The Closers

20

AT 7:50 A.M. THE NEXT DAY Bosch was back on the Nickel. He was watching the food line at the Metro Shelter and he had his eye on Robert Verloren back in the kitchen behind the steam tables. Bosch had gotten lucky. In the early morning, it was almost as if there had been a shift change among the homeless. The people who patrolled the street in darkness were sleeping off the night’s failures. They were replaced by the first shift of homeless, the people who were smart enough to hide from the street at night. Bosch’s intention had been to start at the big centers again and go from there. But as he had made his way into the homeless zone after parking again in Japantown, he started showing the photo of Verloren to the most lucid of the street people he encountered and almost immediately started getting responses. The day people recognized Verloren. Some said they had seen the man in the photo around but that he was much older now. Eventually Bosch came across one man who matter-of-factly said, “Yeah, that’s Chef,” and he pointed Bosch toward the Metro Shelter.

The Metro was one of the smaller satellite shelters that were clustered around the Salvation Army and the Los Angeles Mission and designed to handle the overflow of street people, particularly in the winter months when warmer weather in L.A. drew a migration from colder points north. These smaller centers didn’t have the means to provide three squares a day and by agreement specialized in one service. At the Metro Shelter the service was a breakfast that started at 7 a.m. daily. By the time Bosch got there the line of wobbling, disheveled men and women was extending out the door of the chow center and the long rows of picnic-style tables inside were maxed out. The word on the street was that the Metro had the best breakfast on the Nickel.

Bosch had badged his way through the door and very quickly spotted Verloren in the kitchen beyond the serving tables. It didn’t appear that Verloren was doing one particular job. Instead, he seemed to be checking on the preparation of several things. It appeared that he was in charge. He was neatly dressed in a white, double-breasted kitchen shirt over dark pants, a spotless white apron that went down past his knees and a tall white chef’s hat.

The breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs with red and green peppers, hash browns, grits and disc sausages. It looked and smelled good to Bosch, who had left home without eating anything because he wanted to get moving. To the right of the serving line was a coffee station with two large serve-yourself urns. There were racks containing cups made of thick porcelain that had chipped and yellowed over time. Bosch took a cup and filled it with scalding black coffee and he sipped it and waited. When Verloren strode to the serving table, using the skirt of his apron to hold a hot and heavy replacement pan of eggs, Bosch made his move.

“Hey, Chef,” he called above the clatter of serving spoons and voices.

Verloren looked over and Bosch saw him immediately determine that Bosch was not a “client.” As with the night before, Bosch was dressed informally, but he thought Verloren might have even been able to guess he was a cop. He stepped away from the serving table and approached. But he didn’t come all the way. There seemed to be an invisible line on the floor that was the demarcation between kitchen and eating space. Verloren didn’t cross it. He stood there using his apron to hold the near-empty serving pan he had taken from the steam table.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, do you have a minute? I would like to talk to you.”

“No, I don’t have a minute. I’m in the middle of breakfast.”

“It’s about your daughter.”

Bosch saw the slight waver in Verloren’s eyes. They dropped for a second and then came back up.

“You’re the police?”

Bosch nodded.

“Can I just get through this rush? We’re putting out the last trays now.”

“No problem.”

“You want to eat? You look like you’re hungry.”

“Uh…”

Bosch looked around the room at the crowded tables. He didn’t know where he would sit. He knew that these sorts of chow halls had the same unspoken protocols as prisons. Add in the high degree of mental illness in the homeless population and you could be crossing some sort of line just by the seat you chose.

“Come back with me,” Verloren said. “We have a table in the back.”

Bosch turned back to Verloren but the breakfast chef was already heading back to the kitchen. Bosch followed and was led through the cooking and prep areas to a rear room where there was an empty stainless steel table with a full ashtray on it.

“Have a seat.”

Verloren removed the ashtray and held it behind his back. It was not like he was hiding it. It was like he was a waiter or a maître d’ and he wanted his table perfect for the customer. Bosch thanked him and sat down.

“I’ll be right back.”

It seemed that in less than a minute Verloren brought a plate back loaded with all the things Bosch had seen on the serving table. When he put down the silverware Bosch saw the shake in his hand.

“Thank you, but I was just thinking, will there be enough? You know, for the people coming through?”

“We’re not turning anybody away today. Not as long as they’re on time. How’s your coffee?”

“It’s fine, thanks. You know, it wasn’t like I didn’t want to sit out there with them. I just didn’t know where to sit.”

“I understand. You don’t have to explain. Let me get those trays out and then we can talk. Is there an arrest?”

Bosch looked at him. There was a hopeful, maybe even pleading look in Verloren’s eyes.

“Not yet,” Bosch said. “But we’re getting close to something.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Eat. I call that Malibu scrambled.”

Bosch looked down at his plate. Verloren went back to the kitchen.

The eggs were good. So was the whole breakfast. No toast, but that would have been asking too much. The break area where he sat was between the cooking area of the kitchen and the large room where two men loaded an industrial dishwasher. It was loud, the noise from both directions ricocheting off the gray tiled walls. There was a set of double doors leading to the back alley. One door was open and cool air came in and kept the steam from the dishwasher and the heat from the kitchen at bay.

After Bosch cleaned his plate and washed it down with the rest of his coffee he got up and stepped into the alley to make a phone call away from all the noise. He immediately saw the alley was an encampment. The rear walls of the missions on one side and the toy warehouses on the other were lined almost end to end with cardboard and canvas shanties. It was quiet. These were probably the self-made shelters of the night people. It wasn’t that there was no room for them in the mission dormitories. It was that those beds came with basic rules attached and the people in the alley did not want to abide by such rules.

He called Kiz Rider’s cell phone number and she answered right away. She was already in room 503 and had just finished distributing the wiretap application. Bosch spoke in a low voice.

“I found the father.”

“Great work, Harry. You still got it. What did he say? Did he recognize Mackey?”

“I haven’t talked to him yet.”

He explained the situation and asked if there was anything new on her end.

“The warrant’s on the captain’s desk. Abel’s going to push him on it if we don’t hear back by ten, and then it goes up the chain.”

“How early did you come in?”

“Early. I wanted to get this done.”

“Did you ever get a chance to read the girl’s journal last night?”

“Yeah, I read it in bed. It’s not much help. It’s high school confidential stuff. Unrequited love, weekly crushes, stuff like that. MTL is mentioned but no clue to identity. He might even be a fantasy figure, the way she writes about how special he is. I think Garcia was right to give it back to the mom. It’s not going to help us.”

“Is MTL referred to in the book as a he?”

“Hmm, Harry, that’s clever. I didn’t notice. I have it here and I’ll check. You know something I don’t know?”

“No, just covering all the bases. What about Danny Kotchof? Is he in there?”

“In the beginning. He’s mentioned by name. Then he drops off and mysterious MTL takes his place.”

“Mr. X…”

“Listen, I’m going up to six in a few minutes. I’m going to see about getting access to those old files we were talking about.”

Bosch noticed that she hadn’t mentioned that they were PDU files. He wondered if Pratt or someone else was nearby and she was taking precautions against being overheard.

“Is somebody there, Kiz?”

“That’s right.”

“Take all precautions, right?”

“You got it.”

“Good. Good luck. By the way, did you find a phone on Mariano?”

“Yes,” she said. “There’s one phone and it’s under the name William Burkhart. Must be a roommate. This guy is just a few years older than Mackey and has a record that includes a hate crime. Nothing in recent years but the hate crime was in ’eighty-eight.”

“And guess what,” Bosch said, “he was also Sam Weiss’s neighbor. I must’ve left that out last night when we talked.”

“Too much information coming in.”

“Yeah. You know I was wondering about something. How come Mackey’s cell didn’t come up on the AutoTrack?”

“I’m ahead of you on that. I ran a check on the number and it’s not his. It’s held in the name of Belinda Messier. Her address is over on Melba, also in Woodland Hills. Her record’s clean except for some traffic stuff. Maybe she’s his girlfriend.”

“Maybe.”

“When I get time I will try to track her down. I’m sensing something here, Harry. It’s all coming together. All of this eighty-eight stuff. I tried to pull the file on the hate crime but -”

“Public Disorder?”

“Exactly. And that’s why I’m going up to six.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“I checked with the ESB first thing. They still haven’t found the evidence box. We still don’t have the gun. I’m now wondering if it got misplaced or if it was taken.”

“Yeah,” Bosch said, thinking the same thing. If this case went inside the department, the evidence could have been purposely and permanently lost.

“All right,” Bosch said. “Before I do this interview let’s go back to the journal for a minute. Is there anything in it about the pregnancy?”

“No, she didn’t write about it. The entries are dated and she stopped writing in the book in late April. Maybe it was when she found out. I think maybe she stopped writing in it in case her parents were secretly reading it.”

“Does she mention any hangouts? You know, places she would go?”

“She does mention a lot of movies,” Rider said. “Not who she went with but just that she saw specific movies and what she thought of them. What are you thinking, target acquisition?”

They needed to know where Mackey and Rebecca Verloren could have crossed paths. It was a hole in the case no matter what the motivation was. Where did Mackey come into contact with Verloren in order to target her?

“Movie theaters,” he said. “It could have been where they intersected.”

“Exactly. And I think all the theaters up there in the Valley are in malls. That makes the crossing zone even wider.”

“It’s something to think about.”

Bosch said he would come into the office after talking with Robert Verloren, and they hung up. Bosch went back into the break room and the noise from the dishwashing room seemed louder. The meal service was almost over and the dishwashers were getting slammed. Bosch sat down at the table again and noticed that someone had cleared his empty plate. He tried to think about the conversation with Rider. He knew that a shopping mall would be a huge crossroads, a place where it would be easy to see someone like Mackey crossing paths with someone like Rebecca Verloren. He wondered if the crime could have all come down to a chance encounter-Mackey seeing a girl with the obvious mix of races in her face and hair and eyes. Could this have incensed him to the point that he followed her home and later came back alone or with others to abduct and kill her?

It seemed like a long shot but most theories began as long shots. He thought about the original investigation and the possibility of it having been tainted from within the department. There had been nothing in the murder book that played to the racial angle. But in 1988 the department would have gone out of its way not to play to it. The department and the city had a blind spot. An infection of racial animosities was festering beneath the surface in 1988 but the department and the city looked away. The skin over the seething wound finally broke a few years later and the city was torn apart by three days of rioting, the worst in the country in a quarter-century. Bosch had to consider that the investigation of Rebecca Verloren’s murder might have been stunted in deference to keeping the sickness beneath the surface.

“You ready?”

Bosch looked up and saw Robert Verloren standing over him. His face was sweating from exertion. He now held the chef’s hat in his hand. There was still a slight tremor in his arm.

“Yeah, sure. Do you want to sit down?”

Verloren took the seat across from Bosch.

“Is it always like this?” Bosch asked. “This crowded?”

“Every morning. Today we served a hundred sixty-two plates. A lot of people count on us. No, wait, make that a hundred sixty-three plates. I forgot about you. How was it?”

“It was damn good. Thank you, I needed the fuel.”

“My specialty.”

“A little different than cooking for Johnny Carson and the Malibu set, huh?”

“Yeah, but I don’t miss that. Not at all. Just a stop-off on the road to finding the place where I belong. But I’m here now, thanks to the Lord Jesus, and this is where I want to be.”

Bosch nodded. Whether intentionally or not, Verloren was communicating to Bosch that his new life had been achieved through the intervention of faith. Bosch had often found that those who talked about it the most had the weakest hold on it.

“How did you find me?” Verloren asked.

“My partner and I talked to your wife yesterday and she told us that the last time she had heard anything about you, you were down here. I started looking last night.”

“I wouldn’t go on these streets at night, if I were you.”

There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. But it was something that seemed to have receded over time.

“I thought I was going to find you standing in a line, not feeding the line.”

“Well, not too long ago I was in the line. I had to stand there to stand where I am today.”

Bosch nodded again. He had heard these one-day-at-a-time mantras before.

“How long have you been sober?”

Verloren smiled.

“This time? A little over three years.”

“Look, I don’t want to force you to relive the trauma of seventeen years ago, but we’ve reopened the case.”

“It’s okay, Detective. I reopen the case every night when I shut my eyes and every morning when I say my prayers to Jesus.”

Bosch nodded again.

“Do you want to do this here or take a walk or go over to Parker Center where we can sit in a quiet room?”

“Here is good. I am comfortable here.”

“Okay, then let me tell you a little bit about what is going on. I work for the Open-Unsolved Unit. We are currently looking into your daughter’s murder again because we have some new information.”

“What information?”

Bosch decided to take a different approach with him. Where he had held information back from the mother, he decided to give it all to the father.

“We have a match between blood found on the weapon used in the crime and an individual who we are pretty sure was living up there in Chatsworth at the time of the killing. It’s a DNA match. Do you know what that is?”

Verloren nodded.

“I know. Like in O.J.”

“This one’s solid. It doesn’t mean he is the one who killed Rebecca, but it means he was close to the crime, and that makes us closer.”

“Who is it?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, Mr. Verloren, I want to ask you some questions relating to yourself and the case.”

“What about me?”

Bosch felt the tension rise. The skin around Verloren’s eyes grew tighter. He realized that he could have been careless with this man, mistaking his position in the kitchen as a sign of health and forgetting the warning Rider had issued about the homeless population.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to know a little bit about what has happened to you in the years since Rebecca was taken.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing, but I want to know.”

“What happened to me is that I tripped and fell into a black hole. Took me a long time to see the light and my way out. You got kids?”

“One. A girl.”

“Then you know what I mean. You lose a kid the way I lost my girl and that’s it, my friend. It’s all over. You are like an empty bottle tossed out the window. The car keeps going but you are on the side of the road, broken.”

Bosch nodded. He did know this. He lived a life of screaming vulnerability, knowing that what might happen in a city far away could cause him to live or die, or fall into the same black hole as Verloren.

“After your daughter’s death you lost the restaurant?”

“That’s right. It was the best thing that could have happened. I needed that to happen for me to find out who I really was. And to make my way here.”

Bosch knew that such emotional defenses were fragile. Following Verloren’s logic it could be said that his daughter’s death was the best thing that could have happened because it led to the loss of the restaurant, which triggered all the wonderful personal discoveries he had made. It was bullshit and both men at the table knew it; one just couldn’t admit it.

“Mr. Verloren, talk to me,” Bosch said. “Leave all the self-help lessons for your meetings and the ragged people in line. Tell me how you tripped. Tell me how you fell into that black hole.”

“I just did.”

“Not everybody who loses a child falls so far into the hole. You’re not the only one this has happened to, Mr. Verloren. Some people end up on TV, some run for Congress. What happened to you? Why are you different? And don’t tell me it is because you loved your kid more. We all love our kids.”

Verloren was quiet a moment. He pressed his lips tightly together as he composed. Bosch could tell he had made him angry. But that was okay. He needed to push things.

“All right,” Verloren finally said. “All right.”

But that was all. Bosch could see the muscles of his jaw working. The pain of the last seventeen years had set in his face. Bosch could read it like a menu. Appetizers, entrees, desserts. Frustration, anger, irredeemable loss.

“All right what, Mr. Verloren?”

Verloren nodded. He removed the final barricade.

“I could blame you people but I must blame myself. I abandoned my daughter in death, Detective. And then the only place I could hide from the betrayal was in the bottle. The bottle opens up the black hole. Do you understand?”

Bosch nodded.

“I am trying to. Tell me what you mean about blaming you people. Do you mean cops? Do you mean white people?”

“I mean all of it.”

Verloren turned in his seat so that his back was against the tile wall next to the table. He looked toward the door to the alley. He wasn’t looking at Bosch. Bosch wanted the eye contact, but he was willing to let things ride as long as Verloren kept talking.

“Let’s start with the cops, then,” Bosch said. “Why do you blame the cops? What did the cops do?”

“You expect me to talk to you about what you people did?”

Bosch thought carefully before responding. He felt this was the make-or-break point of the interview and he sensed that this man had something important to give up.

“We start with the fact that you loved your daughter, right?” Bosch said.

“Of course.”

“Well, Mr. Verloren, what happened to her should never have happened. I can’t do anything about it. But I can try to speak for her. That’s why I am here. What the cops did seventeen years ago is not what I am going to do. Most of them are dead now anyway. If you still love your daughter, if you love the memory of her, then you will tell me the story. You will help me speak for her. It’s your only way of making up for what you did back then.”

Verloren started nodding halfway through Bosch’s plea. Bosch knew he had him, that he would open up. It was about redemption. It didn’t matter how many years had gone by. Redemption was always the brass ring.

A single tear rolled down Verloren’s left cheek, almost imperceptible against the dark skin. A man in dirty kitchen whites came into the break area with a clipboard in hand but Bosch quickly waved him away from Verloren. Bosch waited and finally Verloren spoke.

“I chose myself over her and in the end I lost myself anyway,” he said.

“How did that happen?”

Verloren covered his mouth with his hand, as if to try to keep the secrets from being dispelled. Finally he dropped it and spoke.

“I read one day in the newspaper that my daughter had been killed with a gun that came from a burglary. Green and Garcia, they hadn’t told me that. So I asked Detective Green about it and he told me the man with the gun had it because he was afraid. He was a Jewish man and there had been threats against him. I thought…”

He stopped there and Bosch had to prompt him.

“You thought that maybe Rebecca had been targeted because of her mixed races? Because her father was black?”

Verloren nodded.

“I thought, yes, because from time to time there would be a comment or something. Not everybody saw the beauty in her. Not like we did. I wanted to live on the Westside, but Muriel, she was from up there. It was home to her.”

“What did Green tell you?”

“He told me, no, that it wasn’t there. They had looked at that and it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right to me. They were ignoring this, it seemed to me. I kept calling and asking. I was pushing it. Finally I went to a customer I had at the restaurant who was a member of the police commission. I told him about this thing and he said he would check into it for me.”

Verloren nodded, more to himself than to Bosch. He was fortifying his faith in his actions as a father seeking justice for his daughter.

“And then what happened?” Bosch prompted.

“Then I got a visit from two police.”

“Not Green and Garcia?”

“No, not them. Different police. They came to my restaurant.”

“What were their names?”

Verloren shook his head.

“They never gave me their names. They just showed me their badges. They were detectives, I think. They told me I was wrong about what I was pushing Green about. They told me to back off it because I was just stirring the pot. That is what they called it, stirring the pot. Like it was about me and not my daughter.”

He shook his head tightly, that anger still sharp after all the years. Bosch asked an obvious question, obvious because he knew so well how the LAPD worked back then.

“Did they threaten you?”

Verloren snorted.

“Yes, they threatened me,” he said quietly. “They told me that they knew my daughter had been pregnant but they couldn’t find the clinic she had gone to to get it taken care of. So there was no tissue they could use to identify the father. No way to tell who it was or wasn’t. They said that all it would take was for them to ask a few questions about me and her, like with my customer on the police commission, and the rumors would start to run. They said just a few questions in the right places and pretty soon people would think it was me.”

Bosch didn’t interrupt. He felt his own anger tightening his throat.

“They said it would be hard for me to keep my business if everybody thought I had… I had done that to my daughter…”

Now more tears came down his dark face. He did nothing to stop their flow.

“And so I did what they wanted. I backed off and dropped it. Stopped stirring the pot. I told myself it didn’t matter; it wouldn’t bring Becky back to us. So I never called Detective Green again… and they never solved the case. After a while I started drinking to forget what I had lost and what I had done, that I had put myself and my pride and my reputation and my business ahead of my daughter. And pretty soon, before you knew it, I came to that black hole I was telling you about. I fell in and I’m still climbing out.”

After a moment he turned and looked at Bosch.

“How’s that for a story, Detective?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Verloren. I’m sorry that happened. All of it.”

“Is that the story you wanted to hear, Detective?”

“I just wanted to know the truth. Believe it or not, it is going to help me. It will help me speak for her. Can you describe these two men who came to you?”

Verloren shook his head.

“It’s been a long time. I probably wouldn’t recognize them if they stood in front of me. I just remember they were both white men. One of them I always thought of as Mr. Clean because his head was shaved and he stood with his arms folded like the guy on the bottle.”

Bosch nodded and he felt his anger working into the muscles of his shoulders. He knew who Mr. Clean was.

“How much of all this did your wife know?” he asked in a calm tone.

Verloren shook his head.

“Muriel didn’t know anything about this. I kept it from her. It was my water to carry.”

Verloren wiped his cheeks and seemed to have earned some relief from finally telling the story.

Bosch reached into his back pocket and came up with the old photograph of Roland Mackey. He put it down on the table in front of Verloren.

“Do you recognize this kid?”

Verloren looked for a long moment before shaking his head in the negative.

“Should I? Who is he?”

“His name is Roland Mackey. He was a couple years older than your daughter in ’eighty-eight. He didn’t go to school at Hillside but he lived in Chatsworth.”

Bosch waited for a response but didn’t get any. Verloren just stared at the photo on the table.

“That’s a mug shot. What did he do?”

“Stole a car. But he has a record of associating with white power extremists. In and outside of jail. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just asking. Can you remember if your daughter ever mentioned his name or maybe somebody named Ro?”

Verloren shook his head.

“What we are trying to do is figure out if they could have intersected anywhere. The Valley’s a big place. They could’ve -”

“What school did he go to?”

“He went to Chatsworth High but never finished. He got a GED.”

“Rebecca went to Chatsworth High for driver’s ed the summer before she was taken.”

