The Closers

32

THE TAMPA AVENUE entrance ramp to the Ronald Reagan Freeway was closed and traffic was routed down Rinaldi to the Porter Ranch Drive entrance. The entire freeway ramp was choked with official police vehicles. The LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division, California Highway Patrol and the Medical Examiner’s Office were all represented, along with members of the Open-Unsolved Unit. Abel Pratt had made calls and had greased the takeover of the case by the unit. Because the murder of Roland Mackey had taken place on a state freeway entrance, the case technically belonged to the jurisdiction of the CHP. But the agency was more than happy to hand it off, especially since the death was seen as part of an ongoing LAPD investigation. In other words, the LAPD was going to be allowed to clean up its own mess.

The commander of the local CHP barracks did offer the use of his squad’s best accident expert, and Pratt took him up on that. Added to this, Pratt had assembled some of the best forensics people the department could muster, all in the middle of the night.

Bosch and Rider spent much of the time during the crime scene investigation sitting in the back of Pratt’s car, where they were interviewed at length by Pratt and then by Tim Marcia and Rick Jackson, who were called in from home to head up the investigation into Mackey’s death. Since Bosch and Rider were part of some events and witnesses to others, it was determined that they would not investigate the case as leads. This was a technical formality. It was clear that Bosch and Rider would be continuing to pursue the Verloren case, and in doing so they would obviously be pursuing Roland Mackey’s killer.

At about 3 a.m. the forensics investigators gathered with the homicide detectives to go over what they knew so far. Mackey’s body had just been removed from beneath the truck and the scene had been thoroughly photographed, videoed and sketched. It was now considered an open scene and everyone could walk freely about.

Pratt asked the CHP investigator, a tall man named David Allmand, to go first. Allmand used a laser pointer to delineate the tire marks on the roadway and the gravel that he believed were involved in the incident with Mackey. He also pointed to the back of the tow truck, where chalk circles had been drawn around several scratches, dents and breaks in the heavy steel gate. He said he concluded the same thing Bosch and Rider had concluded within seconds of finding Mackey. He was murdered.

“The tire markings tell us that the victim pulled the tow truck onto the shoulder about thirty yards west of this point,” Allmand said. “This was likely to avoid the disabled vehicle already on the shoulder. The tow truck was then backed down the shoulder to this position here. The driver put the transmission in park and set the parking brake before exiting the truck. If he was in a hurry, as some of the ancillary information indicates, he may have gone right to the tail here to lower the towing assembly. This is where he got it.

“The disabled car was obviously not disabled. The driver floored the accelerator and it lurched forward, striking the tow truck driver and pinning him against the back of the truck and the tow assembly. To get ready for the tow the vic would have bent over here to free the hook assembly. He was likely doing this when he was struck, and this would explain the head injuries. He went face first into the assembly. There’s blood on the tow arm. ”

Allmand ran the red eye of his laser over the tow truck’s hook assembly to illustrate.

“The car then backed up,” he continued. “And that’s where you get the striated markings on the asphalt here. He then moved forward for another strike. The victim was probably already fatally injured from the first impact. But he wasn’t dead yet. It is likely he fell to the ground after the first impact and with his last strength crawled under the truck to avoid the second impact. Either way, the vehicle did strike the tow truck a second time. And of course, the victim succumbed to his injuries while beneath the truck.”

Allmand paused there for questions but he was met only with grim silence. Bosch could think of nothing to ask. Unchecked, Allmand finished up his report by pointing to two tire lines made in the gravel and asphalt.

“You’ve got a wheel base on the striking vehicle that is not very wide,” he said. “That will cut it down some. It’s probably going to be a little foreign job. I took measurements, and as soon as I consult my manufacturers’ catalogs I will be able to come up with a list of cars those treads could have come from. I’ll let you know.”

When no one said anything Allmand used his laser to circle a small oil spot on the asphalt.

“Additionally, the striking vehicle was leaking oil. Not a big deal, but if it becomes important for a prosecutor to be able to say how long the killer sat here and waited for the victim, then we can time the leak once the vehicle is recovered and come up with a rough estimate of how long it would have taken to make this little spot here.”

Pratt nodded.

“Good to know,” he said.

Pratt thanked Allmand and asked the assistant medical examiner, Ravi Patel, to report on his preliminary examination of the body. Patel began by listing the numerous broken bones and injuries that were obvious from external examination of the body. He said the impact had likely fractured Mackey’s skull, crushed the orbit of his left eye and dislocated his jaw. His hips were crushed along with the left side of his upper torso. His left arm and left thigh were broken as well.

“It is likely these injuries were sustained in one initial impact,” he said. “The victim was likely standing and the impact came from the right rear side.”

“Would he have been able to crawl under the truck?” Rick Jackson asked.

“It is possible,” Patel answered. “We have seen the instinct for survival allow people to do amazing things. I won’t know until I open him up, but what we often see in cases like this is that the compression perforates the lungs. The lungs fill with blood. This takes time. He could have crawled to what he thought was safety.”

And then drowned on the side of the freeway, Bosch thought.

Next to report was the lead SID investigator, who happened to be Ravi Patel’s brother, Raj. Bosch knew them both from previous cases and knew they were both among the best.

Raj Patel gave the basics of the crime scene investigation and reported that Mackey’s efforts to save his life by crawling under the truck could ultimately allow the investigators to catch his killer.

“The second impact on the truck was without the body as a buffer, you see. It was metal on metal. We have both metal and paint transference and we have collected several samples. If you find the vehicle that did this, we can match it with one hundred percent accuracy.”

That was one piece of light in all the darkness, Bosch thought.

After Patel finished his report the crime scene began to break up, with the investigators heading out to follow various assignments Pratt wanted completed before the entire unit was to meet at the Pacific Dining Car at 9 a.m. to discuss the case.

Marcia and Jackson were assigned to search Mackey’s home. This would entail rousting a judge from sleep and getting a search warrant signed, because Mackey shared the home with William Burkhart and Burkhart was a possible suspect in the killing. The home-with Burkhart presumed to be in it-was under surveillance at the time Mackey was cut down on the freeway. Nevertheless, Burkhart could have directed someone else to carry out the killing and was viewed as a suspect until cleared of involvement.

One of the first calls Bosch and Rider had made after finding Mackey beneath the tow truck was to Kehoe and Bradshaw, the two RHD detectives watching the home on Mariano Street. They immediately went to the house and took Burkhart and a woman identified as Belinda Messier into custody.

They were now waiting to be interviewed at Parker Center and Bosch and Rider drew that assignment from Pratt.

But as they turned to walk up the slope of the freeway exit to Rider’s car, Pratt asked them to hold up. He then huddled with them and spoke so no one else remaining at the scene could hear.

“I guess I don’t have to tell you two that we’re going to get some heat on this,” he said.

“We know,” Rider said.

“I don’t know what form the review will take but I think you can count on a review,” Pratt said.

“We’ll be ready,” Rider said.

“You might want to talk about that on the way downtown,” Pratt suggested. “Make sure everybody’s on the same page.”

Bosch knew Pratt was telling them to get their story straight so that it could be presented in unison and in the light that served them best, even if they were interviewed separately.

“We’ll be all right,” Rider said.

Pratt glanced at Bosch and then looked away, back at the tow truck.

“I know,” Bosch said. “I’m a boot. If somebody takes a fall for this it will be me. That’s okay. The whole thing was my idea.”

“Harry,” Rider said. “That’s not -”

“It was my plan,” Bosch said, cutting her off. “I’m the one.”

“Well, you might not have to be the one,” Pratt said. “The sooner we get this thing put together the better off we’ll be. Success makes a lot of bad shit go away. So let’s close this fucker by breakfast.”

“You got it, Boss,” Rider said.

As Bosch and Rider headed up the slope they didn’t speak.

33

PARKER CENTER WAS DESERTED when they arrived. Though several investigative units operated from the headquarters building, it was primarily filled each day with command staff and support services. It didn’t come alive until after sunup. In the elevator Bosch and Rider split up, Bosch going directly to the Robbery-Homicide Division on the third floor to relieve Kehoe and Bradshaw, while Rider made a stop by the Open-Unsolved office to pick up the file she had put together earlier on William Burkhart.

“See you in a few,” she said to Bosch as he stepped off. “I hope Kehoe and Bradshaw made some coffee.”

Bosch turned the corner out of the elevator alcove and headed down the hallway to the double doors of RHD. A voice from behind stopped him.

“What did I tell you about retreads?”

Bosch turned. It was Irving, coming from the opposite hallway. There was nothing down that way but computer services. Bosch guessed that he had been waiting in the hallway. He tried not to show surprise that Irving apparently already knew about what had happened on the freeway.

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I wanted to get an early start. It’s going to be a big day.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right. And I’ll give you fair warning. In the morning the media will be alerted to this middle-of-the-night fuckup of yours. The reporters will be told how you used this man Mackey as bait, only to let him be killed in a most horrible way. They will ask questions about how a retired detective could have been allowed back into the department to do this. But don’t worry. These questions will most likely be addressed to the chief of police who set it all in motion.”

Bosch laughed and shook his head, acting as though he didn’t feel the threat.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“I will also be urging the commander of the Internal Affairs Division to open an investigation into how you conducted this investigation, Detective Bosch. I wouldn’t get too used to being back.”

Bosch took a step toward Irving, hoping to turn some of the threat back at him.

“Good, Chief, you do that. I hope you also prepare the commander for what I will be telling his investigators as well as the reporters about your own culpability in all of this.”

There was a long pause before Irving bit.

“What nonsense are you talking about?”

“This man you’re so worried about being used as bait was cut loose by you seventeen years ago, Chief. Cut loose so you could make your deal with Richard Ross. Mackey should’ve been in jail. Instead he used the gun from one of his little burglaries to kill an innocent sixteen-year-old girl.”

Bosch waited but Irving didn’t say anything.

“That’s right,” Bosch said. “I might have Roland Mackey’s blood on my hands but you’ve got Rebecca Verloren’s on yours. You want to go to the media and IAD with it? Fine, take your best shot and we’ll see how it all comes out.”

A pinched look formed in Irving ’s eyes. He took a step toward Bosch until their faces were only inches apart.

“You are wrong, Bosch. All of those kids back then, they were cleared of involvement in Verloren.”

“Yeah, how? Who cleared them? Green and Garcia sure didn’t. They were pushed away from them by you. Just like the girl’s father. You and one of your dogs scared him away from it, too.”

Bosch pointed a finger at his chest.

“You let murderers walk so you could keep your little deal intact.”

An urgency entered Irving ’s voice when he responded.

“You are completely wrong on this,” he said. “Do you really think that we would let murderers walk?”

Bosch shook his head, stepped back and almost laughed.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Listen to me, Bosch. We checked alibis on every last one of those boys. They were all clean. For some of them, we were the alibi because we were still watching them. But we made sure every member of that group was clean on this, then we told Green and Garcia to back off. The father was told, too, but he wouldn’t stand down.”

“So you pushed him down, right, Chief? Pushed him into a hole.”

“Things had to be done. The city was very tense back then. We couldn’t have her father running around saying things that weren’t true.”

“Don’t give me that good-of-the-community bullshit, Chief. You had your deal, that’s all you cared about. You had Ross and IAD in your pocket and you wanted to keep it that way. Only you were dead wrong. The DNA proves it. Mackey was good for Verloren and your investigation was for shit.”

“No, wait just a minute. It only proves one thing. That he had the gun. I read the story you planted in the paper today, too. The DNA connects him to the gun, not to the murder.”

Bosch waved him off. He knew there was no sense going back and forth with Irving. His only hope was that his own threat to go to the media and IAD would neutralize Irving ’s threat. He believed they were at a stalemate.

“Who checked the alibis?” he asked calmly.

Irving didn’t answer.

“Let me guess. McClellan. He’s got his prints all over this.”

Again Irving didn’t answer. It was like he had drifted off into the memory of seventeen years before.

“Chief, I want you to call your dog. I know he still works for you. Tell him I want to know about the alibis. I want details. I want reports. I want everything he’s got by seven a.m. today or that’s it. We do what we have to do and we see where the chips fall.”

Bosch was about to turn away when Irving finally spoke.

“There are no alibi reports,” he said. “There never would have been any.”

Bosch heard the elevator open and Rider soon rounded the corner, carrying a file. She stopped dead when she saw the confrontation. She said nothing.

“No reports?” Bosch said to Irving. “Then you better hope he’s got a good memory. Good night, Chief.”

Bosch turned and started down the hall. Rider hurried to catch up to him. She looked back over her shoulder to make sure Irving was not following. After they turned in through the double doors to RHD, she spoke.

“Are we in trouble, Harry? Is he going to turn this against the man up on six?”

Bosch looked at her. The mix of dread and fear on her face told him how important his answer was going to be.

