HILLSIDE PREPARATORY SCHOOL was a structure of Spanish design nestled against the hills of Porter Ranch. Its campus was marked by magnificent green lawns and the daunting rise of mountains behind it. The mountains almost seemed to cradle the school and protect it. Bosch thought it looked like a place that any parent would want their child to go. He thought about his own daughter, just a year away from starting school. He would want her to go to a school that looked like this—on the outside, at least.
He and Rider followed signs that led them to the administration offices. At a front counter Bosch showed his badge and explained that they wanted to see if a student named Roland Mackey had ever attended Hillside. The clerk disappeared into a back office and soon a man emerged. His most notable features were a basketball-sized paunch and thick glasses shaded by bushy eyebrows. Across his forehead his hair left the perfect line of a toupee.
“I’m Gordon Stoddard, principal here at Hillside. Mrs. Atkins told me you are detectives. I’m having her check that name for you. It didn’t ring a bell with me and I’ve been here almost twenty-five years. Do you know exactly when he attended? It might help her with the search.”
Bosch was surprised. Stoddard looked like he was in his mid-forties. He must have come to Hillside fresh from his own schooling and never left. Bosch didn’t know if that was a testament to what they paid teachers here or Stoddard’s own dedication to the place. But from what he knew about teachers private and public, he doubted it was the pay.
“We’d be talking about the eighties, if he went here. That’s a long time ago for you to remember.”
“Yes, but I have a memory for the students that have come through. Most of them. I haven’t been principal for twenty-five years. I was a teacher first. I taught science and then I was dean of the science department.”
“Do you remember Rebecca Verloren?” Rider asked.
Stoddard blanched.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I taught her science. Is that what this is about? Have you arrested this boy, Mackey? I mean, I guess he’d be a man now. Is he the one?”
“We don’t know that, sir,” Bosch said quickly. “We’re reviewing the case and his name came up and we need to check on it. That’s all.”
“Did you see the plaque?” Stoddard asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Outside on the wall in the main hallway. There is a plaque dedicated to Rebecca. The students in her class collected the funds for it and had it made. It is quite nice but of course it is also quite sad. But it does serve its purpose. People around here remember Rebecca Verloren.”
“We missed it. We’ll look at it on our way out.”
“A lot of people still remember her. This school might not pay that well, and most of the faculty might have to work two jobs to make ends meet, but it has a very loyal faculty nonetheless. There are several teachers still here who taught Rebecca. We have one, Mrs. Sable, who was actually a student with her and then returned here to teach. In fact, Bailey was one of her good friends, I believe.”
Bosch glanced at Rider, who raised her eyebrows. They had a plan for approaching Becky Verloren’s friends but here was an opportunity presenting itself. Bosch had recognized the name Bailey. One of the three friends Becky Verloren had spent the evening with two nights before her disappearance was named Bailey Koster.
Bosch knew that it was more than an opportunity to question a witness in the case. If they didn’t get to Sable now she would likely hear about Roland Mackey from Stoddard. Bosch didn’t want that. He wanted to control the flow of information on the case to the players involved in it.
“Is she here today?” Bosch asked. “Could we talk to her?”
Stoddard looked up at the clock on the wall next to the counter.
“Well, she is in class now but school lets out for the day in about twenty minutes. If you don’t mind waiting I am sure you could talk to her then.”
“That’s no problem.”
“Good, I will send a message to her classroom and have her come to the office after school.”
Mrs. Atkins, the counter clerk, appeared behind Stoddard.
“Actually, if you don’t mind,” Rider said, “we’d rather go to her classroom to talk to her. We don’t want to make her uncomfortable.”
Bosch nodded. Rider was on the same frequency. They didn’t want a message of any kind going to Mrs. Sable. They didn’t want her thinking about Becky Verloren until they were right there watching and listening.
“Either way,” Stoddard said. “Whatever you want to do.”
He noticed Mrs. Atkins standing behind him and asked her to report her findings.
“We have no record of a Roland Mackey as a student here,” she said.
“Did you come across anyone with that last name?” Rider asked.
“Yes, one Mackey, first name Gregory, attended for two years in nineteen ninety-six and -seven.”
