BOSCH GOT TO THE SQUAD meeting at the Pacific Dining Car late because of traffic coming in from the Valley. Everyone was in a private area in the back of the restaurant. Most of them already had plates of food in front of them.
His excitement must have showed. Pratt interrupted a report from Tim Marcia to look at Bosch and say, “You either got lucky during the time you had off or you just don’t care about the deep shit we’re in here.”
“I got lucky,” Bosch said as he took the only empty chair and sat down. “But not in the way you mean. Raj Patel just pulled a palm print and two fingers off a wood slat that was beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed.”
“That’s good,” Pratt said dryly. “What’s it mean?”
“It means that as soon as Raj runs it through the database we might have our killer.”
“How so?” Rider asked.
Bosch had never called her. He could already feel a hostile vibe from her.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bosch said to her. Then to the others, he said, “I was looking through the original latents report in the murder book. I realized that they went in there for prints the day after the girl’s body was found. They never went back after it became a strong possibility that the abductor had come into the house earlier in the day when the garage was left open and hid somewhere until everybody was asleep.”
“So why the bed?” Pratt asked.
“The crime scene photos showed the ruffle at the foot of the bed had been pushed in. Like somebody had crawled underneath. They missed it because they weren’t looking for it.”
“Good work, Harry,” Pratt said. “If Raj gets a hit we change directions and move with it. All right, let’s get back to our reports. You can check with your partner on what you’ve missed so far.”
Pratt then turned to Robinson and Nord at the other end of the long table and said, “What did you come up with on the call for the tow truck?”
“Not a lot that helps,” Nord said. “Because the call was made after we had switched our monitoring to the line at the Burkhart property, we don’t have an audio recording of it. But we do have the pen registers and they show that the call came directly to Tampa Towing before being bounced over to the Triple A answering service. The call came from a pay phone outside the Seven-Eleven on Tampa by the freeway entrance. He probably made the call, then drove down the entrance and waited.”
“Prints on the phone?” Pratt asked.
“We asked Raj to take a look after he cleared the scene,” Robinson said. “The phone had been wiped.”
“Figures,” Pratt said. “You talked to Triple A?”
“Yes. No help other than to say the caller was a male.”
He turned to Bosch.
“You have anything to add that your partner didn’t already tell us?”
“Probably just more of the same. Burkhart looks like he is clear on last night and he looks like he’s clear on Verloren as well. Both nights he happened to be under LAPD surveillance.”
Rider gave him her knotted-brow look. He had even more information she didn’t know. He looked away.
“Well, that’s just perfect,” Pratt said. “So who, what and where does that leave us, people?”
“Well, basically, our newspaper plant backfired,” Rider said. “It may have worked in terms of getting Mackey to want to talk about Verloren, but he never got the chance. Somebody else saw the story.”
“That somebody being the actual killer,” Pratt said.
“Exactly,” Rider said. “The person Mackey helped and/or gave the gun to seventeen years ago. That person also saw the story and knew it wasn’t his blood on the gun, so that meant it had to be Mackey’s. He knew Mackey was the link to him, so Mackey had to go.”
“So how did he set it up?” Pratt asked.
“He was either smart enough to figure the story was a plant and we were watching Mackey, or he just figured the best way to get to Mackey was the way he did it. Get him out there alone. Like I said, he was smart. He picked a time and place that would result in Mackey being alone and vulnerable. On that entrance ramp you are up above the freeway. Even with the tow truck’s lights on, nobody would see up there.”
“It was also a good spot in case Mackey had a tail,” Nord added. “The killer knew a tail car would have to just keep moving by, and then he’d have Mackey alone.”
“Aren’t we giving this guy a little too much credit?” Pratt asked. “How would he know the cops were onto this guy? Just from a newspaper article? Come on.”
Neither Bosch nor Rider answered and everyone else silently digested the unspoken suggestion that the killer had a connection to the department or, more specifically, the investigation.
“All right, what’s next?” Pratt said. “I think the containment on this is maybe another twenty-four hours tops. After that it’s going to be in the papers and upstairs on six, and there’s going to be hair on the walls if we don’t wrap it up first. What do we do?”
