The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  "I know what you're thinking," Rider said. "He could have been our guy. But I don't think so. According to the box, he got his Idaho driver's license in May of 'eighty-eight. He was supposedly already up there when Verloren went down."

  "Yeah, supposedly."

  Bosch wasn't convinced by a simple DMV computer check. He pushed all of the information through the filters again to see if anything else jumped out at him.

  "Okay, let's review for a minute, make sure I have it all straight. Back in 'eighty-eight we have a bunch of these Valley boys calling themselves the Eights and running around in their football jerseys trying to kick-start a racial holy war. The department takes a look and pretty soon finds out that the brains behind this group is the son of our own Captain Ross of IAD. Commander Irving puts his finger into the wind and thinks, 'Hmmm, I think I can use this to my advantage.' So he puts the kibosh on going after Richard Junior and they sacrifice William 'Billy Blitz' Burkhart to the Justice Gods instead. The Eights are splintered, score one for the good guys. And Richard Junior skates away, score one for Irving because now he has Richard Senior in his pocket. Everybody lives happily ever after. Am I missing anything?"

  "Actually, it's Billy Blitzkrieg."

  "Blitzkrieg, then. So all of this gets wrapped up by early spring, right?"

  "By the end of March. And by early May Richard Ross Junior has moved to Idaho."

  "Okay, so then in June somebody breaks into Sam Weiss's house and steals his gun. Then in July-the day after our nation's birthday, no less-a girl of mixed race is taken out of her house and murdered. Not raped, but murdered-which is important to remember. The murder is made to look like a suicide. But it is done badly, by all appearances by someone who was new at this. Garcia and Green catch the case, eventually see through it and conduct an investigation that leads them nowhere because, whether knowingly or not, they are pushed in that direction. Now, seventeen years later, the murder weapon is incontrovertibly tied to someone who just a few months before the killing was running around with the Eights. What am I missing here?"

  "I think you've got it all."

  "So the question is, could it be that the Eights were not finished? That they continued to foment, only they tried to disguise their signature now? And that they raised the ante to include murder?"

  Rider slowly shook her head.

  "Anything is possible, but it doesn't make much sense. The Eights were about statements-public statements. Burning crosses and painting synagogues. But it's not much of a statement if you murder somebody and then try to disguise it as a suicide."

  Bosch nodded. She was right. There was not a smooth flow to any of the logic.

  "Then again, they knew they had the LAPD on their backs," he said. "Maybe some of them continued to operate but as sort of an underground movement."

  "Like I said, anything is possible."

  "Okay, so we have Ross Junior supposedly up in Idaho and we have Burkhart in Wayside. The two leaders. Who was left besides Mackey?"

  "There are five other names in the file. None of the names jumped out at me."

  "That's our suspect list for now. We need to run them and see where they went from-wait a minute, wait a minute. Was Burkhart still in Wayside? You said he got a year, right? That meant he'd be out in five or six months unless he got into trouble up there. When exactly did he go in?"

  Rider shook her head.

  "No, it would have been late March or early April when he checked into Wayside. He couldn't have -"

  "Doesn't matter when he checked into Wayside. When was he popped? When was the synagogue thing?"

  "It was January. Early January. I have the exact date back in the file."

  "All right, early January. You said prints on a paint can tripped them to Burkhart. What did that take back in 'eighty-eight, when they were probably still doing it by hand-a week if it was a hot case like this? If they popped Burkhart by the end of January and he didn't make bail . . ."

  He held his hands wide, allowing Rider to finish.

  "February, March, April, May, June," she said excitedly. "Five months. With gain time he could easily have been out by July!"

  Bosch nodded. The county jail system housed inmates awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less. For decades the system had been overcrowded and under court-ordered maximum population counts. This resulted in the routine early release of inmates through gain-time ratios that fluctuated according to individual jail population but sometimes were as high as three days earned for every one day served.

  "This looks good, Harry."

  "Maybe too good. We have to nail it down."

  "When we get back I'll go on the computer and find out when he left Wayside. What's this do to the wiretap?"

  Bosch thought for a moment about whether they should slow things down.

  "I think we go ahead with the wiretap. If the Wayside date fits, then we watch Mackey and Burkhart. We still spook Mackey because he's the weak one. We do it when he's at work and away from Burkhart. If we're right, he'll call him."

  He stood up.

  "But we still have to run down the other names, the other members of the Eights," he added.

  Rider didn't get up. She looked up at him.

  "You think this is going to work?"

  Bosch shrugged.

  "It has to."