“You mean ’eighty-seven?”

Verloren nodded.

“I’ll check it out.”

But Bosch didn’t think it was a good lead. Mackey had dropped out before the summer of 1987 and didn’t come back for his general education degree until 1988. Still, it was worth a thorough look.

“What about the movies? Did she like to go to movies and the mall?”

Verloren shrugged.

“She was a sixteen-year-old girl. Of course she liked movies. Most of her friends had cars. Once they hit sixteen and got mobile they were all over the place. My wife called it the three Ms-movies, malls, and Madonna.”

“Which malls? Which theaters?”

“They went to the Northridge Mall because it was close, you know. They also liked to go to the drive-in over on Winnetka. That way they could sit in the car and talk during the movie. One of the girls had a convertible and they liked going in that.”

Bosch zeroed in on the drive-in. He had forgotten about it when he had spoken about movie theaters with Rider earlier. But Roland Mackey had once been arrested burglarizing the same drive-in on Winnetka. That made it a key possibility as the point of intersection.

“How often did Rebecca and her friends go to the drive-in?”

“I think they liked to go on Friday nights, when the new movies were just out.”

“Did they meet boys there?”

“I would assume so. You see, this is all just second-guessing. There was nothing wrong or unnatural about our daughter going to the movies with her friends and meeting up with boys and whatnot. It is only after the worst-case scenario happens that people ask, ‘Why don’t you know who she was with?’ We thought everything was fine. We sent her to the best school we could find. Her friends were from nice families. We couldn’t watch her every minute of the day. Friday nights-hell, most nights-I worked late at the restaurant.”

“I understand. I am not judging you as a parent, Mr. Verloren. I see nothing wrong with that, okay? I am just dragging a net. I’m collecting as much information as I can because you never know what might become important.”

“Yeah, well, that net got snagged and ripped on the rocks a long time ago.”

“Maybe not.”

“You think this Mackey fellow is the one, then?”

“He’s connected somehow, that’s all we know for sure. We’ll know more soon enough. I promise you that.”

Verloren turned and looked directly into Bosch’s eyes for the first time during the interview.

“When you get to that point, you will speak for her, won’t you, Detective?”

Bosch nodded slowly. He thought he knew what Verloren was asking.

“Yes sir, I will.”

21

KIZ RIDER SAT at her desk with her arms folded, as if she had been waiting for Bosch all morning. She had a somber look on her face and Bosch knew something was up.

“You get the PDU file?” he asked.

“I got to look at it. I wasn’t allowed to take it.”

Bosch nodded. He slid into his seat across from her.

“Good stuff?” he asked.

“Depends on how you look at it.”

“Well, I got some stuff, too.”

He looked around. Abel Pratt’s door was open and Bosch could see him in there, bending over to the little cooler he kept next to his desk. Pratt was in earshot. It wasn’t that Bosch didn’t trust Pratt. He did. But he didn’t want to put him in a position of hearing something he didn’t want to or was not ready to hear. Same as Rider when they had spoken on the phone earlier.

He looked back at his partner.

“You want to take a walk?”

“Yes, I do.”

They got up and headed out. When Bosch went past the OIC’s door he leaned in. Pratt was now on the phone. Bosch caught his attention and pantomimed drinking from a cup and then pointed to Pratt. Shaking his head no to the offer of coffee, Pratt held up a tub of yogurt as if to say he had what he needed. Bosch saw little chunks of green in the gunk. He tried to think of a green fruit and only came up with kiwi. He walked away thinking that the only possible way to make yogurt taste worse was to put kiwi into it.

They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out front to where the memorial fountain was.

“So where do you want to go?” Kiz asked.

“Depends on how much there is to talk about.”

“Probably a lot.”

“Last time I worked in Parker Center I was a smoker. When I needed to walk and think I’d go over to Union Station and buy smokes in the shop over there. I liked that place. It’s got those comfortable chairs in the main hall. Or it used to, at least.”

“Sounds good to me.”

They headed that way, taking Los Angeles Street to the north. The first building they passed was the federal office building, and Bosch noticed that the concrete barriers erected in 2001 to keep potential vehicle bombs away from the building were still in place. The threat of danger didn’t seem to bother the people in the line stretching across the front of the building. They were waiting to get into the immigration offices, each clutching paperwork and ready to make a case for citizenship. They waited beneath the tile mosaics on the front façade that depicted people dressed like angels, their eyes skyward, waiting on heaven.

“Why don’t you start, Harry,” Rider said. “Tell me about Robert Verloren.”

Bosch walked a little further before beginning.

“I liked the guy,” he said. “He’s digging himself out of the hole. He cooks a hundred or so breakfasts a day over there. I had a plate and it was pretty good stuff.”

“And I’m sure it beats the hell out of the prices at Pacific Dining Car. What did he give you that’s made you so angry?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You read me, I read you. I know he told you something that’s got you going.”

Bosch nodded. It sure didn’t seem like three years since they had worked together.

“ Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving.”

“Tell it.”

Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren’s description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.

“Sounds like Irving to me, too,” Rider said.

“And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan.”

“Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He’s been on the Nickel a long time.”

“I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn’t the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren.”

They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.

The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.

“That’s not like you, Harry.”

“What isn’t?”

“Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle.”

“Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?”

She nodded glumly.

“I think so,” she said.

“And they just let you waltz in there and get it?”

“I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives.”

“The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?”

“I’m sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it.”

“Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?”

“Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was connected to an old PDU investigation and I needed to get into Special Archives to look for a file. He sent Lieutenant Hohman with me. We went in, found the file and I had to look through it while Hohman sat across a table from me. You know what, Harry? There are a hell of a lot of files in Special Archives.”

“Where all the bodies are buried…”

Bosch wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure how to say it. Rider looked at him and read him.

“What, Harry?”

He didn’t say anything at first but she waited him out.

“Kiz, you said the man on six trusts you. Do you trust him?”

She looked him in the eye when she answered.

“Like I trust you, Harry. Okay?”

Bosch looked at her.

“That’s good enough for me.”

Rider made a move to turn down Arcadia but Bosch pointed toward the old pueblo, the place where the City of Angels was founded. He wanted to take the long way and walk through.

“I haven’t been down here in a while. Let’s check this out.”

They cut through the circular courtyard where the padres blessed the animals every Easter and then past the Instituto Cultural Mexicano. They followed the curving arcade of cheap souvenir booths and churro stands. Recorded mariachi music came from unseen speakers, but in counterpoint was the sound of a live guitar.

They found the musician sitting on a bench in front of the Avila Adobe. They stopped and listened as the old man played a Mexican ballad Bosch thought he had heard before but could not identify.

Bosch studied the mud-walled structure behind the musician and wondered if Don Francisco Avila had any idea what he was helping to set in motion when he staked his claim to the spot in 1818. A city would grow tall and wide from this place. A city as great as any other. And just as mean. A destination city, a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.

It was a city full of haves and have-nots, movie stars and extras, drivers and the driven, predators and prey. The fat and the hungry and little room in between. A city that despite all of that still had them lining up and waiting every day behind the bomb barriers to get in and stay in.

Bosch pulled the fold of money from his pocket and dropped a five in the old musician’s basket. He and Rider then cut through the old Cucamonga Winery, its cask rooms converted into galleries and artists’ stalls, and out to Alameda. They crossed the street to the train station, its clock tower rising in front of them. In the front walkway they passed a sundial with an inscription cut into its granite pedestal.

Vision to See

Faith to Believe

Courage to Do

Union Station was designed to mirror the city it served and the way in which it was supposed to work. It was a melting pot of architectural styles-Spanish Colonial, Mission, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, Southwestern and Moorish design flourishes among them. But unlike the rest of the city, where the pot more often than not boiled over, the styles at the train station blended smoothly into something unique, something beautiful. Bosch loved it for that.

Through the glass doors they came into the cavernous entry hall, and an archway three stories tall led to the immense waiting room beyond. As Bosch took it in he remembered that he used to walk over here not only for cigarettes, but also to renew himself a little bit. Going to Union Station was like paying a visit to church, a cathedral where the graceful lines of design and function and civic pride all intersected. In the central waiting room the voices of travelers rose into its high empty spaces and were transformed into a choir of languid whispers.

“I love this place,” Rider said. “Did you ever see the movie Blade Runner?”

Bosch nodded. He had seen it.

“This was the police station, right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever see True Confessions?” he asked.

“No, was it good?”

“Yeah, you should see it. Another take on the Black Dahlia and LAPD conspiracy.”

She groaned.

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s what I need right now.”

They got cups of coffee at Union Bagel and then walked into the waiting room, where rows of brown leather seats were lined up like luxurious pews. Bosch looked up as he was always drawn to do. Six huge chandeliers hung forty feet above them in two rows. Rider looked up, too.

Bosch then pointed to two side-by-side seats open near the newsstand. They sat down on the soft padded leather and put their cups on the wide wooden armrests.

“You ready to talk about this now?” Rider asked.

“If you are,” he answered. “What was in the file you saw in Special Archives? What was so sinister?”

“For one thing, Mackey is in there.”

“As a suspect in Verloren?”

“No, the file has nothing to do with Verloren. Verloren was not even a blip on the screen as far as the file goes. It’s all about an investigation that went down and was buttoned up before Rebecca Verloren was even pregnant, let alone snatched from her bed in the night.”

“All right, then what’s it got to do with us?”

“Maybe nothing and maybe everything. You know the guy Mackey lives with, William Burkhart?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s in there, too. Only back then he was better known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That was his moniker in this gang, the Eights.”

“Okay.”

“In March of ’eighty-eight Billy Blitzkrieg went away for a year for vandalizing a synagogue in North Hollywood. Property damage, graffiti, defecation, the whole thing.”

“The hate crime. He was the only one they bagged?”

She nodded.

“They got a latent off a spray can they found in a gutter trap about a block from the synagogue. So he went down for it. Took a plea or they would have made an example of him and he knew it.”

Bosch nodded. He didn’t want to say anything that would interrupt her flow.

“In the reports and in the press Burkhart-or Blitzkrieg or whatever you want to call him-was portrayed as the leader of the Eights. They said he called for nineteen eighty-eight to be a year of racial and ethnic upheaval to honor their beloved Adolf Hitler. You know the crap. RaHoWa, revenge of the white trash and all that. They all ran around in Minnesota Vikings jerseys-the Vikings apparently were a pure race. They all wore number eighty-eight.”

“I’m getting the picture.”

“Anyway, they had a lot on Burkhart. They had him cold on the synagogue and they had the feds chomping at the bit to do a civil rights dance on his pointy little head. There were a lot of crimes, beginning right at the start of the year, when they toasted New Year’s by burning a cross on a black family’s lawn in Chatsworth. After that there were more cross burnings, threatening phone calls, bomb scares. The synagogue break-in. They even trashed a Jewish daycare center in Encino. This was all in early January. They also started going to street corners, picking up Mexican laborers and taking them out into the desert, where they assaulted or abandoned them or both, usually both. To use their terminology, they were fomenting disharmony, which they believed would help lead to a separation of the races.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the song.”

“Okay, well, like I said, they were ready to make Burkhart the poster boy for all of this and, if they went with it to Justice, he could have ended up going away for a ten-year minimum in a federal pen.”

“So it was a no-brainer. He took a deal.”

Rider nodded.

“He took a year in Wayside and a five-year tail, and the rest of it went away. And the Eights went away with it. They were broken up and that was the end of the threat. All of this went down by the end of March, long before Verloren.”

As he thought about all of this Bosch watched a woman in a hurry as she pulled a young girl by the hand toward the gateway to the Metroline tracks. The woman was also lugging a heavy suitcase and her focus was only on the gate ahead. The child was pulled along with her face turned upward as she looked at the ceiling. She was smiling at something. Bosch looked up and saw a child’s balloon trapped in one of the ceiling’s vaulted squares. One child’s disaster was another’s secret smile. The balloon was orange and white and shaped like a fish, and Bosch knew because of his daughter that it was an animated character named Nemo. He had a flash of his daughter but just as quickly pushed it away so he could concentrate. He looked at Rider.

“So where was Mackey in all of this?” he asked.

“He was sort of the runt of the litter,” Rider answered. “One of the minions. He was thought to be the perfect recruit. High school dropout with no life and no prospects. He was on probation for burglary and his juvie jacket was full of pops for car theft, burglary and drugs. So he was just the kind of guy they were looking for. A loser they could mold into a white warrior. But once they jumped him in they found out he was-to use a quote from Burkhart-dumber than a nigger off the boat. He apparently was so stupid that they had to take him off the graffiti runs because he couldn’t even spell their basic racist vocabulary. In fact, his homey name in the group became Wej. Not like you wedge your way into a door. Wej like Jew spelled backwards because that was how he sprayed it once on a synagogue wall.”

“Dyslexic?”

“I’d say.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Even with the giveaways in the Verloren scene, I’m not seeing this guy.”

“I agree. I think he had a part but not the main part. He doesn’t have it between the ears.”

Bosch decided to drop Mackey and double back to the beginning of her report.

“So if they had all of this intel on these guys, how come only Burkhart went down?”

“I’m getting to that.”

“This is where the high jingo comes in?”

“You got it. You see, Burkhart was a leader of the Eights but he wasn’t the leader.”

“Ah.”

“The leader was identified as a guy named Richard Ross. He was older than the others. A true believer. He was twenty-one and was the smooth talker who recruited Burkhart and then most of the other Eights and got the whole thing going.”

Bosch nodded. Richard Ross was a common name but he thought he knew where this was going.

“This Richard Ross, was that as in Richard Ross Junior?”

“Exactly. The good Captain Ross’s prodigy.”

Captain Richard Ross had been the longtime head of Internal Affairs Division during the early part of Bosch’s career in the department. He was now retired.

For Bosch the rest of the story tumbled into place.

“So they kept Junior out of it and saved Senior and the department all the embarrassment,” he said. “They laid it all on Burkhart, Ross’s second in command. He went away to Wayside and the group was broken up. Chalk it all up to youthful misadventure.”

“You got it.”

“And let me guess: all the intel came from Richard Ross Junior.”

“You’re good. It was part of the deal. Richard Junior gave up everybody and it was all PDU needed to quietly splinter the group. Junior then got to walk away from it.”

“All in a day’s work for Irving.”

“And you know what’s funny? I think Irving is a Jewish name.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Whether it is or isn’t, it’s not very funny,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Not if Irving saw an angle.”

“Reading between the lines of the report, I would say he saw all the angles.”

“This deal gave him control of IAD. I mean real, absolute control over who was investigated and how investigations were conducted. It put Ross deep in his pocket. It explains a lot about what was going on back then.”

“It was mostly before my time.”

“So they take care of the Eights and Irving gets a nice big prize in having Richard Ross Senior wearing a collar on the poodle squad,” Bosch said, thinking out loud. “But then Rebecca Verloren ends up dead by a gun stolen from a guy the Eights had been harassing, a gun likely stolen by one of the little runts they let run free. Their whole deal could fall apart if the murder came back on the Eights and then on them.”

“That’s right. So they step in and push the investigation. They steer it away and nobody ever goes down for it.”

“Motherfuckers,” Bosch whispered.

“Poor Harry. You still must have a lot of rust from your lay-off. You thought maybe they pushed the case because they were trying to save the city from burning. It was nothing so heroic.”

“No, they were just trying to save their own asses and the position the deal with Ross had given them. Given Irving.”

“This is all supposition,” Rider cautioned.

“Yeah, just reading between the fucking lines.”

Bosch felt the strongest craving for a cigarette he’d had in at least a year. He looked over at the newsstand and saw all of the packages in the racks behind the counter. He looked away. He looked up at the balloon trapped at the ceiling. He thought he knew how Nemo felt being stuck up there.

“When did Ross retire?” he asked.

“’Ninety-one. He rode it out until he hit twenty-five years-they allowed him that-and then he retired. I checked-he moved up to Idaho. I ran Junior on the box, too, and he’d already moved up there ahead of him. Probably one of those gated white enclaves where he felt right at home.”

“And he was probably up there laughing his ass off when this place came apart after Rodney King in ’ninety-two.”

“Probably, but not for long. He was killed in a DUI in ’ninety-three. He was coming back from an antigovernment rally out in the boonies. What goes around comes around, I guess.”

A dull thud hit Bosch in the stomach. He had started liking Richard Ross Jr. for the Verloren killing. He could have used Mackey to procure the weapon and maybe help carry the victim up the hill. But now he was dead. Could their investigation be leading them to such a dead end? Would they end up going back to Rebecca Verloren’s parents and telling them their long-dead daughter had been taken from them by someone who also was long dead? What kind of justice would that be?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rider said. “He could have been our guy. But I don’t think so. According to the box, he got his Idaho driver’s license in May of ’eighty-eight. He was supposedly already up there when Verloren went down.”

“Yeah, supposedly.”

Bosch wasn’t convinced by a simple DMV computer check. He pushed all of the information through the filters again to see if anything else jumped out at him.

“Okay, let’s review for a minute, make sure I have it all straight. Back in ’eighty-eight we have a bunch of these Valley boys calling themselves the Eights and running around in their football jerseys trying to kick-start a racial holy war. The department takes a look and pretty soon finds out that the brains behind this group is the son of our own Captain Ross of IAD. Commander Irving puts his finger into the wind and thinks, ‘Hmmm, I think I can use this to my advantage.’ So he puts the kibosh on going after Richard Junior and they sacrifice William ‘Billy Blitz’ Burkhart to the Justice Gods instead. The Eights are splintered, score one for the good guys. And Richard Junior skates away, score one for Irving because now he has Richard Senior in his pocket. Everybody lives happily ever after. Am I missing anything?”

“Actually, it’s Billy Blitzkrieg.”

“Blitzkrieg, then. So all of this gets wrapped up by early spring, right?”

“By the end of March. And by early May Richard Ross Junior has moved to Idaho.”

“Okay, so then in June somebody breaks into Sam Weiss’s house and steals his gun. Then in July-the day after our nation’s birthday, no less-a girl of mixed race is taken out of her house and murdered. Not raped, but murdered-which is important to remember. The murder is made to look like a suicide. But it is done badly, by all appearances by someone who was new at this. Garcia and Green catch the case, eventually see through it and conduct an investigation that leads them nowhere because, whether knowingly or not, they are pushed in that direction. Now, seventeen years later, the murder weapon is incontrovertibly tied to someone who just a few months before the killing was running around with the Eights. What am I missing here?”

“I think you’ve got it all.”

“So the question is, could it be that the Eights were not finished? That they continued to foment, only they tried to disguise their signature now? And that they raised the ante to include murder?”

Rider slowly shook her head.

“Anything is possible, but it doesn’t make much sense. The Eights were about statements-public statements. Burning crosses and painting synagogues. But it’s not much of a statement if you murder somebody and then try to disguise it as a suicide.”

Bosch nodded. She was right. There was not a smooth flow to any of the logic.

“Then again, they knew they had the LAPD on their backs,” he said. “Maybe some of them continued to operate but as sort of an underground movement.”

“Like I said, anything is possible.”

“Okay, so we have Ross Junior supposedly up in Idaho and we have Burkhart in Wayside. The two leaders. Who was left besides Mackey?”

“There are five other names in the file. None of the names jumped out at me.”

“That’s our suspect list for now. We need to run them and see where they went from-wait a minute, wait a minute. Was Burkhart still in Wayside? You said he got a year, right? That meant he’d be out in five or six months unless he got into trouble up there. When exactly did he go in?”

Rider shook her head.

“No, it would have been late March or early April when he checked into Wayside. He couldn’t have -”

“Doesn’t matter when he checked into Wayside. When was he popped? When was the synagogue thing?”

“It was January. Early January. I have the exact date back in the file.”

“All right, early January. You said prints on a paint can tripped them to Burkhart. What did that take back in ’eighty-eight, when they were probably still doing it by hand-a week if it was a hot case like this? If they popped Burkhart by the end of January and he didn’t make bail…”

He held his hands wide, allowing Rider to finish.

“February, March, April, May, June,” she said excitedly. “Five months. With gain time he could easily have been out by July!”

Bosch nodded. The county jail system housed inmates awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less. For decades the system had been overcrowded and under court-ordered maximum population counts. This resulted in the routine early release of inmates through gain-time ratios that fluctuated according to individual jail population but sometimes were as high as three days earned for every one day served.

“This looks good, Harry.”

“Maybe too good. We have to nail it down.”

“When we get back I’ll go on the computer and find out when he left Wayside. What’s this do to the wiretap?”

Bosch thought for a moment about whether they should slow things down.

“I think we go ahead with the wiretap. If the Wayside date fits, then we watch Mackey and Burkhart. We still spook Mackey because he’s the weak one. We do it when he’s at work and away from Burkhart. If we’re right, he’ll call him.”

He stood up.

“But we still have to run down the other names, the other members of the Eights,” he added.

Rider didn’t get up. She looked up at him.

“You think this is going to work?”

Bosch shrugged.

“It has to.”

He looked around the cavernous train station. He checked faces and eyes, looking for any that might quickly turn away from his own. He half expected to see Irving in the crowd of travelers. Mr. Clean on the scene. That’s what Bosch used to think when Irving would show up at a crime scene.

Rider stood up. They dropped their empty cups into a nearby trash can and walked toward the front doors of the station. When he got there Bosch looked behind them, again searching for a follower. He knew they now had to consider such possibilities. The place that had been so warm and inviting to him twenty minutes before was now suspicious and forbidding. The voices inside were no longer graceful whispers. There was a sharp edge to them. They sounded angry.

