The Closers

by Michael Connelly

"I do remember this one," she said. "It's not holding up so well, is it?"

  She was right. That tattoo he had gotten in Vietnam had lost its lines over time and the colors had blurred. The character of the rat with a gun emerging from a tunnel was not recognizable. That tattoo looked like a painful bruise.

  "I'm not holding up so well myself, Vicki," Bosch said.

  She ignored his complaint and got down to work. She first used an eyeliner pencil to sketch out the tattoos on his body. Michael Allen Smith had what he had called a Gestapo collar tattooed on his neck. On each side of his neck was the twin lightning bolt insignia of the SS. This symbolized the emblems attached to the collar points of the uniforms worn by Hitler's elite force. Landreth etched these onto Bosch's skin easily and quickly. It tickled and he had a hard time holding still. Then it was time for the bicep piece.

  "Which arm?" she asked.

  "I think the left."

  He was thinking of the play with Mackey. He thought the chances were better that he would end up sitting on Mackey's right as opposed to his left. That meant his left arm would be in Mackey's line of sight.

  Landreth asked him to hold the photo of Smith's arm up next to his own so she could copy it. Tattooed on Smith's bicep was a skull with a swastika inside a circle on the crown. While Smith had never admitted to the murders he was charged with, he had always been quite open about his racist beliefs and the origins of his many body markings. The bicep skull, he said, had been copied from a World War II propaganda poster.

  Shifting the sketch work from his neck to his arm allowed Bosch to breathe easier and Landreth to engage him in conversation.

  "So what's new with you?" she asked.

  "Not a lot."

  "Retirement was boring?"

  "You could say that."

  "What did you do with yourself, Harry?"

  "I worked a couple old cases, but mostly I spent time in Las Vegas trying to get to know my daughter."

  She leaned back away from her work and looked up at Bosch with surprise in her eyes.

  "Yeah, I was surprised too when I found out," he said.

  "How old?"

  "Almost six."

  "You still going to be able to see her now that you're on the job?"

  "Doesn't matter, she's not there."

  "Well, where is she?"

  "Her mother took her to Hong Kong for a year."

  "Hong Kong? What's in Hong Kong?"

  "A job. She signed a year contract."

  "She didn't consult you about it?"

  "I don't know if 'consulted' is the right word. She told me she was going. I talked to a lawyer about it and there wasn't much I could do."

  "That's not fair, Harry."

  "I'm all right. I talk to her once a week. As soon as I earn up some vacation I'll go over there."

  "I'm not talking about it being unfair to you. I'm talking about her. A girl should be close to her father."

  Bosch nodded because that was all he could do. A few minutes later Landreth finished the sketch work, opened a case and took out a jar of Hollywood tattoo ink along with a penlike applicator.

  "This is Bic blue," she said. "It's what most of them use in the jails. I won't be perforating the skin so it should come off in a couple weeks."

  "Should?"

  "Most times. There was one actor I worked with, though. I put an ace of spades on his arm. And the funny thing was that it wouldn't come off. Not all the way. So he just ended up having a real tattoo put over my piece. He wasn't too happy about it."

  "Just like I'm not going to be happy if I have lightning bolts on my neck for the rest of my life. Before you start putting that stuff on me, Vicki, is there -"

  He stopped when he realized she was laughing at him.

  "Just kidding, Bosch. It's Hollywood magic. It comes off with a couple of good scrubs, okay?"

  "Okay, then."

  "Then hold still and let's get this done."

  She went to work applying the dark blue ink to the pencil drawing on his skin. She blotted it regularly with a cloth and repeatedly told him to stop breathing, which he told her he couldn't do. She was finished in under a half hour. She gave him a hand mirror and he studied his neck. It looked good in that it looked real to him. It also looked strange to see such displays of hate on his own skin.

  "Can I put my shirt on now?"

  "Give it a few more minutes."

  She touched the scar on his shoulder once again.

  "Is that from when you got shot in that tunnel downtown?"

