Michael Connelly - The Closers

“Here is good. I am comfortable here.”

“Okay, then let me tell you a little bit about what is going on. I work for the Open-Unsolved Unit. We are currently looking into your daughter’s murder again because we have some new information.”

“What information?”

Bosch decided to take a different approach with him. Where he had held information back from the mother, he decided to give it all to the father.

“We have a match between blood found on the weapon used in the crime and an individual who we are pretty sure was living up there in Chatsworth at the time of the killing. It’s a DNA match. Do you know what that is?”

Verloren nodded.

“I know. Like in O.J.”

“This one’s solid. It doesn’t mean he is the one who killed Rebecca, but it means he was close to the crime, and that makes us closer.”

“Who is it?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, Mr. Verloren, I want to ask you some questions relating to yourself and the case.”

“What about me?”

Bosch felt the tension rise. The skin around Verloren’s eyes grew tighter. He realized that he could have been careless with this man, mistaking his position in the kitchen as a sign of health and forgetting the warning Rider had issued about the homeless population.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to know a little bit about what has happened to you in the years since Rebecca was taken.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing, but I want to know.”

“What happened to me is that I tripped and fell into a black hole. Took me a long time to see the light and my way out. You got kids?”

“One. A girl.”

“Then you know what I mean. You lose a kid the way I lost my girl and that’s it, my friend. It’s all over. You are like an empty bottle tossed out the window. The car keeps going but you are on the side of the road, broken.”

Bosch nodded. He did know this. He lived a life of screaming vulnerability, knowing that what might happen in a city far away could cause him to live or die, or fall into the same black hole as Verloren.

“After your daughter’s death you lost the restaurant?”

“That’s right. It was the best thing that could have happened. I needed that to happen for me to find out who I really was. And to make my way here.”

Bosch knew that such emotional defenses were fragile. Following Verloren’s logic it could be said that his daughter’s death was the best thing that could have happened because it led to the loss of the restaurant, which triggered all the wonderful personal discoveries he had made. It was bullshit and both men at the table knew it; one just couldn’t admit it.

“Mr. Verloren, talk to me,” Bosch said. “Leave all the self-help lessons for your meetings and the ragged people in line. Tell me how you tripped. Tell me how you fell into that black hole.”

“I just did.”

“Not everybody who loses a child falls so far into the hole. You’re not the only one this has happened to, Mr. Verloren. Some people end up on TV, some run for Congress. What happened to you? Why are you different? And don’t tell me it is because you loved your kid more. We all love our kids.”

Verloren was quiet a moment. He pressed his lips tightly together as he composed. Bosch could tell he had made him angry. But that was okay. He needed to push things.

“All right,” Verloren finally said. “All right.”

But that was all. Bosch could see the muscles of his jaw working. The pain of the last seventeen years had set in his face. Bosch could read it like a menu. Appetizers, entrees, desserts. Frustration, anger, irredeemable loss.

“All right what, Mr. Verloren?”

Verloren nodded. He removed the final barricade.

“I could blame you people but I must blame myself. I abandoned my daughter in death, Detective. And then the only place I could hide from the betrayal was in the bottle. The bottle opens up the black hole. Do you understand?”

Bosch nodded.

“I am trying to. Tell me what you mean about blaming you people. Do you mean cops? Do you mean white people?”

“I mean all of it.”

Verloren turned in his seat so that his back was against the tile wall next to the table. He looked toward the door to the alley. He wasn’t looking at Bosch. Bosch wanted the eye contact, but he was willing to let things ride as long as Verloren kept talking.

“Let’s start with the cops, then,” Bosch said. “Why do you blame the cops? What did the cops do?”

“You expect me to talk to you about what you people did?”

Bosch thought carefully before responding. He felt this was the make-or-break point of the interview and he sensed that this man had something important to give up.

“We start with the fact that you loved your daughter, right?” Bosch said.

“Of course.”

“Well, Mr. Verloren, what happened to her should never have happened. I can’t do anything about it. But I can try to speak for her. That’s why I am here. What the cops did seventeen years ago is not what I am going to do. Most of them are dead now anyway. If you still love your daughter, if you love the memory of her, then you will tell me the story. You will help me speak for her. It’s your only way of making up for what you did back then.”

Verloren started nodding halfway through Bosch’s plea. Bosch knew he had him, that he would open up. It was about redemption. It didn’t matter how many years had gone by. Redemption was always the brass ring.

A single tear rolled down Verloren’s left cheek, almost imperceptible against the dark skin. A man in dirty kitchen whites came into the break area with a clipboard in hand but Bosch quickly waved him away from Verloren. Bosch waited and finally Verloren spoke.

“I chose myself over her and in the end I lost myself anyway,” he said.

“How did that happen?”

Verloren covered his mouth with his hand, as if to try to keep the secrets from being dispelled. Finally he dropped it and spoke.

“I read one day in the newspaper that my daughter had been killed with a gun that came from a burglary. Green and Garcia, they hadn’t told me that. So I asked Detective Green about it and he told me the man with the gun had it because he was afraid. He was a Jewish man and there had been threats against him. I thought…”

He stopped there and Bosch had to prompt him.

“You thought that maybe Rebecca had been targeted because of her mixed races? Because her father was black?”

Verloren nodded.

“I thought, yes, because from time to time there would be a comment or something. Not everybody saw the beauty in her. Not like we did. I wanted to live on the Westside, but Muriel, she was from up there. It was home to her.”

“What did Green tell you?”

“He told me, no, that it wasn’t there. They had looked at that and it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right to me. They were ignoring this, it seemed to me. I kept calling and asking. I was pushing it. Finally I went to a customer I had at the restaurant who was a member of the police commission. I told him about this thing and he said he would check into it for me.”

Verloren nodded, more to himself than to Bosch. He was fortifying his faith in his actions as a father seeking justice for his daughter.

“And then what happened?” Bosch prompted.

“Then I got a visit from two police.”

“Not Green and Garcia?”

“No, not them. Different police. They came to my restaurant.”

“What were their names?”

Verloren shook his head.

“They never gave me their names. They just showed me their badges. They were detectives, I think. They told me I was wrong about what I was pushing Green about. They told me to back off it because I was just stirring the pot. That is what they called it, stirring the pot. Like it was about me and not my daughter.”