KIZ RIDER WAS almost halfway through the murder book when Bosch got back with the fresh round of coffees. She took her cup directly out of his hand.
“Thanks. I need something to keep me awake.”
“What, you’re going to sit there and tell me that this is boring compared to pushing paper in the chief’s office?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just all the catching up, the reading. We’ve got to know this book inside and out. We’ve got to be alert for the possibilities.”
Bosch noticed she had a legal tablet next to the murder book and the top page was almost full of notes. He couldn’t read the notes but could see that most of the lines were followed by question marks.
“Besides,” she added, “I’m using different muscles now. Muscles I didn’t use on the sixth floor.”
“I get it,” he said. “All right if I start in behind you now?”
“Be my guest.”
She popped open the rings of the binder and pulled out the two-inch-thick sheaf of documents she had already read through. She handed them across to Bosch, who had sat down at his desk.
“You got an extra pad like that?” he asked. “I just have a little notebook.”
She sighed in an exaggerated way. Bosch knew it was all an act and that she was happy they were working together again. She had spent most of the last two years evaluating policy and troubleshooting for the new chief. It wasn’t the real cop work that she was best at. This was.
She slid a pad across the desk to him.
“You need a pen, too?”
“No, I think I can handle that.”
He put the documents down in front of him and started reading. He was ready to go and he didn’t need the coffee to stay charged.
THE FIRST PAGE of the murder book was a color photograph in a plastic three-hole sleeve. The photo was a yearbook portrait of an exotically attractive young girl with almond-shaped eyes that were startling green against her mocha skin. She had tightly curled brown hair with what looked like natural blonde highlights that caught the flash of the camera. Her eyes were bright and her smile genuine. It was a grin that said she knew things nobody else did. Bosch didn’t think she was beautiful. Not yet. Her features seemed to compete with one another in an uncoordinated way. But he knew that teenage awkwardness often smoothed over and became beauty later.
But for sixteen-year-old Rebecca Verloren there would be no later. Nineteen eighty-eight would be her last year. The cold hit had come from her murder.
Becky, as she was known by family and friends, was the only child of Robert and Muriel Verloren. Muriel was a homemaker. Robert was the chef and owner of a popular Malibu restaurant called the Island House Grill. They lived on Red Mesa Way off of Santa Susana Pass Road in Chatsworth, at the northwest corner of the sprawl that made up Los Angeles. The backyard of their house was the wooded incline of Oat Mountain, which rose above Chatsworth and served as the northwest border of the city. That summer Becky was between her sophomore and junior years at Hillside Preparatory School. It was a private school in nearby Porter Ranch, where she was on the honor roll and her mother volunteered in the cafeteria and often brought jerk chicken and other specialties from her husband’s restaurant for the faculty lunchroom.
On the morning of July 6, 1988, the Verlorens discovered their daughter missing from their home. They found the back door unlocked, though they were sure it had been secured the night before. Thinking the girl might have gone for a walk they waited worriedly for two hours but she did not return. That day she was scheduled to go to the restaurant with her father to work the lunch shift as an assistant hostess and it was well past the time to leave for Malibu. While her mother called her friends hoping to locate her, her father went up the hillside behind the house looking for her. When he came back down the hill without finding a sign of her they decided it was time to call the police.
Patrol officers from the Devonshire Division were called to the home. They found no evidence of a break-in at the house. Citing this and the fact that the girl was in an age group with one of the highest runaway rates, the disappearance was viewed as a possible runaway situation and handled as a routine missing-persons case. This was against the protests of the missing girl’s parents, who did not believe she had run away or left their home of her own volition.
The parents were proved horribly correct two days later when the decomposing body of Becky Verloren was found hidden beside the fallen trunk of an oak tree about ten yards off an equestrian trail on Oat Mountain. A woman riding her Appaloosa had gone off the path to investigate a bad smell and came across the body. The rider might have ignored the odor but had earlier seen signs posted on telephone poles about the missing girl from the area.
Becky Verloren had died less than a quarter mile from her house. It was likely that her father had passed within yards or even feet of her body when he was hiking the hillside and calling out her name. But on that morning there had been no odor yet to draw his attention.
Bosch was the father of a young girl. Though she lived far away from him with her mother, she was never far from his thoughts. He thought now of a father climbing a steep hillside, calling for a daughter who would never come home.
He tried to concentrate on the murder book.
The victim had been shot once in the chest by a high-powered pistol. The weapon, a .45 caliber Colt semiautomatic, was lying in the leaves by her left ankle. As Bosch studied the crime scene photos he saw what appeared to be a burn from a contact shot on the fabric of her light blue nightgown. The bullet hole was located directly above the heart, and Bosch knew by the size of the gun and the entry wound that death was likely immediate. Her heart would have been shattered by the round as it blasted through her body.