“We’ll take the pen registers,” Bosch said, speaking for himself and Rider. “And go from there.”
Bosch had been thinking about the note to Mackey he had seen on the desk in the service station the day before. A call to verify employment from Visa. As Rider had pointed out when she first heard about it, Mackey wasn’t into leaving trails like credit cards. It was something that didn’t fit and therefore he wanted to go after it.
“We have all of the printouts right here,” Robinson said. “The line that was busiest was the one into the station. All kinds of business calls.”
“Okay, Harry, Kiz, you want the registers?” Pratt asked.
Rider looked at Bosch and then at Pratt.
“If that’s what Harry wants. He seems to be on a roll today.”
As if on cue Bosch’s phone began to chirp. He looked at the screen. It was Raj Patel.
“We’ll see what kind of a roll right now,” he said as he opened the phone.
Patel said he had good and bad news.
“The good news is we still had the exemplar skid from the house in records here. The latents we recovered this morning did not match any of them. You found somebody new, Harry. It could be your killer.”
What this meant was that fingerprint examples from the members of the Verloren family and others who had appropriate access to the house were still on file in the SID print lab. None of those examples matched the fingerprints and palm print recovered that morning from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. Of course fingerprints could not be dated, and it was possible that the prints discovered that morning had been left by whoever had installed the bed. But it seemed unlikely. The prints were taken off the underside of the wooden slat. Whoever had left them had most likely been under the bed.
“And the bad news?” Bosch asked.
“I just ran them through the California system. No matches.”
“What about the FBI?”
“That’s next but that won’t be so fast. They have to process it. I will send it through with an expedite request but you know how that goes.”
“I do, Raj. Let me know when you know, and thanks for the effort.”
Bosch closed the phone. He felt a steep letdown and his face showed it. He could already tell the others knew the score before he delivered the news.
“No match on the DOJ database,” he said. “He’ll try the bureau’s base but that will take a while.”
“Shit!” said Renner.
“Speaking of Raj Patel,” Pratt said, “his brother scheduled the autopsy for two o’clock today. I want one team there. Who wants to take it?”
Renner weakly raised his hand. He and Robleto would take it. It was an easy assignment if you didn’t mind the visuals.
The meeting soon broke up after Pratt assigned Robinson and Nord the service station and the interviews of the people Mackey worked with there. Marcia and Jackson would work on pulling reports together and into a murder book. They were still the lead investigators and would coordinate things from room 503.
Pratt looked at the bill, divided it by nine and told everyone to put in ten. This meant Bosch had to throw in a ten even though he hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. He didn’t protest. It was the price of being late and being the guy who put them on this path.
As everyone stood Bosch caught Rider’s eye.
“Did you come directly here or did you ride with somebody?”
“Abel gave me a lift.”
“Want to ride back together?”
“Sure.”
Outside the restaurant she gave Bosch the silent treatment while they waited for his car from the valet. She stared at the large plastic steer that was atop the restaurant’s sign. Under her arm was a file containing the printouts from the pen registers.
Finally the car came and they got in. Before pulling out of the lot Bosch turned and looked at her.
“All right, say it,” he said.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you want to say so you can feel better.”
“You should’ve called me, Harry, that’s all.”
“Look, Kiz, I called you yesterday and you chewed me out. I was just working off of recent experience.”
“This was different and you know it. You called me yesterday because you were excited about something. Today you were following a lead. I should have been with you. And then to not find out what you came up with until you went in there and told everybody. That was embarrassing, Harry. Thanks for that.”
Bosch nodded his contrition.
“You’re right about that part. I’m sorry. I should’ve called you when I was coming in. I just forgot. I knew I was late and I had both hands on the wheel and was just trying to get here.”
She didn’t say anything, so he finally did.
“Can we get back to solving this case now?”
She shrugged and he finally put the car in drive. On the way to Parker Center he tried to fill her in on all the details he hadn’t mentioned during the breakfast meeting. He told her about McClellan’s visit to his house and how that led him to the discovery of the prints under the bed.
