AT 7:50 A.M. THE NEXT DAY Bosch was back on the Nickel. He was watching the food line at the Metro Shelter and he had his eye on Robert Verloren back in the kitchen behind the steam tables. Bosch had gotten lucky. In the early morning, it was almost as if there had been a shift change among the homeless. The people who patrolled the street in darkness were sleeping off the night’s failures. They were replaced by the first shift of homeless, the people who were smart enough to hide from the street at night. Bosch’s intention had been to start at the big centers again and go from there. But as he had made his way into the homeless zone after parking again in Japantown, he started showing the photo of Verloren to the most lucid of the street people he encountered and almost immediately started getting responses. The day people recognized Verloren. Some said they had seen the man in the photo around but that he was much older now. Eventually Bosch came across one man who matter-of-factly said, “Yeah, that’s Chef,” and he pointed Bosch toward the Metro Shelter.
The Metro was one of the smaller satellite shelters that were clustered around the Salvation Army and the Los Angeles Mission and designed to handle the overflow of street people, particularly in the winter months when warmer weather in L.A. drew a migration from colder points north. These smaller centers didn’t have the means to provide three squares a day and by agreement specialized in one service. At the Metro Shelter the service was a breakfast that started at 7 a.m. daily. By the time Bosch got there the line of wobbling, disheveled men and women was extending out the door of the chow center and the long rows of picnic-style tables inside were maxed out. The word on the street was that the Metro had the best breakfast on the Nickel.
Bosch had badged his way through the door and very quickly spotted Verloren in the kitchen beyond the serving tables. It didn’t appear that Verloren was doing one particular job. Instead, he seemed to be checking on the preparation of several things. It appeared that he was in charge. He was neatly dressed in a white, double-breasted kitchen shirt over dark pants, a spotless white apron that went down past his knees and a tall white chef’s hat.
The breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs with red and green peppers, hash browns, grits and disc sausages. It looked and smelled good to Bosch, who had left home without eating anything because he wanted to get moving. To the right of the serving line was a coffee station with two large serve-yourself urns. There were racks containing cups made of thick porcelain that had chipped and yellowed over time. Bosch took a cup and filled it with scalding black coffee and he sipped it and waited. When Verloren strode to the serving table, using the skirt of his apron to hold a hot and heavy replacement pan of eggs, Bosch made his move.
“Hey, Chef,” he called above the clatter of serving spoons and voices.
Verloren looked over and Bosch saw him immediately determine that Bosch was not a “client.” As with the night before, Bosch was dressed informally, but he thought Verloren might have even been able to guess he was a cop. He stepped away from the serving table and approached. But he didn’t come all the way. There seemed to be an invisible line on the floor that was the demarcation between kitchen and eating space. Verloren didn’t cross it. He stood there using his apron to hold the near-empty serving pan he had taken from the steam table.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, do you have a minute? I would like to talk to you.”
“No, I don’t have a minute. I’m in the middle of breakfast.”
“It’s about your daughter.”
Bosch saw the slight waver in Verloren’s eyes. They dropped for a second and then came back up.
“You’re the police?”
Bosch nodded.
“Can I just get through this rush? We’re putting out the last trays now.”
“No problem.”
“You want to eat? You look like you’re hungry.”
“Uh . . .”
Bosch looked around the room at the crowded tables. He didn’t know where he would sit. He knew that these sorts of chow halls had the same unspoken protocols as prisons. Add in the high degree of mental illness in the homeless population and you could be crossing some sort of line just by the seat you chose.
“Come back with me,” Verloren said. “We have a table in the back.”
Bosch turned back to Verloren but the breakfast chef was already heading back to the kitchen. Bosch followed and was led through the cooking and prep areas to a rear room where there was an empty stainless steel table with a full ashtray on it.
“Have a seat.”
Verloren removed the ashtray and held it behind his back. It was not like he was hiding it. It was like he was a waiter or a maître d’ and he wanted his table perfect for the customer. Bosch thanked him and sat down.
