The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  "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 bac
ked 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."

  21

  KIZ RIDER SAT at her desk with her arms folded, as if she had been waiting for Bosch all morning. She had a somber look on her face and Bosch knew something was up.

  "You get the PDU file?" he asked.

  "I got to look at it. I wasn't allowed to take it."

  Bosch nodded. He slid into his seat across from her.

  "Good stuff?" he asked.

  "Depends on how you look at it."

  "Well, I got some stuff, too."

  He looked around. Abel Pratt's door was open and Bosch could see him in there, bending over to the little cooler he kept next to his desk. Pratt was in earshot. It wasn't that Bosch didn't trust Pratt. He did. But he didn't want to put him in a position of hearing something he didn't want to or was not ready to hear. Same as Rider when they had spoken on the phone earlier.

  He looked back at his partner.

  "You want to take a walk?"

  "Yes, I do."

  They got up and headed out. When Bosch went past the OIC's door he leaned in. Pratt was now on the phone. Bosch caught his attention and pantomimed drinking from a cup and then pointed to Pratt. Shaking his head no to the offer of coffee, Pratt held up a tub of yogurt as if to say he had what he needed. Bosch saw little chunks of green in the gunk. He tried to think of a green fruit and only came up with kiwi. He walked away thinking that the only possible way to make yogurt taste worse was to put kiwi into it.

  They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out front to where the memorial fountain was.

  "So where do you want to go?" Kiz asked.

  "Depends on how much there is to talk about."

  "Probably a lot."

  "Last time I worked in Parker Center I was a smoker. When I needed to walk and think I'd go over to Union Station and buy smokes in the shop over there. I liked that place. It's got those comfortable chairs in the main hall. Or it used to, at least."

  "Sounds good to me."

  They headed that way, taking Los Angeles Street to the north. The first building they passed was the federal office building, and Bosch noticed that the concrete barriers erected in 2001 to keep potential vehicle bombs away from the building were still in place. The threat of danger didn't seem to bother the people in the line stretching across the front of the building. They were waiting to get into the immigration offices, each clutching paperwork and ready to make a case for citizenship. They waited beneath the tile mosaics on the front façade that depicted people dressed like angels, their eyes skyward, waiting on heaven
.

  "Why don't you start, Harry," Rider said. "Tell me about Robert Verloren."

  Bosch walked a little further before beginning.

  "I liked the guy," he said. "He's digging himself out of the hole. He cooks a hundred or so breakfasts a day over there. I had a plate and it was pretty good stuff."

  "And I'm sure it beats the hell out of the prices at Pacific Dining Car. What did he give you that's made you so angry?"