When they got outside he noticed that the sun had moved behind the clouds. He wouldn’t need his sunglasses for the walk back.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Rider said.

“For what?”

“I just thought that it would be different, you coming back. Now here we are, your first case back and what do you get, a case with high jingo all over it.”

Bosch nodded as they crossed to the front walkway. He saw the sundial and the words etched in granite beneath it. His eyes held on the last line.

Courage to Do

“I’m not worried,” he said. “But they should be.”

22

GOOD TO GO,” Commander Garcia replied when Bosch asked if he was ready.

Bosch nodded and went to the door to usher in the two women from the Daily News.

“Hi, I’m McKenzie Ward,” said the one leading the way. She was obviously the reporter. The other woman was carrying a camera bag and a tripod.

“I’m Emmy Ward,” said the photographer.

“Sisters?” Garcia asked, though the answer was obvious because of how much the two women, both in their twenties, looked alike: both attractive blondes with big smiles.

“I’m older,” said McKenzie. “But not by much.”

They all shook hands.

“How did two sisters get on the same paper together, then the same story together?” Garcia said.

“I was here a few years and then Emmy just applied. It’s no big deal. We’ve worked together a lot. It’s just a blind draw on who gets the photo assignments. Today we work together. Tomorrow maybe not.”

“Do you mind if we take some photos first?” Emmy asked. “I have another assignment I need to get to right after this.”

“Of course,” Garcia said, ever accommodating. “Where do you want me?”

Emmy Ward set up a shot with Garcia seated at the meeting table with the murder book open in front of him. Bosch had brought it with him to use as a prop. As the photo session proceeded, Bosch and McKenzie Ward stood off to the side and talked casually. Earlier, they had spoken at length on the phone. She had agreed to the deal. If she got the story into the paper the following day, she would be first in line for the exclusive when they took down the killer. She had not agreed easily. Garcia had initially been clumsy in his approach to her before turning the negotiation over to Bosch. Bosch was wise enough to know that no reporter would allow the police department to dictate when a story would be published and how it would be written. So Bosch concentrated on the when, not the how. He went with the assumption that McKenzie Ward would and could write a story that would serve his purposes. He just needed it in the paper sooner rather than later. Kiz Rider had an appointment with a judge that afternoon. If the wiretap application was approved, they would be in business by the next morning.

“Did you talk to Muriel Verloren?” the reporter asked Bosch.

“Yeah, she’s there all afternoon and she’s ready to talk.”

“I pulled the clips and read everything from back then-like I was eight years old at the time-and there were several mentions of the father and his restaurant. Will he be there, too?”

“I don’t think so. He’s gone. It’s more of a mother’s story, anyway. She’s the one who has kept her daughter’s bedroom untouched for seventeen years. She said you could photograph in there, too, if you want.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Bosch watched her looking at the shot being set up with Garcia. He knew what she was thinking. The mother in the bedroom frozen in time would be a lot better shot than an old cop at a table with a binder. She looked at Bosch while she started digging in her purse.

“Then I have to make a call to see if I can keep Emmy.”

“Go ahead.”

She left the office, probably because she didn’t want Garcia to overhear her telling an editor that she needed Emmy to stay on the assignment because she had a better shot with the mother.

She was back in three minutes and nodded to Bosch, which he took to mean that Emmy was going to stay with her on the story.

“So this thing is a go for tomorrow?” he asked, just to make sure once again.

“It’s slotted for the window-depending on the art. My editor wanted to hold it for Sunday, make a nice long feature, but I told him we were competitive on it. Anytime we can beat the Times on a story we do.”

“Yeah, but what will he say when the Times doesn’t run anything? He’ll know you tricked him.”

“No, he’ll think that the Times killed their story because we beat them to the punch. Happens all the time.”

Bosch nodded thoughtfully, then asked, “What did you mean about it being slotted for the window?”

“We run a news feature every day with a photo on the front page. We call it the window because it’s in the center of the page. Also because you can see the art in the window of the newspaper boxes on the street. It’s a prime spot.”

“Good.”

Bosch was excited by the play the story was going to get.

“If you guys screw me on this, I won’t forget it,” McKenzie said quietly.

There was a threat in her tone, the tough reporter coming to the surface. Bosch held his hands wide, as if he had nothing to hide.

“That’s not going to happen. You’ve got the exclusive. As soon as we wrap somebody up, I’m calling you and you only.”

“Thank you. Now, just to go over the rules again, I can quote you by name in the story but you don’t want to be in any photos, right?”

“Right. I may have to do some undercover work on this. I don’t want my face in the paper.”

“Got it. What undercover?”

“You never know. I just want to keep the option open. Besides, the commander is better for the photo. He’s lived with the case longer than I have.”

“Well, I think I already have most of what I need from the clips and our call earlier but I still want to sit down with you two for a few minutes.”

“Whatever you need.”

“Done,” Emmy said, a few minutes later. She started breaking down her equipment.

“Call the photo desk,” her sister said. “I think there’s been a change and you are staying with me.”

“Oh,” Emmy said, not seeming to mind.

“Why don’t you make the call outside while we get going with the interview?” McKenzie said. “I want to get back to writing this as soon as we can.”

The reporter and Bosch took seats at the table with Garcia while the photographer went out to check on her new assignment. McKenzie started by asking Garcia what stuck with him about the case for so long and what made him push it forward through the Open-Unsolved Unit. While Garcia gave a rambling response about the ones that haunt you, Bosch felt the waters of contempt rise in him. He knew what the reporter didn’t know, that Garcia had knowingly or unknowingly allowed the investigation to be shunted aside seventeen years earlier. The fact that it appeared Garcia did not know that his investigation had been tampered with somehow seemed like the lesser sin to Bosch. Still, if it didn’t show personal corruption or a giving way to pressure from the upper reaches of the department, at the very least it showed incompetence.

After a few more questions of Garcia the reporter turned her attention to Bosch and asked what was new in the case seventeen years later.

“The main thing is we have the DNA of the shooter,” he said. “Tissue and blood from the murder weapon was preserved by our Scientific Investigation Division. We are hoping that analysis of it will allow us either to match it to a suspect whose DNA is already in the Department of Justice data bank, or to use it in comparisons to eliminate or identify suspects. We are in the process of going back to everybody in the case. Anybody who looks like a suspect will have their DNA checked against what we’ve got. That is something Commander Garcia couldn’t do in ’eighty-eight. We’re hoping it will change things this time.”

Bosch further explained how the weapon extracted a DNA sample from the person who shot it. The reporter seemed very interested in the happenstance of this and took detailed notes.

Bosch was pleased. The gun and DNA story was what he wanted to get into the paper. He wanted Mackey to read the story and know that his DNA was in the pipeline. It was being analyzed and compared. He would know that a sample from him was already in the DOJ database. The hope was that this would make him panic. Maybe he would try to run, maybe he would make a mistake and make a call in which he discussed the crime. One mistake would be all it would take.

“How long before you get results from the DOJ?” McKenzie asked.

Bosch fidgeted. He was trying not to lie directly to the reporter.

“Uh, that’s hard to say,” he answered. “The DOJ prioritizes comparison requests and there is always a backup. We should have something any day now.”

Bosch was pleased with his response but then the reporter threw another grenade into his foxhole.

“What about race?” she said. “I read all the clips and it seemed like nothing was ever brought up one way or the other about this girl being biracial. Do you think that played at all into the motivation of this murder?”

Bosch flicked a look at Garcia and hoped he would answer first.

“The case was fully explored in that regard in nineteen eighty-eight,” Garcia said. “We found nothing to support the racial angle. That’s probably why it wasn’t in the clips.”

The reporter turned her focus to Bosch, wanting the present take on the question as well.

“We’ve thoroughly reviewed the murder book and there is nothing there that would support a racial motivation in the case,” Bosch said. “We obviously are in the process of reworking the case, front to back, and we’ll be looking for anything that might have played a part in the motivation behind the crime.”

He looked at her and braced himself for her not accepting his answer and pressing it further. He thought about floating the racial angle into the story. It might improve the chances of some kind of response from Mackey. But it might also tip Mackey to how close they were to him. He decided to leave his answer as is.

Instead of pursuing the question further, the reporter flipped her notebook closed.

“I think I have what I need for right now,” she said. “I am going to go talk to Mrs. Verloren and then I have to hurry back and write this up to get it in tomorrow. Is there a number I can reach you at, Detective Bosch? Quickly, if I need to.”

Bosch knew she had him. He reluctantly gave her his cell number, knowing it meant that in the future she would have a direct line to him and would use it in regard to any case or story. It was the last payment on the deal they had made.

Everyone got up from the table and Bosch noticed that Emmy Ward had quietly come back into the office and had been sitting by the door during the interview. He and Garcia thanked them both for coming in and said good-bye. Bosch remained in the office with Garcia.

“I think that went well,” Garcia said after the door had closed.

“I hope so,” Bosch said. “It cost me a cell phone number. I’ve had that number for three years. Now I’ll have to change it and notify everybody about the new number. A big pain in the ass is what it’s going to be.”

Garcia ignored the complaint.

“How sure are you that this guy Mackey will even see the story?”

“We’re not. In fact, we believe he’s dyslexic. He might not read at all.”

Garcia’s jaw dropped.

“Then what are we doing?”

“Well, we have a plan for making sure he’s aware of the story. Don’t worry about that. We’ve got it covered. There’s also another name that’s come up since yesterday. An associate of Mackey then and now. His name is William Burkhart. Back when you were on the case he was known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That ring a bell?”

Garcia put on his best deep thinking look, like the one he had used for the camera, and moved around behind his desk. He then shook his head.

“Don’t think it came up,” he said.

“Yeah, you probably would have remembered.”

Garcia remained standing but leaned over the desk to look at his schedule.

“Let’s see. What have I got next?”

“You’ve got me, Commander,” Bosch said.

Garcia looked at him.

“Excuse me?”

“I need a few more minutes to clear up some of this stuff that’s come up.”

“What stuff? You mean this new guy, Blitzkrieg?”

“Yes, and the stuff the reporter asked about and we lied about. The racial angle.”

Bosch watched Garcia’s face set sternly into stone.

“I didn’t lie to her and I didn’t lie to you yesterday. We didn’t find it. We didn’t see a racial angle to this.”

“We?”

“My partner and I.”

“Are you sure about that?”

The phone on his desk buzzed. Garcia grabbed it up angrily and said, “No calls, no intrusions,” into it before dropping it back into its cradle.

“Detective, I want to remind you whom you are talking to,” Garcia said evenly. “Now what the fuck do you mean, ‘Are you sure?’ What are you saying?”

“With all due respect to the rank, sir, the case was pushed away from the racial angle in ’eighty-eight. I believe you when you say you didn’t see it. Otherwise, I can’t see you calling Pratt down at Open-Unsolved and reminding him there was DNA in the case. But if you didn’t know what was happening, then your partner certainly did. Did he ever talk about the pressure brought to bear on him from the command side on this case?”

“Ron Green was the finest detective I ever knew or worked with. I’m not going to let you besmirch his reputation.”

They stood just a few feet apart, the desk between them, their eyes locked in battle.

“I’m not interested in reputations. I’m interested in the truth. You said yesterday he ate his own gun a few years after this case. Why? Was there a note?”

“The burden, Detective. He couldn’t carry it anymore. He was haunted by the ones who got away.”

“What about the ones he let get away?”

Garcia pointed an angry finger at Bosch.

“How fucking dare you? You are on thin ice here, Bosch. I could make one call to the sixth floor and you’d be out on the street before sundown. You understand me? I know about you. You’re just back from retirement and that makes you expendable with one phone call. You understand me?”

“Sure. I understand you.”

Bosch sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk, hoping it might defuse the tension in the room a little bit. Garcia hesitated and then he sat down as well.

“I find what you have just said to me completely insulting,” he said, his voice juiced with anger.

“I’m sorry, Commander. I was trying to see what you knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am sorry, sir, but the case was definitely stonewalled by chain of command. I don’t want to get into names with you at this point. Some of them are still active. But I think this case revolved on race-the connection to Mackey and now Burkhart proves it. And you didn’t have Mackey or Burkhart back then, but you had the gun and there were other things. I needed to find out if you were part of it. I would say by your reaction that you weren’t.”

“But you are telling me my partner was, and that he kept it from me.”

Bosch nodded.

“Impossible,” Garcia protested. “Ron and I were close.”

“All partners are close, Commander. But not that close. From what I understand, you took care of the book and Green pressed the case forward. If he encountered resistance from within the department, he might have chosen to keep it from you. I think he did. Maybe he was protecting you, maybe he was humiliated about being vulnerable to the push. ”

Garcia dropped his eyes from Bosch and looked down at his desk. Bosch could tell he was looking at a memory. Something in the stone wall of his face broke and gave way.

“I think maybe I knew something was wrong,” he said quietly. “About halfway through.”

“How so?”

“Early on we decided to split up the parents. Ron took the father and I took the mother. You know, to establish relationships. Ron was having trouble with the father. He was volatile. He had been passive and then all of a sudden he’s on Ron’s ass wanting results. But there was something more there and Ron kept it from me.”

“Did you ask about it?”

“Yeah. I asked. He just told me the father was a handful. He said he was paranoid about race, that he thought his daughter was killed because of the race thing. And then he said something that I still remember. He said, ‘We can’t go there.’ That’s all he said, but it stuck with me because that didn’t sound like the Ron Green I knew. We can’t go there. The Ron Green I knew would go wherever it led. There were no can’t-go-theres with him. Not until that case.”

Garcia raised his eyes to Bosch and Bosch nodded, his way of thanking him for opening up.

“You think it had something to do with what happened later?” Bosch asked.

“You mean the suicide?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Anything’s possible. After this case we sort of went in different directions. The thing about partners is that once the work stops, there isn’t a whole lot to talk about.”

“True,” Bosch said.

“I was in a command staff meeting at Seventy-seventh-I was assigned there after making lieutenant. That was when I found out he was dead. It came across in a staff notice. I guess that shows how far apart we had gotten. I found out he had killed himself a week after he did it.”

Bosch just nodded. There was nothing he could say to that.

“I think I have a staff meeting now, Detective,” Garcia said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Yes, sir. But you know, I was thinking, in order for them to push Ron Green so hard, they must have already had something to push him with. You remember anything like that? Did he have an IAD beef running at the time?”

Garcia shook his head. He wasn’t saying no to Bosch’s question. He was saying something else.

“You know, this department has always had more cops assigned to investigating cops than it has to investigating murders. I always thought that if I reached the top, I would change that.”

“Are you saying there was an investigation?”

“I’m saying it was rare in the department not to have something on your record. There was a file on Ron, sure. He had been accused of assaulting a suspect. It was bullshit. The kid bumped his head and needed stitches when Ron was putting him in the back of the car. Big deal, right? Turned out the kid had connections and the IAD wasn’t letting it go away.”

“So they could have used that to push this case.”

“Could have, depending on how much a believer in conspiracy theories you are.”

When it comes to the LAPD I am a believer, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

“Okay, sir, I think I have the picture,” he said instead. “I’ll get out of here now.”

Bosch stood up to leave.

“I understand your need to know all of this,” Garcia said. “I just don’t appreciate how you sandbagged me.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“No you’re not, Detective Bosch. Not really.”

Bosch said nothing. He moved to the door and opened it. He looked back at Garcia and tried to think of something to say. He came up blank. He turned and left, closing the door behind him.

23

KIZ RIDER WAS STILL sitting in the waiting area outside Judge Anne Demchak’s chambers when Bosch got there. He had been caught in mid-afternoon traffic coming back to downtown from Van Nuys and thought he might have missed the conference with the judge. Rider was reading a magazine, but Bosch’s first thought was that at this point in the case he would be unable to leisurely start flipping through a magazine. At this point his focus could not be split. He was all about one thing. In a strange way, he likened it to surfing, a pursuit he had not followed since the summer of 1964, when he ran away from a foster home and lived on the beach. Many years had passed since then but he still remembered the water tunnel. The goal was to tuck yourself into the tube, the place where water swirled completely around you, where there was nothing but the water and the ride. Bosch was in the tube now. There was nothing but the case.

“How long you been here?” he asked.

Rider checked her watch.

“About forty minutes.”

“Has she been in there with it the whole time?”

“Yup.”

“You worried?”

“No. I’ve gone to her before. Once on a Hollywood case after you left. She’s just thorough. She reads every page. It takes a while but she’s one of the good ones.”

“The story’s running tomorrow. We need her to sign this today.”

“I know, Harry. Relax. Sit down.”

Bosch stayed standing. The judges rotated warrant duty. Getting Demchak was luck of the draw.

“I’ve never dealt with her before,” he said. “Was she a DA?”

“No. Other side. Public defender.”

Bosch groaned. His experience had been that criminal defense attorneys who became judges always brought at least the shadow of their allegiance to the defendant with them to the bench.

“We’re in trouble,” he said.

“No we’re not. We’ll be okay. Please sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

“Is Judy Champagne still on the bench? Maybe we can take it into her.”

Judy Champagne was a former prosecutor married to a former cop. They used to say he hooked them and she cooked them. Once she became a judge she was Bosch’s favorite for taking warrants to. Not because she leaned toward the cops. She didn’t. She was down-the-line fair, and that’s what Bosch could count on.

“She’s still a judge but we can’t shop search warrants around the building. You know that, Harry. Now would you please sit down? I’ve got something to show you.”

Bosch sat down in a chair next to her.

“What?”

“I’ve got Burkhart’s probation jacket.”

She pulled a file from her bag, opened it and slid it in front of Bosch on the coffee table. She tapped a fingernail on a line on a release form. Bosch leaned down to read it.

“Released from Wayside July first, nineteen eighty-eight. Reported to probation and parole in Van Nuys on July fifth.”

He straightened up and looked at her.

“So he’s in play.”

“Absolutely. They took him in on the synagogue vandalism on January twenty-sixth. Never made bail and, with time served credits, got out of Wayside five months later. He’s totally in play on this, Harry.”

Bosch felt a charge of excitement as things seemed to fall closer together.

“Okay, good. Did you amend the warrant to include him?”

“I put him in but not in too big a way. Mackey’s still the direct link because of the gun.”

Bosch nodded and looked across the room at the empty desk where the judge’s clerk would normally sit. The name plate on the desk said KATHY CHRZANOWSKI and Bosch wondered how the name would be pronounced and where she was. He then decided to try not to think about what was happening inside the judge’s chambers.

“You want to hear the latest from Commander Garcia?” he asked.

Rider was putting the probation file back in her bag.

“Sure.”

Bosch spent the next ten minutes recounting his visit to Garcia’s office, the newspaper interview, and the commander’s revelations at the end.

“You think he told you everything?” she asked.

“You mean about how much he knew of what happened back then? No, but he told me as much as he was willing to.”

“I think he had to have been part of the deal. I can’t see one partner making a deal the other one doesn’t know about. Not a deal like that.”

“Then if he was in on it, why would he call up Pratt and tell him to send the DNA through the DOJ? Wouldn’t he have just sat on it like he had been doing for seventeen years?”

“Not necessarily. A guilty conscience works in strange ways, Harry. Maybe this has been working on Garcia all these years and he decided to call Pratt to make himself feel better about it. Plus, say he was in on the deal back then with Irving. He might have felt safe to make that call once Irving was pushed to the side by the new chief.”

Bosch thought about Garcia’s reaction to his saying Green might have been haunted by the ones he let get away. Maybe Garcia got heated because it was he who was haunted.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Maybe -”

Bosch’s cell phone chirped. As he pulled it out of his pocket, Rider said, “You better turn that off before we go in. That’s one thing Judge Demchak doesn’t like going off in chambers. I heard about a DA whose phone she confiscated.”

Bosch nodded and opened his phone and said hello.

“Detective Bosch?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Tara Wood. I thought we had an appointment.”

It struck Bosch before she finished the sentence that he had forgotten the meeting at CBS and the bowl of gumbo he was planning for lunch beforehand. He hadn’t even had time for lunch.

“ Tara, I am really sorry. Something came up and we had to sort of run with it. I should have called you but it slipped my mind. I’m going to need to reschedule the interview, if you will still talk to me after this.”

“Um, sure, no problem. I just had a couple of the writers from the show hanging around. They were going to try to talk to you.”

“What show?”

“Cold Case. Remember, I told you we have a -”

“Oh, right, the show. Well, I’m sorry about that.”

Now Bosch didn’t feel so bad. She had been trying to use his interview appointment to work up a publicity angle of some kind. He wondered if there was any feeling left in her for Rebecca Verloren. As if knowing his thoughts, she asked about the case.

“Is something happening on the case? Is that why you weren’t here?”

“Sort of. We’re making progress but there is nothing I can tell you right-actually, there is something. Did you think at all about that name I mentioned last night? Roland Mackey? Ringing any bells?”

“No, still no.”

“I’ve got another one. What about William Burkhart? Maybe Bill Burkhart?”

There was a long silence while Wood did a memory scan.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t think I know him.”

“What about the name Billy Blitzkrieg?”

“Billy Blitzkrieg? You’re kidding, right?”

“No, why, you recognize it?”

“No, not at all. It sounds like a heavy metal rock star or something.”

“No, he’s not. But you’re sure none of the names do anything for you?”

“I’m sorry, Detective.”