“I’ll be right back.”
It seemed that in less than a minute Verloren brought a plate back loaded with all the things Bosch had seen on the serving table. When he put down the silverware Bosch saw the shake in his hand.
“Thank you, but I was just thinking, will there be enough? You know, for the people coming through?”
“We’re not turning anybody away today. Not as long as they’re on time. How’s your coffee?”
“It’s fine, thanks. You know, it wasn’t like I didn’t want to sit out there with them. I just didn’t know where to sit.”
“I understand. You don’t have to explain. Let me get those trays out and then we can talk. Is there an arrest?”
Bosch looked at him. There was a hopeful, maybe even pleading look in Verloren’s eyes.
“Not yet,” Bosch said. “But we’re getting close to something.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Eat. I call that Malibu scrambled.”
Bosch looked down at his plate. Verloren went back to the kitchen.
The eggs were good. So was the whole breakfast. No toast, but that would have been asking too much. The break area where he sat was between the cooking area of the kitchen and the large room where two men loaded an industrial dishwasher. It was loud, the noise from both directions ricocheting off the gray tiled walls. There was a set of double doors leading to the back alley. One door was open and cool air came in and kept the steam from the dishwasher and the heat from the kitchen at bay.
After Bosch cleaned his plate and washed it down with the rest of his coffee he got up and stepped into the alley to make a phone call away from all the noise. He immediately saw the alley was an encampment. The rear walls of the missions on one side and the toy warehouses on the other were lined almost end to end with cardboard and canvas shanties. It was quiet. These were probably the self-made shelters of the night people. It wasn’t that there was no room for them in the mission dormitories. It was that those beds came with basic rules attached and the people in the alley did not want to abide by such rules.
He called Kiz Rider’s cell phone number and she answered right away. She was already in room 503 and had just finished distributing the wiretap application. Bosch spoke in a low voice.
“I found the father.”
“Great work, Harry. You still got it. What did he say? Did he recognize Mackey?”
“I haven’t talked to him yet.”
He explained the situation and asked if there was anything new on her end.
“The warrant’s on the captain’s desk. Abel’s going to push him on it if we don’t hear back by ten, and then it goes up the chain.”
“How early did you come in?”
“Early. I wanted to get this done.”
“Did you ever get a chance to read the girl’s journal last night?”
“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?”
“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.”
He shook his head tightly, that anger still sharp after all the years. Bosch asked an obvious question, obvious because he knew so well how the LAPD worked back then.
“Did they threaten you?”
Verloren snorted.
“Yes, they threatened me,” he said quietly. “They told me that they knew my daughter had been pregnant but they couldn’t find the clinic she had gone to to get it taken care of. So there was no tissue they could use to identify the father. No way to tell who it was or wasn’t. They said that all it would take was for them to ask a few questions about me and her, like with my customer on the police commission, and the rumors would start to run. They said just a few questions in the right places and pretty soon people would think it was me.”
Bosch didn’t interrupt. He felt his own anger tightening his throat.
“They said it would be hard for me to keep my business if everybody thought I had . . . I had done that to my daughter . . .”
Now more tears came down his dark face. He did nothing to stop their flow.
“And so I did what they wanted. I backed off and dropped it. Stopped stirring the pot. I told myself it didn’t matter; it wouldn’t bring Becky back to us. So I never called Detective Green again . . . and they never solved the case. After a while I started drinking to forget what I had lost and what I had done, that I had put myself and my pride and my reputation and my business ahead of my daughter. And pretty soon, before you knew it, I came to that black hole I was telling you about. I fell in and I’m still climbing out.”
After a moment he turned and looked at Bosch.
“How’s that for a story, Detective?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Verloren. I’m sorry that happened. All of it.”
“Is that the story you wanted to hear, Detective?”