For a long time Bosch studied the photographs of the body as it had been found. The victim’s hands were not bound. She was not gagged. Her face was turned in toward the trunk of the fallen tree. There were no indications of defensive wounds of any nature. There was no indication of sexual molestation or any other assault.
The police misinterpretation of the girl’s disappearance was initially compounded by the misinterpretation of the death scene. The assessment at the scene resulted in the death being viewed as a probable suicide. As such the case was kept by the local division’s homicide squad and the two detectives who rolled on the body call, Ron Green and Arturo Garcia. Devonshire Division was at that time and still is the LAPD’s quietest station. Representing a large bedroom community with high property values and mostly upper-middle-class residents, Devonshire always had crime tables that were among the lowest in the city. Inside the department the station was known as Club Dev. It was a highly sought-after posting by officers and detectives who had put in many years and were tired or had simply seen enough action. Devonshire Division also represented the part of the city closest to Simi Valley, a quiet, relatively crime-free community in Ventura County where hundreds of LAPD officers chose to live. A posting at Devonshire made the commute a breeze and the workload the lightest in the department.
The Club Dev pedigree played in the back of Bosch’s mind as he read the reports. He knew part of his task here was to make a judgment on Green and Garcia’s work, to determine if they had been up to the task. He did not know them and had no experience with them. He had no idea what level of skills and dedication they had brought to the case. There was the initial misinterpretation of the death as a suicide. But by the appearance of the records, the two investigators seemed to recover quickly and move on with the case. Their reports seemed to be well written, thorough and complete. They seemed to have taken the extra step wherever possible.
Still, Bosch knew that a murder book could be manipulated to give this impression. The truth would be revealed as he delved deeper and continued his own investigation. He knew there could be a vast difference between what was recorded and what was not.
According to the murder book, Green and Garcia quickly reversed investigative directions when suicide was dismissed after the autopsy was completed and the gun found with the body was analyzed. The case was reclassified as a homicide that had been disguised as a suicide.
Bosch first came to the autopsy findings in the murder book. He had read a thousand autopsy protocols and had attended several hundred of the procedures as well. He knew to skip all the weights and measurements and descriptions of the actual procedure and go right to the summary section and the attendant photographs. Unsurprisingly, he found the cause of death listed as a gunshot wound to the chest. The estimated time of death was between midnight and 2 a.m. on July 6. The summary noted that no witness reported hearing the shot, so the time of death estimate was based solely on measuring loss of body temperature.
The surprises were in the other findings. Rebecca Verloren had long, thick hair. At the right side of the base of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair, the medical examiner found a small circular burn mark that was about the size of a button off an oxford shirt. Two inches from this mark was another burn mark, much smaller than the first. High white cell counts in the blood surrounding these wounds indicated that both had been sustained close to but not at the time of death.
The report concluded that the burns were caused by a stun gun, a handheld device that emits a powerful electric charge and renders its victims unconscious or incapacitated for several minutes or longer, depending on the charge. Normally, a charge from a stun gun would leave two small and almost unnoticeable marks on the skin indicating the location of the twin contacts. But if the contact points of the device were held unevenly against the skin, the electric charge would arc and often burn the skin in the manner seen on Becky Verloren’s neck.
The autopsy summary also noted that an examination of the victim’s bare feet found no soil deposits or cuts or bruises, which would be evident had the girl walked barefoot up the mountainside in the dark.
Bosch drummed his pen on the report and thought about this. He knew this was a mistake made by Green and Garcia. The victim’s feet should have been examined at the scene and they should have made the jump right then to the idea that the suicide was a setup. Instead they missed it and they lost two days waiting for the autopsy on a weekend. Those days plus the two days lost when patrol wrote the parents’ call off as a runaway case added up to a bad number in a murder investigation. There was no doubt that the case was slow out of the blocks. Bosch was beginning to see how badly the department had let Rebecca Verloren down.
The autopsy report also contained the results of a gunshot residue test conducted on the victim’s hands. While GSR was found on Becky Verloren’s right hand, there was no indication of it on her left. Even though Verloren was right-handed Bosch knew that the GSR test was an indicator that she had not actually fired the gun that killed her. Experience—no matter how limited—and common sense would have told the investigators that the girl would have needed to use both hands to properly hold the heavy gun pointed against her own chest and to pull the trigger. The result would have been GSR on both her hands.
There was one more notable point in the autopsy summary. The examination of the body determined that the victim had been sexually active, and scarring on the walls of the uterus was indicative of a recent gynecological dilation and curettage procedure to eliminate a pregnancy. The deputy coroner who conducted the autopsy estimated that this had occurred four to six weeks prior to her death.