Bosch looked up and saw a woman beckoning to them from the open door of the chambers. Rider looked at him and drew a finger across her throat.

“Look, Tara, I need to go now. I will call you to set up the interview as soon as I can. I apologize again and I will call you soon. Thank you.”

He closed the phone before she could respond and then he turned it off. He followed Rider through the door being held open by a woman Bosch assumed was Kathy Chrzanowski.

The shades were drawn over the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the room. A single desk lamp lit the chambers. Behind the desk Bosch saw a woman who appeared to be in her late sixties. She looked small behind the large dark wood desk. She had a kind face, which gave Bosch hope that they would get out of the office with her approval for the phone taps.

“Detectives, come in and sit down,” she said. “I am sorry to have held you out there waiting.”

“No problem, Your Honor,” Rider said. “We appreciate your taking a thorough look at this.”

Bosch and Rider sat in chairs in front of the desk. The judge was not wearing her black robe. Bosch noticed it hanging on a hat rack in the corner. Next to it on the wall was a framed photograph of Demchak with a notoriously liberal state supreme court justice. Bosch felt his stomach tighten. Then on the desk he saw two framed photographs. One was of an older man and a young boy holding golf clubs. Her husband and a grandson maybe. The other photo showed a young girl of maybe nine or ten riding on a swing. But the colors were fading. It was an old photo. Maybe it was her daughter. Bosch started to think that the connection to children might make the difference.

“You seem to be in quite a hurry with this,” the judge said. “Is there a reason for that?”

Bosch looked at Rider and she leaned forward to answer. This was her show. He was just there as a backup and to send the message to the judge that this one was important. Cops had to be lobbyists on occasion.

“Yes, Your Honor, a couple reasons,” Rider began. “The main one is that we believe there is a newspaper article that will be in the Daily News tomorrow. It may cause our primary suspect, Roland Mackey, to contact other suspects-one of whom is listed in the warrant-and talk about the murder. As you can see from the warrant, we believe more than one individual was involved in this crime but we have only directly linked Mackey to it. If we are up and running our taps when the newspaper story hits, we might be able to identify the others involved through his calls and conversations.”

The judge nodded but she wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were cast down on the application and authorization forms. She had a serious look on her face and Bosch began to get a bad feeling. After a few moments of silence, she said, “And the other reason for your hurry?”

“Oh, yes,” Rider said, having apparently forgotten. “The other reason is we believe Roland Mackey still may be engaged in criminal activities. We don’t know exactly what they are at this time, but we believe that the quicker we can start listening in on his conversations the sooner we will ascertain that and be able to stop someone from becoming a victim. As you can see from the application, we know he has been involved in at least one murder before. We didn’t think we should waste time.”

Bosch admired Rider’s response. It was a carefully designed answer that would put a lot of pressure on the judge to sign the authorization. After all, she was an elected official. She had to consider the ramifications of her turning down the application. If Mackey committed a crime that could have been stopped had the police been listening to his phone calls, the judge could be held responsible by an electorate that wouldn’t care much about whether she had been trying to safeguard Mackey’s personal rights.

“I see,” Demchak said coldly in response to Rider. “And what is your probable cause to believe he is engaged in current criminal activities since you cannot cite a specific crime.”

“A variety of things, Judge. Mr. Mackey cleared probation for a sex crime twelve months ago and immediately moved to a new address where his name is not listed on a deed or rental agreement. He left no forwarding address with his former landlord or the post office. He is living on the same property as an ex-convict with whom he has previously engaged in documented criminal activity. That is William Burkhart, also listed in the application. And, as you can see from the application, he is using a phone not registered in his name. He is clearly flying below radar, Your Honor. All of these things together paint a picture of someone taking precautions to hide involvement in criminal activity.”

“Or maybe he just wants to avoid government intrusion,” the judge said. “It is still very thin, Detective. Do you have anything else? I could use something else.”

Rider glanced sideways at Bosch, her eyes wide. Her confidence in the waiting room was leaving her. Bosch knew she had put everything into the application and her comments in chambers. What was left? Bosch cleared his throat and leaned forward to speak for the first time.

“The previous criminal activity he took part in with the man he now lives with were hate crimes, Judge. These guys hurt and threatened a lot of people. A lot of people.”

He settled back in his seat, hoping he had just ratcheted the pressure up at least another notch.

“And how long ago were these crimes?” the judge asked.

“They were prosecuted in the late eighties,” Bosch said. “But who knows how long they have continued? The association of these two men has obviously continued.”

The judge said nothing for another minute as she seemed to be reading and rereading the summation section of Rider’s application. A small red light at the side of the desk went on. Bosch knew it meant that whatever was scheduled in her courtroom was ready to begin. All attorneys and parties were present.

Finally, Judge Demchak shook her head.

“I just don’t think you have it here, Detectives. You have him with the gun but not at the murder scene. He could have handled the gun days or weeks before the killing.”

She waved dismissively at the papers spread in front of her.

“This bit about him burglarizing a drive-in movie theater where the victim and her friends liked to go is tenuous at best. You really put me on the spot here by asking me to sign off on something that just isn’t there.”

“It is there,” Bosch said. “We know it is there.”

Rider put a hand on his arm, a warning not to lose it.

“I’m not seeing it, Detective,” Demchak said. “You are asking me to bail you out here. You don’t have enough probable cause and you are asking me to make up the difference. I can’t do it. Not as is.”

“Your Honor,” Rider said. “If we don’t get this signed we will lose the opportunity with the newspaper story.”

The judge smiled at her.

“That has nothing to do with me and what I must do here, Detective. You know that. I am not an arm of the police department. I am independent and I have to deal with the facts of the case as presented.”

“The victim was biracial,” Bosch said. “This guy is a documented hater. He stole that gun and it was used to kill a girl of mixed race. The connection is right there.”

“Not a connection of evidence, Detective. A circumstantial connection of inference.”

Bosch stared at the judge for a moment and the judge stared right back.

“Do you have children, Judge?” he asked.

The color immediately rose in the judge’s cheeks.

“What does that have to do with this?”

“Your Honor,” Rider broke in. “We’ll come back to you with this.”

“No,” Bosch said. “No, we’re not coming back. We need this now, Judge. This guy has been out there free for seventeen years. What if it had been your daughter? Could you look away then? Rebecca Verloren was an only child.”

Judge Demchak’s eyes grew darker. When she spoke it was with measures of both calm and anger.

“I am not looking away from anything, Detective. I happen to be the only one in this room that is looking closely at this. And I might add that if you continue to insult and question the court, then I will remand you to the lockup for contempt. I could have a bailiff in here in five seconds. Perhaps you could use the downtime to contemplate the deficiencies of your presentation.”

Bosch pressed on undaunted.

“Her mother still lives in the house,” Bosch said. “The bedroom she was taken from is still the same as the day she was killed. Same bedspread, same pillows, same everything. The room-and the mother-are frozen in time.”

“But those facts are not germane to this.”

“Her father became a drunk. He lost his business, then his wife and home. I visited with him on Fifth Street this morning. That’s where he lives now. I know that’s not germane either, but I thought you might want to know. I guess we don’t have enough facts for you but we have a lot of the ripples, Your Honor.”

The judge held his eyes and Bosch knew he was either about to go to jail or walk out with a signed warrant. No in-between. After a moment he saw the glimmer of pain in her eyes. Anybody who spends time in the trenches of the criminal justice system-either side-gets that look after a while.

“Very well, Detective,” she finally said.

She looked down and scribbled a signature at the bottom of the last page and started to fill in the spaces that dictated the length of the wiretaps.

“But I am still not convinced,” she said sternly. “So I am giving you seventy-two hours.”

“Your Honor,” Bosch said.

But Rider put her hand on Bosch’s arm again, trying to stop him from turning a yes into a no. Then she spoke.

“Your Honor, seventy-two hours is a very short time period for this. We were hoping that we would have at least a week.”

“You said the newspaper article is coming out tomorrow,” the judge responded.

“Yes, Judge, it is supposed to, but -”

“You will know something pretty quick then. If you feel you need to extend it then come back and see me on Friday and try to convince me. Seventy-two hours, and I want daily summaries delivered each morning. If I don’t get them I am going to hold you both in contempt. I am not going to allow you to go fishing. If what is on the summaries is not on point then I will shut you down early. Is all of that clear?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Bosch and Rider said in unison.

“Good. Now, I have a status conference in my courtroom. It is time for you to go and for me to go back to work.”

Rider collected the paperwork and they said their thanks. As they headed to the door, Judge Demchak called out to their backs.

“Detective Bosch?”

Bosch turned around and looked at her.

“Yes, Judge?”

“You saw the picture, didn’t you?” she said. “Of my daughter. You guessed I have only one child.”

Bosch looked at her for a moment and then nodded.

“I only have one myself,” he said. “I know what it’s like.”

She held his eyes for a moment before speaking.

“You can go now,” she said.

Bosch nodded and followed Rider through the door.

24

THEY DIDN’T SPEAK to each other as they left the courthouse. It was as if they wanted to get out of there without putting the jinx on it, as if their saying one word about what had happened might echo back through the building and make the judge change her mind and recall them. Now that they had the judge’s signature on the authorization forms, all they cared about was getting out.

Once on the sidewalk in front of the monolithic courthouse Bosch looked at Rider and smiled.

“That was close,” he said.

She smiled and nodded her approval.

“Ripples, huh? You took it right up to the red line with her. I thought I was going to have to go downstairs and post a bond for you.”

They started walking toward Parker Center. Bosch pulled his phone out and turned it back on.

“Yeah, it was close,” he said. “But we got it. You want to tell Abel to set up the meeting with the others?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him. I was just going to wait until we got over there.”

Bosch checked his phone and saw he had missed a call and had a message. He didn’t recognize the number but it had an 818 area code-the Valley. He checked the message and heard a voice he didn’t want to hear.

“Detective Bosch, it’s McKenzie Ward at the News. I need to talk to you about Roland Mackey as soon as possible. I need to hear from you or I may have to hold the story. Call me.”

“Shit,” Bosch said as he deleted the message.

“What?” Rider asked.

“It’s the reporter. I told Muriel Verloren not to mention Mackey to her. But it sounds like she let it slip. Either that or the reporter is talking to somebody else.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what I said.”

They walked a little further without speaking. Bosch was thinking of a way to deal with the reporter. They had to keep Mackey out of the story or else he’d probably just cut and run without bothering to call anyone else.

“What are you going to do?” Rider finally asked.

“I don’t know. Try to talk her out of it. Lie to her if I have to. She can’t put his name in the story.”

“But she has to run the story, Harry. We only have seventy-two hours.”

“I know. Let me think.”

He opened his phone and called Muriel Verloren. She answered and he asked her how the interview went. She said it was fine and she was glad it was over.

“Did they take photos?”

“Yes, they wanted pictures of the bedroom. I didn’t feel good, opening it up like that to them. But I did.”

“I understand. Thank you for doing that. Just remember, the story is going to help us. We’re getting close, Muriel, and the newspaper story will push things. We appreciate your doing it.”

“If it helps, then I am glad to do it.”

“Good. Let me ask you something else. Did you mention the name Roland Mackey to the reporter?”

“No, you told me not to. So I didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m more than sure. She asked me what you people were telling me but I didn’t say anything about him. Why?”

“No reason. I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. Thank you, Muriel. I’ll call you as soon as I have some news.”

He closed the phone. He didn’t think Muriel Verloren would lie to him. The reporter had to have another source.

“What?” Rider asked.

“She didn’t tell her.”

“Then who did?”

“Good question.”

The phone started to vibrate and chirp while he was still holding it. He looked at the screen and recognized the number.

“It’s her-the reporter. I have to take this.”

He answered the call.

“Detective Bosch, it’s McKenzie Ward. I’m on deadline and we need to talk.”

“Right. I just got your message. My phone was off because I was in court.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Roland Mackey?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Roland Mackey. I was told you already have a suspect named Roland Mackey.”

“Who told you that?”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you withheld a key piece of information from me. Is Roland Mackey your prime suspect? Let me guess. You are playing both sides and giving that to the Times.”

Bosch had to think quickly. The reporter was sounding pressed and upset. A reporter who goes off angry could be a problem. He had to calm the situation and at the same time take Mackey out of the mix. The one thing he had going for him was that she had not mentioned a DNA link between Mackey and the gun. This made Bosch think that her source of information was outside the department. Someone with limited information.

“First of all, I’m not talking to the Times on this. As long as it runs tomorrow, you are the only one with this story. Secondly, it does matter where you got that name from because your information is wrong. I am trying to help you here, McKenzie. You would be making a big mistake if you put that name in the article. You might even get sued.”

“Then who is he?”

“Who is your source?”

“You know I can’t give you that.”

“Why not?”

Bosch was stalling for time while he thought it out. While the reporter rattled off a standard response about shield laws and protecting sources, Bosch was ticking off the names of people outside the department whom he and Rider had talked to about Mackey. They included Rebecca Verloren’s three friends-Tara Wood, Bailey Sable and Grace Tanaka. There was also Robert Verloren, Danny Kotchof, Thelma Kibble, the parole agent, and Gordon Stoddard, the school principal, as well as Mrs. Atkins, the secretary who looked for Mackey’s name in the school’s rolls.

There was also Judge Demchak but Bosch dismissed that as a long shot. Ward’s message had been left on his line while he and Rider were with the judge. The idea that the judge would have picked up the phone and called the reporter while she had been alone in chambers studying the search warrant application seemed out of the question. She hadn’t even known of the pending newspaper story let alone the reporter assigned to it.

Bosch guessed that because of time constraints, the reporter had simply gone back to the office and made a few phone calls to round out the story. She had gotten the name Roland Mackey from someone she had called. Bosch doubted that she could have located or even contacted Robert Verloren in the few hours since the interview. He also scratched Grace Tanaka and Danny Kotchof because they weren’t local. Without Mackey’s name, there was no link to Kibble. That left Tara Wood and the school-either Stoddard, Sable or the secretary. The most obvious answer was the school because it would have been the easiest link for the reporter to make. He now felt better and thought he could contain the threat.

“Detective, are you still there?”

“Yes, sorry, I’m trying to dodge some traffic here.”

“Then what is your answer? Who is Roland Mackey?”

“He’s nobody. He’s a loose end. Or was, actually. We’ve tied that up now.”

“Explain that.”

“Look, we inherited this case, right? Well, over the years the murder book got shelved, reshelved, moved around a bit. Things got mixed up. So part of what we had to do was some basic housekeeping. We had to put things in order. We found a picture of this Roland Mackey guy loose in the book and we weren’t sure who he was and what his connection was. When we were out doing interviews, getting acquainted with the players in the case, we showed his picture to a few people to see if they knew who he was and where he fit. At no time, McKenzie, did we tell anyone he was a prime suspect. That is the truth. So either you are exaggerating or whoever mentioned this guy to you was exaggerating.”

There was a silence and Bosch guessed she was revisiting the interview that gave her the name Mackey.

“Then who is he?” she finally asked.

“Just some guy with a juvie record who was living in Chatsworth back then. He hung out at the old drive-in on Winnetka, and that was apparently a hangout for Rebecca and her friends as well. But it turns out that back in 1988 he was cleared of any involvement. We didn’t find out until after we showed the photo to a few people.”

It was a mixture of truth and shadings of the truth. Again the reporter was silent while she considered his answer.

“Who told you about him, Gordon Stoddard or Bailey Sable?” Bosch asked. “We took the photo to the school to see if he fit in there, and it turns out he didn’t even go to school there. We dropped it after that.”

“You sure about this?”

“Look, do what you want but if you put that guy’s name in the paper simply because we asked about him, you could be getting calls from him and his lawyer. We ask about a lot of people, McKenzie. That’s our job.”

More silence slipped by. Bosch thought the silence meant he had successfully defused the bomb.

“We went over to the school to look at the yearbook and copy photos,” Ward finally said. “We found out you took the only one they had in the library from ’eighty-eight.”

It was her way of confirming that Bosch had it right, but without giving up her source.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I have the yearbook on my desk. I don’t know what kind of time you have but you can send somebody over to pick it up if you want.”

“No, there’s no time. We took a picture of the plaque that’s on the wall at the school. That will work. Besides, I found a shot of the vic in our archives. We’ll use that.”

“I saw the plaque. It’s nice.”

“They’re very proud of it.”

“So we’re all right on this, McKenzie?”

“Yes, we’re fine. I just got a little excited there when I thought you were holding back something big.”

“Don’t have anything big to report. Yet.”

“All right, then I better get back to finishing the story.”

“It’s still running in the window tomorrow?”

“If I get it finished. Call me tomorrow and tell me what you think.”

“I will.”

Bosch closed the phone and looked at Rider.

“I think we’re okay,” he said.

“Boy, Harry, you’ve really got it going today. The artful dodger. I think you could probably talk a zebra out of his white stripes if you had to.”

Bosch smiled. He then looked up at the City Hall Annex on Spring Street. Banished from Parker Center, Irvin Irving now operated from the Annex. Bosch wondered if Mr. Clean was looking down on them right now from behind one of the mirrored windows of the Office of Strategic Planning. He thought of something.

“Kiz?”

“What?”

“Do you know McClellan?”

“No, not really.”

“But you know what he looks like?”

“Sure. I saw him at command staff meetings. Irving stopped going once he was moved out to the Annex. He sent McClellan most of the time as his representative.”

“So you could pick him out, then?”

“Sure. But what are you talking about, Harry?”

“Maybe we should go talk to him, maybe spook him and send a message back down the pipe to Irving.”

“You mean right now?”

“Why not? We’re here.”

He gestured toward the Annex building.

“We don’t have the time, Harry. Besides, why pick a fight you can avoid? Let’s not deal with Irving until we have to.”

“All right, Kiz. But we will have to deal with him. I know we will.”

They didn’t speak again, each focused on thoughts on the case, until they reached the Glass House and went inside.

25

ABEL PRATT CONVENED all members of the Open-Unsolved Unit in the squad room as well as four other RHD detectives loaned to the unit for the surveillance. The meeting was turned over to Bosch and Rider, who took a verbal walk through the case that lasted a half hour. On a bulletin board behind them they pinned blowups of the most recent driver’s license photos of Roland Mackey and William Burkhart. The other detectives asked few questions. Bosch and Rider then turned the show back over to Pratt.

“All right, we’re going to need all hands on deck with this,” he said. “We’ll be working the sixes. Two pairs working the sound room, two pairs working Mackey and two pairs working Burkhart. I want the OU teams on Mackey and the surveillance room. The four loaners from RHD will watch Burkhart. Kiz and Harry have dibs and they want the second shift on Mackey. The rest of you can work out how you want to cover the remaining shifts. We start tomorrow morning at six, just about the time the paper will be hitting the streets.”

The plan translated into six pairs of detectives working twelve-hour shifts. The shifts changed at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Since it was their case, Bosch and Rider got first choice of shifts and had elected to cover Mackey beginning each day at 6 p.m. This meant working through the night, but it was Bosch’s hunch that if Mackey made a move or a call it would occur in the evening. And Bosch wanted to be there when it happened.

They would alternate with one of the other teams. The remaining two OU teams would alternate their time in the City of Industry, where a private contractor called ListenTech had what amounted to a wiretap center which was used by all law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County. Sitting in a van next to the telephone pole carrying the line you were listening to was a thing of the past. ListenTech provided a quiet, air-conditioned center where electronic consoles were set up for monitoring and recording conversations placed or received on any phone numbers in the county, including cell phones. There was even a cafeteria with fresh coffee and vending machines. Pizza could be delivered if needed.

ListenTech could service as many as ninety taps at a time. Rider had told Bosch that the company was spawned in 2001 when law enforcement agencies began taking increasing advantage of the widening laws governing wiretaps. A private company that saw the growing need stepped in with regional wiretap centers, also known as sound rooms. They made the work easier. But there were still rules to follow.

“We’re going to hit a bit of a snag in the sound room,” Pratt said. “The law still requires that each line be monitored by a single individual-no listening to two lines at once. But we need to monitor three lines with two cops because that’s all we got. So how do we do this and still stay within the law? We alternate. One line is Roland Mackey’s cell. We monitor that full-time. But the other two lines are secondary. That’s where we alternate. They come from the property where he lives and the place where he works. So what we do is we stay with the first line when he is home and then from four to midnight, when he is at work, we switch to the work line. No matter what lines we are actually listening to, we will still get twenty-four-hour pen registers on all three.”

“Can’t we get one more loaner from RHD to cover the third line?” Rider asked.

Pratt shook his head.

“Captain Norona gave us four bodies and that’s it,” Pratt said. “We won’t miss much. Like I said, we have the pen registers.”

Pen registers were part of the telephone monitoring process. While the investigators were allowed to listen in on phone calls on the monitored lines, the equipment also registered all incoming and outgoing calls on all the lines listed in the warrant, even if they were not being monitored. This would provide the investigators with a listing by time and length of call, as well as the numbers dialed on outgoing calls and the originating numbers for incoming calls.

“Any questions?” Pratt asked.

Bosch didn’t think there would be any questions. The plan was simple enough. But then an OU detective named Renner raised his hand and Pratt nodded at him.

“Is this thing OT authorized?”

“Yes, it is,” Pratt replied. “But as was said before, as of now we only have seventy-two hours on the warrant.”

“Well, let’s hope it goes the whole seventy-two,” Renner said. “I gotta pay for my kid’s summer camp in Malibu.”

