Michael Connelly - The Closers

Bosch shook his head.

“That’s okay. This will be fine for now. We’ll come back by the office before we leave. We need to get that information from Mrs. Atkins anyway.”

“Okay, then I will leave you to it.”

“Oh, can you tell us where Mrs. Sable’s classroom is?”

Stoddard gave them the room number and told them how to get there from the library. He then excused himself, saying he was returning to the office. Before leaving he whispered a few words to a table of boys near the door. The boys then reached down to the backpacks they had dropped on the floor and pulled them underneath the table so as to not impede foot traffic. Something about the way they had haphazardly dropped their packs reminded Bosch of the way the boys of Vietnam had done it-where they stood, not caring about anything but getting the weight off their shoulders.

After Stoddard had left, the boys made faces at the door he had passed through.

Rider took the 1988 yearbook ahead of Bosch and he took the 1986 edition. He wasn’t expecting to find anything of value now that Mrs. Atkins had knocked down his theory that Roland Mackey had attended the school at one point but had dropped out before the murder. He was already resigned to the idea that the connection between Mackey and Becky Verloren-if it even existed-would be found somewhere else.

He did the math in his head and flipped through the book until he found the eighth grade photos. He quickly found Becky Verloren’s picture. She wore pigtails and braces. She was smiling but looked like she was just beginning that period of prepubescent awkwardness. He doubted she had been happy with her appearance in the book. He checked the group photos showing the class’s different clubs and organizations and was able to track her extracurricular activities. She played soccer and was seen in the photos for the science and art clubs and the homeroom representatives in student government. In all the photos she was always in the back row or off to the side. Bosch wondered if that was where she had been placed by a photographer or where she had felt comfortable.

Rider was taking her time with the 1988 edition. She was going through every page, at one point holding the book up to Bosch when she was going through the faculty section. She pointed to a photo of a young Gordon Stoddard, who had much longer hair back then and didn’t wear glasses. He was leaner and looked stronger as well.

“Look at him,” she said. “Nobody should grow old.”

“And everybody should get the chance.”

Bosch moved on to the 1987 yearbook and found that the photos of Becky Verloren showed a young girl who appeared to be blossoming. Her smile was fuller, more confident. If the braces were still there they were no longer noticeable. In the group photos she had moved to front and center. In the student government photos she was not a class officer yet, but she had her arms folded in a take-charge pose. Her posture and her unflinching stare at the camera told Bosch she was going places. Only somebody had stopped her.

Bosch flipped through a few more pages and then closed the book. He was waiting for the bell to ring so they could go interview Bailey Koster Sable.

“Nothing?” Rider asked.

“Of any value,” he said. “It’s good to look at her back then, though. In place. In her element.”

“Yes. Look at this.”

They were sitting across from each other. She turned the 1988 book around on the table so he could see it. She had finally gotten to the sophomore class photos. The top half of the page on the right showed a boy and four girls posing on a wall Bosch recognized as the entrance to the student parking lot. One of the girls was Becky Verloren. The caption above the photo said STUDENT LEADERS. Below the photo the students were identified and their positions listed. Becky Verloren was listed as student council representative. Bailey Koster was class president.

Rider tried to spin the book back toward herself but Bosch held it for a moment, studying the photograph. He could tell by her pose and her style that Becky Verloren had left her teen awkwardness behind. He would not describe the student in the photograph as a girl. She was on her way to becoming an attractive and confident young woman. He let the book go and Rider took it back.

“She was going to be a heartbreaker,” he said.

“Maybe she already was. Maybe she picked the wrong one to break.”

“Anything else in there?”

“Take a look.”

She flipped the open book around again. The two pages were spread with photos from the Art Club’s trip to France the summer before. There were photos of about twenty students, boys and girls, and several parents or teachers in front of Notre Dame, in the courtyard of the Louvre and on a tourist boat on the Seine. Rider pointed out Rebecca Verloren in one of the photos.

“She went to France,” Bosch said. “What about it?”

“She could have met someone over there. Could be an international link to this thing. We might have to go over there and check it out.”

She was trying to hold back a smile.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “You put the req in on that. Send it on up to six.”

“Boy, Harry, I guess your sense of humor stayed retired.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

The school bell rang, ending the discussion as well as classes for the day. Bosch and Rider got up, leaving the yearbooks on the table, and left the library. They followed Stoddard’s directions to Bailey Sable’s classroom, along the way dodging students hurrying to leave the school. The girls wore plaid skirts and white blouses, the boys khakis and white polo shirts.

They looked into the open door of room B-6 and saw a woman sitting at a desk at the front center of the classroom. She did not look up from the papers she was apparently grading. Bailey Sable bore almost no resemblance to the sophomore class president whose photo Bosch and Rider had just studied in the yearbook. The hair was darker and shorter now, the body wider and heavier. Like Stoddard, she wore glasses. Bosch knew she was only thirty-two or thirty-three but she looked older.

There was one last student in the room. She was a pretty blonde girl who was shoving books into a backpack. When she was finished she zipped the pack closed and headed to the door.

“See you tomorrow, Mrs. Sable.”

“Good-bye, Kaitlyn.”

The student gave Bosch and Rider a curious look as she went by them. The detectives stepped into the classroom and Bosch pulled the door closed. That made Bailey Sable look up from her papers.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Bosch took the lead.

“You might be able to,” he said. “Mr. Stoddard said it would be all right if we came to your classroom.”

He approached the desk. The teacher looked up at him warily.

“Are you parents?”

“No, we’re detectives, Mrs. Sable. My name is Harry Bosch and this is Kizmin Rider. We wanted to ask you a few questions about Becky Verloren.”

She reacted as if she had just been punched in the gut. All these years and it was still that close to the surface.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she said.

“We’re sorry to hit you with this out of the blue,” Bosch said.

“Is something happening? Did you find who…?”

She didn’t finish.

“Well, we’re working on it again,” Bosch said. “And you might be able to help us.”

“How?”

Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the mug shot taken from Roland Mackey’s DOC probation file. It was a portrait of Mackey as an eighteen-year-old car thief. Bosch put it down on top of the paper she had been grading. She looked down at it.

“Do you recognize the person in that photo?” Bosch asked.

“It was taken seventeen years ago,” Rider added. “About the time of Becky’s death.”