Michael Connelly - The Closers

“So you found the file?” Rider said.

“Right here,” Kibble said. “You two can have at it. But if you want to ask me about the boy then do it now. My afternoon slate starts in five minutes. If I start late then I have a domino effect running through the whole damn day and I get outta here late. Can’t do that tonight. I gotta date.”

She was beaming at the prospect of her date.

“Okay, well, what do you remember about Mackey? Did you look at the file?”

“Yeah, I looked when I was coming back with it. Mackey was just a pissant weenie wagger. Small-time drug user who got racial religion somewhere along the way. He was no big thing. I rather enjoyed having him under my thumb. But that was about it.”

Rider had opened the file and Bosch was leaning toward her to look into it.

“The lewd and lash was an exposure case?” he asked.

“Actually, I think you’ll find in there that our boy got himself high on speed and alcohol-a lot of alcohol-and he decided to relieve himself in somebody’s front yard. A thirteen-year-old girl happened to live there and she happened to be out front shooting baskets. Mr. Mackey decided upon seeing the girl that since he already had his little pud out and about in the wind that he might as well go ahead and ask the girl if she wanted to partake of it. Did I mention that the girl’s father was LAPD Metro Division and happened to be off-duty and home at the time of this incident? He stepped outside and put Mr. Mackey on the ground. In fact, Mr. Mackey later complained that coincidentally or maybe not so coincidentally he had been put on the ground right on top of the puddle he had just made. He was rather unhappy about that.”

Kibble smiled at the story. Bosch nodded. Her version was more colorful than the case summary in the file.

“And he just pleaded out.”

“That’s right. He got a probation deal and took it. He came to me.”

“Any problems during his twelve months?”

“Nothing other than his problem with me. He asked for another agent and it got turned down and he got stuck with me. He kept it in check but it was there. Underneath, you know? Couldn’t ever tell which bugged his ass more, me being black or me being a woman.”

She looked at Rider as she said this last part and Rider nodded.

The file contained details of Mackey’s past crimes and life. It had photos taken during earlier arrests. It would become the baseline resource on their target. There was too much in it to go through in front of Kibble.

“Can we get this copied?” Bosch asked. “We’d also like to borrow one of these early photos if we could.”

Kibble’s eyes narrowed for a moment.

“You two working an old case, huh?”

Rider nodded.

“From way back,” she said.

“Like a cold case, huh?”

“We call it open-unsolved,” Rider said.

Kibble nodded thoughtfully.

“Well, nothing surprises me in this place-I’ve seen people shoplift a frozen pizza and get popped two days before the end of a four-year tail. But from what I remember of this guy Mackey, he didn’t seem to me to have the killer instinct. Not if you ask me. He’s a follower, not a doer.”

“That’s a good read,” Bosch said. “We’re not sure he is the one. We just know he was involved.”

He stood up, ready to go.

“What about the photo?” he asked. “A photocopy won’t be clear enough to show.”

“You can borrow that one as long as I get it back. I need to keep the file complete. People like Mackey have a tendency to come back to me, know what I mean?”

“Yes, and we’ll get it back to you. Also, can I get a copy of your story there? I want to read it.”

Kibble looked at the newspaper clip tacked to the cubicle’s wall.

“Just don’t look at the picture. That’s the old me.”

After clearing the DOC office Rider and Bosch crossed the street to the Van Nuys Civic Center and walked between the two courthouses to get to the plaza in the middle. They sat down on a bench by the library. Their next appointment was with Arturo Garcia in the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division, which also was one of the buildings in the government center, but they were early and wanted to study the DOC file first.

The file contained detailed accounts of all the crimes Roland Mackey had been arrested for since his eighteenth birthday. It also contained biographical summaries used by probation and parole agents over the years in determining aspects of his supervision. Rider handed Bosch the arrest reports while she started going through the biographical details. She then immediately proceeded to interrupt his reading of a burglary case by calling out details of Mackey’s bio that she thought might be pertinent to the Verloren case.

“He got a general education degree at Chatsworth High the summer of ’eighty-eight,” she said. “So that puts him right in Chatsworth.”

“If he got a GED, then he dropped out first. Does it say from where?”

“Nothing here. Says he grew up in Chatsworth. Dysfunctional family. Poor student. He lived with his father, a welder at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. Doesn’t sound like Hillside Prep material.”

“We still need to check. Parents always want their kid to do better. If he went there and knew her and then dropped out, it would explain why he was never interviewed back in ’eighty-eight.”

Rider just nodded. She was reading on.

“This guy never left the Valley,” she said. “Every address is in the Valley.”

“What’s the last known?”

“ Panorama City. Same as the AutoTrack hit. But if it’s in here, then it’s probably old.”

Bosch nodded. Anybody who had been through the system as many times as Mackey would know to move house the day after clearing a probation tail. Don’t leave an address with the man. Bosch and Rider would go to the Panorama City address to check it out but Bosch knew that Mackey would be gone. Wherever he had moved, he had not used his name on public utility applications and he had not updated his driver’s license or vehicle registration. He was flying below radar.

“Says he was in the Wayside Whities,” Rider said as she reviewed a report.

“No surprise.”

The Wayside Whities was the name of a jail gang that had existed for years in the Wayside Honor Rancho in the northern county. Gangs usually formed along racial lines in the county jails as a means of protection rather than out of racial enmity. It was not unusual to find members of the Nazi-leaning Wayside Whities to secretly be Jewish. Protection was protection. It was a way of belonging to a group and staving off assault from other groups. It was a measure of jail survival. Mackey’s membership was only a tenuous connection to Bosch’s theory that race possibly played a part in the Verloren case.

“Anything else on that?” he asked.

“Not that I see.”

“What about physical description? Any tattoos?”

Rider rifled through the paperwork and pulled out a jail intake form.

“Yeah, tattoos,” she said, reading. “He’s got his name on one bicep and I guess a girl’s name on the other. RaHoWa.”

She spelled the name and Bosch started to get the first tingling sense that his theory was coming strongly into play.

“It’s not a name,” he said. “It’s code. Means ‘racial holy war.’ First two letters of each word. The guy’s one of the believers. I think Garcia and Green missed this and it was right there.”

He could feel the adrenaline picking up.

“Look at this,” Rider said urgently. “He also has the number eighty-eight tattooed on his back. The guy’s got a reminder of what he did in ’eighty-eight.”

“Sort of,” Bosch replied. “It’s more code. I worked one of these white power cases once and I remember all the codes. To these guys eighty-eight stands for double H because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Eighty-eight equals H-H equals Heil Hitler. They also use one ninety-eight for Sieg Heil. They’re pretty clever, aren’t they?”