“Not if I can help it,” he told her.

34

WILLIAM BURKHART and Belinda Messier were being held in separate interview rooms. Bosch and Rider decided to take Messier first so that Burkhart would have to sit and wait and wonder. It would also give them time to let Marcia and Jackson get the warrant and get into the house on Mariano. What they found might be helpful during the interview with Burkhart.

Belinda Messier had come up in the investigation before. The number on the cell phone Mackey carried around was registered to her. In the briefing Kehoe and Bradshaw had given Bosch and Rider upon their arrival she was described as Burkhart’s girlfriend. She had volunteered as much when the RHD detectives had taken both of them into custody. She told them little else after that.

Belinda Messier was a petite woman with mousy blonde hair that framed her face. Her look belied the hard case she turned out to be. She asked to see an attorney the moment Rider and Bosch entered the room.

“Why do you want to see an attorney?” Bosch asked. “Do you think you are under arrest?”

“Are you telling me I can leave?”

She stood up.

“Sit down,” Bosch said. “Roland Mackey was killed tonight and you could be in danger, too. You’re in protective custody. That means you’re not getting out of here until we get some things straight.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I was with Billy all night until you people showed up.”

Over the next forty-five minutes Messier gave up information only grudgingly. She explained that she knew Mackey through Burkhart and that she agreed to apply for cell phone service and turn the phone over to Mackey because he didn’t have a viable credit report. She told the detectives that Burkhart did not work and lived off a damages award he had received after a car accident two years before. He bought the house on Mariano Street with the payout and charged Mackey rent. Messier said she didn’t live in the house but spent many nights there visiting Burkhart. When asked about Burkhart and Mackey’s past ties to white power groups, she feigned surprise. When asked about the tiny swastika tattooed on the webbing between her right thumb and forefinger, she said she thought it was a Navajo good luck symbol.

“Do you know who killed Roland Mackey?” Bosch asked after the long preamble of questions.

“No,” she said. “He was a real nice guy. That’s all I know.”

“What did your boyfriend say after Mackey called him?”

“Nothin’. He just told me he was going to stay up and talk to Ro about something when he came home. He said they might go out for some privacy.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

They went at her several times and from several different angles, with Bosch and Rider trading the lead back and forth, but the interview produced nothing of real value to the investigation.

Burkhart was next, but before going into the interview Bosch called Marcia and Jackson for an update.

“You guys in the house yet?” Bosch asked Marcia.

“Yeah, we’re in. We haven’t found anything yet.”

“What about a cell phone?”

“No cell phone so far. Do you think Burkhart could have slipped out on Kehoe and Bradshaw?”

“Anything’s possible but I doubt it. They weren’t sleeping.”

They were silent a moment as they thought about things and then Marcia spoke.

“How long was it between the time Mackey got it and you called Kehoe and Bradshaw and told them to take Burkhart in?”

Bosch reviewed his actions on the freeway before answering.

“It was pretty quick,” he finally said. “Ten minutes max.”

“Then there you go,” Marcia said. “Getting from the one eighteen in Porter Ranch all the way to Mariano Street in Woodland Hills in ten minutes max? And without being seen by our guys? No way. It wasn’t him. Kehoe and Bradshaw are his alibi.”

“And no cell phone in the house…”

They all already knew that the landline in the house was not used to make a call because it would have registered on the monitoring equipment at ListenTech.

“Nope,” Marcia said. “No cell phone and no call on the landline. I don’t think this is our guy.”

Bosch wasn’t ready to agree yet. He thanked him and hung up, then gave the bad news to Rider.

“So what do we do with him?” she asked.

“Well, he might not be our guy on Mackey, but Mackey called him after the story was read to him. I still like him for Verloren.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. Whoever hit Mackey had to have been his partner on Verloren-unless you’re saying what happened on the on-ramp is just coincidental to all of this.”

Bosch shook his head.

“No, I’m not saying that. We’re just missing something. Burkhart had to have gotten a message out of that house.”

“You mean like dial-a-hitman or something? It’s not working for me, Harry.”

Now Bosch nodded. He knew she was right. It wasn’t coming together.

“All right, then let’s just go in there and see what he has to say for himself.”

Rider agreed and they spent a few minutes working out an interview strategy before going back into the hallway behind the squad room and entering the interview room where Burkhart waited.

The room was stuffy with Burkhart’s body odor and Bosch left the door open. Burkhart had his head down on his folded arms. When he didn’t rouse from his feigned sleep Bosch kicked the leg of his chair and that brought his head up.

“Rise and shine, Billy Blitzkrieg,” Bosch said.

Burkhart had scraggly dark hair that flopped around a face of pasty white skin. He looked like he didn’t go out much except at night.

“I want a lawyer,” Burkhart said.

“We all do. But let’s start with first things first. My name is Bosch and this is Rider. You are William Burkhart and you are under arrest for suspicion of murder.”

Rider started to read him his rights but he cut her off.

“Are you crazy? I never left my house. My girlfriend was there the whole time.”

Bosch held a finger to his lips.

“Let her finish, Billy, and then you can lie to us as much as you like.”

Rider finished reading the rights off the back of one of her business cards. Then Bosch took back over.

“Now, you were saying?”

“I’m saying you are fucked. I was home the whole time and I have a witness who can prove it. Besides, Ro was my friend. Why would I kill him? This is just a fucking joke, so why don’t you go ahead and get me my lawyer now so he can laugh your asses out of here.”

“You finished, Bill? ’Cause I have some news for you. We’re not talking about Roland Mackey. We’re taking you back seventeen years to Rebecca Verloren. You remember her? You and Mackey? The girl you took up into the hills? That’s who we’re talking about here.”

Burkhart showed nothing. Bosch had been hoping for a tell, some sort of sign that he was on the right track.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Burkhart said, his face a stone.

“We’ve got you on tape. Mackey called last night. It’s over, Burkhart. Seventeen years is a long run, but it’s over.”

“You got shit. If there is a tape then all you’ll hear is me tellin’ him to shut up. I don’t have a cell phone and I don’t trust ’em. That’s standing operating procedure. If he was going to start telling me his problems I didn’t want to do it on a goddamn cell phone. As far as Rebecca whatever-her-name-is, I don’t know nothing about that. I guess you should’ve asked Ro while you had the chance.”

He looked at Bosch and winked and Bosch felt like coming across the table at him. But he didn’t.

They verbally sparred for another twenty minutes but neither Bosch nor Rider put a ding in Burkhart’s armor. Eventually Burkhart stopped taking part in the back-and-forth, saying once more that he wanted an attorney and not responding in any form to any question that followed.

Rider and Bosch left the room to discuss their options, which they agreed were minimal. They had thrown a bluff at Burkhart. He had called them on it and they either had to book him and get him his lawyer or kick him loose.

“We don’t have it, Harry,” Rider said. “We shouldn’t kid ourselves. I say we kick him.”

Bosch nodded. He knew it was true. They didn’t have a case now, and for that matter they might never have one. Mackey, the one direct connection to Verloren they had, was gone. Bosch’s own doing had lost him. Now they would have to go back in time and run a full field on Burkhart and search for something that was missed or hidden or ignored seventeen years before. The full depression of their case situation was descending on him like a lead blanket.

He opened his phone and called Marcia once more.

“Anything?”

“Nothing, Harry. No phone, no evidence, nothing.”

“Okay. Just so you know, we’re going to kick him. He might show up there in a little while.”

“Great. He won’t like what he finds here.”

“Good.”

Bosch closed the phone and looked at Rider. Her eyes told the story. Disaster. He knew he had let her down. For the first time he thought maybe Irving had been right-maybe he shouldn’t have come back.

“I’ll go tell him he’s a free man,” he said.

After he walked away Rider called after him.

“Harry, I don’t blame you.”

He looked back at her.

“I went along every step of the way. It was a good plan.”

He nodded.

“Thanks, Kiz.”

35

BOSCH WENT HOME to take a shower, get fresh clothes and maybe close his eyes for a while before heading back downtown for the unit meeting. Once again he drove through a city that was just waking for the day. And once more it came up ugly in his eyes, all sharp edges and harsh glare. Everything seemed ugly to him now.

Bosch didn’t look forward to the unit meeting. He knew all eyes would be on him. Everybody in Open-Unsolved understood that their actions would now be analyzed and second-guessed following Mackey’s death. They also understood that if they were looking for a reason for the potential threat to their careers, they didn’t have to look far.

Bosch threw his keys on the kitchen counter and checked the phone. No messages. He looked at his watch and determined that he had at least a couple hours before he needed to head toward the Pacific Dining Car. Checking the time reminded him of the ultimatum he had given Irving during their confrontation in the hallway outside RHD. But Bosch doubted he would hear from Irving or McClellan now. It seemed as though everybody was calling his bluffs.

He knew sleeping for a couple hours wasn’t really an option, not with everything that weighed on him. He had carried the murder book and the accumulated files into the house. He decided he would work on them. He knew that when all else went wrong there was always the murder book. He had to keep his eyes on the prize. The case.

He started the coffee brewer, took a five-minute shower and then went to work rereading the murder book while a remastered release of Kind of Blue sounded from the CD player.

The feeling that he was missing something right in front of him was grinding on him. He felt that he would be haunted by the case, that he would carry it around with him forever, unless he cracked through and found that missing thing. And he knew that if it was to be found anywhere, it would be in the book.

He decided that this time he would not read through the documents in the order they had been presented to him by the first investigators of the case. He snapped open the rings and took the documents out. He started reading them in random order, taking his time, making sure that he absorbed every name, every word, every photo.

Fifteen minutes later he was staring once again at the crime scene photos of Rebecca Verloren’s bedroom when he heard a car door close in front of his house. Curious about who would be parking out there so early he got up and went to the door. Through the peephole he saw a man approaching by himself. It was hard to clearly see him through the convex lens of the peep. Bosch opened the door anyway, before the man had a chance to knock.

It did not surprise the man that his approach had been watched. Bosch could tell by his demeanor that he was a cop.

“McClellan?”

He nodded.

“Lieutenant McClellan. And I assume you are Detective Bosch.”

“You could have called.”

Bosch stepped back to let him in. Neither man offered to shake hands. Bosch thought it was typical of Irving to send his man to the house. A standard procedure in the old I-know-where-you-live intimidation strategy.

“I thought it better that we talk face to face,” McClellan said.

“You thought? Or Chief Irving thought?”

McClellan was a big man with sandy, almost transparent hair and wide, florid cheeks. Bosch thought he could best be described as well fed. His cheeks turned a darker shade at Bosch’s question.

“Look, I’m here to cooperate with you, Detective.”

“Good. Can I get you something? I have water.”

“Water’d be fine.”

“Have a seat.”

Bosch went into the kitchen and chose the dustiest glass from the cabinet and then filled it with tap water. He flicked off the switch on the coffeemaker and warmer. He wasn’t going to let McClellan get cozy.

When he returned to the living room McClellan was looking out through the sliding glass door and across the deck. The air was clear in the pass. But it was still early.

“Nice view,” McClellan said.

“I know. I don’t see any files in your hand, Lieutenant. I hope this isn’t a social call or like one of those visits you made to Robert Verloren seventeen years ago.”

McClellan turned to Bosch and accepted the glass of water and the insult with the same blank expression.

“There are no files. If there were, they disappeared a long time ago.”

“And what? You’re here to try to convince me with your memories?”

“As a matter of fact, I have great recall of that time period. You have to understand something. I was a detective first grade assigned to the PDU. If I was given a job, I did it. You don’t question command in that situation. You do and you’re out.”

“So you were a good soldier just doing your job. I get it. What about the Chatsworth Eights and the Verloren murder? What about the alibis?”

“There were eight principal players in the Eights. I cleared them all. And don’t think I wanted to clear them and so I just did. I was told to see if any of these little pissants could have been involved. And I checked it out, but they all came up clean-on the murder at least.”

“Tell me about William Burkhart and Roland Mackey.”

McClellan sat down on a chair by the television. He put his glass of water, which he had yet to drink from, down on the coffee table. Bosch turned off Miles Davis in the middle of “Freddie Freeloader” and stood with his hands in his pockets near the sliding doors.

“Well, first of all, Burkhart was easy. We were already watching him that night.”

“Explain that.”

“He had just gotten out of Wayside a few days before. We had gotten tipped that while he was up there he was re-upping on the racial religion, so it was thought to be prudent to keep an eye on him to see if he was going to try to start things up again.”

“Who ordered that?”

McClellan just looked at him.

“ Irving, of course,” Bosch answered. “Keeping the deal safe. So PDU was watching Burkhart. Who else?”

