Michael Connelly - The Closers

The teacher looked down at Mackey’s defiant glare into the police camera. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Bosch looked at Rider and nodded, a signal that maybe she should take over.

“Does it look like anyone you or Becky or any of your friends may have encountered back then?” Rider asked.

“Did he go to school here?” Sable asked.

“No, we don’t think so. But we know he lived in this area.”

“Is he the killer?”

“We don’t know. We’re just trying to see if there is a connection between Becky and him.”

“What is his name?”

Rider looked at Bosch and he nodded again.

“His name is Roland Mackey. Does he look familiar?”

“Not really. It is hard for me to remember back then. Remember the faces of strangers, I mean.”

“So he definitely is not someone you knew, right?”

“Definitely.”

“Do you think Becky could have known him without you being aware of it?”

She thought for a long moment before answering.

“Well, it’s possible. You know, it came out that she’d gotten pregnant. I didn’t know about that, so I guess I might not have known about him. Was he the father?”

“We don’t know.”

Unbidden, she had jumped the interview forward to Bosch’s next line of questioning.

“Mrs. Sable, you know, it’s been a lot of years since then,” he said. “If you were sort of sticking up for a friend back then, we understand that. But if there is more you know, you can tell us now. This is probably the last shot that anybody is going to take at solving this thing.”

“You mean about her being pregnant? I really didn’t know about it. I’m sorry. I was just as shocked as everybody else when the police started asking about that.”

“If Becky were going to confide in someone about that, would it have been you?”

Again, she didn’t answer right away. She gave it some thought.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We were very close but she was that way with a few other girls, too. There were four of us who had been together since first grade here. In first grade we called ourselves the Kitty Cat Club because we all had pet cats. At different times and different years one of us would be closer to one of the others. It changed all the time. But as a group we always stuck together.”

Bosch nodded.

“That summer when Becky was taken, who would you say was closest to her?”

“It was probably Tara. She took it the hardest.”

Bosch looked at Rider, trying to remember the names of the girls Becky had been with two nights before her death.

“Tara Wood?” Rider asked.

“Yes, that’s Tara. They hung out together a lot that summer because Becky’s dad owned a restaurant in Malibu and they were both working there. They were splitting a schedule there. It seemed that summer that all they did was talk about it.”

“What would they say about it?” Rider asked.

“Oh, you know, like what stars came in there. People like Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen. And sometimes they talked about what guys worked there and who was cute. Nothing too interesting to me since I didn’t work there.”

“Was there any one guy in particular they talked about?”

She thought a moment before answering.

“Not really. Not that I remember. They just liked to talk about them because they were so different. They were surfers and would-be actors. Tara and Becky were Valley girls. It was like a culture clash for them.”

“Was she dating anybody from the restaurant?” Bosch asked.

“Not that I knew of. But it’s like I said, I didn’t know about the pregnancy, so there was obviously somebody in her life I didn’t know about. She kept it a secret.”

“Were you jealous of them because they worked there?” Rider asked.

“Not at all. I didn’t have to work and I was pretty happy about that.”

Rider was going somewhere so Bosch let her continue.

“What did you guys do for fun when you got together?” she asked.

“I don’t know, the usual,” Sable said. “We went shopping and to movies, stuff like that.”

“Who had cars?”

“ Tara did and so did I. Tara had a convertible. We used to go up…”

She cut it off when she came to a memory.

“What?” Rider asked.

“I just remember driving up into Limekiln Canyon a lot after school. Tara had a cooler in the trunk and her dad never noticed if she’d taken some of his beers out of the refrigerator. One time we got pulled over up there by a police car. We hid the beers under our uniform skirts. They worked perfect for that. The policeman didn’t notice.”

She smiled at the memory.

“Of course, now that I teach here I’m on the watch for that sort of thing. We still have the same uniforms.”

“What about before she started working at the restaurant?” Bosch said, drawing the interview back to Rebecca Verloren. “She was sick for a week, right after school let out. Did you visit her or talk to her then?”

“I’m sure I did. That is when they said she probably, you know, ended the pregnancy. So she wasn’t really sick. She was just recovering. But I didn’t know. I must have just thought she was sick, that’s all. I can’t really remember if we talked that week or not.”

“Did the detectives back then ask you all of these questions?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure they did.”

“Where would a girl from Hillside Prep go if she got pregnant?” Rider asked. “Back then, I mean.”

“You mean like a clinic or a doctor?”

“Yes.”

Bailey Sable’s neck flushed. She was embarrassed by the question. She shook her head.

“I don’t know. That was as shocking really as Becky being, you know, killed. It made us all think we didn’t really know our friend. It was really sad because I realized she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me these things. You know, I still think about that when I remember things back then.”

“Did she have any boyfriends that you did know about?” Bosch asked.

“Not then. I mean, at the time. She had a boyfriend freshman year but he had moved away to Hawaii with his family. That was like the summer before. Then the whole school year I thought she was alone. You know, she didn’t go to any of the dances or the games with anybody. But I was wrong, I guess.”

“Because of the pregnancy,” Rider said.

“Well, yeah. That’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?”

“Who was the father?” Bosch asked, hoping the direct question might elicit a response with something to pursue.

But Sable shrugged.

“I have no idea, and don’t think I’ve ever stopped wondering.”

Bosch nodded. He had gotten nothing.

“The breakup with the boy who moved to Hawaii -how was that with her?” he asked.

“Well, I thought it broke her heart. She took it really hard. It was like Romeo and Juliet.”

“How so?”

“They were broken up by the parents.”

“You mean they didn’t want them going together?”

“No, his dad took a job or something in Hawaii. They had to move and it broke them up.”

Bosch nodded again. He didn’t know if any of the information they were getting was useful but he knew it was important to cast as wide a net as possible.

“Do you know where Tara Wood is these days?” he asked.

Sable shook her head.

“We had a ten-year reunion and she didn’t come. I lost touch with her. I still talk to Grace Tanaka from time to time. But she lives up in the Bay Area so I don’t see her too much.”

“Can you give us her number?”

“Sure, I have it here.”

She reached down and opened a desk drawer and pulled out her purse. While she was getting out an address book Bosch took the photo of Mackey off the desk and put it back into his pocket. When Sable read off a phone number Rider wrote it down in a small notebook.