The others laughed.

Tim Marcia and Rick Jackson volunteered to be the other street team working with Bosch and Rider. The other four got the sound-room detail, with Renner and Robleto taking the day shift and Robinson and Nord taking the same shift as Bosch and Rider. The ListenTech center was nice and comfortable, but some cops didn’t want to be cooped up no matter what the circumstances. Some would always choose the street and, like Marcia and Jackson, Bosch knew he was one of them.

Pratt ended the meeting by handing out copies of a piece of paper with everyone’s cell phone number on it as well as the radio channel they would use during the surveillance.

“For you teams in the field, I’ve got rovers on hold down in the equipment shed,” Pratt said. “Make sure you have the radio on. Harry, Kiz, did I miss anything?”

“I think you got it covered,” Rider said.

“Since our time is short on this one,” Bosch said, “Kiz and I are working something up to sort of push the action if we don’t see any signs by tomorrow night. We have the newspaper article and we have to make sure he sees it.”

“How’s he going to read it if he’s dyslexic?” Renner asked.

“He got a GED,” Bosch said. “He should be able to read it. We just have to make sure it somehow gets in front of him.”

Everybody nodded their agreement and then Pratt wrapped things up.

“Okay, gang, that’s it,” Pratt said. “I will be checking with everybody through the days and nights. Stay loose and be careful with these guys. We don’t want anything turning back on us. You people taking the first shift might want to head home now and get a good night. Just remember, the clock’s ticking on the warrant. We have till Friday night and then it’s pumpkins. So let’s get out there and get what’s to be got. We’re the closers. So let’s close this one out.”

Bosch and Rider stood and small-talked about the case with the others for a few minutes and then Bosch made his way back to their alcove. He pulled the copy of the probation file out of the stack of accumulated case files. He had not gotten a chance to read through it thoroughly and now was the time.

The file was an add-on file, meaning that as Mackey repeatedly was arrested and continued a lifelong trek through the criminal justice system the reports and court transcripts were merely added to the front of the file. Therefore the reports ran in reverse chronological order. Bosch was most interested in Mackey’s earlier years. He went to the back of the file with the idea of moving forward in time.

Mackey’s first arrest as an adult came only a month after he turned eighteen. In August 1987 he was picked up for car theft in what the follow-up reports classified as a joyriding incident. Mackey had been living at home at the time and stole a neighbor’s Corvette. He had jumped in the car and taken off after the neighbor had left it running in the driveway and gone back inside his house for a forgotten pair of sunglasses.

Mackey pleaded guilty and the presentencing report contained in the file cited his juvenile record but made no mention of the Chatsworth Eights. In September 1987 the young car thief was placed on one year probation by a superior court judge, who tried to talk Mackey out of a life of crime.

The transcript of the sentencing hearing was in the file. Bosch read the judge’s two-page lecture, in which he told Mackey he had seen young men like him a hundred times before. He told Mackey he was standing at the same precipice as the others. One simple crime could be a life lesson, or it could be the first step down a spiral. He urged Mackey not to go down the wrong path. He told him to think hard and make the right decision on which way to go.

The words of warning had obviously fallen on deaf ears. Six weeks later Mackey was arrested for burglarizing a neighborhood home while the husband and wife who lived there were at work. Mackey had cut an alarm, but the break in current had registered with the alarm company and a patrol car was dispatched. When Mackey came out the back door carrying a video camera and assorted other electronics and jewelry, two officers were waiting with guns drawn.

Because Mackey had been on probation for the car theft he was held in the county jail while awaiting disposition of the case. After thirty-six days in stir he stood before the same judge again and, according to the transcript, begged forgiveness and for one more chance. This time the presentencing report noted that drug testing indicated that Mackey was a marijuana user and that he had begun hanging around an unsavory group of young men from the Chatsworth area.

Bosch knew that these men were likely the Chatsworth Eights. It was early December and their plan of terror and symbolic homage to Adolf Hitler was just a few weeks away. But none of this was in the PSR. The report simply stated that Mackey was hanging with the wrong crowd. As he sentenced Mackey, the judge would not have known how wrong that crowd was.

Mackey was sentenced to three years of prison reduced to time served. He was also placed on two years probation. The judge, knowing that prison would be just a finishing school for a young criminal like Mackey, was giving him a break and attempting to break him at the same time. Mackey walked out of court free, but the judge had placed a series of heavy restrictions on his probation. They included weekly drug tests, maintaining gainful employment and a requirement that the high school dropout get his general education degree within nine months. The judge told Mackey that if he failed in any part of the probation order he would be sent to a state prison to complete his three-year sentence.

“You may consider this harsh, Mr. Mackey,” the judge said in the transcript. “But I consider it quite kind. I am giving you a last chance here. If you fail me on this, you will without a doubt be going to prison. Society will be through with trying to help you at that point. It will simply throw you away. Do you understand this?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Mackey said.

The file came with copies of the court-requested completion reports from Chatsworth High. Mackey got his GED in August 1988, a little more than a month after Rebecca Verloren was taken from her bed and murdered.

Despite the judge’s admirable efforts to steer Mackey from a life of crime, Bosch had to wonder if those efforts had cost Rebecca Verloren her life. Whether Mackey was the actual triggerman or not, he’d had possession of the gun that killed her. Was it reasonable to think that the chain of events leading to the murder would have been broken if Mackey had been behind bars? Bosch wasn’t sure. It was possible that Mackey simply filled a role as weapon delivery man. If it wasn’t him it could have been someone else. Bosch knew there was no sense in breaking down the chain into what could or could not have happened.

“Anything?”

Bosch looked up from his thoughts. Rider was standing at her desk. He flipped the file closed.

“Nah, not really. I was reading the probation file. The early stuff. A judge took an interest at first but then sort of let him go. The best he could do was make him get the GED.”

“And that served him so well, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Bosch said nothing else. He only had a GED himself. He’d also stood before a judge once as a car thief. The car he had gone joyriding in had also been a Corvette. Except it had not been a neighbor’s. It had been his foster father’s. Bosch had taken it as a way to say fuck you. But it was the foster father who sent the ultimate fuck you. Bosch was sent back to the youth hall to fend for himself.

“My mother died when I was eleven,” Bosch suddenly said.

Rider looked at him, doing her eyebrow thing.

“I know. Why’d you bring that up?”

“I don’t know. I spent a lot of time in the youth hall after that. I mean, I had some stays with foster families but it never lasted long. I always went back.”

Rider waited but Bosch didn’t continue.

“And?” she prompted.

“Well, we didn’t have gangs in the hall,” he said. “But there was sort of a natural segregation. You know, the whites stuck together. The blacks. The Hispanics. There weren’t any Asians back then.”

“What are you saying, that you feel sorry for this asshole Mackey?”

“No.”

“He killed a girl or at least helped kill her, Harry.”

“I know that, Kiz. That’s not my point.”

“What is your point?”

“I don’t know. I’m just sort of wondering, you know, what makes people go down different paths. How come this guy became a hater? How come I didn’t?”

“Harry, you’re overthinking. Go home tonight and get a good night’s sleep. You’ll need it because there won’t be any tomorrow night.”

Bosch nodded but didn’t move.

“You going to take off?” Rider asked.

“Yeah, in a few. You heading out?”

“Yeah, unless you want me to go with you over to Hollywood Vice.”

“Nah, I’ll be all right. Let’s talk in the morning after we get the paper.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure where I can get the Daily News in the south end. I might have to call you up and let you read it to me.”

The Daily News was circulated widely in the Valley but sometimes hard to locate elsewhere in the city. Rider lived down near Inglewood, in the same neighborhood where she had grown up.

“That’s cool. Give me a call and I’ll have it. There’s a box down at the bottom of the hill from my place.”

Rider opened one of her desk drawers and pulled out her purse. She looked at Bosch and did her eyebrow thing once again.

“You sure about doing this, marking yourself like that?”

She was talking about their plan for pushing Mackey the next day. Bosch nodded.

“I have to be able to sell it,” he said. “Besides, I can wear long sleeves for a while. It isn’t summer yet.”

“But what if it’s not necessary? What if he sees the story in the paper and gets on the phone and starts talking a blue streak?”

“Something tells me that isn’t going to happen. Anyway, it isn’t permanent. Vicki Landreth told me it lasts a couple weeks at the most, depending on how often you shower. It’s not like those henna tattoos kids get on the Santa Monica pier. They last longer.”

She nodded her agreement.

“Okay, Harry. I’ll catch you in the a.m., then.”

“See ya, Kiz. Have a good one.”

She started walking out of the alcove.

“Hey, Kiz?” Bosch called after her.

“What?” she said, stopping and looking back at him.

“What do you think? You happy to be back on it?”

She knew what he was talking about. Being back in homicide.

“Oh yeah, Harry, I’m happy. I’ll be downright giddy once we take this pale rider down and solve the mystery.”

“Yeah,” Bosch said.

After she left, Bosch thought for a few moments about what she meant by calling Mackey a pale rider. He thought it might be some sort of biblical reference but he couldn’t place it. Maybe in the south end it was what some people called racists. He decided to ask her about it the next day. He started to look through the probation file again but soon gave up. He knew it was time to focus on the here and now. Not the past. Not the choices made and the paths not taken. He got up and stacked the file and the murder book under his arm. If things were slow on the surveillance the next day, they might make for good reading. He stuck his head in Abel Pratt’s office to say good-bye.

“Good luck, Harry,” Pratt said. “Close it out.”

“We’re going to.”

26

BOSCH PARKED in the rear lot and walked in through the back doors of Hollywood Division. It had been a long time since he had been in the place and he immediately found it different. The earthquake renovation that Edgar had spoken of had seemingly touched every space in the building. He found the watch office in the place where a holding tank had been located. He found a report writing room for patrol officers, whereas before they’d had to steal space in the detective bureau.

Before going upstairs to the vice unit he had to go by the detective bureau to see if he could pull a file. He went down the rear hallway, passing a patrol sergeant named McDonald whose first name he couldn’t remember.

“Hey, Harry, you back? Long time no see, man.”

“I’m back, Six.”

“Good deal.”

Six was the radio designation for Hollywood Division. Calling the patrol sergeant Six was like calling a homicide detective Roy. It worked and it got Bosch past his awkward memory loss. By the time he got to the end of the hallway he remembered that the sergeant’s name was Bob.

The homicide unit was at the back end of the vast detective squad room. Edgar had been right. It didn’t look like any detective bureau Bosch had ever seen. It was gray and sterile. It looked like a warehouse where yaks made cold calls and ripped off businesses and old ladies for overpriced pens or time-share units. He recognized the top of Edgar’s head just cresting above one of the sound partitions between the cubicles. It looked like he was the only one left in the whole bureau. It was late in the day but not that late.

He walked over and looked over the partition and down on Edgar. He had his head down and was working on the Times crossword puzzle. It had always been a ritual with Edgar. He’d work the puzzle throughout each day, taking it with him to the restroom and to lunch and out on surveillances. He never liked to go home without finishing it.

Edgar hadn’t noticed Bosch’s presence. Bosch quietly stepped back and ducked into the cubicle next to Edgar’s. He carefully lifted the steel trash can out of the desk’s foot well and duck-walked out of the cubicle to a position right behind Edgar. He stood up and let the trash can fall to the new gray linoleum from about four feet. The resulting sound was loud and sharp, almost like a shot. Edgar leaped out of his seat, his crossword pencil flying toward the ceiling. He was about to yell something when he saw it was Bosch.

“Goddamn it, Bosch!”

“How you doin’, Jerry?” Bosch said, barely getting it out while laughing.

“Goddamn it, Bosch!”

“Yeah, you said that. I take it things are pretty slow in Hollywood tonight.”

“What the fuck you doing here? I mean, besides scaring the shit out of me.”

“I’m working, man. I’ve got an appointment with the vice artist upstairs. What are you doing?”

“I’m finishing up. I was about to get out of here.”

Bosch leaned forward and saw that the grid of the crossword was almost entirely filled out with words. There were several erasure marks. Edgar never worked a crossword in ink. Bosch noticed his old red dictionary was off the shelf and on the desk.

“Cheating again, Jerry? You know you aren’t supposed to be using the dictionary like that.”

Edgar dropped back into his seat. He looked exasperated by the scare and now the questions.

“Bullshit. I can do whatever I want. There aren’t any rules, Harry. Why don’t you get on upstairs and leave me alone? Have her put some eyeliner on you and put you out on the stroll.”

“Yeah, you wish. You’d be my first customer.”

“All right, all right. Is there something you need here or did you just drop by to bust my chops?”

Edgar finally smiled and Bosch knew everything was all right between them.

“A little of both,” Bosch said. “I need to pull an old file. Where do they keep them now in this palace?”

“How old is it? They started shipping stuff downtown to be microfilmed.”

“Would’ve been in two thousand. You remember Michael Allen Smith?”

Edgar nodded.

“Of course I do. Someone like me isn’t going to forget Smith. What do you want with him?”

“I just want his picture. That file still here?”

“Yeah, anything that fresh is still around. Follow me.”

He led Bosch to a locked door. Edgar had a key and soon they were in a small room lined with shelves crowded with blue binders. Edgar located the Michael Allen Smith murder book and pulled it off a shelf. He dropped it into Bosch’s hands. It was heavy. It had been a tough case.

Bosch took the murder book to the cubicle next to Edgar’s and started flipping through it until he came to a section of photographs that showed Smith’s upper torso and several close-ups of his tattoos. His markings had been used to identify and charge him with the murders of three prostitutes five years earlier. Bosch, Edgar and Rider had worked the case. Smith was an avowed white supremacist who secretly hired black transvestite prostitutes he picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then out of guilt for crossing both racial and sexual lines, he would kill them. It somehow made him feel better about his transgressions. The key break in the case came when Rider found a prostitute who had seen one of the victims get into a van with a customer. He was able to describe a distinctive tattoo on the john’s hand. That eventually led them to Smith, who had collected a variety of tattoos while in various prisons around the country. He was tried, convicted and sent to death row, where he was still dodging the needle with a barrage of legal appeals.

Bosch removed the photos that showed Smith’s neck, hands and upper left arm, all of which were festooned with prison ink.

“I need these while I’m upstairs. If you’re leaving and need to lock the file room I can just leave these on your desk.”

Edgar nodded.

“That’ll be fine. So what are you getting into, man? You’re going to put that shit on yourself?”

“That’s right. I want to be like Mike.”

Edgar narrowed his eyes.

“This connected to that Chatsworth Eights stuff we were talking about yesterday?”

Bosch smiled.

“You know, Jerry, you ought to be a detective. You’re good at it.”

Edgar nodded like he was merely putting up with another sarcastic assault.

“You going to get the haircut, too?” he asked.

“Nah, I wasn’t planning on going that far,” Bosch said. “I’m going to be sort of a reformed skinhead, I think.”

“I get it.”

“So, listen, are you busy tonight? This shouldn’t take too long up there. If you want to wait and finish your puzzle, we could go grab a steak over at Musso’s.”

Just saying it made Bosch hungry for it. That and a vodka martini.

“Nah, Harry, I gotta go over the hill to the Sportsmen’s Lodge for Sheree Riley’s retirement gig. That’s why I was killing time here. I was just waiting out the traffic.”

Sheree Riley was a sex crimes investigator. Bosch had worked with her on occasion but they had never been close. When sex and murder entwined, the cases were usually so brutal and difficult there wasn’t much room for anything but the work. Bosch didn’t know she was retiring.

“Maybe we can get that steak some other time,” Edgar said. “That cool?”

“Everything’s cool, Jerry. Have a good time up there and tell her I said hello and good luck. And thanks for the pictures. They’ll be on your desk.”

Bosch headed back toward the hallway but heard Edgar curse. He turned around and saw his old partner standing and looking into his cubicle with his arms wide.

“Where’d my damn pencil go?”

Bosch scanned the floor and didn’t see it. Eventually his eyes rose and he saw the pencil stuck into the sound-absorption tiles in the ceiling above Edgar’s head.

“Jerry, sometimes what goes up doesn’t come down.”

Edgar looked up and saw his pencil. It took him two jumps to grab it.

The door to the vice unit on the second floor was locked but this was not unusual. Bosch knocked and it was quickly answered by an undercover officer Bosch didn’t recognize.

“Is Vicki here? She’s expecting me.”

“Then come on in.”

The officer stepped back and let Bosch enter. He saw that this room had not been changed dramatically during the retrofitting. It was a long room with work counters running down both sides. Above each vice officer’s space was a framed movie poster. In Hollywood Division, only posters from movies actually filmed in the division were allowed to grace the walls. He found Vicki Landreth at a workspace under a poster from Blue Neon Night, a film Bosch had not seen. She and the other officer were the only ones in the office. Bosch guessed everybody else was already out on the streets for the night shift.

“Hey, Bosch,” Landreth said.

“Hey, Vic. You still have time to do this?”

“For you, honey, I will always make time.”

Landreth was a former Hollywood makeup artist. One day twenty years earlier she was talked into taking a ride-along with one of the off-duty officers working security on the set. The guy was just trying to make time with her, hoping maybe she’d catch a thrill on the ride-along and it would lead to something else. What it led to was Landreth’s enrollment in the police academy and her becoming a reserve officer, working two shifts a month on patrol, filling in where needed. Then someone in vice found out about her daytime job and asked her to work her two shifts in vice, where she could be used to make undercover officers look more like prostitutes and pimps and drug users and street people. Soon Vicki found the cop work more interesting than the movie work. She quit the industry and became a full-time cop. Her makeup skills were highly coveted and her niche in Hollywood Division was secure.

Bosch showed her the photos of Michael Allen Smith’s tattoos and she studied them for a few moments.

“Nice guy, huh?” she finally said.

“One of the best.”

“And you want all of this done tonight?”

“No. I was thinking about the lightning bolts on the neck. And maybe the bicep, if you could do it.”

“It’s all jailhouse. No real art to it. One color. I can do it. Sit down over here and take off your shirt.”

She led him to a makeup station, where he sat on a stool next to a rack of various body paints and powders. On an upper shelf there were mannequin heads with wigs and beards on them. Below these someone had taped the names of various supervisors in the division.

Bosch took off his shirt and tie. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath.

“I want these to be seen but I don’t want to be too obvious about it,” he said. “I was thinking that you could work it so if I had on a T-shirt like this you would sort of see parts of the tats sticking out. Enough to know what they are and what they mean.”

“Not a problem. Hold still.”

She used a piece of chalk to mark the lines on his skin where the shirt’s sleeve and neck reached.

“These will be the visibility lines,” she explained. “You just tell me how much you want to go above and below them.”

“Got it.”

“Now take it all off, Harry.”

She said it with undisguised sensuality in her voice. Bosch pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it over a chair with his other shirt and the tie. He turned back to her and Landreth was studying his chest and shoulders. She reached over and touched the scar on his left shoulder.

“That’s new,” she said.

“That’s old.”

“Well, it has been a long time since I saw you naked, Harry.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Back when you were a boy in blue and could talk me into anything, even joining the cops.”

“I talked you into my car, not the department. Blame yourself for that.”

Bosch felt embarrassed and felt his skin blush. Their liaison twenty years earlier had flickered out for no reason other than that neither was looking for any sort of commitment to or from anybody. They went their separate ways but always remained easy friends, especially when Bosch was transferred to the Hollywood Division homicide squad and they were working out of the same building.

“Look at you blushing,” Landreth said. “After all these years.”

“Well, you know…”

He said nothing further. Landreth rolled her stool closer to Bosch. She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the tunnel rat tattoo at the top of his right arm.

“I do remember this one,” she said. “It’s not holding up so well, is it?”

She was right. That tattoo he had gotten in Vietnam had lost its lines over time and the colors had blurred. The character of the rat with a gun emerging from a tunnel was not recognizable. That tattoo looked like a painful bruise.

“I’m not holding up so well myself, Vicki,” Bosch said.

She ignored his complaint and got down to work. She first used an eyeliner pencil to sketch out the tattoos on his body. Michael Allen Smith had what he had called a Gestapo collar tattooed on his neck. On each side of his neck was the twin lightning bolt insignia of the SS. This symbolized the emblems attached to the collar points of the uniforms worn by Hitler’s elite force. Landreth etched these onto Bosch’s skin easily and quickly. It tickled and he had a hard time holding still. Then it was time for the bicep piece.

“Which arm?” she asked.

“I think the left.”

He was thinking of the play with Mackey. He thought the chances were better that he would end up sitting on Mackey’s right as opposed to his left. That meant his left arm would be in Mackey’s line of sight.

Landreth asked him to hold the photo of Smith’s arm up next to his own so she could copy it. Tattooed on Smith’s bicep was a skull with a swastika inside a circle on the crown. While Smith had never admitted to the murders he was charged with, he had always been quite open about his racist beliefs and the origins of his many body markings. The bicep skull, he said, had been copied from a World War II propaganda poster.

Shifting the sketch work from his neck to his arm allowed Bosch to breathe easier and Landreth to engage him in conversation.

“So what’s new with you?” she asked.

“Not a lot.”

“Retirement was boring?”

“You could say that.”

“What did you do with yourself, Harry?”

“I worked a couple old cases, but mostly I spent time in Las Vegas trying to get to know my daughter.”

She leaned back away from her work and looked up at Bosch with surprise in her eyes.

“Yeah, I was surprised too when I found out,” he said.

“How old?”

“Almost six.”

