BOSCH WENT HOME to take a shower, get fresh clothes and maybe close his eyes for a while before heading back downtown for the unit meeting. Once again he drove through a city that was just waking for the day. And once more it came up ugly in his eyes, all sharp edges and harsh glare. Everything seemed ugly to him now.
Bosch didn’t look forward to the unit meeting. He knew all eyes would be on him. Everybody in Open-Unsolved understood that their actions would now be analyzed and second-guessed following Mackey’s death. They also understood that if they were looking for a reason for the potential threat to their careers, they didn’t have to look far.
Bosch threw his keys on the kitchen counter and checked the phone. No messages. He looked at his watch and determined that he had at least a couple hours before he needed to head toward the Pacific Dining Car. Checking the time reminded him of the ultimatum he had given Irving during their confrontation in the hallway outside RHD. But Bosch doubted he would hear from Irving or McClellan now. It seemed as though everybody was calling his bluffs.
He knew sleeping for a couple hours wasn’t really an option, not with everything that weighed on him. He had carried the murder book and the accumulated files into the house. He decided he would work on them. He knew that when all else went wrong there was always the murder book. He had to keep his eyes on the prize. The case.
He started the coffee brewer, took a five-minute shower and then went to work rereading the murder book while a remastered release of Kind of Blue sounded from the CD player.
The feeling that he was missing something right in front of him was grinding on him. He felt that he would be haunted by the case, that he would carry it around with him forever, unless he cracked through and found that missing thing. And he knew that if it was to be found anywhere, it would be in the book.
He decided that this time he would not read through the documents in the order they had been presented to him by the first investigators of the case. He snapped open the rings and took the documents out. He started reading them in random order, taking his time, making sure that he absorbed every name, every word, every photo.
Fifteen minutes later he was staring once again at the crime scene photos of Rebecca Verloren’s bedroom when he heard a car door close in front of his house. Curious about who would be parking out there so early he got up and went to the door. Through the peephole he saw a man approaching by himself. It was hard to clearly see him through the convex lens of the peep. Bosch opened the door anyway, before the man had a chance to knock.
It did not surprise the man that his approach had been watched. Bosch could tell by his demeanor that he was a cop.
“McClellan?”
He nodded.
“Lieutenant McClellan. And I assume you are Detective Bosch.”
“You could have called.”
Bosch stepped back to let him in. Neither man offered to shake hands. Bosch thought it was typical of Irving to send his man to the house. A standard procedure in the old I-know-where-you-live intimidation strategy.
“I thought it better that we talk face to face,” McClellan said.
“You thought? Or Chief Irving thought?”
McClellan was a big man with sandy, almost transparent hair and wide, florid cheeks. Bosch thought he could best be described as well fed. His cheeks turned a darker shade at Bosch’s question.
“Look, I’m here to cooperate with you, Detective.”
“Good. Can I get you something? I have water.”
“Water’d be fine.”
“Have a seat.”
Bosch went into the kitchen and chose the dustiest glass from the cabinet and then filled it with tap water. He flicked off the switch on the coffeemaker and warmer. He wasn’t going to let McClellan get cozy.
When he returned to the living room McClellan was looking out through the sliding glass door and across the deck. The air was clear in the pass. But it was still early.
“Nice view,” McClellan said.
“I know. I don’t see any files in your hand, Lieutenant. I hope this isn’t a social call or like one of those visits you made to Robert Verloren seventeen years ago.”
McClellan turned to Bosch and accepted the glass of water and the insult with the same blank expression.
“There are no files. If there were, they disappeared a long time ago.”
“And what? You’re here to try to convince me with your memories?”
“As a matter of fact, I have great recall of that time period. You have to understand something. I was a detective first grade assigned to the PDU. If I was given a job, I did it. You don’t question command in that situation. You do and you’re out.”
“So you were a good soldier just doing your job. I get it. What about the Chatsworth Eights and the Verloren murder? What about the alibis?”
