“Bosch, you still there?” Pounds asked.

“Yeah. It looks like we just broke for lunch.”

“Good. Then head over there and I’ll meet you. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I hope it’s just another wacko. For your sake, it might be best.”

“Right.”

As Bosch was hanging up he heard Pounds’s voice and brought the phone back to his ear.

“One more thing. If the media shows up out there, leave them to me. However this turns out, you shouldn’t be formally involved in this new case because of the litigation stemming from the old. We are just having you out there as an expert witness, so to speak.”

“Right.”

“See you there.”

Bosch took Wilshire out of downtown and cut up to Third after he made it through what was left of MacArthur Park. Turning north on Western he could see up on the left the grouping of patrol cars, detective cars and the crime-scene and coroner’s vans. In the distance the HOLLYWOOD sign hung over the northern view, its letters barely legible in the smog.

Bing’s was three blackened walls cradling a pile of charred debris. No roof, but the uniforms had hung a blue plastic tarp over the top of the rear wall and strung it to the chain-link fence that ran along the front of the property. Bosch knew it hadn’t been done because the investigators wanted shade where they worked. He leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. He saw them up there, circling. The city’s carrion birds: the media helicopters.

As Bosch pulled to a stop at the curb he saw a couple of city workers standing next to an equipment truck. They had sick looks on their faces and dragged hard and deep on cigarettes. Their jackhammers were on the ground near the back of the truck. They were waiting-hoping-that their work here was done.

On the other side of their truck Pounds was standing next to the coroner’s blue van. It looked as though he was composing himself, and Bosch saw that he shared the same sick expression with the civilians. Though Pounds was commander of Hollywood detectives, including the homicide table, he had never actually worked homicide himself. Like many of the department’s administrators, his climb up the ladder was based on test scores and brownnosing, not experience. It always pleased Bosch to see someone like Pounds get a dose of what real cops dealt with every day.

Bosch looked at his watch before getting out of his Caprice. He had one hour before he had to be back in court for openers.

“Harry,” Pounds said as he walked up. “Glad you made it.”

“Always glad to check out another body, Lieutenant.”

Bosch slipped off his suit coat and put it inside his car on the seat. Then he moved to the trunk and got out a baggy blue jumpsuit and put it on over his clothes. It would be hot, but he didn’t want to come back into court covered with dirt and dust.

“Good idea,” Pounds said. “Wish I had brought my stuff.”

But Bosch knew he didn’t have any stuff. Pounds ventured to a crime scene only when there was a good chance TV would show up and he could give a sound bite. And it was only TV he was interested in. Not print media. You had to make sense for more than two sentences in a row with a newspaper reporter. And then your words became attached to a piece of paper and were there all the next day and possibly forever to haunt you. It wasn’t good department politics to talk to the print media. TV was a more fleeting and less dangerous thrill.

Bosch headed toward the blue tarp. Beneath it he saw the usual gathering of investigators. They stood next to a pile of broken concrete and along the edge of a trench dug into the concrete pad that had been the building’s foundation. Bosch looked up as one of the TV helicopters made a low flyover. They wouldn’t get much usable video with the tarp hiding the scene. They were probably dispatching ground crews now.

There was still a lot of debris in the building’s shell. Charred ceiling beams and timber, broken concrete block and other rubble. Pounds caught up with Bosch and they began carefully stepping through to the gathering beneath the tarp.

“They’ll bulldoze this and make another parking lot,” Pounds said. “That’s all the riots gave the city. About a thousand new parking lots. You want to park in South Central these days, no problem. You want a bottle of soda or to put gas in your car, then you got a problem. They burned every place down. You drive through the South Side before Christmas? They got Christmas tree lots every block, all the open space down there. I still don’t understand why those people burned their own neighborhoods.”

Bosch knew that the fact people like Pounds didn’t understand why “those people” did what they did was one reason they did it, and would have to do it again someday. Bosch looked at it as a cycle. Every twenty-five years or so the city had its soul torched by the fires of reality. But then it drove on. Quickly, without looking back. Like a hit-and-run.

Suddenly Pounds went down after slipping on the loose rubble. He stopped his fall with his hands and jumped up quickly, embarrassed.

“Damn it!” he cried out, and then, though Bosch hadn’t asked, he added, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

He quickly used his hand to carefully smooth back the strands of hair that had slipped off his balding cranium. He didn’t realize that he was smearing black char from his hand across his forehead as he did this and Bosch didn’t tell him.

They finally picked their way to the gathering. Bosch walked toward his former partner, Jerry Edgar, who stood with a couple of investigators Harry knew and two women he didn’t. The women wore green jumpsuits, the uniform of the coroner’s body movers. Minimum-wage earners who were dispatched from death scene to death scene in the blue van, picking up the bodies and taking them to the ice box.

“Whereyat, Harry?” Edgar said.

“Right here.”

Edgar had just been to New Orleans for the blues festival and had somehow come back with the greeting. He said it so often it had become annoying. Edgar was the only one in the detective bureau who didn’t realize this.

Edgar was the standout amidst the group. He was not wearing a jumpsuit like Bosch-in fact, he never did because they wrinkled his Nordstrom suits-and somehow had managed to make his way into the crime scene area without getting so much as a trace of dust on the pants cuffs of his gray double-breasted suit. The real estate market-Edgar’s onetime lucrative outside gig-had been in the shithouse for three years but Edgar still managed to be the sharpest dresser in the division. Bosch looked at Edgar’s pale blue silk tie, knotted tightly at the black detective’s throat, and guessed that it might have cost more than his own shirt and tie combined.

Bosch looked away and nodded to Art Donovan, the SID crime scene tech, but said nothing else to the others. He was following protocol. As at any murder scene a carefully orchestrated and incestuous caste system was in effect. The detectives did most of the talking amongst themselves or to the SID tech. The uniforms didn’t speak unless spoken to. The body movers, the lowest on the totem pole, spoke to no one except the coroner’s tech. The coroner’s tech said little to the cops. He despised them because in his view they were whiners-always needing this or that, the autopsy done, the tox tests done, all of it done by yesterday.

Bosch looked into the trench they stood above. The jackhammer crew had broken through the slab and dug a hole about eight feet long and four feet deep. They had then excavated sideways into a large formation of concrete that extended three feet below the surface of the slab. There was a hollow in the stone. Bosch dropped to a crouch so he could look closer and saw that the concrete hollow was the outline of a woman’s body. It was as if it were a mold into which plaster could be poured to make a cast, maybe to manufacture a mannikin. But it was empty inside.