“You still going to be able to see her now that you’re on the job?”

“Doesn’t matter, she’s not there.”

“Well, where is she?”

“Her mother took her to Hong Kong for a year.”

“Hong Kong? What’s in Hong Kong?”

“A job. She signed a year contract.”

“She didn’t consult you about it?”

“I don’t know if ‘consulted’ is the right word. She told me she was going. I talked to a lawyer about it and there wasn’t much I could do.”

“That’s not fair, Harry.”

“I’m all right. I talk to her once a week. As soon as I earn up some vacation I’ll go over there.”

“I’m not talking about it being unfair to you. I’m talking about her. A girl should be close to her father.”

Bosch nodded because that was all he could do. A few minutes later Landreth finished the sketch work, opened a case and took out a jar of Hollywood tattoo ink along with a penlike applicator.

“This is Bic blue,” she said. “It’s what most of them use in the jails. I won’t be perforating the skin so it should come off in a couple weeks.”

“Should?”

“Most times. There was one actor I worked with, though. I put an ace of spades on his arm. And the funny thing was that it wouldn’t come off. Not all the way. So he just ended up having a real tattoo put over my piece. He wasn’t too happy about it.”

“Just like I’m not going to be happy if I have lightning bolts on my neck for the rest of my life. Before you start putting that stuff on me, Vicki, is there -”

He stopped when he realized she was laughing at him.

“Just kidding, Bosch. It’s Hollywood magic. It comes off with a couple of good scrubs, okay?”

“Okay, then.”

“Then hold still and let’s get this done.”

She went to work applying the dark blue ink to the pencil drawing on his skin. She blotted it regularly with a cloth and repeatedly told him to stop breathing, which he told her he couldn’t do. She was finished in under a half hour. She gave him a hand mirror and he studied his neck. It looked good in that it looked real to him. It also looked strange to see such displays of hate on his own skin.

“Can I put my shirt on now?”

“Give it a few more minutes.”

She touched the scar on his shoulder once again.

“Is that from when you got shot in that tunnel downtown?”

“Yes.”

“Poor Harry.”

“More like Lucky Harry.”

She started packing up her equipment while he sat there with his shirt off and feeling awkward about it.

“So what’s the assignment tonight?” he asked, just to be saying something.

“For me? Nothing. I’m out of here.”

“You’re done?”

“Yeah, we worked a day shift today. Working girls invading the hotel by the Kodak Center. Can’t have that in the new Hollywood, can we? So we bagged four of them.”

“I’m sorry, Vicki. I didn’t know I was holding you up. I would’ve come in sooner. Hell, I was downstairs shooting the shit with Edgar before coming up. You should’ve told me you’d be waiting on me.”

“It’s all right. It was good to see you. And I wanted to tell you I’m glad you’re back on the job.”

Bosch suddenly thought of something.

“Hey, you want to hit Musso’s for dinner or are you going up to the Sportsmen’s Lodge?”

“Forget the Sportsmen’s Lodge. Those things remind me too much of wrap parties. I didn’t like them either.”

“Then what do you think?”

“I don’t know if I want to be seen in that place with such an obvious racist pig.”

This time Bosch knew she was kidding. He smiled and she smiled and she said dinner was a go.

“I’ll go on one condition,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You put your shirt back on.”

27

WITHOUT NEED OF an alarm, Bosch awoke at five-thirty the next morning. This was not unusual for him. He knew that this was what happened when you surfed into the tube on a case. Waking hours overpowered the sleeping hours. You did all you could to stay up on that board and in the pipeline. Though not scheduled to begin work for more than twelve hours, he knew this would be the pivotal day in the case. He could not sleep anymore.

In darkness and unfamiliar surroundings he got dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where he found a pad for writing down needed grocery items. He wrote a note and left it in front of the automatic coffeemaker, which he had watched Vicki Landreth set the night before to begin brewing at 7 a.m. The note said very little other than thank you for the evening and good-bye. There were no promises or see-you-laters. Bosch knew she would not be expecting any. They both knew that little had changed in the twenty years between their liaisons. They liked each other fine but that wasn’t enough to build a house on.

The streets between Vicki Landreth’s Los Feliz home and the Cahuenga Pass were misted and gray. People drove with their lights on, either because they had been driving through the night or because they thought it might help wake up the world. Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits.

He tried to push thoughts of the night before out of his mind so that he could focus only on the case. He knew the others would be moving into position now on Mariano Street in Woodland Hills and in the ListenTech sound room in the City of Industry. While Roland Mackey slept, the forces of justice were quietly closing in on him. That’s how Bosch looked at it. That was what put the wire in his blood. He still believed it was unlikely that Mackey had been the one to pull the trigger on Rebecca Verloren. But Bosch felt no doubt that Mackey provided the gun and would lead them on this day to the triggerman, whether it would be William Burkhart or someone else.

Bosch pulled into the parking lot in front of the Poquito Mas at the bottom of the hill from his house. He left the Mercedes running and got out and went to the row of newspaper boxes. He saw the face of Rebecca Verloren staring out at him through the smeared plastic window of the box. He felt a little catch in his rhythm. It didn’t matter what the story said, they were now in play.

He dropped the coins into the box and took a paper out. He repeated the process, taking a second paper. One for the files and one for Mackey. He didn’t bother reading the story until he had driven up the hill to his house. He put a pot of coffee on and read the story while standing in the kitchen. The window photo was a shot of Muriel Verloren sitting on her daughter’s bed. The room was neat and the bed perfectly made, right down to the ruffle skirting the floor. There was an inset photograph of Rebecca in the top corner. It turned out that the Daily News archives had held the same shot as the yearbook. A headline above the photo said A MOTHER’S LONG VIGIL.

The bedroom photograph was credited to Emerson Ward, the photographer apparently using her given name. Below it was a caption that read: “Muriel Verloren sits in her daughter’s bedroom. The room, like Mrs. Verloren’s grief, has been untouched by time.”

Beneath the photo and above the body of the story was what a reporter had once told Bosch was a deck headline-a fuller description of the story. It read: “HAUNTED: Muriel Verloren has waited 17 years to learn who took her daughter’s life. In a renewed effort the LAPD may be close to finding out.”

Bosch thought the deck was perfect. If and when Mackey saw it, he would feel the cold finger of fear poke him in the chest. Bosch anxiously read the story.

By McKenzie Ward, Staff Writer

Seventeen years ago this summer, a young and beautiful high-school girl named Rebecca Verloren was stolen away from her Chatsworth home and brutally murdered on Oat Mountain. The case was never solved, leaving in its wake a splintered family, haunted police officers and a community with no sense of closure from the crime.

But in a measure of hope for the victim’s mother, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched a new investigation of the case that may see results and closure for Muriel Verloren. This time out the detectives have something they didn’t in 1988: the killer’s DNA.

The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit began the intense refocus on the Verloren case after one of the original detectives-now a Valley area commander-urged that it be reopened two years ago when the squad was formed to investigate cold cases.

“As soon as I heard we were going to start looking at cold cases I was on the phone to them,” Cmdr. Arturo Garcia said yesterday from his office in the Valley Bureau command center. “This was the case that always stuck with me. That beautiful young girl taken from her home like that. No murder in our society is acceptable, but this one hurt more than most. It haunted me all these years.”

So, too, Muriel Verloren. Rebecca’s mother has continued to live in the house on Red Mesa Way from which her 16-year-old daughter was taken. Rebecca’s bedroom remains unaltered from the night she was carried out a back door, never to return.

“I don’t want to change anything,” the tearful mother said yesterday while smoothing the spread on her daughter’s bed. “It’s my way of remaining close to her. I will never change this room and I will never leave this house.”

Det. Harry Bosch, who is assigned to the renewed investigation, told the News that there are several promising leads in the case now. The greatest aid in the case has been the technological advances made since 1988. Blood that did not belong to Rebecca Verloren was actually found inside the murder weapon. Bosch explained that the pistol’s hammer “bit” the shooter on the hand, taking a sample of blood and tissue. In 1988 it could only be analyzed, typed and preserved. Now it can be directly matched to a suspect. The challenge is finding that suspect.

“The case was thoroughly investigated previously,” Bosch said. “Hundreds of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were followed. We are backtracking on all of that but our real hope lies in the DNA. It will be the case breaker, I think.”

The detective explained that while the victim was not sexually assaulted, there were elements to the crime of a psychosexual nature. Ten years ago the state Department of Justice started a database containing DNA samples from every person convicted of a sexually related crime. The DNA from the Verloren case is in the process of being compared to those samples. Bosch believes it is likely that Rebecca Verloren’s killing was not an isolated crime.

“I think it is unlikely that this killer only committed this one crime and then led a law-abiding existence. The nature of this offense indicates to us that this person likely committed other crimes. If he was ever caught and his DNA put into a data bank, then it’s only a matter of time before we identify him.”

Rebecca was carried from her home in the dead of night on July 5, 1988. For three days police and community members searched for her. A woman riding a horse on Oat Mountain found the body secreted by a fallen tree. While the investigation revealed many things, including that Rebecca had terminated a pregnancy about six weeks before her death, the police were unable to determine who her killer was and how he got into the house.

In the years since, the crime has echoed through many lives. The victim’s parents have split up and Muriel Verloren could not say where her husband, Robert Verloren, a former Malibu restaurateur, is now located. She said the disintegration of their marriage was directly attributed to the strain and grief brought on by their daughter’s murder.

One of the original investigators on the case, Ronald Green, retired early from the department and later committed suicide. Garcia said he believes the unsolved Verloren case played a part in his former partner’s decision to end his life.

“Ronnie took things to heart, and I think this one always bothered him,” Garcia said.

And at Hillside Preparatory School, where Rebecca Verloren was a popular student, there is a daily reminder of her life and death. A plaque erected by her classmates remains affixed to the wall in the exclusive school’s main hallway.

“We don’t ever want to forget someone like Rebecca,” said Principal Gordon Stoddard, who was a teacher when Verloren was a student at the school.

One of Rebecca’s friends and classmates is now a teacher at Hillside. Bailey Koster Sable spent an evening with Rebecca just two days before she was murdered. The loss has haunted her, and she says she thinks about her friend all the time.

“I think about it because it feels like it could have happened to anybody,” Sable said after classes yesterday. “So it leads me to always ask the same thing: why her?”

That is a question the Los Angeles police hope to finally answer soon.

Bosch looked at the photo on the inside page where the story jumped to. It showed Bailey Sable and Gordon Stoddard standing on either side of the plaque on the wall at Hillside Prep. Emerson Ward was credited with this photo as well. The caption read: “FRIEND AND TEACHER: Bailey Sable went to school with Rebecca Verloren, and Gordon Stoddard taught her science class. Now school principal, Stoddard said, ‘Becky was a good kid. This shouldn’t have happened.’”

Bosch poured coffee into a mug and then read the story again while sipping his breakfast. He then excitedly grabbed the phone off the counter and called Kizmin Rider’s home number. She answered with a blurry voice.

“Kiz, the story is perfect. She put in everything we wanted.”

“Harry? What time is it, Harry?”

“Almost seven. We’re in business.”

“Harry, we have to work all night. What are you doing awake? What are you doing calling me at seven o’clock?”

Bosch realized his mistake.

“I’m sorry. I’m just excited about it.”

“Call me back in two hours.”

She hung up. There had not been a pleasant tone in her voice.

Undaunted, Bosch pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. It was the sheet of numbers Pratt had passed out during the staff meeting. He called Tim Marcia’s cell number.

“It’s Bosch,” he said. “You guys in position?”

“Yeah, we’re here.”

“Anything shaking?”

“It’s a sleepy hollow right now. We figure if this guy worked till midnight last night, then he’s going to be sleeping late.”

“His car is there? The Camaro?”

“Yes, Harry, it’s here.”

“Okay. Did you read the story in the paper?”

“Not yet. But we’ve got two teams sitting on this house for Mackey and Burkhart. We’re about to break off to get coffee and pick up the paper.”

“It’s good. It’s going to work.”

“Let’s hope so.”

After Bosch hung up he realized that until Mackey or Burkhart left the house on Mariano there would be double surveillance on the place. It was a waste of time and money but he didn’t see any way around it. There was no telling when one of the surveillance subjects might take off from the house. They knew very little about Burkhart. They didn’t even know if he had a job.

He next called Renner in the sound room at ListenTech. He was the oldest detective on the squad and had used seniority to get him and his partner the day shift in the sound room.

“Anything yet?” Bosch asked him.

“Not yet, but you’ll be the first to know.”

Bosch thanked him and hung up. He checked his watch. It wasn’t even seven-thirty and he knew it was going to be a long day waiting for his surveillance shift to begin. He refilled his coffee mug and looked at the paper again. The photo of the dead girl’s bedroom bothered him in a way he could not pinpoint. There was something there but he could not pull it out. He closed his eyes for a five count and then brought them open, hoping the trick would jar something loose. But the photo did not reveal the secret. A sense of frustration started to rise in him but then the phone rang.

It was Rider.

“Great, now I can’t go back to sleep. You better be bright-eyed tonight, Harry, because I won’t be.”

“Sorry, Kiz. I will.”

“Read me the story.”

He did, and when he was finished she seemed to have caught some of his excitement. They both knew that the story would play perfectly into provoking a response from Mackey. The key would be to make sure that he saw it and read it, and they thought they had that covered.

“Okay, Harry, I’m going to get going. I have some things to do today.”

“All right, Kiz, see you up there. How ’bout we meet at quarter to six on Tampa about a block south of the service station?”

“I’ll be there unless something happens before.”

“Yeah, me too.”

After hanging up, Bosch went into his bedroom and changed into fresh clothes that would be comfortable during an all-night surveillance and useful as well for the play he intended for Mackey. He chose a white T-shirt that had been washed many times and had shrunk so that its sleeves were tight and short on his biceps. Before putting on a shirt over it he checked his look in the mirror. A full half of the skull was exposed and the SS bolts pointed up above the cotton on his neck.

The tattoos looked more authentic than they had the night before. He had taken a shower at Vicki Landreth’s and she told him that the water would slightly blur the ink on his skin as was the case with most prison-applied tattoos. She warned him that the ink would start to wash away after two or three showers and, if needed, she could maintain his look with further applications. He told her he wasn’t planning on needing the tattoos more than one day. They would work or not work when he made his play.

He put on a long-sleeved button-down shirt over the T-shirt. He checked this in the mirror and thought he could see details of the skull tattoo bleeding through the cotton. The thick black swastika on the crown was coming through.

Ready to go but with hours before he was needed, Bosch paced nervously around his living room for a few moments, wondering what to do. He decided to call his daughter, hoping that her sweet voice and cheerfulness would give him an added charge for the day.

He got the number for the Intercontinental Hotel in Kowloon off the Post-it on his refrigerator and punched it into his phone. It would be almost 8 p.m. there. His daughter should still be awake. But when his call was connected to Eleanor Wish’s room there was no answer. He wondered if he had the time change wrong. Maybe he was calling too early or too late.

After six rings an answering service picked up, giving Bosch instructions in English and Cantonese in how to leave a message. He left a short message for both Eleanor and his daughter and hung up the phone.

Now not wanting to dwell on his daughter or thoughts about where she was, Bosch opened the murder book and began reviewing its contents again, always looking for details of the case he had possibly missed. Despite everything he had learned about the case and how it was pushed off track by the powers that be, he still believed in the book. He believed the answers to the mysteries were always found in the details.

He finished a read-through and was going to take up the copy of Mackey’s probation file when he thought of something and called Muriel Verloren. She was at home.

“Did you see the story in the paper?” he asked.

“Yes, it makes me feel so sad to see that.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it makes it all real to me. I had pushed it away.”

“I’m sorry but it is going to help us. I promise. I’m glad you did it. Thank you.”

“Whatever will help I want to do.”

“Thank you, Muriel. Listen, I wanted to tell you that I located your husband. I spoke to him yesterday morning.”

There was a long silence before she spoke.

“Really? Where is he?”

“Down on Fifth Street. He runs a soup kitchen for the homeless. He serves breakfast to them. It’s called the Metro Shelter. I thought you might want to know.”

Again a silence. Bosch guessed she wanted to ask him questions and he was willing to wait.

“You mean he works there?”

“Yes. He’s sober now. He said it’s been three years. I guess he first went there for a meal and he’s sort of worked his way up. He runs the kitchen now. And it’s good food. I ate there yesterday.”

“I see.”

“Um, I have a number that he gave me. It’s not a direct line. He doesn’t have a phone in his room. But it’s in the kitchen and he’s there in the mornings. He said it slows down after about nine.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want the number, Muriel?”

This question was followed by the longest silence of all. Bosch finally answered the question himself.

“I’ll tell you what, Muriel. I’ve got the number, and if you ever want it you can just call me. Is that okay?”

“That would be fine, Detective. Thank you.”

“No problem. I’m going to go now. We’re hoping something breaks on the case today.”

“Please call me.”

“It will be the first call I make.”

After hanging up, Bosch realized that talking about breakfast had made him hungry. It was now almost noon and he hadn’t eaten anything since the steak at Musso’s the night before. He decided that he would go into the bedroom and rest for a while and then have a late lunch before reporting for the surveillance. He would go over to Dupar’s in Studio City. It was on the way out to Northridge. Pancakes were the perfect surveillance food. He would order a full stack of buttered pancakes and they would sit in his stomach like clay and keep him full all night if necessary.

In the bedroom he lay on his back and shut his eyes. He tried to think of the case but his mind wandered to the drunken time he got the tattoo put on his arm in a dirty studio in Saigon. As he drifted off to sleep he remembered the man with the needle and his smile and his body odor. He remembered the man had said, “Are you sure? Remember, you’ll be marked forever with this.”

Bosch had smiled back and said, “I already am.”

Then in his dream the man’s smiling face turned into Vicki Landreth’s face. She had red lipstick smeared across her mouth. She held up a buzzing tattoo needle.

She said, “Are you ready, Michael?”

He said, “I’m not Michael.”

She said, “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter who you are. Everybody’s dodging the needle. But nobody gets away.”

28

KIZ RIDER WAS already at the meeting spot when Bosch got there. He got out of his car and brought the murder book and the other files to her car, a nondescript white Taurus.

“You have any room in your trunk?” he asked before getting in.

“It’s empty. Why?”

“Pop it. I forgot to leave my spare tire at home.”

He went back to his car, a Mercedes-Benz SUV, and took the spare tire out of the back and transferred it to Rider’s trunk. Using a screwdriver from the tool kit he removed the license plates from his car and put them in the trunk as well. He then got in with her and they drove up Tampa to the plaza shopping center across from the service station where Mackey worked. The day team, Marcia and Jackson, were waiting in their car in the lot.

The space next to them was open and Rider pulled in. Everybody put down their windows so they could talk and transfer the two rovers without having to get out of their cars. Bosch took the radios but knew he and Rider wouldn’t use them.

“Well?” Bosch asked.

“Well, nothing,” Jackson said. “Seems like we’re pumping a dry hole here, Harry.”

“Nothing at all?” Rider asked.

“There has been absolutely no indication at all that he’s seen the paper or that anybody he knows has seen it. We checked with the sound room twenty minutes ago and this guy hasn’t even gotten a phone call, let alone one about this. He hasn’t even had a tow call since he came on.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t concerned yet. Sometimes things needed a little push and that was what he was ready to do.

“I hope you’ve got a good plan, Harry,” Marcia called over. He was in the driver’s side of their car and Bosch was furthest away on the passenger side of Rider’s car.

“You want to stick around?” Bosch replied. “No use waiting on it if there hasn’t been any action. I’m ready to go.”

Jackson nodded.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “You going to need backup?”

“I doubt it. I’m just going to plant a seed. But you never know. It couldn’t hurt.”

“All right. We’ll watch anyway. Just in case, what’s your flare going to be?”

Bosch hadn’t thought about how he would send up a flare if things went wrong and he had to call in backup.

“I guess I’ll hit the horn,” he said. “Or you’ll hear the shots.”

He smiled and everybody nodded and then Rider backed out of the space and they headed back down Tampa to his car.

“You sure about this?” Rider asked as she pulled in next to the Mercedes.

“I’m sure.”

He had noticed on the way over that she had brought an accordion file with her. It was on the armrest between the seats.

“What’s this?”

“Since you woke me up early I decided to go to work. I traced down the other five members of the Chatsworth Eights.”

“Great work. Any of them still local?”

“Two of them are still around. But it looks like they have grown out of their so-called youthful indiscretions. No records. They’ve got pretty decent jobs.”

“What about the others?”

“The only one that still seems like he’s a believer in the cause is a guy named Frank Simmons. Moved down here from Oregon when he was in high school. A couple years later he joins the Eights. He now lives in Fresno. But he did a two-year bit in Obispo for selling machine guns.”

“I might be able to use that. When was he there?”

“Hold on a second.”

She opened her file and dug through it until she came up with a slim manila folder with the name Frank Simmons on it. She opened it and showed Bosch a prison mug shot of Simmons.

“Six years ago,” she said. “He got out six years ago.”

Bosch studied the photo, committing the details of Simmons’s look to memory. He had dark short hair and dark eyes. His skin was very pale and his face was tracked with acne scars. He tried to cover these with a goatee that would also make him look tougher.

“Where was the case, here?” he asked.

“No, actually, it was from Fresno. He apparently moved up there after the troubles down here.”

“Who was he selling the machine guns to?”

