The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  Everyone got up from the table and Bosch noticed that Emmy Ward had quietly come back into the office and had been sitting by the door during the interview. He and Garcia thanked them both for coming in and said good-bye. Bosch remained in the office with Garcia.

  "I think that went well," Garcia said after the door had closed.

  "I hope so," Bosch said. "It cost me a cell phone number. I've had that number for three years. Now I'll have to change it and notify everybody about the new number. A big pain in the ass is what it's going to be."

  Garcia ignored the complaint.

  "How sure are you that this guy Mackey will even see the story?"

  "We're not. In fact, we believe he's dyslexic. He might not read at all."

  Garcia's jaw dropped.

  "Then what are we doing?"

  "Well, we have a plan for making sure he's aware of the story. Don't worry about that. We've got it covered. There's also another name that's come up since yesterday. An associate of Mackey then and now. His name is William Burkhart. Back when you were on the case he was known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That ring a bell?"

  Garcia put on his best deep thinking look, like the one he had used for the camera, and moved around behind his desk. He then shook his head.

  "Don't think it came up," he said.

  "Yeah, you probably would have remembered."

  Garcia remained standing but leaned over the desk to look at his schedule.

  "Let's see. What have I got next?"

  "You've got me, Commander," Bosch said.

  Garcia looked at him.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I need a few more minutes to clear up some of this stuff that's come up."

  "What stuff? You mean this new guy, Blitzkrieg?"

  "Yes, and the stuff the reporter asked about and we lied about. The racial angle."

  Bosch watched Garcia's face set sternly into stone.

  "I didn't lie to her and I didn't lie to you yesterday. We didn't find it. We didn't see a racial angle to this."

  "We?"

  "My partner and I."

  "Are you sure about that?"

  The phone on his desk buzzed. Garcia grabbed it up angrily and said, "No calls, no intrusions," into it before dropping it back into its cradle.

  "Detective, I want to remind you whom you are talking to," Garcia said evenly. "Now what the fuck do you mean, 'Are you sure?' What are you saying?"

  "With all due respect to the rank, sir, the case was pushed away from the racial angle in 'eighty-eight. I believe you when you say you didn't see it. Otherwise, I can't see you calling Pratt down at Open-Unsolved and reminding him there was DNA in the case. But if you didn't know what was happening, then your partner certainly did. Did he ever talk about the pressure brought to bear on him from the command side on this case?"

  "Ron Green was the finest detective I ever knew or worked with. I'm not going to let you besmirch his reputation."

  They stood just a few feet apart, the desk between them, their eyes locked in battle.

  "I'm not interested in reputations. I'm interested in the truth. You said yesterday he ate his own gun a few years after this case. Why? Was there a note?"

  "The burden, Detective. He couldn't carry it anymore. He was haunted by the ones who got away."

  "What about the ones he let get away?"

  Garcia pointed an angry finger at Bosch.

  "How fucking dare you? You are on thin ice here, Bosch. I could make one call to the sixth floor and you'd be out on the street before sundown. You understand me? I know about you. You're just back from retirement and that makes you expendable with one phone call. You understand me?"

  "Sure. I understand you."

  Bosch sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk, hoping it might defuse the tension in the room a little bit. Garcia hesitated and then he sat down as well.

  "I find what you have just said to me completely insulting," he said, his voice juiced with anger.

  "I'm sorry, Commander. I was trying to see what you knew."

  "I don't understand."

  "I am sorry, sir, but the case was definitely stonewalled by chain of command. I don't want to get into names with you at this point. Some of them are still active. But I think this case revolved on race-the connection to Mackey and now Burkhart proves it. And you didn't have Mackey or Burkhart back then, but you had the gun and there were other things. I needed to find out if you were part of it. I would say by your reaction that you weren't."

  "But you are telling me my partner was, and that he kept it from me."

  Bosch nodded.

  "Impossible," Garcia protested. "Ron and I were close."

  "All partners are close, Commander. But not that close. From what I understand, you took care of the book and Green pressed the case forward. If he encountered resistance from within the department, he might have chosen to keep it from you. I think he did. Maybe he was protecting you, maybe he was humiliated about being vulnerable to the push. "

  Garcia dropped his eyes from Bosch and looked down at his desk. Bosch could tell he was looking at a memory. Something in the stone wall of his face broke and gave way.

  "I think maybe I knew something was wrong," he said quietly. "About halfway through."

  "How so?"