Twenty minutes later they were in their alcove in room 503. Bosch finally had a cup of coffee in front of him. They sat across from each other and had the pen register printouts spread between them.
Bosch was concentrating on the reports on the service station phones. The listing was at least a couple hundred entries—calls going in or out on the station’s two phones—between 6 a.m., when the surveillance started, and 4 p.m., when Mackey reported for work and Renner and Robleto started live-monitoring the line.
Bosch scanned down the list. Nothing looked immediately familiar. Many of the calls were to or from business listings with some automobile connection clearly apparent in the name. Many others came in from the AAA dispatch center and these were likely tow calls.
There were also several calls that came from personal phones. Bosch looked closely at these names but saw nothing that jumped out at him. No one listed was an already established player in the case.
There were four entries on the list that were attributed to Visa, all the same number. Bosch picked up the phone and called it. He never heard it ring. He just got the loud screeching sound of a computer hookup. It was so loud that even Rider heard it.
“What is that?”
Bosch hung up.
“I’m trying to run down that note I saw on the desk in the station about Visa calling to confirm Mackey’s employment. Remember you said it didn’t fit?”
“I forgot about that. Was that the number?”
“I don’t know. There are four listings for Visa but—wait a minute.”
He realized that the Visa calls were outgoing calls.
“Never mind, these were outgoing. It must be the number the machine calls when you use a credit card to pay. That’s not it. There is no incoming call listed as Visa.”
Bosch picked up the phone again and called Nord’s cell phone.
“Are you at the service station yet?”
She laughed.
“We’ve barely cleared Hollywood. We’ll be there in a half hour.”
“Ask them about a phone message somebody left for Mackey yesterday. Something about Visa calling to confirm employment on a credit application. Ask them what they remember from the call and more importantly, what time it came in. Try to get the exact time if you can. Ask them about this first thing and then call me back.”
“Yes, sir. You want us to pick up your laundry, too?”
Bosch realized it was getting to be a bad morning for stepping on toes.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’re working under the gun here.”
“Aren’t we all? I’ll call you as soon as we see the guy.”
Nord hung up. Bosch put the phone down and looked at Rider. She was looking at the class picture of Rebecca Verloren in the yearbook they had borrowed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked without looking up at Bosch.
“This thing with Visa bothers me.”
“I know, so what are you thinking?”
“Well, say you’re the killer and you got the gun you did it with from Mackey.”
“You’re completely giving up on Burkhart? You sure liked him last night.”
“Let’s just say the facts are persuading me. For now, okay?”
“Okay, go on.”
“All right, so you’re the killer and you got the gun from Mackey. He’s the one person in the world who can put the thing on you. But seventeen years go by and nothing ever happens and you feel safe and maybe you even lose track of Mackey.”
“Okay.”
“And then yesterday you pick up the paper and you see the picture of Rebecca and you read the story and it says they’ve got DNA. You know it wasn’t your blood, so it was either a big bluff by the cops or it’s got to be Mackey’s blood. So that’s when you know.”
“Mackey’s gotta go.”
“Exactly. The cops are getting close. He’s got to go. So how do you find him? Well, Mackey’s spent his entire life—when he isn’t in jail—driving a tow truck. If you knew that then you’d do exactly what we did. You get out the yellow pages and start calling tow companies.”
Rider stood up and went to the bank of file cabinets along the alcove’s back wall. The phone books were stacked haphazardly on top. She had to stand on her toes to reach the yellow pages for the Valley. She came back and opened the book to the pages advertising tow services. She ran her finger down a listing until she reached Tampa Towing, where Mackey had worked. She backed up to the previous listing, a company called Tall Order Towing Services. She picked up her phone and dialed the number. Bosch heard only her side of the conversation.
“Yes, who am I speaking with?”
She waited a moment.
“My name is Detective Kizmin Rider with the Los Angeles Police Department. I am investigating a fraud case and wondered if I could ask you a question.”
Rider nodded as she apparently got a go-ahead.
“The suspect I am documenting has a history of calling businesses and identifying himself as someone working for Visa. He then attempts to verify someone else’s employment as part of an application for a credit card. Does any of this ring a bell with you? We have information that leads us to believe that this individual was operating in the Valley yesterday. He likes to target automotive businesses.”