There was a long-shot possibility that it was a younger brother or a cousin. It might become necessary to check the name out.
“Can you see if there is a current address or contact number for him?” Rider asked.
Mrs. Atkins looked at Stoddard for approval and he nodded. She disappeared to go get the information. Bosch checked the wall clock. They had almost twenty minutes to kill.
“Mr. Stoddard, are there yearbooks from the late eighties that we could look at while we’re waiting to see Mrs. Sable?” he asked.
“Yes, of course, I will take you to the library and get those for you.”
On the way to the library Stoddard took them by the plaque Rebecca Verloren’s classmates had put on the wall of the main hallway. It was a simple dedication with her name, the years of her birth and death and the youthful promise of WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER.
“She was a sweet kid,” Stoddard said. “Always involved. Her family, too. What a tragedy.”
Stoddard used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the dust off the laminated photograph of the smiling Becky Verloren on the plaque.
The library was around the corner. There were few students at the tables or browsing the shelves as the end of the day drew near. In a whisper Stoddard told them to have a seat at a table and then he went off into the stacks. Less than a minute later he came back with three yearbooks and put them down on the table. Bosch saw that each book had the title Veritas and the year on the cover. Stoddard had brought yearbooks from 1986, 1987 and 1988.
“These are the last three years,” Stoddard whispered. “I remember she went here from grade one, so if you want earlier books just let me know. They’re on the shelf.”
Bosch shook his head.
“That’s okay. This will be fine for now. We’ll come back by the office before we leave. We need to get that information from Mrs. Atkins anyway.”
“Okay, then I will leave you to it.”
“Oh, can you tell us where Mrs. Sable’s classroom is?”
Stoddard gave them the room number and told them how to get there from the library. He then excused himself, saying he was returning to the office. Before leaving he whispered a few words to a table of boys near the door. The boys then reached down to the backpacks they had dropped on the floor and pulled them underneath the table so as to not impede foot traffic. Something about the way they had haphazardly dropped their packs reminded Bosch of the way the boys of Vietnam had done it—where they stood, not caring about anything but getting the weight off their shoulders.
After Stoddard had left, the boys made faces at the door he had passed through.
Rider took the 1988 yearbook ahead of Bosch and he took the 1986 edition. He wasn’t expecting to find anything of value now that Mrs. Atkins had knocked down his theory that Roland Mackey had attended the school at one point but had dropped out before the murder. He was already resigned to the idea that the connection between Mackey and Becky Verloren—if it even existed—would be found somewhere else.
He did the math in his head and flipped through the book until he found the eighth grade photos. He quickly found Becky Verloren’s picture. She wore pigtails and braces. She was smiling but looked like she was just beginning that period of prepubescent awkwardness. He doubted she had been happy with her appearance in the book. He checked the group photos showing the class’s different clubs and organizations and was able to track her extracurricular activities. She played soccer and was seen in the photos for the science and art clubs and the homeroom representatives in student government. In all the photos she was always in the back row or off to the side. Bosch wondered if that was where she had been placed by a photographer or where she had felt comfortable.
Rider was taking her time with the 1988 edition. She was going through every page, at one point holding the book up to Bosch when she was going through the faculty section. She pointed to a photo of a young Gordon Stoddard, who had much longer hair back then and didn’t wear glasses. He was leaner and looked stronger as well.
“Look at him,” she said. “Nobody should grow old.”
“And everybody should get the chance.”
Bosch moved on to the 1987 yearbook and found that the photos of Becky Verloren showed a young girl who appeared to be blossoming. Her smile was fuller, more confident. If the braces were still there they were no longer noticeable. In the group photos she had moved to front and center. In the student government photos she was not a class officer yet, but she had her arms folded in a take-charge pose. Her posture and her unflinching stare at the camera told Bosch she was going places. Only somebody had stopped her.
Bosch flipped through a few more pages and then closed the book. He was waiting for the bell to ring so they could go interview Bailey Koster Sable.
“Nothing?” Rider asked.
“Of any value,” he said. “It’s good to look at her back then, though. In place. In her element.”