  "Early on we decided to split up the parents. Ron took the father and I took the mother. You know, to establish relationships. Ron was having trouble with the father. He was volatile. He had been passive and then all of a sudden he's on Ron's ass wanting results. But there was something more there and Ron kept it from me."

  "Did you ask about it?"

  "Yeah. I asked. He just told me the father was a handful. He said he was paranoid about race, that he thought his daughter was killed because of the race thing. And then he said something that I still remember. He said, 'We can't go there.' That's all he said, but it stuck with me because that didn't sound like the Ron Green I knew. We can't go there. The Ron Green I knew would go wherever it led. There were no can't-go-theres with him. Not until that case."

  Garcia raised his eyes to Bosch and Bosch nodded, his way of thanking him for opening up.

  "You think it had something to do with what happened later?" Bosch asked.

  "You mean the suicide?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe. I don't know. Anything's possible. After this case we sort of went in different directions. The thing about partners is that once the work stops, there isn't a whole lot to talk about."

  "True," Bosch said.

  "I was in a command staff meeting at Seventy-seventh-I was assigned there after making lieutenant. That was when I found out he was dead. It came across in a staff notice. I guess that shows how far apart we had gotten. I found out he had killed himself a week after he did it."

  Bosch just nodded. There was nothing he could say to that.

  "I think I have a staff meeting now, Detective," Garcia said. "It's time for you to go."

  "Yes, sir. But you know, I was thinking, in order for them to push Ron Green so hard, they must have already had something to push him with. You remember anything like that? Did he have an IAD beef running at the time?"

  Garcia shook his head. He wasn't saying no to Bosch's question. He was saying something else.

  "You know, this department has always had more cops assigned to investigating cops than it has to investigating murders. I always thought that if I reached the top, I would change that."

  "Are you saying there was an investigation?"

  "I'm saying it was rare in the department not to have something on your record. There was a file on Ron, sure. He had been accused of assaulting a suspect. It was bullshit. The kid bumped his head and needed stitches when Ron was putting him in the back of the car. Big deal, right? Turned out the kid had connections and the IAD wasn't letting it go away."

  "So they could have used that to push this case."

  "Could have, depending on how much a believer in conspiracy theories you are."

&nbs
p; When it comes to the LAPD I am a believer, Bosch thought but didn't say.

  "Okay, sir, I think I have the picture," he said instead. "I'll get out of here now."

  Bosch stood up to leave.

  "I understand your need to know all of this," Garcia said. "I just don't appreciate how you sandbagged me."

  "I'm sorry, sir."

  "No you're not, Detective Bosch. Not really."

  Bosch said nothing. He moved to the door and opened it. He looked back at Garcia and tried to think of something to say. He came up blank. He turned and left, closing the door behind him.

  23

  KIZ RIDER WAS STILL sitting in the waiting area outside Judge Anne Demchak's chambers when Bosch got there. He had been caught in mid-afternoon traffic coming back to downtown from Van Nuys and thought he might have missed the conference with the judge. Rider was reading a magazine, but Bosch's first thought was that at this point in the case he would be unable to leisurely start flipping through a magazine. At this point his focus could not be split. He was all about one thing. In a strange way, he likened it to surfing, a pursuit he had not followed since the summer of 1964, when he ran away from a foster home and lived on the beach. Many years had passed since then but he still remembered the water tunnel. The goal was to tuck yourself into the tube, the place where water swirled completely around you, where there was nothing but the water and the ride. Bosch was in the tube now. There was nothing but the case.

  "How long you been here?" he asked.

  Rider checked her watch.

  "About forty minutes."

  "Has she been in there with it the whole time?"

  "Yup."

  "You worried?"

  "No. I've gone to her before. Once on a Hollywood case after you left. She's just thorough. She reads every page. It takes a while but she's one of the good ones."

  "The story's running tomorrow. We need her to sign this today."

  "I know, Harry. Relax. Sit down."

  Bosch stayed standing. The judges rotated warrant duty. Getting Demchak was luck of the draw.

  "I've never dealt with her before," he said. "Was she a DA?"

  "No. Other side. Public defender."

  Bosch groaned. His experience had been that criminal defense attorneys who became judges always brought at least the shadow of their allegiance to the defendant with them to the bench.

  "We're in trouble," he said.

  "No we're not. We'll be okay. Please sit down. You're making me nervous."

  "Is Judy Champagne still on the bench? Maybe we can take it into her."

  Judy Champagne was a former prosecutor married to a former cop. They used to say he hooked them and she cooked them. Once she became a judge she was Bosch's favorite for taking warrants to. Not because she leaned toward the cops. She didn't. She was down-the-line fair, and that's what Bosch could count on.