“Burkhart got out and hooked up with two guys from the old group. A guy named Withers and another named Simmons. It looked like they might’ve been planning something, but on the night in question they were in a pool hall on Tampa drinking themselves into oblivion. It was solid. Two undercovers were in there with them the whole time. That’s what I’m here to tell you. They were all solid, Detective.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me about Mackey. The PDU wasn’t watching him, was it?”

“No, not Mackey.”

“Then how was he so solid?”

“What I remember about Mackey was that on the night the girl was taken he was getting tutored at Chatsworth High. He was going to night school, getting his high school degree.”

“Actually, his general education degree. Not exactly the same thing.”

“That’s right. A judge had ordered it as a condition of probation. Only he had to pass and he wasn’t doing too good. But he was getting tutored on the off nights-when there was no school. And the night the girl got grabbed, he was with his tutor. I confirmed it.”

Bosch shook his head. McClellan was trying to feed him a line.

“You’re telling me Mackey was getting tutored through the middle of the night? Either you’re full of shit or you believed a line of bullshit from Mackey and his tutor. Who was the tutor?”

“No, no, they were together earlier in the evening. I don’t remember the guy’s name now, but they were done by like eleven at the latest and then they went their separate ways. Mackey went home.”

Bosch looked astonished.

“That’s no alibi, Lieutenant! Time of death on the girl was two in the a.m. Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course I did. But time of death wasn’t the only alibi point. I was given the summaries put together by the guys on the case. There was no forced entry to that house. And the father had gone around and checked all the doors and locks after he got home at ten that night. That meant the killer had to have been inside the house at that point. He was in there hiding, waiting for everybody to go to sleep.”

Bosch sat down on the couch and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He suddenly realized that McClellan was right and that everything was now different. He had seen the same report McClellan had seen seventeen years before but its meaning had not registered. The killer had been inside by the time Robert Verloren came home from work.

This changed a lot, Bosch knew. It changed how he looked not only at the first investigation, but also at his own.

Not registering Bosch’s inner turmoil, McClellan continued.

“So Mackey couldn’t have gotten into that house because he was with his tutor. He checked out. All those little assholes checked out. So I gave my boss a verbal report and then he told the two guys working the case. And that was the end of it until this DNA thing came up.”

Bosch was nodding to what McClellan was saying but he was thinking about other things.

“If Mackey was clean, how do you explain his DNA on the murder weapon?” he asked.

McClellan looked dumbfounded. He shook his head.

“I don’t know what to say. I can’t explain it. I cleared him of involvement in the actual murder, but he must’ve…”

He didn’t finish. Bosch thought that he actually looked wounded by the idea that he might have helped a murderer or at least the person who provided the weapon for a murder to get away with it. He looked as though he knew all at once that he had been corrupted by Irving. He looked crushed.

“Is Irving still planning to tip the media and IAD to all of this?” Bosch asked quietly.

McClellan slowly shook his head.

“No,” he said. “He told me to give you a message. He said to tell you an agreement is only an agreement if both sides keep their end of it. That’s it.”

“One last question,” Bosch said. “The evidence box on the Verloren case is gone. You know anything about that?”

McClellan stared at him. Bosch could tell he had badly insulted the man.

“I had to ask,” Bosch said.

“All I know is that stuff disappears from the place,” McClellan said through a tight jaw. “Anybody could have walked off with it in seventeen years. But it wasn’t me.”

Bosch nodded. He stood up.

“Well, I have to get back to work on this,” he said.

McClellan took the cue and stood. He seemed to swallow his anger over the last question, maybe accepting Bosch’s explanation that it had to be asked.

“All right, Detective,” he said. “Good luck with this thing. I hope you catch the guy. And I really mean that.”

He held his hand out to Bosch. Bosch didn’t know McClellan’s story. He didn’t know all the circumstances of life in the PDU in 1988. But it looked like McClellan was leaving the house with a greater burden than he had come in with. So Bosch decided he could shake his hand.

After McClellan left, Bosch sat down again, thinking about the idea that Rebecca Verloren’s killer had been hiding in the house. He got up and went to the dining room table, where the files from the murder book were spread out. The photos from the dead girl’s room were at center in the spread. He looked through the reports until he found the SID report on latent fingerprint analysis.

The report was several pages long and contained the analysis of several fingerprints lifted from surfaces in the Verloren household. The main summary concluded that no print lifted from the house was an unknown, therefore it was likely the suspect or suspects wore gloves or simply avoided touching surfaces likely to retain prints.

The summary said that all latent fingerprints lifted from the house were matched to samples from members of the Verloren family or people who had an appropriate reason to have been in the house and touching the surfaces where the prints were found.

This time Bosch read the report differently and in its entirety. This time he was no longer interested in the analysis. He wanted to know where the SID techs had looked for prints.

The report was dated a day after the discovery of Rebecca’s body. It detailed a routine search for fingerprints in the household. All topical surfaces were examined. All doorknobs and locks. All windowsills and frames. Every place it was logical to think that the killer/kidnapper might have touched a surface during the crime. While several prints on windowsills and latches were recovered and matched to Robert Verloren, the report stated that no usable prints at all were recovered from doorknobs in the house. It noted that this was not unusual because of the smudging that routinely occurred when knobs were turned.

It was in what was not included in the report that Bosch saw the crack through which a killer might have escaped. The SID team had gone into the house a day after the victim’s body was discovered. This would have been after the case had been misread twice, first as a missing-persons case and second as a suicide. Added to this, when a murder investigation was finally mounted the latents team was sent in blind. There was no understanding of the case at that point. The idea that the killer might have hidden in the garage or somewhere else in the house for several hours had not been formulated yet. The search for fingerprints and other evidence, such as hairs and fibers, never went beyond the obvious, beyond the surface.

Bosch knew it was too late now. Too many years had passed. A cat roamed the house and who knows what objects from yard sales had come in and gone out of the house where a killer had hidden and waited.

Then his eyes fell to the spread of photos on the table and he realized something. Rebecca’s bedroom was the one place that had not been contaminated over time. It was like a museum with its artwork encased and almost hermetically sealed.

Bosch spread all the crime scene photos of the bedroom in front of him. There had been something gnawing at him about these photos since the first time he had seen them. He still couldn’t get to it but now he felt urgent about it. He studied the shots of the bureau and the bed table and then the open closet. Last he studied the bed.

He thought of the photo that had run in the newspaper and took the second copy of the paper out of the file containing all reports and documents accumulated during the reinvestigation of the case. He unfolded the paper and studied Emmy Ward’s photo and then compared it to the photographs of seventeen years before.

The room seemed exactly the same, as if untouched by the grief emanating from it like heat from an oven. Then Bosch noticed a small difference. In the Daily News shot the bed had been carefully straightened and smoothed by Muriel before the photograph was taken. In the older SID shots the bed was made, but the ruffle fluffed outward along one side of the bed and inward along the foot.

Bosch’s eyes moved back and forth from one photo to the other. He felt something breaking loose inside. He felt a little charge drop into his blood. This was what had bothered him. It was the something that was not right.

“In and out,” he said to himself.

It was possible, he knew, that the ruffle had been pushed inward at the bottom of the bed by someone crawling underneath it. That would make it likely that the outward fluffing of the ruffle at the side of the bed would have occurred when that same person slid or crawled out.

After everyone was asleep.

Bosch got up and started pacing as he worked it through again. In the photo taken after the abduction and murder, the bed clearly showed the possibility of entrance and exit. Rebecca’s killer could have been waiting right below her as she fell asleep.

“In and out,” Bosch said again.

He worked it further. He knew that no readable fingerprints had been recovered at the house. But only obvious surfaces had been checked. This did not necessarily mean the killer had worn gloves. It only meant he was smart enough not to touch obvious places with his bare hands, or smudged the prints when he needed to. Even if gloves had been worn during the entry to the house, might not the killer have removed them while waiting-possibly for hours-under the bed?

It was worth a shot. Bosch went to the kitchen and called SID and asked for Raj Patel.

“Raj, what are you doing?”

“I am cataloging the evidence we gathered last night on the freeway.”

“I need your best latents man to meet me back up there in Chatsworth.”

“Now?”

“Right now, Raj. I might not even have a job later. We have to do this now.”

“What is it we are to do?”

“I want to lift a bed and look underneath it. It’s important, Raj. If we find something, it will lead us to the killer.”

There was a short silence and then Patel replied.

“I am my best latents man, Harry. Give me the address.”

“Thanks, Raj.”

He gave Patel the address and then hung up the phone. He drummed his fingers on the counter, wondering if he should call Kiz Rider. She had been so distressed and discouraged as they had walked out of Parker Center that she said all she wanted to do was go home to sleep. Should he wake her for the second day in a row? He knew that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether he should wait to see if there was anything beneath the bed before telling her and getting her hopes up.

He decided to hold off on the call until there was something solid to tell her. Instead he picked up the phone and woke up Muriel Verloren. He told her he was on his way.

36

BOSCH GOT TO THE SQUAD meeting at the Pacific Dining Car late because of traffic coming in from the Valley. Everyone was in a private area in the back of the restaurant. Most of them already had plates of food in front of them.

His excitement must have showed. Pratt interrupted a report from Tim Marcia to look at Bosch and say, “You either got lucky during the time you had off or you just don’t care about the deep shit we’re in here.”

“I got lucky,” Bosch said as he took the only empty chair and sat down. “But not in the way you mean. Raj Patel just pulled a palm print and two fingers off a wood slat that was beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed.”

“That’s good,” Pratt said dryly. “What’s it mean?”

“It means that as soon as Raj runs it through the database we might have our killer.”

“How so?” Rider asked.

Bosch had never called her. He could already feel a hostile vibe from her.

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bosch said to her. Then to the others, he said, “I was looking through the original latents report in the murder book. I realized that they went in there for prints the day after the girl’s body was found. They never went back after it became a strong possibility that the abductor had come into the house earlier in the day when the garage was left open and hid somewhere until everybody was asleep.”

“So why the bed?” Pratt asked.

“The crime scene photos showed the ruffle at the foot of the bed had been pushed in. Like somebody had crawled underneath. They missed it because they weren’t looking for it.”

“Good work, Harry,” Pratt said. “If Raj gets a hit we change directions and move with it. All right, let’s get back to our reports. You can check with your partner on what you’ve missed so far.”

Pratt then turned to Robinson and Nord at the other end of the long table and said, “What did you come up with on the call for the tow truck?”

“Not a lot that helps,” Nord said. “Because the call was made after we had switched our monitoring to the line at the Burkhart property, we don’t have an audio recording of it. But we do have the pen registers and they show that the call came directly to Tampa Towing before being bounced over to the Triple A answering service. The call came from a pay phone outside the Seven-Eleven on Tampa by the freeway entrance. He probably made the call, then drove down the entrance and waited.”

“Prints on the phone?” Pratt asked.

“We asked Raj to take a look after he cleared the scene,” Robinson said. “The phone had been wiped.”

“Figures,” Pratt said. “You talked to Triple A?”

“Yes. No help other than to say the caller was a male.”

He turned to Bosch.

“You have anything to add that your partner didn’t already tell us?”

“Probably just more of the same. Burkhart looks like he is clear on last night and he looks like he’s clear on Verloren as well. Both nights he happened to be under LAPD surveillance.”

Rider gave him her knotted-brow look. He had even more information she didn’t know. He looked away.

“Well, that’s just perfect,” Pratt said. “So who, what and where does that leave us, people?”

“Well, basically, our newspaper plant backfired,” Rider said. “It may have worked in terms of getting Mackey to want to talk about Verloren, but he never got the chance. Somebody else saw the story.”

“That somebody being the actual killer,” Pratt said.

“Exactly,” Rider said. “The person Mackey helped and/or gave the gun to seventeen years ago. That person also saw the story and knew it wasn’t his blood on the gun, so that meant it had to be Mackey’s. He knew Mackey was the link to him, so Mackey had to go.”

“So how did he set it up?” Pratt asked.

“He was either smart enough to figure the story was a plant and we were watching Mackey, or he just figured the best way to get to Mackey was the way he did it. Get him out there alone. Like I said, he was smart. He picked a time and place that would result in Mackey being alone and vulnerable. On that entrance ramp you are up above the freeway. Even with the tow truck’s lights on, nobody would see up there.”

“It was also a good spot in case Mackey had a tail,” Nord added. “The killer knew a tail car would have to just keep moving by, and then he’d have Mackey alone.”

“Aren’t we giving this guy a little too much credit?” Pratt asked. “How would he know the cops were onto this guy? Just from a newspaper article? Come on.”

Neither Bosch nor Rider answered and everyone else silently digested the unspoken suggestion that the killer had a connection to the department or, more specifically, the investigation.

“All right, what’s next?” Pratt said. “I think the containment on this is maybe another twenty-four hours tops. After that it’s going to be in the papers and upstairs on six, and there’s going to be hair on the walls if we don’t wrap it up first. What do we do?”