“Yes. Look at this.”
They were sitting across from each other. She turned the 1988 book around on the table so he could see it. She had finally gotten to the sophomore class photos. The top half of the page on the right showed a boy and four girls posing on a wall Bosch recognized as the entrance to the student parking lot. One of the girls was Becky Verloren. The caption above the photo said STUDENT LEADERS. Below the photo the students were identified and their positions listed. Becky Verloren was listed as student council representative. Bailey Koster was class president.
Rider tried to spin the book back toward herself but Bosch held it for a moment, studying the photograph. He could tell by her pose and her style that Becky Verloren had left her teen awkwardness behind. He would not describe the student in the photograph as a girl. She was on her way to becoming an attractive and confident young woman. He let the book go and Rider took it back.
“She was going to be a heartbreaker,” he said.
“Maybe she already was. Maybe she picked the wrong one to break.”
“Anything else in there?”
“Take a look.”
She flipped the open book around again. The two pages were spread with photos from the Art Club’s trip to France the summer before. There were photos of about twenty students, boys and girls, and several parents or teachers in front of Notre Dame, in the courtyard of the Louvre and on a tourist boat on the Seine. Rider pointed out Rebecca Verloren in one of the photos.
“She went to France,” Bosch said. “What about it?”
“She could have met someone over there. Could be an international link to this thing. We might have to go over there and check it out.”
She was trying to hold back a smile.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “You put the req in on that. Send it on up to six.”
“Boy, Harry, I guess your sense of humor stayed retired.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
The school bell rang, ending the discussion as well as classes for the day. Bosch and Rider got up, leaving the yearbooks on the table, and left the library. They followed Stoddard’s directions to Bailey Sable’s classroom, along the way dodging students hurrying to leave the school. The girls wore plaid skirts and white blouses, the boys khakis and white polo shirts.
They looked into the open door of room B-6 and saw a woman sitting at a desk at the front center of the classroom. She did not look up from the papers she was apparently grading. Bailey Sable bore almost no resemblance to the sophomore class president whose photo Bosch and Rider had just studied in the yearbook. The hair was darker and shorter now, the body wider and heavier. Like Stoddard, she wore glasses. Bosch knew she was only thirty-two or thirty-three but she looked older.
There was one last student in the room. She was a pretty blonde girl who was shoving books into a backpack. When she was finished she zipped the pack closed and headed to the door.
“See you tomorrow, Mrs. Sable.”
“Good-bye, Kaitlyn.”
The student gave Bosch and Rider a curious look as she went by them. The detectives stepped into the classroom and Bosch pulled the door closed. That made Bailey Sable look up from her papers.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Bosch took the lead.
“You might be able to,” he said. “Mr. Stoddard said it would be all right if we came to your classroom.”
He approached the desk. The teacher looked up at him warily.
“Are you parents?”
“No, we’re detectives, Mrs. Sable. My name is Harry Bosch and this is Kizmin Rider. We wanted to ask you a few questions about Becky Verloren.”
She reacted as if she had just been punched in the gut. All these years and it was still that close to the surface.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she said.
“We’re sorry to hit you with this out of the blue,” Bosch said.
“Is something happening? Did you find who . . . ?”
She didn’t finish.
“Well, we’re working on it again,” Bosch said. “And you might be able to help us.”
“How?”
Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the mug shot taken from Roland Mackey’s DOC probation file. It was a portrait of Mackey as an eighteen-year-old car thief. Bosch put it down on top of the paper she had been grading. She looked down at it.
“Do you recognize the person in that photo?” Bosch asked.
“It was taken seventeen years ago,” Rider added. “About the time of Becky’s death.”
The teacher looked down at Mackey’s defiant glare into the police camera. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Bosch looked at Rider and nodded, a signal that maybe she should take over.
“Does it look like anyone you or Becky or any of your friends may have encountered back then?” Rider asked.
“Did he go to school here?” Sable asked.
“No, we don’t think so. But we know he lived in this area.”
“Is he the killer?”
“We don’t know. We’re just trying to see if there is a connection between Becky and him.”
“What is his name?”
Rider looked at Bosch and he nodded again.
