? He didn’t think the way the face had been painted gave any indication that the victim was a Latina.

Edgar hung up then and said his caller had said her name was Becky, that she had lived in Studio City a few years back.

“What’d you get?”

“I got a Maggie. No last name. Possibly a Latin last name. He said she was in porno.”

“That would fit, except she don’t look Mexican to me.”

“I know.”

The phone rang again. Edgar picked up and listened a few moments and then hung up.

“Another one that recognizes my mom.”

Bosch took the next one.

“I just wanted to tell you that the girl they were showing on TV was in porno,” the voice said.

“How do you know she was in porno?”

“I can tell by that thing they showed on TV. I rented a tape. Only once. She was in it.”

Only once, Bosch thought, but he remembered. Yeah, sure.

“You know her name?”

The other phone rang and Edgar picked it up.

“I don’t know names, man,” Bosch’s caller said. “They all use fake ones anyway.”

“What was the name of the tape?”

“Can’t remember. I was, uh, intoxicated when I saw it. Like I said, it was the only time.”

“Look, I’m not taking your confession. You got anything else?”

“No, smartass, I don’t.”

“Who is this?”

“I don’t have to say.”

“Look, we’re trying to find a killer here. What was the name of the place you rented it?”

“I’m not telling you, you might be able to get my name from them. Doesn’t matter, they have those tapes all over, every adult place.”

“How would you know if you only rented one once?”

The caller hung up.

Bosch stayed another hour. By the end they had five calls saying the painted face belonged to a porno starlet. Only one of the callers said her name was Maggie, the other four men saying they didn’t pay much attention to names. There was one call naming her Becky of Studio City, and one saying she was a stripper who had worked for a while at the Booby Trap on La Brea. One man who called said the face belonged to his missing wife, but Bosch learned through further questioning that she had been missing only two months. The concrete blonde had been dead too long. The hope and desperation in the caller’s voice seemed genuine to Bosch, and he didn’t know whether he was telling the man good news by explaining that it could not be his wife or bad news because he was left in the void again.

There were three callers who gave vague descriptions of a woman they thought might be the concrete blonde, but after a few questions into each conversation Bosch and Edgar identified the callers as cop geeks, people who got a thrill from talking to the police.

The most unusual call was from a Beverly Hills psychic who mentioned that she had placed her hand on the TV screen while it showed the face and felt the dead woman’s spirit cry out to her.

“What did it cry?” Bosch asked patiently.

“Praise.”

“Praise for what?”

“Jesus our savior, I would assume but I don’t know. That was all I received. I might receive more if I could touch the actual plaster cast of the-”

“Well, did this spirit that was giving praise identify itself? See, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re more interested in a name than cries of praise.”

“Someday you will believe but by then you will be lost.”

She hung up on him.

At seven-thirty Bosch told Edgar he was splitting.

“How ’bout you? You going to hang out for the eleven o’clock news?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here but I can handle it. If I get a lot of calls I’ll pull one of the dipshits off the desk.”

Stock that OT, Bosch thought.

“What’s next?” he asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Well, aside from all the calls saying it’s your mother, this porno thing seems to be the way to go.”

“Leave my blessed mother out of it. How you think I can check the porno?”

“Administrative Vice. Guy over there, a detective-three, name of Ray Mora, he works porno. He’s the best. He also was on the Dollmaker task force. Call him and see if he can come take a look at the face. He might’ve known her. Tell him we had one call saying her name was Maggie.”

“Will do. It fits with the Dollmaker, doesn’t it? The porno, I mean.”