“We’ll take the pen registers,” Bosch said, speaking for himself and Rider. “And go from there.”

Bosch had been thinking about the note to Mackey he had seen on the desk in the service station the day before. A call to verify employment from Visa. As Rider had pointed out when she first heard about it, Mackey wasn’t into leaving trails like credit cards. It was something that didn’t fit and therefore he wanted to go after it.

“We have all of the printouts right here,” Robinson said. “The line that was busiest was the one into the station. All kinds of business calls.”

“Okay, Harry, Kiz, you want the registers?” Pratt asked.

Rider looked at Bosch and then at Pratt.

“If that’s what Harry wants. He seems to be on a roll today.”

As if on cue Bosch’s phone began to chirp. He looked at the screen. It was Raj Patel.

“We’ll see what kind of a roll right now,” he said as he opened the phone.

Patel said he had good and bad news.

“The good news is we still had the exemplar skid from the house in records here. The latents we recovered this morning did not match any of them. You found somebody new, Harry. It could be your killer.”

What this meant was that fingerprint examples from the members of the Verloren family and others who had appropriate access to the house were still on file in the SID print lab. None of those examples matched the fingerprints and palm print recovered that morning from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. Of course fingerprints could not be dated, and it was possible that the prints discovered that morning had been left by whoever had installed the bed. But it seemed unlikely. The prints were taken off the underside of the wooden slat. Whoever had left them had most likely been under the bed.

“And the bad news?” Bosch asked.

“I just ran them through the California system. No matches.”

“What about the FBI?”

“That’s next but that won’t be so fast. They have to process it. I will send it through with an expedite request but you know how that goes.”

“I do, Raj. Let me know when you know, and thanks for the effort.”

Bosch closed the phone. He felt a steep letdown and his face showed it. He could already tell the others knew the score before he delivered the news.

“No match on the DOJ database,” he said. “He’ll try the bureau’s base but that will take a while.”

“Shit!” said Renner.

“Speaking of Raj Patel,” Pratt said, “his brother scheduled the autopsy for two o’clock today. I want one team there. Who wants to take it?”

Renner weakly raised his hand. He and Robleto would take it. It was an easy assignment if you didn’t mind the visuals.

The meeting soon broke up after Pratt assigned Robinson and Nord the service station and the interviews of the people Mackey worked with there. Marcia and Jackson would work on pulling reports together and into a murder book. They were still the lead investigators and would coordinate things from room 503.

Pratt looked at the bill, divided it by nine and told everyone to put in ten. This meant Bosch had to throw in a ten even though he hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. He didn’t protest. It was the price of being late and being the guy who put them on this path.

As everyone stood Bosch caught Rider’s eye.

“Did you come directly here or did you ride with somebody?”

“Abel gave me a lift.”

“Want to ride back together?”

“Sure.”

Outside the restaurant she gave Bosch the silent treatment while they waited for his car from the valet. She stared at the large plastic steer that was atop the restaurant’s sign. Under her arm was a file containing the printouts from the pen registers.

Finally the car came and they got in. Before pulling out of the lot Bosch turned and looked at her.

“All right, say it,” he said.

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is you want to say so you can feel better.”

“You should’ve called me, Harry, that’s all.”

“Look, Kiz, I called you yesterday and you chewed me out. I was just working off of recent experience.”

“This was different and you know it. You called me yesterday because you were excited about something. Today you were following a lead. I should have been with you. And then to not find out what you came up with until you went in there and told everybody. That was embarrassing, Harry. Thanks for that.”

Bosch nodded his contrition.

“You’re right about that part. I’m sorry. I should’ve called you when I was coming in. I just forgot. I knew I was late and I had both hands on the wheel and was just trying to get here.”

She didn’t say anything, so he finally did.

“Can we get back to solving this case now?”

She shrugged and he finally put the car in drive. On the way to Parker Center he tried to fill her in on all the details he hadn’t mentioned during the breakfast meeting. He told her about McClellan’s visit to his house and how that led him to the discovery of the prints under the bed.

Twenty minutes later they were in their alcove in room 503. Bosch finally had a cup of coffee in front of him. They sat across from each other and had the pen register printouts spread between them.

Bosch was concentrating on the reports on the service station phones. The listing was at least a couple hundred entries-calls going in or out on the station’s two phones-between 6 a.m., when the surveillance started, and 4 p.m., when Mackey reported for work and Renner and Robleto started live-monitoring the line.

Bosch scanned down the list. Nothing looked immediately familiar. Many of the calls were to or from business listings with some automobile connection clearly apparent in the name. Many others came in from the AAA dispatch center and these were likely tow calls.

There were also several calls that came from personal phones. Bosch looked closely at these names but saw nothing that jumped out at him. No one listed was an already established player in the case.

There were four entries on the list that were attributed to Visa, all the same number. Bosch picked up the phone and called it. He never heard it ring. He just got the loud screeching sound of a computer hookup. It was so loud that even Rider heard it.

“What is that?”

Bosch hung up.

“I’m trying to run down that note I saw on the desk in the station about Visa calling to confirm Mackey’s employment. Remember you said it didn’t fit?”

“I forgot about that. Was that the number?”

“I don’t know. There are four listings for Visa but-wait a minute.”

He realized that the Visa calls were outgoing calls.

“Never mind, these were outgoing. It must be the number the machine calls when you use a credit card to pay. That’s not it. There is no incoming call listed as Visa.”

Bosch picked up the phone again and called Nord’s cell phone.

“Are you at the service station yet?”

She laughed.

“We’ve barely cleared Hollywood. We’ll be there in a half hour.”

“Ask them about a phone message somebody left for Mackey yesterday. Something about Visa calling to confirm employment on a credit application. Ask them what they remember from the call and more importantly, what time it came in. Try to get the exact time if you can. Ask them about this first thing and then call me back.”

“Yes, sir. You want us to pick up your laundry, too?”

Bosch realized it was getting to be a bad morning for stepping on toes.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’re working under the gun here.”

“Aren’t we all? I’ll call you as soon as we see the guy.”

Nord hung up. Bosch put the phone down and looked at Rider. She was looking at the class picture of Rebecca Verloren in the yearbook they had borrowed.

“What are you thinking?” she asked without looking up at Bosch.

“This thing with Visa bothers me.”

“I know, so what are you thinking?”

“Well, say you’re the killer and you got the gun you did it with from Mackey.”

“You’re completely giving up on Burkhart? You sure liked him last night.”

“Let’s just say the facts are persuading me. For now, okay?”

“Okay, go on.”

“All right, so you’re the killer and you got the gun from Mackey. He’s the one person in the world who can put the thing on you. But seventeen years go by and nothing ever happens and you feel safe and maybe you even lose track of Mackey.”

“Okay.”

“And then yesterday you pick up the paper and you see the picture of Rebecca and you read the story and it says they’ve got DNA. You know it wasn’t your blood, so it was either a big bluff by the cops or it’s got to be Mackey’s blood. So that’s when you know.”

“Mackey’s gotta go.”

“Exactly. The cops are getting close. He’s got to go. So how do you find him? Well, Mackey’s spent his entire life-when he isn’t in jail-driving a tow truck. If you knew that then you’d do exactly what we did. You get out the yellow pages and start calling tow companies.”

Rider stood up and went to the bank of file cabinets along the alcove’s back wall. The phone books were stacked haphazardly on top. She had to stand on her toes to reach the yellow pages for the Valley. She came back and opened the book to the pages advertising tow services. She ran her finger down a listing until she reached Tampa Towing, where Mackey had worked. She backed up to the previous listing, a company called Tall Order Towing Services. She picked up her phone and dialed the number. Bosch heard only her side of the conversation.

“Yes, who am I speaking with?”

She waited a moment.

“My name is Detective Kizmin Rider with the Los Angeles Police Department. I am investigating a fraud case and wondered if I could ask you a question.”

Rider nodded as she apparently got a go-ahead.

“The suspect I am documenting has a history of calling businesses and identifying himself as someone working for Visa. He then attempts to verify someone else’s employment as part of an application for a credit card. Does any of this ring a bell with you? We have information that leads us to believe that this individual was operating in the Valley yesterday. He likes to target automotive businesses.”

Rider waited while there was a response to her question. She looked at Bosch but gave no indication of anything.

“Yes, could you put her on the line, please?”

Rider went through the whole thing again with another person and asked the same question. Then she leaned forward and seemed to take a stiffer attitude in her posture. She covered the mouthpiece and looked at Bosch.

“Bingo,” she said.

She then went back to the phone call and listened some more.

“Was it a male or female?”

She wrote something down.

“And what time was this?”

She wrote another note and Bosch stood up so he could look across his desk to read it. She had written “male, 1:30 approx” on a scratch pad. While she continued the conversation Bosch consulted the pen register and saw that a call came in on the Tampa Towing line at 1:40 p.m. It was from a personal number. The name on the register was Amanda Sobek. The number’s prefix indicated it was a cell phone. Neither the name nor the number meant anything to Bosch. But that didn’t matter. He thought they were getting close to something here.

Rider finished her call by asking if the person she was talking to remembered the name the supposed Visa employee had tried to confirm. After she apparently got a negative reply, she asked, “What about the name Roland Mackey?”

She waited.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Okay, thank you for your time, Karen.”

She hung up and looked at Bosch. The excitement in her eyes wiped out everything about being left out of the morning’s fingerprints find.

“You were right,” she said. “They got a call. Same thing. She even remembered the name Roland Mackey once I gave it to her. Harry, somebody was tracking him down the whole time we were watching him.”

“And now we’re going to track them down. If they were going down the line in the phone book they would have called Tampa Towing next. The register shows a one-forty call from somebody named Amanda Sobek. I don’t recognize it but this might be the call we’re looking for.”

“Amanda Sobek,” Rider said as she opened her laptop. “Let’s see what AutoTrack has on her.”

While she was tracing the name, Bosch got a call from Robinson, who had arrived with Nord at Tampa Towing.

“Harry, the dayshift guy says that call came in between one-thirty and two o’clock. He knows because he had just come back from lunch and he was sent out on a tow at two o’clock. A Triple A run.”

“Was it a male or female caller from Visa?”

“Male.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“Yeah, once this guy confirmed that Mackey worked here, the Visa guy asked what hours he worked.”

“Okay. Can you ask the day man another question?”

“He’s right here.”

“Ask if they have a customer named Sobek. Amanda Sobek.”

Bosch waited while the question was asked.

“No customer named Sobek,” Robinson reported back. “Is that good news, Harry?”

“It’ll work.”

After closing the phone Bosch got up and walked around the desks so he could look at Rider’s computer screen. He told her what Robinson had just reported.

“Anything on Amanda Sobek?” he asked.

“Yeah, this is it. She lives in the West Valley. Farralone Avenue in Chatsworth. But there is not a lot here. No credit cards or mortgage. I think it means it’s all in her husband’s name. She might be a housewife. I’m running the address to see if I can pull him up.”

Bosch opened the yearbook to Rebecca Verloren’s class. He started flipping through the pages looking for the name Sobek or Amanda.

“Here he is,” Rider said. “Mark Sobek. Everything’s basically in his name and it looks like a lot. Four cars, two houses, lots of credit cards.”

“There was nobody named Sobek in her class,” Bosch said. “But there were two girls named Amanda. Amanda Reynolds and Amanda Riordan. Think she is one of them?”

Rider shook her head.

“I don’t think so. The age is off. This says Amanda Sobek is forty-one. That would make her eight years older than Rebecca. Something doesn’t fit. Think we should just call her?”

Bosch closed the yearbook with a bang. Rider jumped in her seat.

“No,” he said. “Let’s just go.”

“Where? To see her?”

“Yeah. Time to get off your ass and knock on doors.”

He looked down at Rider and could tell she wasn’t amused.

“I don’t mean your ass specifically. It’s a figure of speech. Let’s just go.”

She started getting up.

“You are awfully flippant for somebody who might not have a job at the end of the day.”

“It’s the only way to be, Kiz. Darkness waits. But it comes no matter what you do.”

He led the way out of the office.

37

THE FARRALONE AVENUE address AutoTrack led Bosch and Rider to belonged to a Mediterranean-style mansion that had to have been on the upper side of 6,000 square feet. It had a separate garage with four dark-stained wooden doors and windows from a guest suite above. The detectives had to view all of this through a wrought iron gate while waiting for someone to answer the intercom. Finally a voice came from the small square box on a pole next to Bosch’s open window.

“Yes, who is it?”

It was a woman. She sounded young.

“Amanda Sobek?” Bosch asked in reply.

“No, this is her assistant. Who are you two?”

Bosch looked again at the box and saw the camera lens. They were being watched as well as listened to. He pulled out his badge and held it a foot from the lens.

