Bosch felt his throat start to tighten. He tried not to show Mora anything. Just gave him the deadpan look.

“Earlier?”

“Yeah. What if the two other porno chicks who were killed were actually done by the copycat? Who says he had to start after Church was dead?”

Bosch felt the full chill now. If Mora was the follower, was he so confident that he would risk laying the whole pattern out for Bosch? Or could his hunch-after all, that’s all it was, a guess-be completely out of line? Regardless, it felt creepy sitting with Mora, his desk covered by magazines with sex acts depicted on the covers, the calendar girl leering from the vertical file. The statue’s clay face turned away. Bosch realized that Delta Bush, the actress on the calendar Mora had displayed, was blonde-haired and buxom. She fit the pattern. Was that why Mora had put up the calendar?

“You know, Ray,” he said, after composing his voice into a monotone, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. It fits better that way, all the evidence, I mean, if the follower did all three of them… What made you think of it?”

Mora put the report he was working on away in a desk drawer and leaned onto his desk. Subconsciously he brought his left hand up and pulled the Holy Spirit medal from his open collar. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger as he leaned back in his seat again, elbows on the arm rests.

He dropped the medal and said, “Well, I remembered something is what I did. It was a tip that I got right before you nailed Church. See, I dropped it when you dropped Church.”

“You’re talking about four years ago.”

“Yeah. We all thought that was it, end of case, when you got Church.”

“Get to it, Ray, what’d you remember?”

“Yeah, right, well, I remember a couple days, maybe a week before you got Church, I was given one of the call-in tips. It was given to me ’cause I was the resident expert on porno and it was a porno chick who called it in. She used the name Gallery. That’s it, just Gallery. She was in the bottom-line stuff. Loops, live shows, peep booths, nine hundred phone call stuff. And she was just beginning to move up, get her name on some video boxes.

“Anyway, she called the task force-this was right before you nailed Church-and said there was a Tom that’d been making the rounds of the sets up in the Valley. You know, watching the action, hanging out with the producers, but he wasn’t like the other Toms.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Toms?”

“That’s short for Peeping Tom. That’s what the girls call these guys who hang out on the sets. Usually they’re friendly with the producer or they’ve kicked in part of the budget. They throw a grand to the producer and he lets the guy hang around and watch ’ em shoot. It ’s pretty common. These shoots draw a lot of people for whom seeing it on video isn’t enough. They want to be right up there and see it live.”

“All right, so what about this guy?”

“Well, Harry, look, there’s really only one reason these people hang around the sets. They’re hitting on the chicks between takes. I mean, these guys wanna get laid. Or they want to make flicks themselves. They want to break in. And that was the thing with this guy. He wasn’t hitting on anybody. He was just hanging around. She-this is Gallery-said she never saw this dude make the move on anybody. He talked to some of the girls but never left with any of them.”

“And that’s what made him weird? He didn’t want to get laid?”

Mora raised his hands and shrugged like he knew it sounded weak.

“Yeah, basically. But listen, Gallery worked shoots with both Heather Cumhither and Holly Lere, the two Dollmaker victims, and she said it was on those shoots that she saw this Tom. That’s why she called.”

Now the story had Bosch’s attention. But he didn’t know what to make of it. Mora could be simply trying to deflect attention, to send Bosch down the wrong trail.

“She didn’t have a name on the guy?”

“No, that was the problem. That was why I didn’t jump all over it. I had a backlog of tips I was assigned and she calls in with this one without a name. I would have gotten to it eventually, but a few days later you put Church’s dick in the dirt and that was that.”

“You let it go.”

“Yeah, dropped it like a bag of shit.”

Bosch waited. He knew Mora would go on. He had more to say. There had to be more.

“So the thing is, when I looked up the card on Magna Cum Loudly for you yesterday, I recognized some of her early titles. She worked with Gallery in some of her early work. That’s what made me remember the tip. So just stringing along on a hunch, I try to look Gallery up, ask around with some people in the business I know, and it turns out Gallery dropped out of the scene three years ago. Just like that. I mean, I know a top producer with the Adult Film Association and he told me she dropped out right in the middle of one of his shoots. Never said a word to anyone. And no one ever heard from her again. The producer, he remembered it pretty clearly ’cause it cost him a lot of money to reshoot the flick. There would’ve been no continuity if he just dumped in another actress to take her place.”

Bosch was surprised that continuity was even a factor in such films. He and Mora were both silent a moment, thinking about the story, before Bosch finally spoke.

“So, you’re thinking she might be in the ground somewhere? Gallery, I’m talking about. In concrete like the one we found this week.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. People in the industry-I mean, they are not your mainstream people, so there are plenty of disappearing acts. I remember this one broad, she dropped out, next thing I know I see her inPeople magazine. One of those stories about some celebrity fund-raiser and she’s on the arm of what’s his name, guy has his own TV show about the guy in charge of a kennel. Noah’s Bark. I can’t think of-”

“Ray, I don’t give-”

“Okay, okay, anyway the point is, these chicks drop in and out of the biz all the time. Not unusual. They aren’t the smartest people in the first place. They just get it in their mind to do something else. Maybe they meet a guy who they think is going to keep them in cocaine and caviar, be their sugar daddy, like that Noah’s Bark asshole, and they never show up for work again-until they find out they were wrong. As a group, they don’t look much past the next line of blow.

“Y’ask me, what they’re all looking for is Daddy. They all got knocked around when they were a kid and this is some fucked-up way of showing they’re worth something to Daddy. Least I read that somewhere. Prob’ly bullshit like everything else.”

Bosch didn’t need the psychology lesson.

“C’mon Ray, I’m in court and I’m trying to run down this case. Get to the point. What about Gallery?”

“What I’m saying is that with Gallery the situation’s unusual ’cause it’s been almost three years and she never came back. See, they always come back. Even if they’ve fucked over a producer so bad he had to do reshoots, they always come back. They start at the bottom-loops, fluffing-and work their way back up.”

“Fluffing?”

“A fluff is off-camera talent, you could say. Girls who keep the acts up and ready to perform while they’re getting cameras ready, moving lights, changing angles. Things like that, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Bosch was depressed after hearing about the business for ten minutes. He looked at Mora, who had been in Ad-Vice for as long as Bosch could remember.

“What about the survivor? You ever check with her on this tip?”

“Never got around to it. Like I said, I dropped it when you dropped Church. Thought we were done with the whole thing.”

“Yeah, so did I.”

Bosch took out a small pocket notebook and wrote down a few notes from the conversation.

“Did you save any notes from this? From back then?”