“I called the FBI office up there, talked to the agent. He didn’t want to cooperate with me until he checked me out. I’m still waiting for the callback.”

“Great.”

“I got the feeling that Mr. Simmons is still of active interest to the bureau up there and the agent wasn’t into sharing.”

Bosch nodded.

“Where was Simmons living at the time of the Verloren thing?”

“Can’t tell. He was one of the younger ones, so he was probably living with his parents. AutoTrack doesn’t trace him back further than ’ninety. By then he was in Fresno.”

“So unless his parents moved out after this thing, he was probably right there in the Valley.”

“It’s possible.”

“Okay, this is good, Kiz. I might be able to use some of this. Follow me over to the top of Balboa Park by Woodley. I think that’s a good spot. There’s a golf course there with a parking lot. There will be a lot of cars. You guys will be able to park there and it will be good cover. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Tell the other guys.”

He took out his badge wallet, his cuffs and his service pistol and put them all down on the floor of the car.

“Harry, you got a backup?”

“I’ve got you, right?”

“I mean it.”

“Yes, Kiz, I’ve got a little popper on my ankle. I’ll be all right.”

He got out and got into his own car. On the drive over to the park he rehearsed the play in his mind. He got ready and got excited.

Ten minutes later he pulled over onto the shoulder of the park road, killed the engine and got out. He went to the right front side of the car and let the air out of the tire through the valve. Because he knew some tow trucks come equipped with compressed air, he opened his pocket knife and slashed open the stem of the tire’s valve. The tire would have to be repaired, not refilled.

Ready to go, he opened his cell phone and called the service station where Mackey worked. He said he needed a tow and was put on hold. A whole minute went by before another voice came on the line. Roland Mackey.

“What do you need?”

“I need a tow. I got a flat and the valve looks like it’s fucked up.”

“What kind of car is it?”

“Black Mercedes SUV.”

“What about the spare?”

“It got stolen by some ni-it was stolen when I was in South-Central last week.”

“That’s too bad. Shouldn’t go down there.”

“I had no choice. Can you tow me or not?”

“Okay, okay. Where are you?”

Bosch told him. It was close enough that this time Mackey didn’t try to talk him into calling someone else.

“All right, ten minutes,” Mackey said. “Be there with your car when I get there.”

“I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

Bosch closed the phone and opened the back of the SUV. He pulled his outer shirt out of his pants and then took it off. He put it in the back. His new tattoos were now partially displayed. He sat down on the tailgate and waited. Two minutes later his cell phone chirped. It was Rider.

“Harry, they were able to pipe the call over to me from ListenTech. You sounded legit.”

“Good.”

“I just talked to the guys. Mackey’s moving. They’re with him.”

“Okay, I’m ready.”

“I kind of wish now we had gotten you a body wire. You never know what this guy is going to say to you.”

“Too risky in just a T-shirt. Besides, the chances of the guy telling a stranger he was the one who killed the girl in the newspaper story are probably longer than me winning the lotto without buying a ticket.”

“I guess.”

“I gotta go, Kiz.”

“Good luck, Harry. Be careful.”

“All the time.”

He closed the phone.

29

THE TOW TRUCK SLOWED as it approached the Mercedes. Bosch looked up from the rear hatch, where he was sitting below the shade of the overhead door and reading the Daily News. He waved the paper at the tow truck driver and stood up. The truck drove by and then onto the shoulder in front of the Mercedes. It then backed up to within five feet of it. Its driver got out. It was Roland Mackey.

Mackey was wearing leather gloves that were grease-stained dark in the palms. Rather than acknowledge Bosch, he walked around the front of the Mercedes and looked down at the flattened tire. As Bosch came around, still holding the paper, Mackey squatted down and looked at the tire’s valve. He reached out and bent it back and forth, exposing the slice that had been cut into it.

“Almost looks like it was cut,” Mackey said.

“Maybe glass in the road or something,” Bosch offered.

“And no spare. Ain’t that a bitch?”

He looked up at Bosch, squinting in the light from the sun that was beginning to go down behind Bosch.

“You’re telling me,” Bosch replied.

“Well, I can tow it in and then have my guy put a new valve on the tire. Take about fifteen minutes once we get it into the garage.”

“Fine. Do it.”

“This going to be on Triple A or insurance?”

“No, cash.”

Mackey told him it would be eighty-five dollars for the tow plus three dollars for every mile his car was towed. The charge for the valve replacement would be another twenty-five plus the cost of the valve.

“Fine, do it,” Bosch said again.

Mackey stood up and looked at Bosch. He appeared to glance directly at Bosch’s neck and then away. He said nothing about the tattoos.

“You should close the back,” he said instead. “Unless you want to dump everything out on the way.”

He smiled. A little tow truck humor.

“I’ll grab my shirt out of there and close it,” Bosch said. “All right if I ride with you?”

“Unless you want to call a cab and ride in style.”

“I’d rather ride with somebody who speaks English.”

Mackey laughed loudly while Bosch went to the back of his car. Bosch then stood off to the side while Mackey went through the procedures for hooking the vehicle to the truck. It took him no more than ten minutes before he was standing at the side of his truck, holding down a lever that raised the front end of the SUV into the air. After it was high enough for Mackey, he checked all the chains and harnesses and said he was ready to go. When Bosch got into the tow truck he had his shirt over his arm and the folded newspaper in his hand. It was folded so the photo of Rebecca Verloren was noticeable.

“Does this thing have air-conditioning?” Bosch said as he pulled the door closed. “I was sweating my ass off out there.”

“You and me both. You should’ve stayed in the vehicle with your own AC blowing while you waited. This piece of shit doesn’t have air in the summer or heat in the winter. Kind of like my ex-wife.”

More tow truck humor, Bosch guessed. Mackey handed him a clipboard with an information page and a pen attached.

“Fill that out,” he said. “Then we’re set.”

“Okay.”

Bosch started to fill the form in with the false name and address he had come up with earlier. Mackey pulled a microphone off the dashboard and spoke into it.

“Hey, Kenny?”

A few moments later there was a response.

“Go ahead.”

“Tell Spider not to leave yet,” Mackey said. “I’m bringing in a tire that needs a valve.”

“He’s not going to like that. He’s already washed up.”

“Just tell him. Out.”

Mackey returned the microphone to its dash holder.

“Think he’ll stay?” Bosch asked.

“You better hope so. Or you’re going to be waiting till tomorrow for your tire to get done.”

“I can’t do that. I have to get back on the road.”

“Yeah? Where to?”

“ Barstow.”

Mackey started the tow truck and turned his body to the left so he could look out the side window and make sure it was okay to pull off the shoulder onto the road. He could not see Bosch from this position. Bosch quickly hiked the left sleeve on his T-shirt up so that more than half of the skull tattoo was visible.

The tow truck pulled into the street and they started off. Bosch glanced out his window and saw the cars belonging to both Rider and the other surveillance team in the parking lot of the golf course. Bosch put his elbow on the sill of the open window and his hand on the top frame. Out of Mackey’s view, he was able to give the thumbs-up sign to the watchers.

“What’s out in Barstow?” Mackey asked.

“Home, that’s all. I want to get home tonight.”

“What have you been doing down here?”

“This and that.”

“What about South-Central? What were you doing down there with those people last week?”

Bosch understood the reference to those people as meaning the predominant minority population of South L.A. He turned and looked pointedly at Mackey, as if telling him he was asking too many questions.

“This and that,” he said evenly.

“That’s cool,” Mackey responded, taking his hands off the wheel in a backing off gesture.

“Tell you what, though, it doesn’t matter what I was doing, you can just fucking keep this city, man.”

Mackey smiled.

“I know what you mean,” he said.

Bosch thought they were close to sharing more than small talk. He believed Mackey had gotten a glimpse of the tattoos and was trying to draw from Bosch a signal as to what kind of person he was. He thought the moment was right for another subtle move toward the newspaper article.

Bosch put the newspaper down on the seat between them, making sure the photo of Rebecca Verloren was still noticeable. He then started putting his shirt back on. He leaned forward and extended his arms to do it. He didn’t look at Mackey but knew the skull on his left arm would be very noticeable as he did this. He put his right arm into the shirt first and then brought the shirt behind his back and put his left arm into its sleeve. He leaned back and started buttoning the shirt.

“Just a little too third world around here for me,” Bosch said.

“I’m with you on that.”

“Yeah? Is this where you’re from?”

“My whole life.”

“Well, pal, you ought to take your family-if you have a family-and the flag with you and leave. Just fucking leave this place.”

Mackey laughed and nodded.

“I got a friend says the same thing. All the time.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not an original idea.”

“Got that right.”

Then the radio interrupted the momentum of the conversation.

“Hey, Ro?”

Mackey grabbed the mike.

“Yeah, Ken?”

“I’m gonna run over to KFC while Spider’s waiting on you. You want something?”

“Nah, I’ll go out later. Out.”

He hung the mike up. They drove in silence for a few moments while Bosch tried to think of a way to naturally get the conversation going again and in the right direction. Mackey had driven down to Burbank Boulevard and gone right. They were coming up on Tampa. He would turn right again and then it would be a straight shot to the station. In less than ten minutes the ride would be over.

But it was Mackey who got it going again.

“So where’d you do your time?” he suddenly asked.

Bosch waited a moment so that his excitement wouldn’t show.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I saw your markings, man. It’s no big deal. But they’re either homemade or prison-made. That’s obvious.”

Bosch nodded.

“Obispo. I spent a nickel up there.”

“Yeah? For what?”

Bosch turned and looked at him again.

“This and that.”

Mackey nodded, apparently not put off by his passenger’s reluctance to open up.

“That’s cool, man. I have a friend that was there for a while. Late nineties. He said it wasn’t so bad. It’s kind of a white-collar place. Not as many niggers there as other places, at least.”

Bosch was silent for a long moment. He knew Mackey’s use of the racial slur was like a password. If Bosch responded in the proper way, then he would be accepted. It was code work.

“Yeah,” Bosch said, nodding his head. “That made the conditions a little more livable. I probably missed your friend, though. I got out in early ’ninety-eight.”

“Frank Simmons. That’s his name. He was only there for like eighteen months or something. He was from Fresno.”

“Frank Simmons from Fresno,” Bosch said as if trying to recall the name. “I don’t think I knew him.”

“He’s good people.”

Bosch nodded.

“There was one guy who came in like a few weeks before I walked out of that place,” he said. “I heard he was from Fresno. But, man, I was on short time and I wasn’t into meeting new people, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, that’s cool. I was just wondering, you know.”

“Did your guy have dark hair and his face had a lot a scars like from zits and stuff?”

Mackey started smiling and nodding.

“That’s him! That’s Frank. We used to call him Crater Face from Crater Lake.”

“And I’m sure he was happy about that.”

The tow truck turned onto Tampa and headed north. Bosch knew he might have more time with Mackey in the service station while the tire was being fixed but he couldn’t count on it. There could be another tow call or myriad other distractions. He had to finish the play and plant the seed now, while he was alone with the target. He picked up the newspaper and held it in his lap, glancing down as if he was reading the headlines. He had to figure out a way to naturally steer the conversation directly toward the Verloren article.

Mackey took his right hand off the wheel and pulled off his glove by biting one of the fingers. It reminded Bosch of the way a child would do it. Mackey then extended his hand to Bosch.

“I’m Ro, by the way.”

Bosch shook his hand.

“Ro?”

“Short for Roland. Roland Mackey. Pleased to meet you.”

“George Reichert,” Bosch said, giving the name he had made up after careful thought earlier in the day.

“Reichert?” Mackey said. “German, right?”

“Means ‘heart of the Reich.’”

“That’s cool. And I guess that explains the Mercedes. You know, I deal with cars all fucking day. You can tell a lot about people by the cars they drive and how they take care of them.”

“I suppose.”

Bosch nodded. He now saw the direct way to his goal. Once again Mackey had unwittingly helped.

“German engineering,” Bosch said. “The best fucking carmakers in the world. What do you drive when you’re not in this rig?”

“I’m restoring a ’seventy-two Camaro. It’s going to be a sweet ride when I’m finished.”

“Good year,” Bosch offered.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t buy anything out of Detroit nowadays. You know who’s making our cars now, don’t you? All the fucking mud people. I wouldn’t drive one, let alone put my family in one.”

“In Germany,” Bosch responded, “you go into a factory and everybody’s got blue eyes, you know what I mean? I’ve seen pictures.”

Mackey nodded thoughtfully. Bosch thought it was time to make the direct move. He unfolded the newspaper on his lap. He held it up so that the full front page, and the full Verloren story, could be seen.

“Talk about mud people,” he said. “Did you read this story?”

“No, what’s it say?”

“It’s about this mother sittin’ on a bed boohooing about her mud child who got killed seventeen years ago. And the police are still on the case. But I mean, who cares, man?”

Mackey glanced over at the paper and saw the photo with the inset shot of Rebecca Verloren’s face. But he didn’t say anything and his own face did not betray any recognition. Bosch lowered the paper so as not to be too obvious about it. He refolded it and discarded it on the seat between them. He pushed things one more time.

“I mean, you mix the races like that and what are you going to get?” he asked.

“Exactly,” Mackey said.

It wasn’t a strong reply. It was almost hesitant, as if Mackey was thinking about something else. Bosch took this as a good sign. Maybe Mackey had just felt that cold finger go down his spine. Maybe it was the first time in seventeen years.

Bosch decided he had given it his best shot. If he tried to do anything more he might cross the line into obviousness and give himself away. He decided to ride the rest of the way silently, and Mackey seemed to make the same choice.

But a few blocks later Mackey swerved the truck into the second lane to get around a slow-moving Pinto.

“You believe there is still one of those on the street?” he said.

As they passed the little car Bosch saw a man of Asian descent huddled behind the wheel. Bosch thought he might be Cambodian.

“Figures,” Mackey said, as he saw the driver. “Watch this.”

Mackey then steered back into the original lane, squeezing the Pinto between the towed Mercedes and a row of cars parked against the curb. The Pinto driver had no choice but to pull to a screeching stop. Mackey’s laughter drowned out the weak horn blast from the Pinto.

“Fuck you!” Mackey yelled. “Get back on your fucking boat!”

He looked to Bosch for affirmation and Bosch smiled, the hardest thing he’d had to do in a long while.

“Hey, man, that was my car you almost hit that guy with,” he said in mock protest.

“Hey, were you in Vietnam?” Mackey asked.

“Why?”

“Because, man. You were there, weren’t you?”

“So?”

“So, man, I had a friend who was there. He said they dusted mooks like that guy back there like it was nothing. A dozen for breakfast and another dozen for lunch. I wish I’d been there, is all I’m saying.”

Bosch looked away from him and out the side window. Mackey’s statement had left an opening for him to ask about guns and killing people. But Bosch couldn’t bring himself to go there. All at once he just wanted to get away from Mackey.

But Mackey kept talking.

“I tried to sign up for the Gulf-the first one-but they wouldn’t take me.”

Bosch recovered some and got back into it.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I don’t know. They needed the slot for a nigger, I guess.”

“Or maybe you had a criminal record.”

Bosch had turned to look at him as he said this. He immediately thought he had sounded too accusatory about it. Mackey turned and held his stare for as long as he could before having to return his eyes to the road.

“I’ve got a record, man, big fucking deal. They still could’ve used me over there.”

The conversation died there, and in a few blocks they were pulling into the service station.

“I don’t think we’ll need to put it in the garage,” Mackey said. “Spider can just take the wheel off while I have it on the hook. We’ll do it quick.”

“Whatever you want to do,” Bosch said. “You’re sure he didn’t leave yet?”

“No, that’s him right there.”

As the tow truck went by the double bays of the garage a man emerged from the shadows and headed toward the back of the truck. He was holding a pneumatic drill with one hand and pulling the air line with the other. Bosch saw the webwork tattooed on his neck. Prison blue. Something about the man’s face immediately struck Bosch as familiar. In a rushed moment of dread he thought he knew the man because he’d had dealings with him as a cop. He had arrested him or questioned him before, maybe even sent him to the prison where he had gotten the webwork done.

Bosch suddenly knew he had to stay clear of the man called Spider. He pulled his phone off his belt.

“All right if I sit here and make a call?” he asked Mackey, who was getting out of the truck.

“Yeah, go ahead. This won’t take long.”

Mackey closed the door, leaving Bosch alone. As he heard the drill start taking the lugs off the wheel of his SUV, Bosch rolled the window up and called Rider’s cell phone.

“How’s it going?” she said by way of a greeting.

“It was going good till we got back to the station,” Bosch said in a low voice. “I think I know the mechanic. If he knows me, this could be a problem.”

“You mean he might know you’re a cop?”

“Exactly.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you want us to do? Tim and Rick are still floating around.”

“Call them and tell them what’s happening. Tell them to stay loose until I get clear. I’m going to stay in the truck as long as I can. If I hold the phone up like I am talking I can keep him from seeing my face.”

“Okay.”

“I just hope Mackey doesn’t want to introduce me. I think I made an impression on him. He might want to show me off.”

“Okay, Harry, just stay cool and we’ll move in if we have -”

“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the play with -”

“Hey, he’s coming over.”

Just as she said the warning there was a sharp rap on the window. Bosch lowered the phone and turned to see Mackey staring at him. He rolled the window down.

“It’s done,” he said.

“Already?”

“Yup. You can come into the office and pay while he puts the wheel back on. You’ll make it home in a couple hours.”

“Great.”

Holding the phone up to his right ear, Bosch got out of the truck and walked to the office, never allowing Spider a decent look at his face. He spoke to Rider while he walked.

“It looks like I’m getting out of here,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “The man in question is putting on your wheel. Watch yourself when you leave.”

“Will do.”

Once he was in the little office Bosch closed the phone. Mackey had gone behind a greasy, cluttered desk. He took several seconds to use a calculator to do the simple arithmetic of the tow and repair charges.

“Comes to one twenty-five even,” he said. “Four miles towing and the valve was three bucks.”

Bosch sat down in a chair in front of the desk and pulled out his fold of money.

“Can I get a receipt for it?”

As he counted out six twenties and a five he heard the drill outside. The tire was being put back on. He held the money out, but Mackey was preoccupied by looking at a Post-it note he had found on the desk. He held it at an angle that allowed Bosch to read it.

Ro-FYI. Visa called to confirm employment on your app.

Bosch read it in a few seconds, but Mackey looked at it for a long time before finally dropping the note back on the desk and taking the money from Bosch. Mackey put the money in a cash drawer and then started fishing around on the desk for a receipt pad. He was taking a long time.

“Kenny usually writes up the receipts,” he said. “And he went to get some chicken.”

Bosch was about to say never mind about the receipt when he heard the scrape of a step behind him and knew that someone had entered the office. He didn’t turn in case it was Spider.

“All right, Ro, it’s done. You just need to let her down.”

Bosch knew this was the tight moment. Mackey would either introduce him or not.

“All right, Spider,” Mackey said.

“Then I’m outta here.”

“Okay, man, thanks for sticking. Catch you tomorrow.”

Spider left the office without Bosch ever turning around. Mackey found what he was looking for in the center drawer and scribbled something on it. He gave it to Bosch. It was a blank receipt. He had written $125 in a childlike scrawl at the bottom.

“You can just fill that out,” Mackey said as he got up. “I’ll go drop your machine and you can get out of here.”

Bosch followed him out, realizing he had left the newspaper on the seat of the truck. He wondered if he should leave it there or come up with an excuse to go back into the truck so he could get it and maybe leave it in the office where he knew Mackey watched television during the slow parts of his shift.

He decided to leave it where it was. He had planted the seed as best he could. It was time now to just step back and see what grew from it.

The Mercedes was off the truck now. Bosch walked around to the driver’s side. Mackey was stowing the harness in the back of the tow truck.

“Thanks, Roland,” Bosch said.

“Just Ro, man,” Mackey responded. “You take care, man. And do yourself a favor and stay out of South-Central.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Bosch said. “I will.”

Mackey smiled and winked as he pulled off his glove again and offered Bosch his hand. Bosch shook it and smiled back. He then looked down at their hands and saw a tiny white scar in the fleshy part between Mackey’s right thumb and finger. The tattoo from a Colt.45.

“I’ll catch you later,” he said.

30

BOSCH DROVE TO THE SPOT where he had met Rider at the start of the surveillance shift and she was there waiting. He parked and got into her Taurus.

“That was close,” she said. “Turns out you probably did know that guy. Jerry Townsend. Ring a bell? We ran the plate on his pickup when he left work and got the ID.”

“Jerry Townsend? No, not the name. I just recognized his face.”

“He has a manslaughter conviction in ’ninety-six. Served five years. Sounds like it was a domestic abuse case, but that’s all they could pull off the computer. I bet if we pulled the file your name would be on it. That’s how you recognized him.”

“You think he could be connected to this thing we’re working?”

“I doubt it. What’s probably going on is that whoever owns that station doesn’t mind hiring ex-cons. They come cheap, you know? And if he’s scamming on repairs, then who’s going to complain?”

“Well, let’s get back and see what happens.”

She put the car into gear and pulled out on Tampa to head back up to the intersection where the service station was.

“How did it go with him?” Rider asked.

“Pretty good. I did all but read the story to him. He didn’t show anything, no recognition, but the seed is definitely planted.”

“Did he see the tattoos?”

“Yeah, they worked good. He started asking questions right after he saw them. Your file on Simmons paid off, too. He came up in the conversation. And for what it’s worth, he had a scar on the webbing by his right thumb. From the bite.”