“Police,” he said. “We need to talk to Amanda or Mark Sobek.”

“About what?”

“About police business. Open the gate, please, ma’am.”

They waited and Bosch was just about to punch the call button again when the gate slowly started to automatically open. They drove in and parked in a turnaround circle in front of the two-story portico.

“Looks like the kind of place it might be worth killing a tow truck driver to protect,” Bosch said quietly as he cut the engine.

The door was opened before they got there by a woman in her twenties. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse. The assistant.

“And you are?” Bosch asked.

“ Melody Lane. I work for Mrs. Sobek.”

“Is she here?” Rider asked.

“Yes, she’s getting dressed and will be right down. You can wait in the living room.”

They were led into an entrance hallway, where there was a table with several family photos on display. It looked like a husband, wife and two teenaged daughters. They followed Melody into a sumptuous living room with large windows looking out on Santa Susana State Park and Oat Mountain beyond.

Bosch checked his watch. It was almost noon. Melody noticed.

“She wasn’t sleeping. She worked out earlier and was taking a shower. She should be down -”

She didn’t need to finish. An attractive woman in white slacks and blouse left open over a pink chiffon shirt came hurrying into the room.

“What is it? Is something wrong? Are my girls all right?”

“Are you Amanda Sobek?” Bosch asked.

“Of course I am. What is wrong? Why are you here?”

Bosch pointed to the grouping of couch and chairs in the center of the room.

“Why don’t we sit down here, Mrs. Sobek.”

“Just tell me if something is wrong.”

The panic on her face looked real to Bosch. He started to think they may have made a wrong turn somewhere.

“Nothing is wrong,” he said. “This is not about your daughters. Your daughters are fine.”

“Is it Mark?”

“No, Mrs. Sobek. As far as we know he is fine, too. Let’s sit down over here.”

She finally relented and walked quickly to the big chair to the right of the couch. Bosch moved around a glass coffee table and sat on the couch. Rider took one of the remaining chairs. Bosch identified himself and Rider and showed his badge again. He noticed that the glass on the table was spotless.

“We are conducting an investigation that I can’t tell you about. I need to ask you some questions about your cell phone.”

“My cell phone? You scared me to death over my cell phone?”

“It’s actually a very serious investigation, Mrs. Sobek. Do you have your cell phone with you?”

“It’s in my purse. Do you need to see it?”

“No, not yet. Can you tell me when you used it yesterday?”

Sobek shook her head like it was an inane question.

“I don’t know. In the morning I called Melody from the gym. I can’t remember when else. I went to the store and called my daughters to see if they were on their way home after school. I can’t remember anything else. I was home almost all day except for the gym. When I’m home I don’t use my cell. I use the regular phone.”

Bosch’s misgivings were multiplying. Somewhere they had made a wrong move.

“Could someone else have used the phone?” Rider asked.

“My daughters have their own. So does Melody. I don’t understand this.”

Bosch pulled the page from the pen register out of his coat pocket. Out loud he read the number of the phone that had called Tampa Towing.

“Is that your number?” he asked.

“No, it’s my daughter’s. It’s Kaitlyn’s.”

Bosch leaned forward. This changed things further.

“Your daughter’s? Where was she yesterday?”

“I already told you. She was in school. And she didn’t use her phone until after, because it’s not allowed at school.”

“What school does she go to?” Rider asked.

“ Hillside Prep. It’s over in Porter Ranch.”

Bosch leaned back and looked at Rider. Something had just come full circle. He wasn’t sure what it was but it felt important.

Amanda Sobek read the looks on their faces.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong at the school?”

“Not as far as we know, ma’am,” Bosch answered. “What grade is your daughter in?”

“She is a sophomore.”

“Does she have a teacher named Bailey Sable?” Rider asked.

Sobek nodded.

“She has her for homeroom and English.”

“Is there any reason why Mrs. Sable might have borrowed your daughter’s phone yesterday?” Rider asked.

Sobek shrugged.

“Not that I can think of. You have to understand how strange this is. All these questions. Was her phone used to make a threat or something? Is this some kind of terrorist thing?”

“No, ma’am,” Bosch said. “But it is a serious matter. We are going to have to go to the school now and talk to your daughter. We would appreciate it if you came with us and were there when we spoke to her.”

“Does she need a lawyer?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am.”

Bosch stood up.

“Shall we go?”

“Can Melody come too? I want Melody to go with me.”

“Tell you what. Have Melody meet us there. That way she can drive you back if we need to go somewhere else.”

38

ON THE DRIVE OVER to Hillside Prep the car was silent. Bosch wanted to talk to Rider, to dope out this latest twist, but he didn’t want to do it in front of Amanda Sobek. So they were silent until their passenger asked if she could call her husband and Bosch said that was fine. But she couldn’t reach him and left a message in a near-hysterical voice telling him to call her as soon as he could.

When they got to the school it was lunchtime. As they walked down the main hallway to the office they could hear the near-riotous collision of voices from the cafeteria.

Mrs. Atkins was behind the counter in the office. She looked a little confused when she saw Amanda Sobek in the company of the detectives. Bosch asked to see Principal Stoddard.

“Mr. Stoddard took lunch off-campus today,” Mrs. Atkins said. “Is there something I can help with?”

“Yes, we’d like to see Kaitlyn Sobek. Mrs. Sobek here will be with us when we talk to her.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, Mrs. Atkins, right now. I would appreciate it if you or another school employee could go and get her. It might be better if the other kids didn’t see her being accompanied by the police.”

“I could go get her,” Amanda offered.

“No,” Bosch said quickly. “We want to see her at the same time as you.”

It was a polite way of saying that he didn’t want her to ask her daughter about the cell phone before the police did.

“I’ll just go to the cafeteria and find her,” Mrs. Atkins said. “You can use the principal’s meeting room for your… uh, talk.”

She came around the counter, averted her eyes from Amanda Sobek and headed toward the door that led to the main hallway.

“Thank you, Mrs. Atkins,” Bosch said.

It took Mrs. Atkins almost five minutes to locate and return with Kaitlyn Sobek. While they were waiting, Melody Lane arrived and Bosch told Amanda that her assistant would have to wait outside the interview. The girl accompanied Bosch, Rider and her mother into a room off the principal’s office that had a round table with six chairs around it.

After everyone sat down, Bosch nodded to Rider and she took over. Bosch thought it would be best for a woman to lead the interview of the girl and Rider understood this without discussion. She explained to Kaitlyn that they were investigating a phone call that was made on her cell phone at 1:40 p.m. the day before. The girl immediately interrupted.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“Why is that?” Rider asked. “We had an electronic trap on the line that was called. It showed the call came from your phone.”

“I was in school yesterday. We’re not allowed to use cell phones during school hours.”

The girl appeared nervous. Bosch could tell she was lying but couldn’t figure out what the play was. He wondered if she was lying because her mother was in the room.

“Where is your phone right now?” Rider asked.

“In my backpack in my locker. And it’s turned off.”

“Is that where it was yesterday at one-forty?”

“Uh-huh.”

She looked away from Rider as she lied. She was easy to read and Bosch knew Rider was getting the same thing he was getting.

“Kaitlyn, this is a very serious investigation,” Rider said in a soothing tone. “If you are lying to us you could find yourself in a lot of trouble.”

“Kaitlyn, don’t lie!” Amanda Sobek said forcefully.

“Mrs. Sobek, let’s stay calm about this,” Rider said. “Kaitlyn, these electronic traps I was telling you about are called pen registers. The registers don’t lie. Your cell phone was used to make the call. There is no doubt. So is it possible someone got into your locker and used your phone yesterday?”

She shrugged.

“Anything’s possible, I guess.”

“Okay, who would have done that?”

“I don’t know. You were the one who said it.”

Bosch cleared his throat, which drew the girl’s eyes to his. He stared hard at her and said, “I think maybe we should take a drive downtown. Maybe this is not the right place for an interview.”

He started to push back his chair and get up.

“Kaitlyn, what is going on here?” Amanda pleaded. “These people are serious. Who did you call?”

“No one, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay.”

“I didn’t have the phone, all right? It was confiscated.”

Bosch sat back down and Rider took over again.

“Who confiscated your phone?” she asked.

“Mrs. Sable,” the girl said.

“Why?”

“Because we’re not supposed to use them inside school once the homeroom bell rings. Yesterday my best friend Rita didn’t come to school. So I tried to text message her during homeroom to see if she was all right and Mrs. Sable caught me.”

“And she took your phone?”

“Yes, she took it.”

Bosch’s mind was racing, trying to put Bailey Koster Sable into the mold of murderer of Rebecca Verloren. He knew one thing didn’t work. A sixteen-year-old Bailey Koster could not have carried her friend’s limp body up the hill behind her house.

“Why did you just lie to us about this?” Rider asked Kaitlyn.

“Because I didn’t want her to know I was in trouble,” the girl said, indicating her mother with her chin.

“Kaitlyn, you never lie to the police,” Amanda shot back. “I don’t care what -”

“Mrs. Sobek, you can talk to her about this later,” Bosch said. “Let us continue.”

“When did you get the phone back, Kaitlyn?” Rider asked.

“At the end of the day.”

“So Mrs. Sable had your phone all day?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Not all day.”

“Well, who had it?”

“I don’t know. When they take your phone they tell you that you have to pick it up at the end of the day at the principal’s office. That’s what I did. Mr. Stoddard gave it back to me.”

Gordon Stoddard. Things all at once started to come together. Bosch had tucked into the water tunnel and the case and all its details were swirling around him. He rode the wave of clarity and grace. Everything was clicking. Stoddard clicked. Mackey’s last word clicked. Stoddard was Rebecca’s teacher. He was close to her. He was her lover and the late night caller. It all clicked into place.

Mr. X.

Bosch stood up and left the room without a word. He walked past Stoddard’s office door. It was open and the desk was empty. He went out to the front counter.

“Mrs. Atkins, where is Mr. Stoddard?”

“He was just here but then he stepped out.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the cafeteria. I told him you and the other detective were here talking to Kaitlyn.”

“And then he left?”

“Yes. Oh, I just realized-he might be in the parking lot. He said he got a new car today. Maybe he’s showing it to one of the teachers.”

“What kind of car? Did he say?”

“A Lexus. He said it had a model number but I forget which one.”

“Does he have an assigned parking space?”

“Uh, yes, it is in the first row on the right as you come out of the entrance hall.”

Bosch turned from her and went out the door to the hallway. It was crowded with students leaving the cafeteria to start afternoon classes. Bosch started moving through the crowd, dodging students and picking up speed. Soon he was free of them and running. He came into the parking lot and immediately trotted down the parking lane to the right. He found an empty space with Stoddard’s name painted on the curb.

He turned to go back in to get Rider. He was pulling his phone off his belt when he saw a silver blur to his right. It was a car coming right at him and it was too late to get out of the way.

39

BOSCH WAS HELPED UP into a sitting position on the asphalt.

“Harry, are you all right?”

He focused and saw that it was Rider. He nodded shakily. He tried to remember what had just happened.

“It was Stoddard,” he said. “He was coming right at me.”

“In his car?”

Bosch laughed. He had left that part out.

“Yeah, his new car. A silver Lexus.”

Bosch started to get up. Rider put a hand on his shoulder to hold him down.

“Just wait a minute. Are you sure you’re all right? Does anything hurt?”

“Just my head.”

It was coming back to him now.

“I banged it when I landed,” he said. “I jumped out of the way. I saw his eyes, you know? The rage, I mean.”

“Let me see your eyes.”

He looked up at her and she held his chin while she checked his pupils.

“You look all right,” she said.

“Okay, then, I’ll sit here for a second while you go back in and get Stoddard’s home address from Mrs. Atkins.”

Rider nodded.

“All right. You wait here.”

“Hurry. We have to find him.”

She ran back into the school. Bosch reached up and felt the bump on the back of his head. He replayed the clearing memory. He had seen Stoddard’s face behind the windshield. It was angry, contorted.

But then he had yanked the wheel to the left as Bosch jumped the other way.

Bosch reached for his phone so he could call in a wanted bulletin for Stoddard. It wasn’t on his belt. He looked around and saw the phone on the asphalt near the rear tire of a BMW. He crawled over and grabbed it, then stood up.

Bosch was hit with mild vertigo and had to lean on the car. Suddenly an electronic voice said, “Please step away from the car!”

Bosch pulled his hand away and started walking toward the part of the lot where he had parked his own car. On the way he called central dispatch and put out the wanted bulletin for Stoddard and his silver Lexus.

Bosch closed the phone and hooked it on his belt. He got to his car, started it and pulled up to the entrance so they would be ready to go as soon as Rider came out with the address.

After what seemed like an interminable wait Rider finally emerged and trotted to the car. But she came to his side, opened his door and waved him out.

