The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  He clicked on the phone and listened to an uninterrupted dial tone. It meant he had no messages. He called the retrieval number anyway and replayed a message he had saved from the week before. It was his daughter's tiny voice, left the night she and her mother went traveling far away from him.

  "Hello, Daddy," she said. "Good night, Daddy."

  That was all she had said but that was enough. Bosch saved the message for the next time he needed it and then killed the line.

  Part Two HIGH JINGO

  20

  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."