“What’s the same?”

Bosch immediately saw what had been there all along and simply gone unnoticed in his survey of everything contained in the files. In the Crowe photo the subject was posed, looking around the corner of a brick wall. Bosch guessed that she was supposed to look mysterious, the photo showing depth of character and perhaps making up for her not being a knockout beauty. In the Conlon photo the woman was posed with her back leaning against a brick wall. Her pose was meant to be alluring, even sexually intriguing, and it counterposed the soft beauty of her features against the hard brick wall.

“The brick wall,” Bosch said.

Using her finger, Rider pointed out bricks in each photo that were the same. They were either chipped or scuffed in some way that made them unique. It was clear that both actresses had posed at the same brick wall.

“But now look,” she said.

She flipped the photos over, and below the listing of credits was the name of the photographer. The names were different but each name was followed by a matching location. Hollywood & Vine Studios.

“So you have different photographers using the same studio,” Bosch said.

He was thinking out loud, trying to take it to the next step.

“Did you look through the other files where there are headshots?” he asked.

“No, I just discovered this connection.”

“Good work.”

Bosch quickly went back to the stack of files and soon they were pulling the headshot photos out of files where they found them.

“Every actress in the city needs headshots,” Rider said as she worked. “It’s like death and taxes. You walk down Hollywood Boulevard and there are ads for photographers on every light pole.”

In five minutes they had six headshot photos of dead actresses with photo credits from six different photographers but all from Hollywood & Vine Studios. Lizbeth Grayson’s photo-the shot Bosch had borrowed from the acting coach-was one of the six.