Michael Connelly - The Closers

“You think it was related to the pregnancy?” Rider asked.

Garcia nodded.

“We thought that was tied in but we could never nail it down.”

“MTL-you never figured that one out.”

Garcia looked at her, confusion on his face.

“Empty L?”

“No, M-T-L. The initials Rebecca used in her journal. You mentioned it in the formal interview with the parents. ‘My true love,’ remember?”

“Oh, yeah, the initials. It was like a code. We never knew for sure. We never found out who that was. Are you looking for the journal?”

Bosch nodded and Rider spoke.

“We’re looking for everything. The journal, the gun, the whole evidence carton is lost somewhere in the ESB.”

Garcia shook his head like a man who had spent a career dealing with the department’s frustrations.

“That is not surprising. Par for the course, right?”

“Right.”

“Tell you one thing, though. If they find the carton there won’t be any journal in it.”

“Why?”

“Because I gave it back.”

“To the parents?”

“To the mother. Like I said, I made lieutenant and was shipping out, going to South Bureau. Ron Green had already retired. I was passing the case off and I knew that was going to be the end of it. Nobody was going to pay attention to it like we did. So I told Muriel I was leaving and I gave her the journal…

“That poor woman. It was like time stood still for her on that day in July. She became frozen. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. I remember I went to see her before I left. This was a year or so after the murder. She had me look at Becky’s bedroom. It was untouched. It was exactly the way it was on the night she was taken.”

Rider nodded somberly. Garcia said nothing else. Bosch finally cleared his throat, leaned forward and spoke, hitting Garcia with the same question again.

“When we first came in and said we got a DNA match, you guessed it was somebody from the restaurant. Why?”

Bosch looked at Rider to see if she was annoyed that he was entering the questioning. She didn’t appear to be.

“I don’t know why,” Garcia said. “Like I said, I always sort of thought that it might have come from that side of things, because I never felt we nailed everything down over there.”

“You’re talking about the father?”

Garcia nodded.

“The father was hinky. I don’t know if you even say that anymore. But back then the word was hinky.”

“How so?” Rider asked. “How was the father hinky?”

Before Garcia could answer the question one of the uniformed adjutants came into the office.

“Commander? They’re all in the conference room and ready to start.”

“Okay, Sergeant. I’ll be there shortly.”

After the sergeant left, Garcia looked back at Rider as if he had forgotten the question.

“There is nothing in the murder book that casts any suspicion on the father,” Rider said. “Why did you think he was hinky?”

“Oh, I don’t really know. Sort of a gut feeling. He never really acted like you would think a father would act, you know? He was too quiet. He never got mad, never yelled-I mean, somebody took his little girl. He never once took Ron or me aside and said, ‘I want first shot at the guy when you find him.’ I expected that.”

As far as Bosch was concerned, everybody was still a suspect, even with the cold hit tying Mackey to the murder weapon. This certainly included Robert Verloren. But he immediately dismissed Garcia’s gut instinct based on the father’s emotional responses to his daughter’s murder. He knew from working hundreds of murders that there was absolutely no way to judge such responses or to build suspicion on them. Bosch had seen every permutation of it and it all meant nothing. One of the biggest criers and screamers he had ever encountered on a case ended up being the killer.

In dismissing Garcia’s instinct and suspicion Bosch was also dismissing Garcia. He and Green had made early mistakes but recovered to conduct a by-the-numbers investigation of the murder. The murder book bore this out. But Bosch now guessed that whatever was done well was probably done by Green. He knew he should have suspected as much when he heard that Garcia had given up homicide for management.

“How long did you work homicide?” Bosch asked.

“Three years.”

“All in Devonshire Division?”

“That’s right.”

Bosch quickly did the math. Devonshire would have had a light caseload. He figured that Garcia had worked no more than a couple dozen murders at the most. It wasn’t enough experience to do it well. He decided to move on.

“What about your former partner?” he asked. “Did he feel the same way about Robert Verloren?”

“He was willing to give the guy a little more slack than me.”

“Are you still in touch with him?”

“Who, the father?”

“No. Green.”

“No, he retired way back.”

“I know, but are you still in touch?”

Garcia shook his head.

“No, he’s dead. He retired up to Humboldt County. He should’ve left his gun down here. All that time and nothing to do up there.”

“He killed himself?”

Garcia nodded.

Bosch looked down at the floor. It wasn’t Ron Green’s death that struck him. He didn’t know Green. It was the loss of the connection to the case. He knew Garcia wasn’t going to be much help.

“What about race?” Bosch asked, again stepping on Rider’s lead.

“What about it?” Garcia asked. “In this case? I don’t see it.”

“Interracial couple, biracial kid, the gun came from a burglary where the victim was being harassed on religious lines.”

“That’s a stretch. You got something with this Mackey character?”

“There might be something.”

“Well, we didn’t have the luxury of a named suspect to work with. We didn’t see any aspect of that with what we had back then.”

Garcia said it forcefully and Bosch knew he had touched a nerve. He didn’t like to be second-guessed. No detective did. Even an inexperienced one.

“I know it’s Monday-morning quarterbacking to start with the guy and go backwards,” Rider quickly said. “It’s just something we’re looking at.”

Garcia seemed placated.

“I understand,” he said. “Leave no stone unturned.”

He stood up.

“Well, Detectives, I hate to rush this. I wish we could kick this around all day. I used to put people in jail. Now I go into meetings about budget and deployment.”

That’s what you deserve, Bosch thought. He glanced at Rider, wondering if she understood that he had saved her from a similar fate when he talked her into partnering with him in the Open-Unsolved Unit.

“Do me a favor,” Garcia said. “When you hook up this guy Mackey, let me know. Maybe I’ll come down and look through the window at him. I’ve been waiting for this one.”

“No problem, sir,” Rider said, breaking her stare away from Bosch. “We’ll do that. If you think of anything else that might help us with this, give me a call. All my numbers are on this.”

She stood up, placing a business card down on the table.

“I’ll do it.”

Garcia started to go around his desk to head to his meeting.

“There’s something we might need you to do,” Bosch said.

Garcia stopped in his tracks and looked at him.

“What is it, Detective? I need to get in that meeting.”

“We might try to flush the birds out of the bushes with a newspaper story. It might be good if it came from you. You know, former homicide guy, now a commander, haunted by the old case. He calls Open-Unsolved and gets them to run the DNA through the pipeline. What do you know, they get a cold hit.”

Garcia nodded. Bosch could tell it played to his ego perfectly.