Rider waited while there was a response to her question. She looked at Bosch but gave no indication of anything.
“Yes, could you put her on the line, please?”
Rider went through the whole thing again with another person and asked the same question. Then she leaned forward and seemed to take a stiffer attitude in her posture. She covered the mouthpiece and looked at Bosch.
“Bingo,” she said.
She then went back to the phone call and listened some more.
“Was it a male or female?”
She wrote something down.
“And what time was this?”
She wrote another note and Bosch stood up so he could look across his desk to read it. She had written “male, 1:30 approx” on a scratch pad. While she continued the conversation Bosch consulted the pen register and saw that a call came in on the Tampa Towing line at 1:40 p.m. It was from a personal number. The name on the register was Amanda Sobek. The number’s prefix indicated it was a cell phone. Neither the name nor the number meant anything to Bosch. But that didn’t matter. He thought they were getting close to something here.
Rider finished her call by asking if the person she was talking to remembered the name the supposed Visa employee had tried to confirm. After she apparently got a negative reply, she asked, “What about the name Roland Mackey?”
She waited.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Okay, thank you for your time, Karen.”
She hung up and looked at Bosch. The excitement in her eyes wiped out everything about being left out of the morning’s fingerprints find.
“You were right,” she said. “They got a call. Same thing. She even remembered the name Roland Mackey once I gave it to her. Harry, somebody was tracking him down the whole time we were watching him.”
“And now we’re going to track them down. If they were going down the line in the phone book they would have called Tampa Towing next. The register shows a one-forty call from somebody named Amanda Sobek. I don’t recognize it but this might be the call we’re looking for.”
“Amanda Sobek,” Rider said as she opened her laptop. “Let’s see what AutoTrack has on her.”
While she was tracing the name, Bosch got a call from Robinson, who had arrived with Nord at Tampa Towing.
“Harry, the dayshift guy says that call came in between one-thirty and two o’clock. He knows because he had just come back from lunch and he was sent out on a tow at two o’clock. A Triple A run.”
“Was it a male or female caller from Visa?”
“Male.”
“Okay, anything else?”
“Yeah, once this guy confirmed that Mackey worked here, the Visa guy asked what hours he worked.”
“Okay. Can you ask the day man another question?”
“He’s right here.”
“Ask if they have a customer named Sobek. Amanda Sobek.”
Bosch waited while the question was asked.
“No customer named Sobek,” Robinson reported back. “Is that good news, Harry?”
“It’ll work.”
After closing the phone Bosch got up and walked around the desks so he could look at Rider’s computer screen. He told her what Robinson had just reported.
“Anything on Amanda Sobek?” he asked.
“Yeah, this is it. She lives in the West Valley. Farralone Avenue in Chatsworth. But there is not a lot here. No credit cards or mortgage. I think it means it’s all in her husband’s name. She might be a housewife. I’m running the address to see if I can pull him up.”
Bosch opened the yearbook to Rebecca Verloren’s class. He started flipping through the pages looking for the name Sobek or Amanda.
“Here he is,” Rider said. “Mark Sobek. Everything’s basically in his name and it looks like a lot. Four cars, two houses, lots of credit cards.”
“There was nobody named Sobek in her class,” Bosch said. “But there were two girls named Amanda. Amanda Reynolds and Amanda Riordan. Think she is one of them?”
Rider shook her head.
“I don’t think so. The age is off. This says Amanda Sobek is forty-one. That would make her eight years older than Rebecca. Something doesn’t fit. Think we should just call her?”
Bosch closed the yearbook with a bang. Rider jumped in her seat.
“No,” he said. “Let’s just go.”
“Where? To see her?”
“Yeah. Time to get off your ass and knock on doors.”
He looked down at Rider and could tell she wasn’t amused.
“I don’t mean your ass specifically. It’s a figure of speech. Let’s just go.”
She started getting up.
“You are awfully flippant for somebody who might not have a job at the end of the day.”
“It’s the only way to be, Kiz. Darkness waits. But it comes no matter what you do.”
He led the way out of the office.