“It’s not far,” she announced. “It’s a house on Chase off of Winnetka. But you’re not driving. I am.”

Bosch knew that arguing would waste time. He got out and moved as quickly as his balance allowed around the front of the car and got in on the passenger side. Rider hit the gas and they moved out of the parking lot.

As Rider made her way on surface streets toward Stoddard’s home Bosch called for backup from Devonshire Division patrol and then called Abel Pratt to quickly fill him in on the morning’s revelations.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Pratt asked.

“No idea. We’re on the way to his house.”

“Is he suicidal?”

“No idea.”

Pratt was silent for a moment as he digested this. He then asked a few more questions about minor details and hung up.

“He sounded happy,” Bosch told Rider. “Says if we get this guy it’ll help turn a lemon into lemonade.”

“Good,” Rider replied. “We can pull prints from Stoddard’s office or home and match them to the print from underneath the bed. Then it’s a done deal whether he’s in the wind or not.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”

“Harry, what are you thinking, Stoddard and Mackey did this together?”

“I don’t know. But I remember that photo of Stoddard from the yearbook. He looked pretty lean. He might have been able to carry her up the hill by himself. We’ll never know unless we find him and ask him.”

Rider nodded.

“The key question,” she then said, “is how Stoddard connected with Mackey.”

“The gun.”

“I know that. That’s obvious. I mean, how did he know Mackey back then? Where is the intersection and how did he know him well enough to get the gun from him?”

“I think it was right there in front of us all along,” Bosch said. “And Mackey told me with his last word.”

“Chatsworth?”

“Chatsworth High.”

“How do you mean?”

“That summer he was getting his GED at Chatsworth High. On the night of the murder Mackey’s alibi was his tutor. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Mackey was the tutor’s alibi.”

“Stoddard?”

“He told us that first day that all of the teachers at Hillside had outside jobs. Maybe Stoddard was working as a tutor. Maybe he was Mackey’s tutor.”

“That’s a lot of maybes, Harry.”

“That’s why we’ve got to find Stoddard before he does anything to himself.”

“You think he’s suicidal? You told Abel you didn’t know.”

“I don’t know anything for sure. But back in that parking lot he turned away from me at the last second. It makes me think that he only wants to hurt one person.”

“Himself? Maybe he just didn’t want to dent his new car.”

“Maybe.”

Rider turned onto Winnetka, a four-lane street, and started moving faster. They were almost to Stoddard’s home. Bosch rode silently, thinking about what might be waiting for them ahead. Rider finally turned west on Chase and there was a black-and-white patrol car with both of its front doors open in the street up ahead. Rider pulled to a quick stop behind it and they jumped out of the car. Bosch took his gun off his belt and carried it at his side. Rider had a point about Stoddard maybe only thinking about his car when he avoided hitting Bosch.

The front door of the small World War II-era house was open. There was no sign of the patrol officers from the car. Bosch looked at Rider and saw that she was unholstered as well. They were ready to go in. At the door, Bosch shouted, “Detectives coming in!”

He stepped into the threshold and got a response from inside.

“It’s clear! It’s clear!”

Bosch didn’t relax or lower his weapon as he entered the living room. He scanned the room and didn’t see anyone. He looked down at the coffee table and saw the Daily News from the previous day unfolded, the story on Rebecca Verloren on display.

“Patrol coming out!” a voice called from a hallway to the right.

Soon two patrol officers stepped out of the hallway into the living room. They carried their weapons at their sides. Now Bosch relaxed and lowered his own.

“All clear,” said the patrolman with the P2 stripes on his uniform. “We found the door open and came in. There’s something you ought to see back here in the bedroom.”

The patrolmen led the way and Bosch and Rider followed. They went down a short hallway that passed the open doors to a bathroom and a small bedroom that was used as a home office. They entered a bedroom and the P2 pointed to an oblong wooden box that was open on the bed. The box had a foam lining with a cutout in the shape of a long-barreled revolver. The cutout was empty and the gun was gone. There was a small rectangular cutout in the foam for a box of bullets. It was empty, too, but the box was nearby on the bed.

“Is there someone he’s going after?” the P2 asked.

Bosch didn’t look up from the gun box.

“Probably just himself,” he said. “Either of you guys have gloves? Mine are in the car.”

“Right here,” the P2 said.

He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a small compartment on his equipment belt. He handed them to Bosch, who snapped them on and then picked up the bullet box. Bosch opened it and slid out a plastic tray in which the bullets were stored. There was only one bullet missing.

Bosch was staring at the space left by the missing bullet and thinking about things when Rider tapped him on the elbow. He looked at her and then followed her gaze to the table on the other side of the bed.

There was a framed photo of Rebecca Verloren. It was a shot of her standing in a green field with the Eiffel Tower behind her. She was wearing a black beret and she was smiling in an unforced way. Bosch thought the look in her eyes was sincere and showed love for the person she was looking at.

“He wasn’t in any of the pictures in the yearbook because he was the one behind the camera,” Bosch said.

Rider nodded. She, too, was in the water tunnel.

“That’s where it started,” she said. “That’s where she fell in love with him. My true love.”

They stared in somber silence for a few moments until the P2 spoke.

“Detectives, can we clear?”

“No,” Bosch said. “We need you to stay here and secure the house until SID gets here. And be ready in case he comes back.”

“You’re leaving?” the P2 asked.

“We’re leaving.”

40

THEY MOVED QUICKLY back to Bosch’s car and Rider once again got behind the wheel.

“Where to?” she said as she turned the ignition.

“The Verloren house,” Bosch said. “And let’s hurry.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’ve been thinking about the picture they ran in the paper, with Muriel sitting on the bed. It showed how the room was still the same, you know?”

Rider thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Yeah.”

Rider understood. The photo showed that Rebecca’s room was unchanged since the night she was taken. Seeing it might trigger something in Stoddard. A desire for something lost long ago. The photo was like an oasis, it was a reminder of a perfect place where nothing had gone wrong.

Rider pinned the accelerator and the car lurched forward. Bosch opened his cell, called dispatch and called for another backup unit to meet them at Muriel Verloren’s house. He also updated the bulletin on Stoddard, describing him now as armed and dangerous and possibly 5150-meaning mentally unstable. He knew as he closed the phone that he and Rider were close to the Verloren home and would get there first. His next call was to Muriel Verloren but there was no answer. When the message service picked up he closed his phone.

“No answer.”

They turned the corner onto Red Mesa Way five minutes later and Bosch’s eyes immediately locked on the silver car parked at a haphazard angle against the curb in front of the Verloren house. It was the Lexus that had come at him in the school parking lot. Rider stopped next to the car and once again they emerged quickly, with weapons ready.

The front door of the house was ajar. Using hand signals they took stances on either side of it. Bosch then pushed the door open and went in first. Rider followed and they immediately moved into the living room.

Muriel Verloren was on the floor. There was a cardboard box and other packing supplies next to her. Brown packing tape had been wrapped several times around her head and face as a gag, and used to bind her hands and ankles. Rider propped her up against the couch and held a finger up to her lips.

“Muriel, is he in the house?” she whispered.

Muriel nodded, her eyes wide and wild.

“Rebecca’s room?”

Muriel nodded again.

“Have you heard a gunshot?”

Muriel shook her head no and emitted a muffled sound that would have been a scream if not for the tape across her mouth.

“You have to be quiet,” Rider whispered. “If I take off the tape you have to be very quiet.”

Muriel nodded intensely and Rider started working on the tape. Bosch huddled in close.

“I’m going up to the room.”

“Wait, Harry,” Rider ordered, her voice louder than a whisper. “We go up together. Get her ankles.”

Bosch started working on the tape binding Muriel’s feet together. Rider finally worked the tape loose from Muriel’s mouth and pulled it down over her chin. She shooshed her soothingly as she did this.

“It’s Becky’s teacher,” Muriel whispered, her voice intense but not loud. “He’s got a gun.”

Rider started working on her wrists.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to deal with it.”

“What is he doing?” Muriel asked. “Is he the one?”

“Yes, he’s the one.”

Muriel Verloren let out a long, loud and anguished sigh. Her hands and feet were now loose and they helped her up to her feet.

“We’re going up there,” Rider told her. “We need you to get out of the house.”

They started ushering her toward the entrance hallway.

“I can’t leave. He’s in her room. I can’t -”

“You have to leave, Muriel,” Bosch whispered harshly. “It’s not safe here. Go to a neighbor’s house.”

“I don’t know my neighbors.”

“Muriel, you have to get out,” Rider said. “Go down the street. More police are on the way. Wave them down and tell them we’re inside already.”

They pushed her through the open front door and then closed it behind her.

“Don’t let him ruin her room!” they heard her plead from the other side. “It’s all I have left!”

Bosch and Rider made their way to the back hallway and went up the stairway as quietly as they could. They took positions on either side of the door to Rebecca’s bedroom.

Bosch looked across at Rider. They both knew there was little time. When backup units arrived the situation would change. It was a classic suicide-by-police setup. This was the one chance they might have of getting to Stoddard before he or a SWAT cop put a bullet into his brain.

Rider pointed to the doorknob and Bosch reached out and tried to silently turn it. He shook his head. The door was locked.

They used hand signals to outline a plan, nodded when they were ready, and then Bosch stepped back into the hallway and prepared to drive his heel into the door next to the knob. He knew he had to do it with one kick. They would lose the advantage of surprise after that.

“Who’s out there?”

It was Stoddard, his voice coming through the door. Bosch looked at Rider. So much for the element of surprise. He pointed to her and gave her the silent sign. He would do the talking.

“Mr. Stoddard, it’s Detective Bosch. How are you doing?”

“Not too good.”

“Yeah, things have sort of gotten out of hand, haven’t they?”

Stoddard didn’t answer.

“Tell you what,” Bosch said. “You really need to think about putting the gun down and coming out. You’re lucky I’m here. I just came to check on Mrs. Verloren. But my partner and the SWAT team are going to be here soon. You don’t want to tangle with SWAT. Now is the time to come out.”

“I just want you to know I loved her, that’s all.”

Bosch hesitated before speaking. He glanced over at Rider and then back at the door. He could go two ways with Stoddard. He could work on getting a confession right now or he could work on talking him out of the house and saving his life. Both things were possible but maybe not likely.

“So what happened?” he asked.

There was a long silence before Stoddard spoke.

“What happened was she wanted to keep the baby and she didn’t understand how that would ruin everything. We had to get rid of it, and then afterward she changed her mind.”

“About the baby?”

“About me. About all of it.”

Bosch didn’t respond. After a few moments Stoddard spoke again.

“I loved her.”

“But you killed her.”

“I made mistakes.”

“Like that night?”

“I don’t want to talk about that night. I want to remember all the times before that night.”

“I guess I don’t blame you.”

Bosch looked at Rider and held up three fingers. They were going to go on a three count. Rider nodded. She was ready.

Bosch dropped one finger.

“You know what I don’t get, Mr. Stoddard?”

He dropped the second finger.

“What?” Stoddard asked.

Bosch dropped the third finger, then raised his right leg and drove it into the door. It was a hollow-interior door. It gave way easily and swung open with a crash. Bosch’s momentum took him into the bedroom right behind it. He raised his gun and turned toward the bed.

Stoddard wasn’t there.

Bosch continued his turn, catching a glimpse of Stoddard in the mirror. He was standing in the corner to the other side of the door. He was raising the muzzle of a long-barreled revolver to his mouth.

Bosch heard Rider shout and her body came through the door at full speed as she threw herself into Stoddard.

The crack of a gunshot shook the room as Rider and Stoddard went down to the floor. The revolver fell from Stoddard’s hand and clattered onto the floor. Bosch moved quickly to them and dropped his weight onto Stoddard as Rider rolled off him.

“Kiz, you hit?”

There was no answer. Bosch tried to look at her while keeping Stoddard under control. Rider was holding one hand to the left side of her head.

“Kiz?”

“I’m not hit!” she yelled. “I think I’m just deaf in one ear.”

Stoddard tried to get up, even with Bosch’s weight on top of him.

“Please!” he said.

Bosch used his forearm to knock one of Stoddard’s arms out from supporting him. Stoddard’s chest hit the floor and Bosch quickly pulled the arm back and cuffed it. After a minor struggle he pulled the other arm back and completed the cuffing. He then leaned down and spoke to Stoddard.

“Please what?”

“Please let me die.”

Bosch got up and pulled Stoddard to his feet.

“That would be too easy for you, Stoddard. That would be like letting you get away all over again.”

Bosch looked over at Rider, who had gotten to her feet. He could see that some of her hair had been singed by the gun’s discharge. It had been that close.

“You going to be okay?”

“As soon as the ringing stops.”

Bosch looked up and saw the bullet hole in the ceiling. He could hear sirens coming. He grabbed Stoddard by the elbow and pulled him toward the bedroom’s door.