Bosch read the first Investigator’s Summary report, which was written and added to the book after the autopsy. Green and Garcia had now classified the death as a murder and established the theory that someone had entered the girl’s bedroom while she was sleeping, incapacitated her with a stun gun and then carried her from the room and the house. She was carried up the mountainside to the location by the fallen oak tree, where the murder was committed and clumsily disguised as a suicide in what was possibly a spur-of-the-moment decision by her killer. The report was filed Monday, July 11—five days after Rebecca Verloren had been left dead on the hillside.
Bosch moved on to the firearm analysis report. Though the autopsy had produced more than convincing evidence of staged suicide, the study of the gun and the attendant ballistics further confirmed the investigative theory.
The gun was found to be devoid of fingerprints except for those from Becky Verloren’s right hand. The fact that there were no prints from her left hand or smudges of any kind on the pistol indicated to the investigators that the weapon had been carefully wiped clean of prints before being placed and held in Becky’s hand, then turned toward her chest and fired. It was likely that the victim was unconscious—from the stun gun assault—at the time this manipulation occurred.
The bullet casing ejected from the pistol when the fatal shot was fired was recovered six feet from the body. There were no fingerprints or smudges on it, an indication that the weapon had been loaded with gloved hands.
The investigation’s single most important piece of evidence was recovered during the analysis of the gun itself. It was actually found inside the gun. The weapon was the Mark IV Series 80 model manufactured by Colt in 1986, two years before the murder. It featured a long hammer spur, which was notable because the gun had a reputation for leaving a “tattoo” injury on the shooter if the weapon was not handled properly while firing. This usually occurred when a two-handed grip on the weapon pushed the primary shooting hand up high on the grip and too close to the hammer spur. The primary hand could then receive a painful stamp when the trigger was pulled, the weapon fired and the slide automatically came backward to eject the bullet casing. As the slide returned to firing position, it would pinch the skin of the shooter’s hand—usually the webbing between the thumb and forefinger, often taking a piece of skin back with it inside the gun. All of this occurred in a fraction of a second, the novice shooter often not even knowing what had “bitten” him.
That was exactly what had happened with the gun used to kill Becky Verloren. When a firearms expert broke open the weapon he found a small piece of skin tissue and dried blood on the underside of the slide. It would not have been noticeable to someone examining the exterior of the gun or wiping it clean of blood and fingerprints.
Green and Garcia added this to their investigative theory. In the second Investigator’s Summary report they wrote that evidence indicated that the killer wrapped Becky Verloren’s hand around the gun and then pressed the muzzle to her chest. The killer used one or both of his own hands to steady the weapon and push or pull her finger over the trigger. The gun fired and the slide “tattooed” the killer, taking a piece of his skin with it inside the gun.
Bosch noted to himself that Green and Garcia made no mention of another possibility in their investigative theory. That being that the tissue and the blood found inside the weapon was already there on the night of the murder, that the weapon had tattooed someone other than the killer when it was fired at some point before the killing.
Regardless of that potential oversight, the blood and tissue was collected from the weapon and, while it was already known from the autopsy that Becky Verloren had no wounds on her hands, a routine blood comparison test was conducted. The blood collected from the gun was type O. Becky Verloren’s blood was type AB positive. The investigators concluded they had the killer’s blood on the weapon. The killer was blood type O.
But in 1988 the use of DNA comparison in criminal investigation was still years away from common and, more important, court-accepted practice in California. Databases containing the DNA profiles of criminal offenders were only on the verge of being funded and created. During the course of the 1988 investigation the detectives were left to compare blood type only to potential suspects as they arose. And no one emerged as a primary suspect in the Verloren killing. The case was worked hard and long but ultimately without an arrest ever being made. And it went cold.
“Until now,” Bosch said out loud without realizing it.
“What?” Rider asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”
“You want to start talking about it?”
“Not yet. I want to finish reading first. You’re done?”
“Just about.”
“You know who we have to thank for this, don’t you?” Bosch asked.
She looked at him quizzically.
“I give up.”
“Mel Gibson.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When did Lethal Weapon come out? Right around this time, right?”
“I guess. But what are you talking about? Those movies were so far-fetched.”
“That’s my point. That’s the movie that started all of this holding the gun sideways and with two hands, one over the other. We got blood on this gun because the shooter was a Lethal Weapon fan.”
Rider shook her head dismissively.
“You watch,” Bosch said. “I’m going to ask the guy when we bring him in.”
“Okay, Harry, you ask him.”
“Mel Gibson saved a lot of lives. All those sideways shooters, they couldn’t hit shit. We ought to make him like an honorary cop or something.”
“Okay, Harry, I’m going to go back to reading, okay? I want to get through this.”
“Yeah, okay. Me too.”