  He looked around the cavernous train station. He checked faces and eyes, looking for any that might quickly turn away from his own. He half expected to see Irving in the crowd of travelers. Mr. Clean on the scene. That's what Bosch used to think when Irving would show up at a crime scene.

  Rider stood up. They dropped their empty cups into a nearby trash can and walked toward the front doors of the station. When he got there Bosch looked behind them, again searching for a follower. He knew they now had to consider such possibilities. The place that had been so warm and inviting to him twenty minutes before was now suspicious and forbidding. The voices inside were no longer graceful whispers. There was a sharp edge to them. They sounded angry.

  When they got outside he noticed that the sun had moved behind the clouds. He wouldn't need his sunglasses for the walk back.

  "I'm sorry, Harry," Rider said.

  "For what?"

  "I just thought that it would be different, you coming back. Now here we are, your first case back and what do you get, a case with high jingo all over it."

  Bosch nodded as they crossed to the front walkway. He saw the sundial and the words etched in granite beneath it. His eyes held on the last line.

  Courage to Do

  "I'm not worried," he said. "But they should be."

  22

  GOOD TO GO," Commander Garcia replied when Bosch asked if he was ready.

  Bosch nodded and went to the door to usher in the two women from the Daily News.

  "Hi, I'm McKenzie Ward," said the one leading the way. She was obviously the reporter. The other woman was carrying a camera bag and a tripod.

  "I'm Emmy Ward," said the photographer.

  "Sisters?" Garcia asked, though the answer was obvious because of how much the two women, both in their twenties, looked alike: both attractive blondes with big smiles.

  "I'm older," said McKenzie. "But not by much."

  They all shook hands.

  "How did two sisters get on the same paper together, then the same story together?" Garcia said.

  "I was here a few years and then Emmy just applied. It's no big deal. We've worked together a lot. It's just a blind draw on who gets the photo assignments. Today we work together. Tomorrow maybe not."

  "Do you mind if we take some photos first?" Emmy asked. "I have another assignment I need to get to right after this."

  "Of course," Garcia said, ever accommodating. "Where do you want me?"

  Emmy Ward set up a shot with Garcia seated at the meeting table with the murder book open in front of him. Bosch had brought it with him to use as a prop. As the photo session proceeded, Bosch and McKenzie Ward stood off to the
side and talked casually. Earlier, they had spoken at length on the phone. She had agreed to the deal. If she got the story into the paper the following day, she would be first in line for the exclusive when they took down the killer. She had not agreed easily. Garcia had initially been clumsy in his approach to her before turning the negotiation over to Bosch. Bosch was wise enough to know that no reporter would allow the police department to dictate when a story would be published and how it would be written. So Bosch concentrated on the when, not the how. He went with the assumption that McKenzie Ward would and could write a story that would serve his purposes. He just needed it in the paper sooner rather than later. Kiz Rider had an appointment with a judge that afternoon. If the wiretap application was approved, they would be in business by the next morning.

  "Did you talk to Muriel Verloren?" the reporter asked Bosch.

  "Yeah, she's there all afternoon and she's ready to talk."

  "I pulled the clips and read everything from back then-like I was eight years old at the time-and there were several mentions of the father and his restaurant. Will he be there, too?"

  "I don't think so. He's gone. It's more of a mother's story, anyway. She's the one who has kept her daughter's bedroom untouched for seventeen years. She said you could photograph in there, too, if you want."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  Bosch watched her looking at the shot being set up with Garcia. He knew what she was thinking. The mother in the bedroom frozen in time would be a lot better shot than an old cop at a table with a binder. She looked at Bosch while she started digging in her purse.

  "Then I have to make a call to see if I can keep Emmy."

  "Go ahead."

  She left the office, probably because she didn't want Garcia to overhear her telling an editor that she needed Emmy to stay on the assignment because she had a better shot with the mother.

  She was back in three minutes and nodded to Bosch, which he took to mean that Emmy was going to stay with her on the story.

  "So this thing is a go for tomorrow?" he asked, just to make sure once again.

  "It's slotted for the window-depending on the art. My editor wanted to hold it for Sunday, make a nice long feature, but I told him we were competitive on it. Anytime we can beat the Times on a story we do."

  "Yeah, but what will he say when the Times doesn't run anything? He'll know you tricked him."

  "No, he'll think that the Times killed their story because we beat them to the punch. Happens all the time."

  Bosch nodded thoughtfully, then asked, "What did you mean about it being slotted for the window?"

  "We run a news feature every day with a photo on the front page. We call it the window because it's in the center of the page. Also because you can see the art in the window of the newspaper boxes on the street. It's a prime spot."

  "Good."

  Bosch was excited by the play the story was going to get.