“I just wanted to know the truth. Believe it or not, it is going to help me. It will help me speak for her. Can you describe these two men who came to you?”
Verloren shook his head.
“It’s been a long time. I probably wouldn’t recognize them if they stood in front of me. I just remember they were both white men. One of them I always thought of as Mr. Clean because his head was shaved and he stood with his arms folded like the guy on the bottle.”
Bosch nodded and he felt his anger working into the muscles of his shoulders. He knew who Mr. Clean was.
“How much of all this did your wife know?” he asked in a calm tone.
Verloren shook his head.
“Muriel didn’t know anything about this. I kept it from her. It was my water to carry.”
Verloren wiped his cheeks and seemed to have earned some relief from finally telling the story.
Bosch reached into his back pocket and came up with the old photograph of Roland Mackey. He put it down on the table in front of Verloren.
“Do you recognize this kid?”
Verloren looked for a long moment before shaking his head in the negative.
“Should I? Who is he?”
“His name is Roland Mackey. He was a couple years older than your daughter in ’eighty-eight. He didn’t go to school at Hillside but he lived in Chatsworth.”
Bosch waited for a response but didn’t get any. Verloren just stared at the photo on the table.
“That’s a mug shot. What did he do?”
“Stole a car. But he has a record of associating with white power extremists. In and outside of jail. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just asking. Can you remember if your daughter ever mentioned his name or maybe somebody named Ro?”
Verloren shook his head.
“What we are trying to do is figure out if they could have intersected anywhere. The Valley’s a big place. They could’ve—”
“What school did he go to?”
“He went to Chatsworth High but never finished. He got a GED.”
“Rebecca went to Chatsworth High for driver’s ed the summer before she was taken.”
“You mean ’eighty-seven?”
Verloren nodded.
“I’ll check it out.”
But Bosch didn’t think it was a good lead. Mackey had dropped out before the summer of 1987 and didn’t come back for his general education degree until 1988. Still, it was worth a thorough look.
“What about the movies? Did she like to go to movies and the mall?”
Verloren shrugged.
“She was a sixteen-year-old girl. Of course she liked movies. Most of her friends had cars. Once they hit sixteen and got mobile they were all over the place. My wife called it the three Ms—movies, malls, and Madonna.”
“Which malls? Which theaters?”
“They went to the Northridge Mall because it was close, you know. They also liked to go to the drive-in over on Winnetka. That way they could sit in the car and talk during the movie. One of the girls had a convertible and they liked going in that.”
Bosch zeroed in on the drive-in. He had forgotten about it when he had spoken about movie theaters with Rider earlier. But Roland Mackey had once been arrested burglarizing the same drive-in on Winnetka. That made it a key possibility as the point of intersection.
“How often did Rebecca and her friends go to the drive-in?”
“I think they liked to go on Friday nights, when the new movies were just out.”
“Did they meet boys there?”
“I would assume so. You see, this is all just second-guessing. There was nothing wrong or unnatural about our daughter going to the movies with her friends and meeting up with boys and whatnot. It is only after the worst-case scenario happens that people ask, ‘Why don’t you know who she was with?’ We thought everything was fine. We sent her to the best school we could find. Her friends were from nice families. We couldn’t watch her every minute of the day. Friday nights—hell, most nights—I worked late at the restaurant.”
“I understand. I am not judging you as a parent, Mr. Verloren. I see nothing wrong with that, okay? I am just dragging a net. I’m collecting as much information as I can because you never know what might become important.”
“Yeah, well, that net got snagged and ripped on the rocks a long time ago.”
“Maybe not.”
“You think this Mackey fellow is the one, then?”
“He’s connected somehow, that’s all we know for sure. We’ll know more soon enough. I promise you that.”
Verloren turned and looked directly into Bosch’s eyes for the first time during the interview.
“When you get to that point, you will speak for her, won’t you, Detective?”
Bosch nodded slowly. He thought he knew what Verloren was asking.
“Yes sir, I will.”