“Harry, man, you covered everything. I guess all we do now is sit back and see what happens.”

“Did the other guys take off?”

“As soon as we get back on post they’re leaving.”

When they got to the intersection of Tampa and Roscoe they saw Mackey’s tow truck waiting to pull onto Roscoe to head west.

“He’s on the move,” Bosch said. “Why didn’t anybody tell us?”

Just as he said it Rider’s cell phone buzzed. She handed it to Bosch so she could concentrate on driving. She cut into the left turn lane so she would be able to follow Mackey onto Roscoe. Bosch opened her phone. It was Tim Marcia. He explained that Mackey went on the move without a call coming into the station for a tow. Jackson had checked with the sound room. There had been no call on the lines they were listening to.

“All right,” Bosch said. “He said something when I was in the truck about going to grab dinner. Maybe this is it.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, Tim, we got him now. Thanks for sticking around. Tell Rick the same.”

“Good luck, Harry.”

They followed the tow truck to a plaza shopping center and watched Mackey go into a Subway fast food restaurant. He did not take the newspaper Bosch had left in the truck with him, but after getting his food he sat down at one of the inside tables and started to eat.

“You going to get hungry, Harry?” Rider asked. “Now might be the time.”

“I did Dupar’s on the way in so I’ll be fine. Unless we see a Cupid’s around. I’d go for that.”

“No way. That’s one thing I got over after you left. I don’t eat that fast food crap anymore.”

“What do you mean? We ate good. Didn’t we go to Musso’s every Thursday?”

“If you call chicken pot pie a healthy meal, yeah, we ate good. Besides, I’m talking about stakeouts. Did you hear about Rice and Beans in Hollywood?”

Rice and Beans was the designation given to a pair of robbery detectives in Hollywood Division named Choi and Ortega. They were there when Bosch worked in the division.

“No, what happened?”

“They were on a surveillance gig on these guys that were taking down street prostitutes, and Ortega was sittin’ in the car eating a hotdog. He suddenly started choking on it and he couldn’t clear himself. He’s turning purple and pointing to his throat and Choi’s like, what the fuck? So finally Beans jumps out of the car and Choi finally gets what’s going on. He comes running around to give him the Heimlich. He popped the hotdog onto the hood of the car. And they blew the surveillance.”

Bosch laughed as he pictured it. He knew it was a story Rice and Beans would never live down in the division. Not with people like Edgar there to tell and retell it to anyone who transferred in.

“Well, see, they don’t have a Cupid’s down in Hollywood,” he said. “If he’d been eating a nice soft dog from Cupid’s there wouldn’t have been a problem like that.”

“I don’t care, Harry. No hotdogs on stakeout. No crap. That’s my new rule. I don’t want people talking about me like that the rest of my -”

Bosch’s phone chirped. It was Robinson, who was working the late shift in the sound room with Nord.

“They just had a tow call come into the station. They then turned around and called Mackey. He must not be at the station.”

Bosch explained the situation and apologized for not keeping the sound room in the loop.

“Where’s the tow?” he asked.

“It’s an accident on Reseda at Parthenia. I guess the car’s DOA. He’s got to tow it into a dealership.”

“Okay, we’re with him.”

A few minutes later Mackey came out of the fast food restaurant carrying a large soda cup with a straw sticking out. They followed him to Reseda Boulevard and Parthenia Street, where a Toyota with the front end caved in had been pushed off the road. Another tow truck was just jacking up the other car, a large SUV that had its back end realigned by the accident. Mackey spoke briefly with the other tow truck driver-a professional courtesy-and went to work on the Toyota. An LAPD patrol car was sitting in the parking lot of the corner plaza and the officer inside was writing up a report. Bosch saw no drivers. He thought this meant that they might have all been transported to an emergency room because of injuries.

Mackey towed the Toyota to a dealership all the way over on Van Nuys Boulevard. While he was there, letting the wreck down in the service drive, Bosch got another call. Robinson told him that Mackey had been summoned again. This time to the Northridge Fashion Center, where an employee of the Borders bookstore needed a battery jump.

“This guy isn’t going to have time to read the paper if he stays busy like this,” Rider said after Bosch reported on the phone call.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m wondering if he can even read.”

“You mean the dyslexia?”

“Yeah, but not just that. I haven’t seen him do any reading or writing. He told me to fill in the forms for the tow. Then he either didn’t want to or couldn’t fill out a receipt at the end. And then there was this note on the desk for him.”

“What note?”

“He picked it up and stared at it for a long time but I wasn’t really sure he knew what it said.”

“Could you read it? What did it say?”

“It was a note from the dayshift people. Visa had called to confirm his employment on an application he had made, I guess.”

Rider wrinkled her brow.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Just seems weird, him applying for a credit card. That would make him findable, which I thought he was trying to avoid.”

“Maybe he’s starting to feel safe.”

Mackey went from the Toyota dealership straight to the shopping mall, where he jump-started a woman’s car. He then turned his truck toward the home base. It was almost ten o’clock by the time he pulled back into the station. Bosch’s sagging hopes were buoyed when he looked through the binoculars from the plaza across the street and saw Mackey walking from the truck to the office.

“We might still be in play,” he said to Rider. “He’s carrying the paper with him.”

It was hard to keep track of Mackey inside the station. The front office was glass on two sides and that was not a problem. But the garage doors were now closed and oftentimes it seemed that Mackey would disappear into these areas, where Bosch could not see him.

“You want me to be the eyes for a while?” Rider asked.

Bosch lowered the binoculars and looked at her. He could barely read her face in the darkness of the car.

“Nah, I’m okay. You’re doing all the driving anyway. Why don’t you rest? I woke you up early today.”

He raised the binoculars back up.

“I’m fine,” Rider said. “But anytime you need a break…”

“Besides,” Bosch said, “I sort of feel responsible for this guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. This whole thing. I mean, we could’ve just pulled Mackey in and sweated him in the box, tried to break him. Instead we went this way, and it’s my plan. I’m responsible.”

“We can still sweat him. If this doesn’t work, then that’s probably what we’ll need to do.”

Bosch’s phone began to chirp.

“Maybe this is what we’re waiting for,” he said as he answered.

It was Nord.

“I thought you told us this guy got his general education degree, Harry.”

“He did. What’s going on?”

“He just had to call someone to read the story to him out of the paper.”

Bosch sat up a little straighter. They were in play. It didn’t matter how the story was communicated to Mackey, the important thing was that he wanted to know what it said.

“Who did he call?”

“A woman named Michelle Murphy. Sounded like an old girlfriend. He asked if she still got the paper every day, like he wasn’t sure anymore. She said yeah and he asked her to read the story to him.”

“Did they talk about it after she read it?”

“Yeah. She asked him if he knew the girl the story was about. He said no, but then he said, ‘I knew the gun.’ Just like that. Then she said she didn’t want to know anything else and that was it. They hung up.”

Bosch thought about all of this. The play earlier in the day had worked. It had kicked over a rock that had not been moved in seventeen years. He was excited, and he could feel the charge building in his blood.

“Can you pipe the recording over the line to us here?” he asked. “I want to hear it.”

“I think we can,” Nord said. “Let me get one of the techs who are floating around here to-hey, Harry, I gotta call you back. Mackey’s making a call.”

“Call me back.”

Bosch quickly closed the phone so Nord could get back to her monitor. He excitedly recounted for Rider the report on Mackey’s phone call to Michelle Murphy. He could tell Rider caught the charge as well.

“We might be in business, Harry.”

Bosch was looking through the binoculars at Mackey. He was sitting behind the desk in the office and talking on his cell phone.

“Come on, Mackey,” Bosch whispered. “Spill it. Tell us the story.”

But then Mackey closed the phone. Bosch knew the call was too short.

Ten seconds later Nord called Bosch back.

“He just called Billy Blitzkrieg.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I might be in trouble’ and ‘I might need to make a move,’ and then Burkhart cut him off and said, ‘I don’t care what it is, don’t talk about it on the phone.’ So they agreed to meet after Mackey gets off work.”

“Where?”

“Sounded like at the house. Mackey said, ‘You’ll be up?’ and Burkhart said he would be. Mackey then said, ‘What about Belinda, she still there?’ and Burkhart said she’d be asleep and not to worry about her. They ended it like that.”

Bosch immediately felt a crushing blow to his hopes of breaking the case that night. If Mackey met Burkhart inside the house, they would not hear what transpired inside. They’d be locked out of the confession they had set up the surveillance to get.

“Call me if he makes any other calls,” he said quickly and then hung up.

He looked at Rider, who was waiting expectantly in the dark.

“Not good?” she asked. She had obviously read something in his tone to Nord.

“Not good.”

He told her about the calls and the obstacle they would face if Mackey met with Burkhart to discuss his “trouble” behind closed doors.

“It’s not all bad, Harry,” she said after hearing everything. “He made a solid admission to the Murphy woman and a lesser admission to Burkhart. But we’re getting close so don’t get depressed. Let’s figure this out. What can we do to make them meet outside of the house? Like at a Starbucks or something.”

“Yeah, right. Mackey ordering a latte.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Even if we roust them out of the house, how are we going to get close? We can’t. We need this to be a phone call. It’s the blind spot-my blind spot-to this whole thing.”

“We just need to sit tight and see what happens. It’s all we can do right now. Look, it would be good to have an ear on this but maybe it’s not the end of the world. We already have Mackey on the phone saying he might have to make a move. If he does, if he runs, then that could be seen by a jury as a shading of guilt. And if you take that and what we already have on tape it might be enough to squeeze more out of him when we finally bring him in. So all is not lost here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You want me to call it in to Abel? He’d want to know.”

“Yeah. Fine, call it in. There’s nothing to call in, but go ahead.”

“Just cool down, Harry.”

Bosch shut her out by raising the binoculars and looking at Mackey. He was still behind the desk and appeared deep in thought. The other night man, the one Bosch assumed was Kenny, was sitting on another chair and his face was angled up for viewing the television. He was laughing at something he was watching.

Mackey was not laughing or watching. His face was cast down. He was looking at something in memory.

The wait until midnight was the longest ninety minutes of surveillance Bosch had ever spent. As they waited for the station to close and Mackey to head to his rendezvous with Burkhart, nothing happened. The phones were silent, Mackey did not move from his spot at the desk and Bosch came up with no plan to either avert the rendezvous or infiltrate it in some way. It was as though they were all frozen until the clock struck twelve.

Finally, the exterior lights of the station went off and the two men closed the business for the night. When Mackey walked out, he was carrying the newspaper he could not read. Bosch knew he was going to show it to Burkhart and most likely discuss the murder.

“And we won’t be there,” Bosch mumbled as he tracked Mackey through the binoculars.

Mackey got into his Camaro and revved the engine loudly after firing it up. He then pulled out onto Tampa and headed south toward his home, the intended meeting place. Rider waited an appropriate amount of time and then pulled out of the plaza lot, cut across the northbound lanes of Tampa and headed south as well. Bosch called Nord in the sound room and told her Mackey had left the station and they should switch their monitoring to the house line.

The lights of Mackey’s car were three blocks ahead. Traffic was sparse and Rider kept a safe distance back. As they passed the lot where Bosch had left his car he checked on the Mercedes just to make sure it was still there.

“Uh oh,” Rider said.

Bosch turned back to the street ahead in time to see Mackey’s car complete a fast U-turn. He was now heading back toward Bosch and Rider.

“Harry, what do I do?” Rider asked.

“Nothing. Don’t do anything obvious.”

“He’s coming right back at us. He must have seen the tail!”

“Sit tight. Maybe he saw my car parked back there.”

The deep-throated engine of the Camaro could be heard long before the car got to them. It sounded menacing and evil, like a monster roaring and coming for them.

31

THE OLD CAMARO went screaming by Bosch and Rider without hesitation. It blew the light at Saticoy and kept going. Bosch watched its lights disappearing to the north.

“What was that?” Rider said. “You think he knows there’s a tail?”

“I don’t -”

Bosch’s cell phone sounded and he quickly answered it. It was Robinson.

“He just got called back by the Triple A answering service. He seemed pretty upset but they have to take it, I guess.”

“What do you mean, he’s got a tow?”

“Yeah. It was Triple A dispatch. I guess if he didn’t take it they would go to another company and that could mean trouble. Like losing the Triple A business.”

“Where’s the tow?”

“It’s a breakdown on the Reagan. On the westbound side near the Tampa Avenue overpass. So it’s close. He said he was on the way.”

“Okay. We got him.”

Bosch closed the phone and told Rider to turn around, that their cover was still intact, that Mackey was simply hurrying back to get the tow truck.

By the time they were back to the intersection of Tampa and Roscoe, the tow truck was pulling out of the darkened station. Mackey wasn’t wasting any time.

Since they knew Mackey’s destination Rider could afford to hang back and not risk being noticed in the tow truck’s rearview mirror. They headed north on Tampa toward the freeway. The Reagan was the 118 Freeway, which ran east-west across the northern stretch of the Valley. It was one of the few freeways that was not crowded with traffic twenty-four hours a day. Named after the late governor and president, it led to Simi Valley, where Reagan’s presidential library was located. Still, it had been jarring to Bosch to hear Robinson call it the Reagan. To Bosch it was always simply the 118.

The westbound entrance to the 118 ramped down from Tampa Avenue to the ten lanes of freeway. Rider slowed and hung back and they watched the tow truck turn left and head down the ramp out of sight. She then pulled up and made the same turn. As they came on the ramp and started down they immediately realized their problem. The disabled car was not on the freeway as Nord had said but actually on the entrance ramp. They were quickly coming up on the tow truck. It was pulled onto the ramp’s shoulder about fifty yards ahead. Its rear spreader lights were on and it was backing toward a small red car that was parked on the shoulder with its emergency lights blinking.

“What do we do, Harry?” Rider said. “If we pull over it’s going to be obvious.”

She was right. They would blow their cover.

“Just go on by,” he replied.

He had to think quickly. He knew that once they were on the freeway they could pull onto the shoulder and wait until Mackey’s tow truck came by with the disabled car on its hook. But that was risky. Mackey might recognize Rider’s car, or even stop to see if they needed assistance. If he saw Bosch then the surveillance would be blown.

“You got a Thomas Guide?”

“Under the seat.”

Rider drove by the disabled car and the tow truck as Bosch reached under the seat for the map book. Once they were clear of the tow truck he put on the overhead light and quickly flipped through the map pages. A Thomas map book was the driving bible of Los Angeles. Bosch had years of experience with them and quickly found the page depicting the section of the city they were in. He made a quick study of their situation and gave Rider directions.

“The next exit is Porter Ranch Drive,” he said. “Less than a mile. We get off and go right and then another right on Rinaldi. It takes us back to Tampa. We either wait up on top of the overpass and watch or we just keep circling.”

“I think we wait up on top,” Rider said. “If we keep going down that ramp in the same car he might notice.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“I don’t like it but I don’t know what choice we have.”

They covered the distance to the Porter Ranch exit quickly.

“Did you check out the tow car?” Bosch asked. “I was looking for the map book.”

“Small foreign job,” Rider responded. “It looked like one person behind the wheel and that was it. The lights from the truck were too bright to see anything else.”

Rider kept her speed up until they pulled into the exit lane for Porter Ranch Drive. As instructed, she took a right and then another right and they were quickly heading back toward Tampa. They got stopped at the light at Corbin but then Rider drove through it after checking to make sure it was clear. Less than three minutes after passing the tow truck they were back on Tampa. Rider pulled to the side of the road in the middle of the overpass. Bosch cracked his door.

“I’ll check it out,” he said.

He stepped out of the car. At this angle he couldn’t see the tow truck but the spreader lights on the top of the cab cast a glow above the entrance ramp.

“Harry, take this,” Rider called.

Bosch ducked back into the car and took the rover Rider was holding out to him.

He walked back along the overpass. The freeway wasn’t crowded, but it was still loud with the cars passing beneath him. When he got to the top of the ramp and looked down, it took him a few moments to adjust his vision because the lights from the back of the tow truck were still slashing through the darkness.

But soon he realized that the blinking lights of the disabled car were not there. He looked closer and saw that the car was no longer on the shoulder. His eyes traveled down the ramp to the freeway and he saw the red taillights of dozens of cars moving westbound into the distance.

He looked back at the tow truck. Everything was still. There was no sign of Mackey.

Bosch raised the radio to his mouth and keyed the mike.

“Kiz?”

“Yeah, Harry?”

“You better get over here.”

Bosch started walking down the ramp. As he did so he drew his weapon and carried it down by his side. In thirty seconds lights flashed behind him and Rider pulled her car onto the shoulder. She got out with a flashlight and they continued down the ramp.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

There was still no sign of Mackey in or around the tow truck. Bosch felt his chest tighten. He instinctively knew something was wrong. The closer they got the more he knew it.

“What do we say if he’s here and everything’s okay?” Rider whispered.

“It isn’t,” Bosch said.

The light from the back of the truck was almost blinding and Bosch knew they were in a vulnerable position. He could not see anyone on the front side of the tow truck. He moved to his right so that he and Rider would be spread apart. Rider could not move to the left or she would be walking into the entrance lane.

A semi-truck roared by on the ramp, wafting petroleum-tinged wind and sound over them and making the ground shake like an earthquake. Bosch was now walking in the weeds that were on the upward slope off the shoulder. He still didn’t see anyone up ahead.

Bosch and Rider did not communicate. The noise from passing traffic on the freeway just below was echoing from beneath the overpass. They would have to shout now and that would detract from their concentration.

They came back together when they got to the tow truck. Bosch checked the cab and there was no sign of Mackey. The truck was still running. He stepped back to the rear and looked at the ground illuminated by the spreader lights. There were curving black tire marks leading right up to the truck’s rear gate. And on the gravel was one of the leather gloves, grease-stained in the palm, that he had seen Mackey wearing earlier in the day.

“Let me borrow this,” he said, taking the flashlight from Rider. He noticed that it was one of the short rubber models approved by the police chief after an officer was videotaped beating a suspect with one of the heavy steel lights.

Bosch pointed the beam at the truck’s rear gate, running it over the underside that had been cast in shadows by the bright glare from the spreader above.

Blood reflected brightly on the dark steel. It could not be mistaken for oil. It was as red and real as life. Bosch squatted down and pointed the light beneath the truck. It had been dark here, too, made all the more impervious to vision by the bright lights above.

He saw Mackey’s body crumpled against the rear axle differential. Fully one-half of his face was bathed in blood from a long and deep laceration that cut across the left side of his head. His blue uniform shirt was maroon down the front from blood from other unseen injuries. The crotch of his pants was stained with blood or urine or both. The one arm Bosch could see was bent oddly at the forearm and a jagged, ivory white bone protruded from the flesh. The arm was cradled against Mackey’s chest, which heaved with non-rhythmic gasps. He was still alive.

“Oh God!” Rider called out from behind Bosch.

“Get an ambulance!” Bosch ordered as he started to crawl under the truck.

Hearing Rider’s feet crunch on the gravel as she ran back to her car and the radio, Bosch moved as close to Mackey as he could get. He knew he might be destroying a crime scene but he had to get close.

“Ro, can you hear me? Ro, who did this? What happened?”

Mackey seemed to stir at the sound of his name. His mouth started moving and that was when Bosch could tell his jaw was broken or dislocated. Its movements were uncoordinated. It was like Mackey was trying it out for the first time.

“Take your time, Ro. Tell me who did this. Did you see him?”

Mackey whispered something but a car speeding by on the entrance ramp drowned it out.

“Tell me again, Ro. Say it again.”

Bosch pushed forward and leaned his head down by Mackey’s mouth. What he heard was half gasp, half whisper.

“… sworth…”

He pulled back and looked at Mackey. He put the light into his face, hoping it might rouse him. He saw that the bone structure around Mackey’s left eye was also crushed and hemorrhaging. He wasn’t going to make it.

“Ro, if you have something to say, say it now. Did you kill Rebecca Verloren? Were you there that night?”

Bosch leaned forward. If Mackey said anything it was drowned in the noise of another car going by. When Bosch pulled back to look at him again he appeared to be dead. Bosch pushed two fingers into the bloodied side of Mackey’s neck and could not find a pulse.

“Ro? Roland, are you still with me?”

The one undamaged eye was open but at half-mast. Bosch moved the light in close and saw no pupil movement. He was gone.

Bosch carefully crawled out from beneath the truck. Rider was standing there, her arms folded tightly in front of her.

“Ambulance on the way,” she said.

“Call ’em off.”

He handed her back her flashlight.

“Harry, if you think he’s dead, the paramedics should confirm it.”

“Don’t worry, he’s dead. They’ll just get under there and ruin our crime scene. Call them off.”

“Did he say anything?”

“It sounded like he said ‘Chatsworth.’ That was it. Anything else, I couldn’t hear.”

She seemed to be pacing now, in a small track, nervously moving back and forth.

“Oh God,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Then move back over there, away from the scene.”

She walked off behind her car. Bosch felt sick to his stomach as well, but he knew he could keep it in. It wasn’t seeing Mackey’s torn and broken body that was causing the bile to rise in his throat. Bosch, like Rider, had seen far worse. It was the circumstances that were sickening. Instinctively he knew that this was no accident. This had been an assassination. And it was he who had put it all into motion.

He was sick because he had just gotten Roland Mackey killed. And with the death he might have lost the last, best link to Rebecca Verloren’s killer.