“I’m going to go down and put this guy in a car. We’ll book him at Devonshire, hold him there until the arraignment.”

Rider nodded but Bosch could tell she was still dealing with what had just happened. The ringing in her ear was a reminder of how close it had been.

Bosch held Stoddard by the arm as he walked him down the steps. When they got to the living room, Stoddard spoke with a desperation in his voice.

“You could do it now.”

“Do what?”

“Shoot me. Say I ran. Take one of the cuffs off and say I got loose. You want to kill me, don’t you?”

Bosch stopped and looked at him.

“Yes, I’d want to kill you. But that would be too good for you. You are going to have to pay for what you did to that girl and her family. And just putting you down right here wouldn’t even cover the interest on seventeen years.”

Bosch roughly pushed him toward the door. They stepped out onto the front lawn just as a patrol car pulled to a stop and cut its siren. Bosch could tell by the streamlined light bar across the roof that it was one of the new cars he had heard about, with state-of-the-art equipment. The department could afford only a few of them in each budget cycle.

The car gave Bosch an idea. He raised his hand and circled his finger in the air, giving the all-clear sign.

As he walked Stoddard toward the car he saw Muriel Verloren walking down the middle of the street to her house. She was staring at Stoddard. Her mouth was wide open as if in a silent scream of horror. She started running toward them.

41

BOSCH RODE in the backseat of the patrol car with Stoddard on the way to Devonshire Division. Rider was left behind at the Verloren house to calm Muriel and to be checked out herself by paramedics. When they gave her the okay she would drive Bosch’s car to the station.

The trip to the division would only take ten minutes. Bosch knew he had to quickly take a shot at getting Stoddard talking. The first thing he did was read the school principal his rights. Stoddard had made some admissions while holed up in Rebecca Verloren’s bedroom, but whether they could be used in court was open to question because they had not been recorded and he had not been forewarned about his rights, which included remaining silent.

After reading the Miranda warning off a business card he had borrowed earlier from Rider, Bosch simply asked, “Now, do you want to talk to me?”

Stoddard was leaning forward because his hands were still cuffed behind his back. His chin was almost down to his chest.

“What is there to say?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t need you to talk. We’ve got you. Actions and evidence-we’ve got all we need. I just thought you might want to explain things, that’s all. At a point like this a lot of people just want to explain themselves.”

Stoddard didn’t respond at first. The car was heading east on Devonshire Boulevard. The station was a couple miles ahead. Earlier, when he had conferred with the two patrolmen outside of the car, Bosch had told the driver to take it slow.

“It’s funny,” Stoddard finally said.

“What is?”

“I’m a science teacher, you know? I mean, before I was principal I taught science. I was head of the science department.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I taught my students about DNA. I always told them that it was the secret of life. Decode DNA and you decode life itself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And now… now, well, it’s used to decode death. By you people. It’s the secret of life. It’s the secret of death. I don’t know. I guess it’s not really funny. It’s more ironic in my case.”

“If you say so.”

“A guy who taught DNA gets caught by DNA.”

Stoddard started to laugh.

“Hey, that’s a good headline,” he said. “Make sure you tell them that.”

Bosch reached over and used a key to unlock Stoddard’s cuffs. He then relocked his wrists in front of his body so that he could sit up.

“Back there at the house, you said you loved her,” Bosch said.

Stoddard nodded.

“I did. I still do.”

“Funny way of showing it, wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t planned. Nothing was planned that night. I had been watching her, that’s all. Whenever I could, I watched her. I drove by all the time. I followed her when she got to take the car. I watched her at work, too.”

“And all the time you had a gun.”

“No, the gun was for me, not her. But…”

“You found out it was easier to kill her instead of yourself.”

“That night… I saw the garage door was open. I went in. I wasn’t sure why. I thought I was going to use the gun on myself. On her bed. It would be my way of showing her my devotion.”

“But you went under the bed instead of on top of it.”

“I had to think.”

“Where was Mackey?”

“Mackey? I don’t know where he was.”

“He wasn’t with you? He didn’t help you?”

“He gave me the gun. We made a deal. The gun for the grade. I was his teacher. And his tutor. It was my summer job.”

“But he wasn’t with you that night? You carried her up the hill by yourself?”

Stoddard’s eyes were open and staring into the distance even though their focus was only on the back of the front seat.

“I was strong back then,” he said in a whisper.

The patrol car pulled through the opening in the concrete block wall that surrounded the back of Devonshire Division. Stoddard looked out the window. Seeing all of the patrol cars and the back of the station must have brought an awakening to him. He realized his situation.

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Bosch said. “We’ll put you in a holding room and get you a lawyer if you want.”

The car stopped in front of a set of double doors and Bosch got out. He came around and got Stoddard out and then walked him in through the doors. The detective bureau was on the second floor. They took an elevator and were met by the lieutenant in charge of Devonshire detectives. Bosch had called him from the Verloren house. An interview room was waiting for Stoddard. Bosch put him in a seat and cuffed one of his wrists to a metal ring bolted to the center of the table.

“Sit tight,” Bosch said. “I’ll be back.”

At the door, he looked back at Stoddard. He decided to make one last play.

“And for what it’s worth, I think your story is bullshit,” he said.

Stoddard looked at him, surprise on his face.

“What do you mean? I loved her. I didn’t want -”

“You stalked her with one purpose. To kill her. She rejected you and you couldn’t take it, so you wanted her dead. And now seventeen years later you’re going to try to tell it different, like it’s Romeo and Juliet or something. You’re a coward, Stoddard. You stalked her and killed her and you should own up to it.”

“No, you’re wrong. I had the gun for myself.”

Bosch came back into the room and leaned down on the table.

“Yeah? What about the stun gun, Stoddard? Was that for yourself, too? You left that out of your story, didn’t you? Why’d you need a stun gun if you went in there to kill yourself?”

Stoddard was silent. It was almost as if after seventeen years he had been able to erase the Professional 100 from his memory.

“We got first degree and we got lying in wait,” Bosch said. “You’re going down for the whole ride, Stoddard. You were never going to kill yourself. Back then, or even today.”

“I think I want a lawyer now,” Stoddard said.

“Yeah, of course you do.”

Bosch left the room and walked down the hallway to an open door. It was the monitoring room. The lieutenant and one of the patrol officers from the ride in were in the small space. There were two active video screens. On one Bosch saw Stoddard sitting in the interview room. The camera angle was from an upper corner of the room. Stoddard seemed to be staring blankly at the wall.

The image on the other screen was frozen. It showed Bosch and Stoddard in the backseat of the patrol car.

“How’s the sound?” Bosch asked.

“Beautiful,” the lieutenant said. “We got it all. Taking off the cuffs was a nice touch. Brought his face up into the camera.”

The lieutenant hit a switch and the picture started moving. Bosch could hear Stoddard’s voice clearly. He nodded. The patrol car had been equipped with a dashboard camera used for filming traffic stops and prisoner transports. For the ride in with Stoddard the car’s interior microphone was turned on and the exterior was cut off.

It had worked perfectly. Stoddard’s admissions in the backseat would help seal the case. Bosch felt no worries from that direction at all. He thanked the lieutenant and the patrolman and asked if he could borrow a desk to make some calls.

Bosch called Abel Pratt to update him and to assure him that Rider was shaken up but otherwise okay. He told Pratt that he needed to get SID teams to both Stoddard’s and Muriel Verloren’s homes to process crime scenes. He said a search warrant should be applied for and approved before the SID team entered Stoddard’s house. He said that Stoddard was about to be booked and his fingerprints taken. The prints would need to be compared to those found on the slat from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. He finished by telling Pratt about the video taken during the ride to the station and the admissions Stoddard had made.

“It’s all solid and it’s on tape,” Bosch said. “It all came after Miranda.”

“Good going, Harry,” Pratt said. “I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about on this.”

“Not with the case, at least.”

Meaning that Stoddard was going to go down without a problem, but Bosch wasn’t sure how he would fare in the review of his handling of the case.

“It’s tough to argue with results,” Pratt said.

“We’ll see.”

Bosch started getting a call-waiting signal on his phone. He told Pratt he had to go and clicked over to the new call. It was McKenzie Ward from the Daily News.

“My sister was listening to the scanner in the photo shop,” she said urgently. “She said a backup unit and an ambulance were sent to the Verloren house. She recognized the address.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s going on, Detective? We had a deal, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. And I was just about to call you.”

42

THE KITCHEN at the Metro Shelter was dark. Bosch went to the small lobby of the adjoining hotel and spoke to the man behind the glass window. He asked for Robert Verloren’s room number.

“He’s gone, man.”

Something about the finality in his tone put a hollow into Bosch’s chest. It didn’t sound like he meant Verloren had gone out for the night.

“What do you mean gone?”

“I mean gone. He did his thing and he’s gone. That’s it.”

Bosch took a step closer to the glass. The man had a paperback novel open on the counter and had not looked up from its yellowed pages.

“Hey, look at me.”

The man flipped the book over to not lose his page and looked up. Bosch showed him his badge. He then glanced down and saw the book was called Ask the Dust.

“Yes, Officer.”

Bosch looked back up at the man’s tired eyes.

“What do you mean, He did his thing, and what do you mean he’s gone?”

The man shrugged.

“He came in drunk and that’s the one rule we got around here. No drinking. No drunks.”

“He was fired?”

The man nodded.

“What about his room?”

“Room came with the job. Like I said, he’s gone.”

“Where?”

The man shrugged one more time. He pointed to the door that led to the sidewalk on Fifth Street. He was telling Bosch that Verloren was out there somewhere.

“It happens,” the man said.

Bosch looked back at him.

“When did he go?”

“Yesterday. It was you cops who did it to him, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard some cop came in here, told him some shit. I don’t know what it was about, but that was right before-know what I’m saying? He got off work and went out and took the taste again. And that was that. All I know is, we need a new chef now ’cause the guy they got fillin’ in can’t make eggs for shit.”

Bosch said nothing else to the man. He stepped away from the window and went to the door. Outside the shelter the street was teeming with people. The night people. The damaged and displaced. People hiding from others and hiding from themselves. People running from the past, from the things they did and the things they didn’t do.

Bosch knew the story was going to hit the news in the morning. He had wanted to tell it to Robert Verloren himself.

Bosch decided he would look for Robert Verloren out there. He didn’t know what the news he would bring would do for him. He didn’t know if it would bring Verloren out or push him further into the hole. Maybe nothing could help him now. But he needed to tell him anyway. The world was full of people who could not get over things. There was no closure and there was no peace. The truth did not set you free. But you could get through things. That’s what Bosch would tell him. You could head toward the light and climb and dig and fight your way out of the hole.

Bosch pushed open the door and headed out into the night.

43

THE POLICE ACADEMY parade field was nestled like a green blanket against one of the wooded hills of Elysian Park. It was a beautiful and shaded place and spoke well of the tradition the police chief had wanted Bosch to be reminded of.

At 8 a.m. on the morning following his fruitless night search for Robert Verloren, Bosch presented himself at the graduation check-in table and was escorted to an assigned seat on the platform beneath the VIP tent. There were four rows of chairs in formation behind the lectern from which the speeches would be made. Bosch’s seat looked out across the parade grounds where the new cadets would march, then form up and be inspected. As an invited guest of the chief he would be one of the inspectors.

Bosch was in full uniform. It was tradition to fly the colors at the graduation of new officers-to welcome them to the uniform in the uniform. And he was early. He sat by himself and listened to the police band play old standards. As other VIPs were taken to their seats, no one bothered him. They were mostly politicians and dignitaries and a few purple heart winners from Iraq who wore the uniform of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Bosch’s skin felt raw under his starched collar and tightly knotted tie. He had spent almost an hour in the shower scrubbing away the ink he’d had put to his skin, hoping that it would take all the ugliness of the case down the drain with it.

He didn’t notice the approach of Deputy Chief Irvin Irving until the cadet leading him to the tent said, “Excuse me, sir.”

Bosch looked up and saw that Irving was being seated right next to him. He straightened up and grabbed his program off the seat intended for Irving.

“Enjoy yourself, sir,” the cadet said before snapping into a turn and heading back for another VIP.

Irving didn’t say anything at first. He seemed to be spending a lot of time making himself comfortable and looking around to see who might be watching them. They were in the first row, two of the best seats in the place. Finally he spoke without turning or looking at Bosch.

“What is going on here, Bosch?”

“You tell me, Chief.”

Bosch took a turn looking around to see if anyone was watching them. It obviously wasn’t happenstance that they were sitting next to each other. Bosch did not believe in coincidences. Not like that.

“The chief said he wanted me to be here,” he said. “He invited me on Monday when he gave me back my badge.”

“Good for you.”