“His name is Roland Mackey. Does he look familiar?”
“Not really. It is hard for me to remember back then. Remember the faces of strangers, I mean.”
“So he definitely is not someone you knew, right?”
“Definitely.”
“Do you think Becky could have known him without you being aware of it?”
She thought for a long moment before answering.
“Well, it’s possible. You know, it came out that she’d gotten pregnant. I didn’t know about that, so I guess I might not have known about him. Was he the father?”
“We don’t know.”
Unbidden, she had jumped the interview forward to Bosch’s next line of questioning.
“Mrs. Sable, you know, it’s been a lot of years since then,” he said. “If you were sort of sticking up for a friend back then, we understand that. But if there is more you know, you can tell us now. This is probably the last shot that anybody is going to take at solving this thing.”
“You mean about her being pregnant? I really didn’t know about it. I’m sorry. I was just as shocked as everybody else when the police started asking about that.”
“If Becky were going to confide in someone about that, would it have been you?”
Again, she didn’t answer right away. She gave it some thought.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We were very close but she was that way with a few other girls, too. There were four of us who had been together since first grade here. In first grade we called ourselves the Kitty Cat Club because we all had pet cats. At different times and different years one of us would be closer to one of the others. It changed all the time. But as a group we always stuck together.”
Bosch nodded.
“That summer when Becky was taken, who would you say was closest to her?”
“It was probably Tara. She took it the hardest.”
Bosch looked at Rider, trying to remember the names of the girls Becky had been with two nights before her death.
“Tara Wood?” Rider asked.
“Yes, that’s Tara. They hung out together a lot that summer because Becky’s dad owned a restaurant in Malibu and they were both working there. They were splitting a schedule there. It seemed that summer that all they did was talk about it.”
“What would they say about it?” Rider asked.
“Oh, you know, like what stars came in there. People like Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen. And sometimes they talked about what guys worked there and who was cute. Nothing too interesting to me since I didn’t work there.”
“Was there any one guy in particular they talked about?”
She thought a moment before answering.
“Not really. Not that I remember. They just liked to talk about them because they were so different. They were surfers and would-be actors. Tara and Becky were Valley girls. It was like a culture clash for them.”
“Was she dating anybody from the restaurant?” Bosch asked.
“Not that I knew of. But it’s like I said, I didn’t know about the pregnancy, so there was obviously somebody in her life I didn’t know about. She kept it a secret.”
“Were you jealous of them because they worked there?” Rider asked.
“Not at all. I didn’t have to work and I was pretty happy about that.”
Rider was going somewhere so Bosch let her continue.
“What did you guys do for fun when you got together?” she asked.
“I don’t know, the usual,” Sable said. “We went shopping and to movies, stuff like that.”
“Who had cars?”
“Tara did and so did I. Tara had a convertible. We used to go up . . .”
She cut it off when she came to a memory.
“What?” Rider asked.
“I just remember driving up into Limekiln Canyon a lot after school. Tara had a cooler in the trunk and her dad never noticed if she’d taken some of his beers out of the refrigerator. One time we got pulled over up there by a police car. We hid the beers under our uniform skirts. They worked perfect for that. The policeman didn’t notice.”
She smiled at the memory.
“Of course, now that I teach here I’m on the watch for that sort of thing. We still have the same uniforms.”
“What about before she started working at the restaurant?” Bosch said, drawing the interview back to Rebecca Verloren. “She was sick for a week, right after school let out. Did you visit her or talk to her then?”
“I’m sure I did. That is when they said she probably, you know, ended the pregnancy. So she wasn’t really sick. She was just recovering. But I didn’t know. I must have just thought she was sick, that’s all. I can’t really remember if we talked that week or not.”
“Did the detectives back then ask you all of these questions?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure they did.”
“Where would a girl from Hillside Prep go if she got pregnant?” Rider asked. “Back then, I mean.”
“You mean like a clinic or a doctor?”
“Yes.”
Bailey Sable’s neck flushed. She was embarrassed by the question. She shook her head.
“I don’t know. That was as shocking really as Becky being, you know, killed. It made us all think we didn’t really know our friend. It was really sad because I realized she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me these things. You know, I still think about that when I remember things back then.”
