Michael Connelly - The Closers

“Yeah, I read it in bed. It’s not much help. It’s high school confidential stuff. Unrequited love, weekly crushes, stuff like that. MTL is mentioned but no clue to identity. He might even be a fantasy figure, the way she writes about how special he is. I think Garcia was right to give it back to the mom. It’s not going to help us.”

“Is MTL referred to in the book as a he ?”

“Hmm, Harry, that’s clever. I didn’t notice. I have it here and I’ll check. You know something I don’t know?”

“No, just covering all the bases. What about Danny Kotchof? Is he in there?”

“In the beginning. He’s mentioned by name. Then he drops off and mysterious MTL takes his place.”

“Mr. X…”

“Listen, I’m going up to six in a few minutes. I’m going to see about getting access to those old files we were talking about.”

Bosch noticed that she hadn’t mentioned that they were PDU files. He wondered if Pratt or someone else was nearby and she was taking precautions against being overheard.

“Is somebody there, Kiz?”

“That’s right.”

“Take all precautions, right?”

“You got it.”

“Good. Good luck. By the way, did you find a phone on Mariano?”

“Yes,” she said. “There’s one phone and it’s under the name William Burkhart. Must be a roommate. This guy is just a few years older than Mackey and has a record that includes a hate crime. Nothing in recent years but the hate crime was in ’eighty-eight.”

“And guess what,” Bosch said, “he was also Sam Weiss’s neighbor. I must’ve left that out last night when we talked.”

“Too much information coming in.”

“Yeah. You know I was wondering about something. How come Mackey’s cell didn’t come up on the AutoTrack?”

“I’m ahead of you on that. I ran a check on the number and it’s not his. It’s held in the name of Belinda Messier. Her address is over on Melba, also in Woodland Hills. Her record’s clean except for some traffic stuff. Maybe she’s his girlfriend.”

“Maybe.”

“When I get time I will try to track her down. I’m sensing something here, Harry. It’s all coming together. All of this eighty-eight stuff. I tried to pull the file on the hate crime but -”

“Public Disorder?”

“Exactly. And that’s why I’m going up to six.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“I checked with the ESB first thing. They still haven’t found the evidence box. We still don’t have the gun. I’m now wondering if it got misplaced or if it was taken.”

“Yeah,” Bosch said, thinking the same thing. If this case went inside the department, the evidence could have been purposely and permanently lost.

“All right,” Bosch said. “Before I do this interview let’s go back to the journal for a minute. Is there anything in it about the pregnancy?”

“No, she didn’t write about it. The entries are dated and she stopped writing in the book in late April. Maybe it was when she found out. I think maybe she stopped writing in it in case her parents were secretly reading it.”

“Does she mention any hangouts? You know, places she would go?”

“She does mention a lot of movies,” Rider said. “Not who she went with but just that she saw specific movies and what she thought of them. What are you thinking, target acquisition?”

They needed to know where Mackey and Rebecca Verloren could have crossed paths. It was a hole in the case no matter what the motivation was. Where did Mackey come into contact with Verloren in order to target her?

“Movie theaters,” he said. “It could have been where they intersected.”

“Exactly. And I think all the theaters up there in the Valley are in malls. That makes the crossing zone even wider.”

“It’s something to think about.”

Bosch said he would come into the office after talking with Robert Verloren, and they hung up. Bosch went back into the break room and the noise from the dishwashing room seemed louder. The meal service was almost over and the dishwashers were getting slammed. Bosch sat down at the table again and noticed that someone had cleared his empty plate. He tried to think about the conversation with Rider. He knew that a shopping mall would be a huge crossroads, a place where it would be easy to see someone like Mackey crossing paths with someone like Rebecca Verloren. He wondered if the crime could have all come down to a chance encounter-Mackey seeing a girl with the obvious mix of races in her face and hair and eyes. Could this have incensed him to the point that he followed her home and later came back alone or with others to abduct and kill her?

It seemed like a long shot but most theories began as long shots. He thought about the original investigation and the possibility of it having been tainted from within the department. There had been nothing in the murder book that played to the racial angle. But in 1988 the department would have gone out of its way not to play to it. The department and the city had a blind spot. An infection of racial animosities was festering beneath the surface in 1988 but the department and the city looked away. The skin over the seething wound finally broke a few years later and the city was torn apart by three days of rioting, the worst in the country in a quarter-century. Bosch had to consider that the investigation of Rebecca Verloren’s murder might have been stunted in deference to keeping the sickness beneath the surface.

“You ready?”

Bosch looked up and saw Robert Verloren standing over him. His face was sweating from exertion. He now held the chef’s hat in his hand. There was still a slight tremor in his arm.

“Yeah, sure. Do you want to sit down?”

Verloren took the seat across from Bosch.

“Is it always like this?” Bosch asked. “This crowded?”

“Every morning. Today we served a hundred sixty-two plates. A lot of people count on us. No, wait, make that a hundred sixty-three plates. I forgot about you. How was it?”

“It was damn good. Thank you, I needed the fuel.”

“My specialty.”

“A little different than cooking for Johnny Carson and the Malibu set, huh?”

“Yeah, but I don’t miss that. Not at all. Just a stop-off on the road to finding the place where I belong. But I’m here now, thanks to the Lord Jesus, and this is where I want to be.”

Bosch nodded. Whether intentionally or not, Verloren was communicating to Bosch that his new life had been achieved through the intervention of faith. Bosch had often found that those who talked about it the most had the weakest hold on it.

“How did you find me?” Verloren asked.

“My partner and I talked to your wife yesterday and she told us that the last time she had heard anything about you, you were down here. I started looking last night.”

“I wouldn’t go on these streets at night, if I were you.”

There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. But it was something that seemed to have receded over time.

“I thought I was going to find you standing in a line, not feeding the line.”

“Well, not too long ago I was in the line. I had to stand there to stand where I am today.”

Bosch nodded again. He had heard these one-day-at-a-time mantras before.

“How long have you been sober?”

Verloren smiled.

“This time? A little over three years.”

“Look, I don’t want to force you to relive the trauma of seventeen years ago, but we’ve reopened the case.”

“It’s okay, Detective. I reopen the case every night when I shut my eyes and every morning when I say my prayers to Jesus.”

Bosch nodded again.

“Do you want to do this here or take a walk or go over to Parker Center where we can sit in a quiet room?”