  "She's still a judge but we can't shop search warrants around the building. You know that, Harry. Now would you please sit down? I've got something to show you."

  Bosch sat down in a chair next to her.

  "What?"

  "I've got Burkhart's probation jacket."

  She pulled a file from her bag, opened it and slid it in front of Bosch on the coffee table. She tapped a fingernail on a line on a release form. Bosch leaned down to read it.

  "Released from Wayside July first, nineteen eighty-eight. Reported to probation and parole in Van Nuys on July fifth."

  He straightened up and looked at her.

  "So he's in play."

  "Absolutely. They took him in on the synagogue vandalism on January twenty-sixth. Never made bail and, with time served credits, got out of Wayside five months later. He's totally in play on this, Harry."

  Bosch felt a charge of excitement as things seemed to fall closer together.

  "Okay, good. Did you amend the warrant to include him?"

  "I put him in but not in too big a way. Mackey's still the direct link because of the gun."

  Bosch nodded and looked across the room at the empty desk where the judge's clerk would normally sit. The name plate on the desk said KATHY CHRZANOWSKI and Bosch wondered how the name would be pronounced and where she was. He then decided to try not to think about what was happening inside the judge's chambers.

  "You want to hear the latest from Commander Garcia?" he asked.

  Rider was putting the probation file back in her bag.

  "Sure."

  Bosch spent the next ten minutes recounting his visit to Garcia's office, the newspaper interview, and the commander's revelations at the end.

  "You think he told you everything?" she asked.

  "You mean about how much he knew of what happened back then? No, but he told me as much as he was willing to."

  "I think he had to have been part of the deal. I can't see one partner making a deal the other one doesn't know about. Not a deal like that."

  "Then if he was in on it, why would he call up Pratt and tell him to send the DNA through the DOJ? Wouldn't he have just sat on it like he had been doing for seventeen years?"

  "Not necessarily. A guilty conscience works in strange ways, Harry. Maybe this has been working on Garcia all these years and he decided to call Pratt to make himself feel better about it. Plus, say he was in on the deal back then with Irving. He might have felt safe to make that call once Irving was pushed to the side by the new chief."

  Bosch thought about Garcia's reaction to his saying Green might have been haunted by the ones he let get away. Maybe Garcia got heated because it was he who was haunted.

  "I don't know," Bosch said. "Maybe -"

  Bosch's cell phone chirped. As he pulled it out of his pocket, Rider said, "You better turn that off before we go in. That's one thing Judge Demchak doesn't like going off in chambers. I heard about a DA whose phone she confiscated."

  Bosch nodded and opened his phone and said hello.

  "Detective Bosch?"

  "Yes."

  "It's Tara Wood. I thought we had an appointment."

  It struck Bosch before she finished the sentence that he had forgotten the meeting at CBS and the bowl of gumbo he was planning for lunch beforehand. He hadn't even had time for lunch.

  "Tara, I am really sorry. Something came up and we had to sort of run with it. I should have called you but it slipped my mind. I'm going to need to reschedule the interview, if you will still talk to me after this."

  "Um, sure, no problem. I just had a couple of the writers from the show hanging around. They were going to try to talk to you."

  "What show?"

  "Cold Case. Remember, I told you we have a -"

  "Oh, right, the show. Well, I'm sorry about that."

  Now Bosch didn't feel so bad. She had been trying to use his interview appointment to work up a publicity angle of some kind. He wondered if there was any feeling left in her for Rebecca Verloren. As if knowing his thoughts, she asked about the case.

  "Is something happening on the case? Is that why you weren't here?"

  "Sort of. We're making progress but there is nothing I can tell you right-actually, there is something. Did you think at all about that name I mentioned last night? Roland Mackey? Ringing any bells?"

  "No, still no."

  "I've got another one. What about William Burkhart? Maybe Bill Burkhart?"

  There was a long silence while Wood did a memory scan.

  "No, I'm sorry. I don't think I know him."

  "What about the name Billy Blitzkrieg?"

  "Billy Blitzkrieg? You're kidding, right?"

  "No, why, you recognize it?"

  "No, not at all. It sounds like a heavy metal rock star or something."

  "No, he's not. But you're sure none of the names do anything for you?"

  "I'm sorry, Detective."

  Bosch looked up and saw a woman beckoning to them from the open door of the chambers. Rider looked at him and drew a finger across her throat.

  "Look, Tara, I need to go now. I will call you to set up the
interview as soon as I can. I apologize again and I will call you soon. Thank you."