“Did she have any boyfriends that you did know about?” Bosch asked.
“Not then. I mean, at the time. She had a boyfriend freshman year but he had moved away to Hawaii with his family. That was like the summer before. Then the whole school year I thought she was alone. You know, she didn’t go to any of the dances or the games with anybody. But I was wrong, I guess.”
“Because of the pregnancy,” Rider said.
“Well, yeah. That’s sort of obvious, isn’t it?”
“Who was the father?” Bosch asked, hoping the direct question might elicit a response with something to pursue.
But Sable shrugged.
“I have no idea, and don’t think I’ve ever stopped wondering.”
Bosch nodded. He had gotten nothing.
“The breakup with the boy who moved to Hawaii—how was that with her?” he asked.
“Well, I thought it broke her heart. She took it really hard. It was like Romeo and Juliet.”
“How so?”
“They were broken up by the parents.”
“You mean they didn’t want them going together?”
“No, his dad took a job or something in Hawaii. They had to move and it broke them up.”
Bosch nodded again. He didn’t know if any of the information they were getting was useful but he knew it was important to cast as wide a net as possible.
“Do you know where Tara Wood is these days?” he asked.
Sable shook her head.
“We had a ten-year reunion and she didn’t come. I lost touch with her. I still talk to Grace Tanaka from time to time. But she lives up in the Bay Area so I don’t see her too much.”
“Can you give us her number?”
“Sure, I have it here.”
She reached down and opened a desk drawer and pulled out her purse. While she was getting out an address book Bosch took the photo of Mackey off the desk and put it back into his pocket. When Sable read off a phone number Rider wrote it down in a small notebook.
“Five ten,” Rider said. “What is that, Oakland?”
“She lives in Hayward. She wants to live in San Francisco but it costs too much for what she makes.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a metal sculptor.”
“Her last name is still Tanaka?”
“Yes. She never married. She . . .”
“What?”
“She turned out to be gay.”
“Turned out?”
“Well, what I mean is, we never knew. She never told us. She moved up there and once about eight years ago I went up to visit and then I knew.”
“It was obvious?”
“Obvious.”
“Did she come to the ten-year high school reunion?”
“Yes, she was there. We had fun, but it was sort of sad, too, because people talked about Becky and how it was never solved. I think that’s probably why Tara didn’t come. She didn’t want to be reminded of what happened to Becky.”
“Well, maybe we’ll change that by the twentieth reunion,” Bosch said, immediately regretting the flippant remark. “Sorry, that wasn’t a nice thing to say.”
“Well, I hope you do change it. I think about her all the time. Always wondering who did it and why they have never been found. I look at her picture every day on the plaque when I come into school. It’s weird. I helped raise the money for that plaque when I was class president.”
“They?” Bosch asked.
“What?”
“You said they have never been found. Why did you say they?”
“I don’t know. He, she, whatever.”
Bosch nodded.
“Mrs. Sable, thanks for your time,” he said. “Would you do us a favor and not talk about this with anyone? We don’t want people being prepared for us, you know what I mean?”
“Like with me?”
“Exactly. And if you think of anything else, anything at all you want to talk about, my partner will give you a card with our numbers on it.”
“Okay.”
She seemed to be in a far-off reverie. The detectives said good-bye and left her there with the stack of papers to grade. Bosch thought she was probably remembering a time when four girls were the best of friends and the future sparkled in front of them like an ocean.
Before leaving the school they stopped by the office to see if the school had any current contact information for former student Tara Wood. Gordon Stoddard had Mrs. Atkins check but the answer was no. Bosch asked if they could borrow the 1988 yearbook to make copies of some of the photos and Stoddard gave his approval.
“I’m on my way out,” he said. “I’ll walk with you.”
They small-talked on the way back to the library and Stoddard gave them the yearbook, which had already been returned to the shelves. On the way out to the parking lot Stoddard stopped with them once more in front of the memorial plaque. Bosch ran his fingers over the raised letters of Becky Verloren’s name. He noticed that the edges had been worn smooth over the years by many students doing the same thing.