Another five minutes went by before Irving spoke again. The tent was almost full, except for the spot reserved for the chief of police and his wife at the end of the first row. Irving whispered now.

“You’ve had a hell of a week, Detective. You land in shit and come out stinking like a rose. Congratulations.”

Bosch nodded. It was an accurate assessment.

“What about you, Chief? Just another week at the office for you?”

Irving didn’t respond. Bosch thought about the places he had looked for Robert Verloren the night before. He thought about Muriel Verloren’s face when she had seen her daughter’s killer being led to the patrol car. Bosch had had to hurry Stoddard into the backseat to keep her away from him.

“It was all because of you,” Bosch said quietly.

Irving glanced at him for the first time.

“What are you talking about?”

“Seventeen years, that’s what I’m talking about. You had your man check the alibis on the Eights. He didn’t know that Gordon Stoddard was also the girl’s teacher. If it had been Green and Garcia running down the alibis-as it should have been-they would have come across Stoddard and easily put the whole thing together. Seventeen years ago. All of that time, that’s on you.”

Irving turned fully in his seat to face Bosch.

“We had an agreement, Detective. You break it and I will find other ways of getting to you. I hope that’s understood.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say, Chief. But you forget one thing. I’m not the only one who knows about you. What are you going to do, make your little deals with everybody? Every reporter, every cop? Every mother and father who has had to live with a hollowed-out life because of what you did?”

“Keep your voice down,” Irving said through his teeth.

Bosch responded in a quiet, calm voice.

“I’ve said all I want to say to you.”

“Well, let me tell you something, I’m not finished talking to you. If I find -”

He dropped the sentence as the chief of police was escorted by with his wife. Irving straightened himself in his seat as the music swelled and the show began. Twenty-four cadets with shining new badges on their uniformed chests marched into the parade grounds and took their positions in front of the VIP tent.

There were too many preliminary speeches. Then the inspection of the new officers took too long. But finally the program reached the main event, the traditional remarks of the chief of police. The man who had taken Bosch back into the department was relaxed and poised at the lectern. He spoke of rebuilding the police department from the inside out and starting with the twenty-four new officers standing before him. He said he was talking about rebuilding both the image and the practice of the department. He said many of the things he had said to Bosch on Monday morning. He urged the new officers never to break the law to enforce the law. To do their job constitutionally and compassionately at all times.

But then he surprised Bosch with his wrap-up.

“I would also like to draw your attention to two officers here as my guests today. One coming, one going. Detective Harry Bosch has returned to the department this week after a few years of retirement. I guess he learned during his extended vacation that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

There was polite laughter from the crowd on the other side of the parade grounds. This was where the families and friends of the cadets sat. The chief continued.

“So he came back to the LAPD family and already he has performed admirably. He has put himself in harm’s way for the good of the community. Yesterday he and his partner cleared a seventeen-year-old murder that had been sticking like a thorn into the side of this community. We welcome Detective Bosch back to the fold.”

There was a smattering of applause from the crowd. Bosch felt his face go hot. He looked down at his hands.

“I would also like to thank Deputy Chief Irvin S. Irving for being here today,” the chief continued. “Chief Irving has served in this department for nearly forty-five years. There is no current officer who has served longer. His decision to retire today and make this graduation his final action while wearing the badge is a fitting end to his tour of duty. We thank him for such service to this department and this city.”

The applause for Irving was much louder and sustained. People started to stand in honor of the man who had served the department and city so long. Bosch turned slightly to his right so that he could see Irving ’s face and he knew the moment he saw the deputy chief’s eyes that he had not seen it coming. He had been sandbagged.

Soon everyone was standing and clapping and Bosch felt compelled to do the same for a man he despised. He knew exactly who had engineered Irving ’s fall. If Irving protested or tried in some way to recover his position he would face an internal case built by Kizmin Rider. There would be no doubt who would lose that one. No doubt at all.

What Bosch didn’t know was when it had been planned. Bosch thought about Rider sitting on the desk in 503, waiting for him with coffee, black just like he liked it. Had she already known then what case the cold hit had come from and where it would lead? He remembered the date on the DOJ report. It was ten days old by the time he had read it. What happened during those ten days? What was planned for his arrival?

Bosch didn’t know and he was not sure he even cared. Department politics were played on the sixth floor. Bosch worked out of 503 and that’s where he would make his stand. No question.

After the chief finished his remarks he stepped away from the microphone. He gave each cadet, one by one, a certificate of completion of academy training and posed for a photo shaking hands with the recipient. It was all very fast and clean and choreographed perfectly. Three police helicopters flew over the parade grounds in formation and the cadets ended the ceremony by hurling their hats into the air.

Bosch remembered the time more than thirty years before when he had thrown his hat into the air. He smiled at the memory. No one from his class was left. They were dead or retired or washed out. He knew it was up to him to carry the banner and tradition. To fight the good fight.

As the ceremony ended and the crowds rushed to the field to congratulate the new officers, Bosch watched Irving stand up and start walking directly across the parade grounds to the exit area. He stopped for no one, not even those who extended hands of congratulations and thanks to him.

“Detective, you’ve had a busy week.”

Bosch turned. It was the chief of police. He nodded. He didn’t know what to say.

“Thank you for being here,” the chief said. “How is Detective Rider?”

“She took the day off. She had a close one yesterday.”

“So I heard. Will either of you be attending the press conference today?”

“Well, she’s off and I was thinking of skipping it, if that’s all right.”

“We’ll handle it. I see you already gave the story to the Daily News. Now everyone else is clamoring for it. We have to put on the dog-and-pony show.”

“I owed the reporter from the News that one.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“When the dust settles, will I still have a job, Chief?”

“Of course, Detective Bosch. As in any investigation, choices must be made. Tough choices. You made the best decisions you could make. There will be a review but I don’t think you will have a problem.”

Bosch nodded. He almost said thank you but decided against it. He just looked at the man.

“Is there something else you wanted to ask me, Detective?”

Bosch nodded again.

“I was just sort of wondering,” he said.

“About what?”

“The case started with a letter from the DOJ and that letter was old by the time it got to me. I’m wondering why it was held for me. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m wondering about what you knew and when you knew it.”

“Does any of that matter now?”

Bosch poked his chin in the direction Irving had taken.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. But he won’t just walk away. He’ll go to the media. Or to the lawyers.”

“He knows that if he does it will be a mistake. That there will be consequences for him. He’s not a stupid man.”

Bosch just nodded. The chief studied him a moment before speaking again.

“You still seem troubled, Detective. Remember what I told you Monday? I told you I carefully reviewed your case and career before deciding whether to welcome you back.”

Bosch just looked at him.

“I meant that,” the chief said. “I studied you and I think I know something about you. You are on this earth for one thing, Detective Bosch. And you now have the opportunity to do that, to continue to carry out your mission. After that, does anything else matter?”

Bosch held his eyes for a long time before answering.

“I guess what I really wanted to ask is about what you said the other day. When you said all of that about the ripples and the voices, did you mean it? Or were you just winding me up to go after Irving for you?”

Fire quickly spread across the police chief’s cheeks. His eyes dropped from Bosch’s as he composed his answer. Then he looked back up at Bosch and it was his eyes that held Bosch’s this time.

“I meant every word of it. And don’t you forget it. You go back to room five oh three and you close cases, Detective. That’s what you are here for. Close them out or I’ll find reason to close you out. Do you understand?”

Bosch didn’t feel threatened. He liked the chief’s answer. It made him feel better. He nodded.

“I understand.”

The chief raised his hand and took Bosch by the upper arm.

“Good. Then let’s go over here and get a picture taken with some of these young people who have joined our family today. Maybe they can learn something from us. Maybe we can learn something from them.”

As they moved into the crowd Bosch looked off in the direction Irving had taken. But he was long gone.

44

BOSCH LOOKED for Robert Verloren for three of the next seven nights but didn’t find him until it was too late.

One week after the academy graduation, Bosch and Rider were sitting across from each other at their desks while putting the finishing touches on the case against Gordon Stoddard. The accused murderer had been arraigned in San Fernando Municipal Court earlier in the week and had pleaded not guilty. Now the legal dance had begun. Bosch and Rider had to put together a comprehensive charging document that outlined the case against Stoddard. It would be given to the prosecutor and used in negotiations with Stoddard’s defense attorney. After meeting with Muriel Verloren as well as Bosch and Rider, the prosecutor set a case strategy. If Stoddard elected to go to trial the state would seek the death penalty under the lying-in-wait statute. The alternative was for Stoddard to avoid risking death and plead guilty to first-degree murder in a plea agreement that would send him to prison for life without the possibility of parole.

Either way, the case summary Bosch and Rider were composing would be of key importance because it would show Stoddard and his lawyer just how strong the evidence was. It would force their hand, make Stoddard choose between the grim alternatives of life in a jail cell or gambling his life on the slim possibility of beating the case with a jury.

It had been a good week until that point. Rider bounced back from her near miss from Stoddard’s bullet and showed full command of her skills in putting together the case summary. Bosch had spent all of Monday going over the investigation with an Internal Affairs investigator and was cleared the next day. The “no action taken” verdict from IAD meant he was clear within the department, even though the ongoing stories about the case in the media continued to call into question the department’s actions in using Roland Mackey as bait.

Bosch was ready to move on to the next investigation. He had already told Rider he wanted to check into the case of the lady he found tied up and drowned in her bathtub on his first day on the job. They would take it up as soon as they put the paper case on Stoddard to rest.

Abel Pratt came out of his office and stepped into their alcove. He had an ashen look on his face. He nodded toward Rider’s computer screen.

“Is that Stoddard you’re working on?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rider said. “What’s up?”

“You can spike it. He’s dead.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

“Dead?” Rider finally asked. “What do you mean, dead?”

“Dead in his cell in Van Nuys jail. Two puncture wounds to the neck.”

“He did it himself?” Bosch asked. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”

“No, somebody did it for him.”

Bosch sat up straight.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “He was on the high-power floor and on keep-away status. Nobody could’ve -”

“Somebody did this morning,” Pratt said. “And that’s the bad part.”

Pratt raised a small notebook in his hand. Notes had been scribbled on it. He read from it.

“On Monday night a man was arrested on Van Nuys Boulevard on a drunk and disorderly. He also assaulted one of the cops who hooked him up. He was routinely fingerprinted and booked into Van Nuys jail. He had no ID and gave the name Robert Light. The next day at arraignment he pleaded guilty to all charges and the judge gave him a week in Van Nuys jail. The prints had still not been run through the computer.”

Bosch felt a deep tug in his gut. He felt dread. He knew where this was going. Pratt continued, using his notes to construct the story.

“The man who called himself Robert Light was assigned to kitchen duty at the jail because he claimed and also demonstrated that he had restaurant experience. This morning he traded jobs with one of the others in the kitchen and was pushing the wagon that was carrying food trays to the custodies on high power. According to two guards who witnessed it, when Stoddard went to the slide window on his cell door to accept the food tray, Robert Light reached through the bars and grabbed him. He then stabbed him repeatedly with a shiv made from a sharpened spoon. He got two punctures into the neck before the guards subdued him. But the guards were too late. Stoddard’s carotid artery was slashed and he bled out in his cell before they could get help to him.”

Pratt stopped there but Bosch and Rider asked no questions.

“Coincidentally,” Pratt began again, “Robert Light’s fingerprints were finally entered into the database at about the same time that he was killing Stoddard. The computer kicked out a bogie-a custody who gave a false name. The real name, as I am sure you have already guessed, was Robert Verloren.”

Bosch looked across at Rider but couldn’t hold her eyes for long. He looked down at his desk. He felt as though he had been punched. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with his hands. He felt that it was in some way his fault. Robert Verloren had been his responsibility in the investigation. He should have found him.

“How’s that for closure?” Pratt said.

Bosch dropped his hands and stood up. He looked at Pratt.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Verloren? They still have him there. Van Nuys homicide is handling it.”

“I’m going up there.”

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

“I don’t know. Whatever I can.”

He walked out of the alcove, leaving Rider and Pratt behind. Out in the hallway he punched the elevator button and waited. The heaviness in his chest wasn’t going away. He knew it was the feeling of guilt, the feeling that he had not been ready for this case and that his mistakes had been so costly.

“It’s not your fault, Harry. He did what he had waited seventeen years to do.”

Bosch turned. Rider had come up behind him.

“I should have found him first.”

“He didn’t want to be found. He had a plan.”

The elevator door opened. It was empty.

“Whatever you’re doing,” Rider said, “I’m going with you.”

He nodded. Being with her would make it easier. He motioned her into the elevator and then followed. On the way down he felt a resolve rise inside him. A resolve to carry on the mission. A resolve never to forget Robert and Muriel and Rebecca Verloren along the way. And a promise always to speak for the dead.