“There were eight principal players in the Eights. I cleared them all. And don’t think I wanted to clear them and so I just did. I was told to see if any of these little pissants could have been involved. And I checked it out, but they all came up clean—on the murder at least.”
“Tell me about William Burkhart and Roland Mackey.”
McClellan sat down on a chair by the television. He put his glass of water, which he had yet to drink from, down on the coffee table. Bosch turned off Miles Davis in the middle of “Freddie Freeloader” and stood with his hands in his pockets near the sliding doors.
“Well, first of all, Burkhart was easy. We were already watching him that night.”
“Explain that.”
“He had just gotten out of Wayside a few days before. We had gotten tipped that while he was up there he was re-upping on the racial religion, so it was thought to be prudent to keep an eye on him to see if he was going to try to start things up again.”
“Who ordered that?”
McClellan just looked at him.
“Irving, of course,” Bosch answered. “Keeping the deal safe. So PDU was watching Burkhart. Who else?”
“Burkhart got out and hooked up with two guys from the old group. A guy named Withers and another named Simmons. It looked like they might’ve been planning something, but on the night in question they were in a pool hall on Tampa drinking themselves into oblivion. It was solid. Two undercovers were in there with them the whole time. That’s what I’m here to tell you. They were all solid, Detective.”
“Yeah? Well, tell me about Mackey. The PDU wasn’t watching him, was it?”
“No, not Mackey.”
“Then how was he so solid?”
“What I remember about Mackey was that on the night the girl was taken he was getting tutored at Chatsworth High. He was going to night school, getting his high school degree.”
“Actually, his general education degree. Not exactly the same thing.”
“That’s right. A judge had ordered it as a condition of probation. Only he had to pass and he wasn’t doing too good. But he was getting tutored on the off nights—when there was no school. And the night the girl got grabbed, he was with his tutor. I confirmed it.”
Bosch shook his head. McClellan was trying to feed him a line.
“You’re telling me Mackey was getting tutored through the middle of the night? Either you’re full of shit or you believed a line of bullshit from Mackey and his tutor. Who was the tutor?”
“No, no, they were together earlier in the evening. I don’t remember the guy’s name now, but they were done by like eleven at the latest and then they went their separate ways. Mackey went home.”
Bosch looked astonished.
“That’s no alibi, Lieutenant! Time of death on the girl was two in the a.m. Didn’t you know that?”
“Of course I did. But time of death wasn’t the only alibi point. I was given the summaries put together by the guys on the case. There was no forced entry to that house. And the father had gone around and checked all the doors and locks after he got home at ten that night. That meant the killer had to have been inside the house at that point. He was in there hiding, waiting for everybody to go to sleep.”
Bosch sat down on the couch and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He suddenly realized that McClellan was right and that everything was now different. He had seen the same report McClellan had seen seventeen years before but its meaning had not registered. The killer had been inside by the time Robert Verloren came home from work.
This changed a lot, Bosch knew. It changed how he looked not only at the first investigation, but also at his own.
Not registering Bosch’s inner turmoil, McClellan continued.
“So Mackey couldn’t have gotten into that house because he was with his tutor. He checked out. All those little assholes checked out. So I gave my boss a verbal report and then he told the two guys working the case. And that was the end of it until this DNA thing came up.”
Bosch was nodding to what McClellan was saying but he was thinking about other things.
“If Mackey was clean, how do you explain his DNA on the murder weapon?” he asked.
McClellan looked dumbfounded. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t explain it. I cleared him of involvement in the actual murder, but he must’ve . . .”
He didn’t finish. Bosch thought that he actually looked wounded by the idea that he might have helped a murderer or at least the person who provided the weapon for a murder to get away with it. He looked as though he knew all at once that he had been corrupted by Irving. He looked crushed.
“Is Irving still planning to tip the media and IAD to all of this?” Bosch asked quietly.
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.