Michael Connelly - The Closers

“I sell things,” she said matter-of-factly. “Online.”

They waited for further explanation and didn’t get any.

“Really?” Rider asked. “What things do you sell?”

“Whatever I can find. I go to yard sales. I find things. Books, toys, clothes. People will buy anything. And they’ll pay anything. This morning I sold two napkin rings for fifty dollars. They were very old.”

“We want to ask your husband about the photo,” Bosch said then. “Do you know where we could find him?”

She shook her head.

“Somewhere down there in toyland. I haven’t heard from him in a long, long time.”

A somber moment of silence passed by. Most of the homeless missions in downtown Los Angeles were clustered at the edge of the Toy District, several blocks of toy manufacturers and wholesalers, even a few retailers. It wasn’t unusual to find homeless people sleeping in the doorways of toy stores.

What Muriel Verloren was telling them was that her husband was lost in the world of floating human debris. He had descended from restaurateur to the stars to a homeless existence on the streets. But there was a contradiction there. He still had a home here. He just couldn’t stay because of what had happened. Yet his wife would never leave.

“When were you divorced?” Rider asked.

“We never did get a divorce. I guess I always thought Robert would wake up and realize that no matter how far you run you can’t get away from what happened to us. I thought he would realize that and come home. It hasn’t happened yet.”

“Do you think you knew all of your daughter’s friends?” Bosch asked.

Muriel thought about this one for a long moment.

“Until the morning she disappeared I did. But then we learned things. She kept secrets. I think that is one of the things that bothers me most. Not that she kept secrets from us, but that she thought she had to. I think that maybe if she had come to us things would have been different.”

“You mean the pregnancy?”

Muriel nodded.

“What makes you think that played into what happened to her?”

“Just a mother’s instinct. I have no proof. I just think it started with that.”

Bosch nodded. But he couldn’t blame the daughter for her secrets. By the time he had been her age Bosch had been on his own, without real parents. He had no idea what that relationship would have been like.

“We spoke to Commander Garcia,” Rider said. “He told us that several years ago he returned your daughter’s journal to you. Do you still have that?”

Muriel looked alarmed.

“I read part of it every night. You’re not going to take that away from me are you? It’s my bible!”

“We need to borrow it and make a copy of it. Commander Garcia should have made a copy back then but he didn’t.”

“I don’t want to lose it.”

“You won’t, Mrs. Verloren. I promise. We’ll copy it and get it right back to you.”

“Do you want it now? It’s by my bed.”

“Yes, if you could get it.”

Muriel Verloren left them and disappeared down a hallway that led toward the left side of the house. Bosch looked at Rider and raised his eyebrows in a what-do-you-think sort of way. Rider shrugged, meaning that they would talk about it later.

“Once my daughter wanted to get another cat,” Bosch whispered. “My ex said no, one was enough. Now I know why.”

Rider was smiling inappropriately when Muriel came back in, carrying a small book with a flowery cover and the words My Journal embossed in gold on it. The gold was flaking off. The book had been handled a lot. She gave it to Rider, who went out of her way to handle it reverently.

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Verloren, we’d like to look around,” Bosch said. “To sort of connect what we’ve seen and read in the book with the actual layout of the house.”

“What book?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That’s copspeak. All the investigative records from the case are kept in a large binder. We call it a book.”

“A murder book?”

“Yes, that’s right. Is it all right if we look around? I would like to look at the back door and look around out back, too.”

She signaled with a raised arm which way they should go. Bosch and Rider got up.

“It’s changed,” Muriel said. “It used to be there were no houses up there. You’d go out our door and walk straight up the mountain. But they terraced it. Now there are houses. Millions of dollars. They built a mansion on the spot where my baby was found. I hate it.”

There was nothing to say to that. Bosch just nodded and followed her down a short hallway and into the kitchen. There was a door with a glass window in it. It led to the backyard. Muriel unlocked the door and they all stepped out. The yard was on a steep incline that led to a grove of eucalyptus trees. Through the trees Bosch could see the Spanish-tiled roofline of a large house.

“It used to be all open up there,” Muriel said. “Just trees. Now there are houses. It’s got a gate. They don’t let me walk up there like I used to. They think I’m a bag lady or something because I liked to go up there sometimes and have a picnic at Becky’s spot.”

Bosch nodded and thought for a moment about a mother having a picnic at the spot where her daughter was murdered. He tried to drop the idea and instead study the terrain of the hillside. The autopsy had said Becky Verloren weighed ninety-six pounds. Even as light as that, it would have been a struggle taking her up that incline. He wondered about the possibility that there had been more than one killer. He thought of Bailey Sable saying they .

He looked at Muriel Verloren, who was standing still and silent, her eyes closed. She had canted her head so that the late afternoon sun warmed her face. Bosch wondered if this was some form of communion with her lost daughter. As if sensing that they were looking at her, she spoke, keeping her eyes closed.

“I love this place. I’ll never leave.”

“Can we look at your daughter’s bedroom?” Bosch asked.

She opened her eyes.

“Just wipe your feet when we go back inside.”

She led them back through the kitchen and into the hallway. The stairway up began next to the door that led to the garage. The door was open and Bosch caught a glimpse of a battered minivan surrounded by stacks of boxes and things Muriel Verloren had apparently collected on her rounds. He also noted how close the door to the garage was to the stairs. He didn’t know whether this meant anything. But he recalled the summary report in the murder book that suggested the killer had hidden somewhere in the house and waited for the family to go to sleep. The garage was the likely place.

The stairway was narrow because there were boxes of yard sale purchases lining one side all the way up. Rider went first. Muriel signaled for Bosch to go next and when he passed by her she whispered to him.

“Do you have children?”

He nodded, knowing his answer would hurt.

“A daughter.”

She nodded back.

“Never let her out of your sight.”

Bosch didn’t tell her that she lived with her mother far out of his sight. He just nodded and started up the stairs.

On the second floor there was a landing and two bedrooms with a bathroom in between them. Becky Verloren’s bedroom was to the rear, with windows that looked up the hillside.

The door was closed and Muriel opened it. When they stepped inside they stepped into a time warp. The room was unchanged from the seventeen-year-old photos Bosch had studied in the murder book. The rest of the house was crowded with junk and the detritus from a disintegrated life, but the room where Becky Verloren had slept and talked on the phone and written in her secret journal was unchanged. It had now been preserved longer than the girl had actually lived.