Michael Connelly - The Closers

“Good. Give me the address. That should be easy enough to check. But I’m not sure I want you following the suspect alone. That’s not smart, Harry.”

“We had to find his address.”

He wasn’t going to tell her about the near miss. He gave her the address and waited a moment while she wrote it down.

“I’ve got some other stuff, too,” he said. “I made some calls.”

“You’ve been busy for just a day back on the job. What’ve you got?”

He recounted the phone calls he made and received after she had left the office. Rider asked no questions and then was silent after he finished.

“That brings you up to date,” Bosch said. “What do you think, Kiz?”

“I think there might be a picture coming together, Harry.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Plus, the year, nineteen eighty-eight. I think you were onto something about that. Maybe these assholes were trying to prove a point in ’eighty-eight. The problem is, it all went under the door at PDU. Who knows where all of that stuff ended up. Irving probably dumped it in the evidence incinerator at the ESB.”

“Not all of it. When the new chief came in he wanted a full assessment of everything. He wanted to know where the bodies were buried. Anyway, I wasn’t involved in that but I knew about it and I heard that a lot of the PDU files were kept after the unit was disbanded. A lot of it Irving put in Special Archives.”

“Special Archives? What the hell is that?”

“It just means limited access. You need command approval. It’s all in the basement at Parker Center. It’s mostly in-house investigations. Political stuff. Dangerous stuff. This Chatsworth business doesn’t really seem to qualify, unless it was connected to something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like somebody in the department or somebody in the city.”

The latter meant someone powerful in city politics.

“Can you get in there and see if any files on this still exist? What about your pal on six? Maybe he’d -”

“I can try.”

“Then try.”

“First thing. What about you? I thought you were going out to find Robert Verloren tonight, and now I hear you were following our suspect.”

“I went down there. I didn’t find him.”

He proceeded to update her on his earlier swing through the Toy District, leaving out his encounter with the would-be robbers. That incident and the phone fiasco behind Mackey’s house were not things he cared to share with her.

“I’ll go back out there tomorrow morning,” he said in conclusion.

“Okay, Harry. Sounds like a plan. I should have the warrant together by the time you get in. And I’ll check on the PDU files.”

Bosch hesitated but then decided not to hold back any warnings or concerns with his partner. He looked out the windshield at the dark street. He could hear the hiss from the nearby freeway.

“Kiz, be careful.”

“How do you mean, Harry?”

“You know what it means when a case has high jingo?”

“Yeah, it means it’s got command staff’s fingers in the pie.”

“That’s right.”

“And so?”

“So be careful. This thing has Irving all over it. It’s not that obvious but it’s there.”

“You think his little visit with you at the coffee counter wasn’t coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Not like that.”

There was silence for a bit before Rider answered.

“Okay, Harry, I’ll watch myself. No holding back, though, right? We take it where it goes and let the chips fall. Everybody counts or nobody counts, remember?”

“Right. I remember. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Harry.”

She hung up and Bosch sat in the car for a long time before turning the key.

BOSCH STARTED THE ENGINE, pulled a slow U-turn on Mariano and drove by the driveway that led to Mackey’s house. It appeared to be all quiet down there. He saw no lights behind the windows.

He cut over to the freeway and took it east across the Valley and then down into the Cahuenga Pass. On the way he used his cell phone to call central dispatch and run the plate off the Ford pickup that Mackey had parked next to. It came back registered to a William Burkhart, who was thirty-seven years old and had a criminal record dating back to the late 1980s but nothing else in fifteen years. The dispatcher gave Bosch the California penal code numbers for his arrests because that’s how they were listed on the computer.

Bosch immediately recognized aggravated assault and receiving stolen property charges. But there was one charge in 1988 with a code that he didn’t recognize.

“Anybody there with a code book who can tell me what that is?” he asked, hoping things were quiet enough that the dispatcher would just do it herself. He knew that copies of the penal code were always in the dispatch center because officers often called in to get the proper citations when they were in the field.

“Hold on.”

He waited. Meantime, he exited on Barham and took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills toward his home.

“Detective?”

“Still here.”

“That was a hate crime violation.”

“Okay. Thanks for looking it up.”

“No problem.”

Bosch pulled into his carport and killed the engine. Mackey’s roommate or landlord was charged with a hate crime in 1988-the same year as the murder of Rebecca Verloren. William Burkhart was likely the same Billy Burkhart whom Sam Weiss had identified as a neighbor and one of his tormentors. Bosch didn’t know how all of this fit together but he knew it was part of the same picture. He now wished he had taken home the Department of Corrections file on Mackey. He was feeling too tired to go all the way back downtown to get it. He decided he would leave it be for the night and read it cover to cover when he got back to the office the next day. He would also get the file on William Burkhart’s hate crime arrest.

The house was quiet when he got inside. He grabbed the phone and a beer out of the box and headed out onto the deck to check on the city. On the way he turned on the CD player. There was already a disc in the machine and he soon heard the voice of Boz Scaggs on the outside speakers. He was singing “For All We Know.”

The song competed with the muted sound of the freeway down below. Bosch looked out and saw there were no searchlights cutting across the sky from Universal Studios. It was too late for that. Still, the view was captivating in the way it could only be at night. The city shimmered out there like a million dreams, not all of them good.

Bosch thought about calling Kiz Rider back and telling her about the William Burkhart connection but decided to let it wait until the morning. He looked out at the city and felt satisfied with the day’s moves and accomplishments, but he was also out of sorts. High jingo did that to you.

The man with the knife had not been too far off in calling him a missionary man. He almost had it right. Bosch knew he had a mission in life and now, after three years, he was back on the beat. But he could not bring himself to believe it was all good. He felt that there was something out there beyond the shimmering lights and dreams, something he could not see. It was waiting for him.

He clicked on the phone and listened to an uninterrupted dial tone. It meant he had no messages. He called the retrieval number anyway and replayed a message he had saved from the week before. It was his daughter’s tiny voice, left the night she and her mother went traveling far away from him.

“Hello, Daddy,” she said. “Good night, Daddy.”

That was all she had said but that was enough. Bosch saved the message for the next time he needed it and then killed the line.