Michael Connelly - The Closers

McClellan slowly shook his head.

“No,” he said. “He told me to give you a message. He said to tell you an agreement is only an agreement if both sides keep their end of it. That’s it.”

“One last question,” Bosch said. “The evidence box on the Verloren case is gone. You know anything about that?”

McClellan stared at him. Bosch could tell he had badly insulted the man.

“I had to ask,” Bosch said.

“All I know is that stuff disappears from the place,” McClellan said through a tight jaw. “Anybody could have walked off with it in seventeen years. But it wasn’t me.”

Bosch nodded. He stood up.

“Well, I have to get back to work on this,” he said.

McClellan took the cue and stood. He seemed to swallow his anger over the last question, maybe accepting Bosch’s explanation that it had to be asked.

“All right, Detective,” he said. “Good luck with this thing. I hope you catch the guy. And I really mean that.”

He held his hand out to Bosch. Bosch didn’t know McClellan’s story. He didn’t know all the circumstances of life in the PDU in 1988. But it looked like McClellan was leaving the house with a greater burden than he had come in with. So Bosch decided he could shake his hand.

After McClellan left, Bosch sat down again, thinking about the idea that Rebecca Verloren’s killer had been hiding in the house. He got up and went to the dining room table, where the files from the murder book were spread out. The photos from the dead girl’s room were at center in the spread. He looked through the reports until he found the SID report on latent fingerprint analysis.

The report was several pages long and contained the analysis of several fingerprints lifted from surfaces in the Verloren household. The main summary concluded that no print lifted from the house was an unknown, therefore it was likely the suspect or suspects wore gloves or simply avoided touching surfaces likely to retain prints.

The summary said that all latent fingerprints lifted from the house were matched to samples from members of the Verloren family or people who had an appropriate reason to have been in the house and touching the surfaces where the prints were found.

This time Bosch read the report differently and in its entirety. This time he was no longer interested in the analysis. He wanted to know where the SID techs had looked for prints.

The report was dated a day after the discovery of Rebecca’s body. It detailed a routine search for fingerprints in the household. All topical surfaces were examined. All doorknobs and locks. All windowsills and frames. Every place it was logical to think that the killer/kidnapper might have touched a surface during the crime. While several prints on windowsills and latches were recovered and matched to Robert Verloren, the report stated that no usable prints at all were recovered from doorknobs in the house. It noted that this was not unusual because of the smudging that routinely occurred when knobs were turned.

It was in what was not included in the report that Bosch saw the crack through which a killer might have escaped. The SID team had gone into the house a day after the victim’s body was discovered. This would have been after the case had been misread twice, first as a missing-persons case and second as a suicide. Added to this, when a murder investigation was finally mounted the latents team was sent in blind. There was no understanding of the case at that point. The idea that the killer might have hidden in the garage or somewhere else in the house for several hours had not been formulated yet. The search for fingerprints and other evidence, such as hairs and fibers, never went beyond the obvious, beyond the surface.

Bosch knew it was too late now. Too many years had passed. A cat roamed the house and who knows what objects from yard sales had come in and gone out of the house where a killer had hidden and waited.

Then his eyes fell to the spread of photos on the table and he realized something. Rebecca’s bedroom was the one place that had not been contaminated over time. It was like a museum with its artwork encased and almost hermetically sealed.

Bosch spread all the crime scene photos of the bedroom in front of him. There had been something gnawing at him about these photos since the first time he had seen them. He still couldn’t get to it but now he felt urgent about it. He studied the shots of the bureau and the bed table and then the open closet. Last he studied the bed.

He thought of the photo that had run in the newspaper and took the second copy of the paper out of the file containing all reports and documents accumulated during the reinvestigation of the case. He unfolded the paper and studied Emmy Ward’s photo and then compared it to the photographs of seventeen years before.

The room seemed exactly the same, as if untouched by the grief emanating from it like heat from an oven. Then Bosch noticed a small difference. In the Daily News shot the bed had been carefully straightened and smoothed by Muriel before the photograph was taken. In the older SID shots the bed was made, but the ruffle fluffed outward along one side of the bed and inward along the foot.

Bosch’s eyes moved back and forth from one photo to the other. He felt something breaking loose inside. He felt a little charge drop into his blood. This was what had bothered him. It was the something that was not right.

“In and out,” he said to himself.

It was possible, he knew, that the ruffle had been pushed inward at the bottom of the bed by someone crawling underneath it. That would make it likely that the outward fluffing of the ruffle at the side of the bed would have occurred when that same person slid or crawled out.

After everyone was asleep.

Bosch got up and started pacing as he worked it through again. In the photo taken after the abduction and murder, the bed clearly showed the possibility of entrance and exit. Rebecca’s killer could have been waiting right below her as she fell asleep.

“In and out,” Bosch said again.

He worked it further. He knew that no readable fingerprints had been recovered at the house. But only obvious surfaces had been checked. This did not necessarily mean the killer had worn gloves. It only meant he was smart enough not to touch obvious places with his bare hands, or smudged the prints when he needed to. Even if gloves had been worn during the entry to the house, might not the killer have removed them while waiting-possibly for hours-under the bed?

It was worth a shot. Bosch went to the kitchen and called SID and asked for Raj Patel.

“Raj, what are you doing?”

“I am cataloging the evidence we gathered last night on the freeway.”

“I need your best latents man to meet me back up there in Chatsworth.”

“Now?”

“Right now, Raj. I might not even have a job later. We have to do this now.”

“What is it we are to do?”

“I want to lift a bed and look underneath it. It’s important, Raj. If we find something, it will lead us to the killer.”

There was a short silence and then Patel replied.

“I am my best latents man, Harry. Give me the address.”

“Thanks, Raj.”

He gave Patel the address and then hung up the phone. He drummed his fingers on the counter, wondering if he should call Kiz Rider. She had been so distressed and discouraged as they had walked out of Parker Center that she said all she wanted to do was go home to sleep. Should he wake her for the second day in a row? He knew that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether he should wait to see if there was anything beneath the bed before telling her and getting her hopes up.

He decided to hold off on the call until there was something solid to tell her. Instead he picked up the phone and woke up Muriel Verloren. He told her he was on his way.