  "If you guys screw me on this, I won't forget it," McKenzie said quietly.

  There was a threat in her tone, the tough reporter coming to the surface. Bosch held his hands wide, as if he had nothing to hide.

  "That's not going to happen. You've got the exclusive. As soon as we wrap somebody up, I'm calling you and you only."

  "Thank you. Now, just to go over the rules again, I can quote you by name in the story but you don't want to be in any photos, right?"

  "Right. I may have to do some undercover work on this. I don't want my face in the paper."

  "Got it. What undercover?"

  "You never know. I just want to keep the option open. Besides, the commander is better for the photo. He's lived with the case longer than I have."

  "Well, I think I already have most of what I need from the clips and our call earlier but I still want to sit down with you two for a few minutes."

  "Whatever you need."

  "Done," Emmy said, a few minutes later. She started breaking down her equipment.

  "Call the photo desk," her sister said. "I think there's been a change and you are staying with me."

  "Oh," Emmy said, not seeming to mind.

  "Why don't you make the call outside while we get going with the interview?" McKenzie said. "I want to get back to writing this as soon as we can."

  The reporter and Bosch took seats at the table with Garcia while the photographer went out to check on her new assignment. McKenzie started by asking Garcia what stuck with him about the case for so long and what made him push it forward through the Open-Unsolved Unit. While Garcia gave a rambling response about the ones that haunt you, Bosch felt the waters of contempt rise in him. He knew what the reporter didn't know, that Garcia had knowingly or unknowingly allowed the investigation to be shunted aside seventeen years earlier. The fact that it appeared Garcia did not know that his investigation had been tampered with somehow seemed like the lesser sin to Bosch. Still, if it didn't show personal corruption or a giving way to pressure from the upper reaches of the department, at the very least it showed incompetence.

  After a few more questions of Garcia the reporter turned her attention to Bosch and asked what was new in the case seventeen years later.

  "The main thing is we have the DNA of the shooter," he said. "Tissue and blood from the murder weapon was preserved by our Scientific Investigation Division. We are hoping that analysis of it will allow us either to match it to a suspect whose DNA is already in the Department of Justice data bank, or to use it in comparisons to eliminate or identify suspects. We are in the process of going back to everybody in the case. Anybody who looks like a suspect will have their DNA checked against what we've got. That is something Commander Garcia couldn't do in 'eighty-eight. We're hoping it will change things this time."

  Bosch further explained how the weapon extracted a DNA sample from the person who shot it. The reporter seemed very interested in the happenstance of this and took detailed notes.

  Bosch was pleased. The gun and DNA story was what he wanted to get into the paper. He wanted Mackey to read the story and know that his DNA was in the pipeline. It was being analyzed and compared. He would know that a sample from him was already in the DOJ database. The hope was that this would make him panic. Maybe he would try to run, maybe he would make a mistake and make a call in which he discussed the crime. One mistake would be all it would take.

  "How long before you get results from the DOJ?" McKenzie asked.

  Bosch fidgeted. He was trying not to lie directly to the reporter.

  "Uh, that's hard to say," he answered. "The DOJ prioritizes comparison requests and there is always a backup. We should have something any day now."

  Bosch was pleased with his response but then the reporter threw another grenade into his foxhole.

  "What about race?" she said. "I read all the clips and it seemed like nothing was ever brought up one way or the other about this girl being biracial. Do you think that played at all into the motivation of this murder?"

  Bosch flicked a look at Garcia and hoped he would answer first.

  "The case was fully explored in that regard in nineteen eighty-eight," Garcia said. "We found nothing to support the racial angle. That's probably why it wasn't in the clips."

  The reporter turned her focus to Bosch, wanting the present take on the question as well.

  "We've thoroughly reviewed the murder book and there is nothing there that would support a racial motivation in the case," Bosch said. "We obviously are in the process of reworking the case, front to back, and we'll be looking for anything that might have played a part in the motivation behind the crime."

  He looked at her and braced himself for her not accepting his answer and pressing it further. He thought about floating the racial angle into the story. It might improve the chances of some kind of response from Mackey. But it might also tip Mackey to how close they were to him. He decided to leave his answer as is.

  Instead of pursuing the question further, the reporter flipped her notebook closed.

  "I
think I have what I need for right now," she said. "I am going to go talk to Mrs. Verloren and then I have to hurry back and write this up to get it in tomorrow. Is there a number I can reach you at, Detective Bosch? Quickly, if I need to."

  Bosch knew she had him. He reluctantly gave her his cell number, knowing it meant that in the future she would have a direct line to him and would use it in regard to any case or story. It was the last payment on the deal they had made.