  "Yes."

  "Poor Harry."

  "More like Lucky Harry."

  She started packing up her equipment while he sat there with his shirt off and feeling awkward about it.

  "So what's the assignment tonight?" he asked, just to be saying something.

  "For me? Nothing. I'm out of here."

  "You're done?"

  "Yeah, we worked a day shift today. Working girls invading the hotel by the Kodak Center. Can't have that in the new Hollywood, can we? So we bagged four of them."

  "I'm sorry, Vicki. I didn't know I was holding you up. I would've come in sooner. Hell, I was downstairs shooting the shit with Edgar before coming up. You should've told me you'd be waiting on me."

  "It's all right. It was good to see you. And I wanted to tell you I'm glad you're back on the job."

  Bosch suddenly thought of something.

  "Hey, you want to hit Musso's for dinner or are you going up to the Sportsmen's Lodge?"

  "Forget the Sportsmen's Lodge. Those things remind me too much of wrap parties. I didn't like them either."

  "Then what do you think?"

  "I don't know if I want to be seen in that place with such an obvious racist pig."

  This time Bosch knew she was kidding. He smiled and she smiled and she said dinner was a go.

  "I'll go on one condition," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "You put your shirt back on."

  27

  WITHOUT NEED OF an alarm, Bosch awoke at five-thirty the next morning. This was not unusual for him. He knew that this was what happened when you surfed into the tube on a case. Waking hours overpowered the sleeping hours. You did all you could to stay up on that board and in the pipeline. Though not scheduled to begin work for more than twelve hours, he knew this would be the pivotal day in the case. He could not sleep anymore.

  In darkness and unfamiliar surroundings he got dressed and made his way to the kitchen, where he found a pad for writing down needed grocery items. He wrote a note and left it in front of the automatic coffeemaker, which he had watched Vicki Landreth set the night before to begin brewing at 7 a.m. The note said very little other than thank you for the evening and good-bye. There were no promises or see-you-laters. Bosch knew she would not be expecting any. They both knew that little had changed in the twenty years between their liaisons. They liked each other fine but that wasn't enough to build a house on.

  The streets between Vicki Landreth's Los Feliz home and the Cahuenga Pass were misted and gray. People drove with their lights on, either because they had been driving through the night or because they thought it might help wake up the world. Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits.

  He tried to push thoughts of the night before out of his mind so that he could focus only on the case. He knew the others would be moving into position now on Mariano Street in Woodland Hills and in the ListenTech sound room in the City of Industry. While Roland Mackey slept, the forces of justice were quietly closing in on him. That's how Bosch looked at it. That was what put the wire in his blood. He still believed it was unlikely that Mackey had been the one to pull the trigger on Rebecca Verloren. But Bosch felt no doubt that Mackey provided the gun and would lead them on this day to the triggerman, whether it would be Will
iam Burkhart or someone else.

  Bosch pulled into the parking lot in front of the Poquito Mas at the bottom of the hill from his house. He left the Mercedes running and got out and went to the row of newspaper boxes. He saw the face of Rebecca Verloren staring out at him through the smeared plastic window of the box. He felt a little catch in his rhythm. It didn't matter what the story said, they were now in play.

  He dropped the coins into the box and took a paper out. He repeated the process, taking a second paper. One for the files and one for Mackey. He didn't bother reading the story until he had driven up the hill to his house. He put a pot of coffee on and read the story while standing in the kitchen. The window photo was a shot of Muriel Verloren sitting on her daughter's bed. The room was neat and the bed perfectly made, right down to the ruffle skirting the floor. There was an inset photograph of Rebecca in the top corner. It turned out that the Daily News archives had held the same shot as the yearbook. A headline above the photo said A MOTHER'S LONG VIGIL.

  The bedroom photograph was credited to Emerson Ward, the photographer apparently using her given name. Below it was a caption that read: "Muriel Verloren sits in her daughter's bedroom. The room, like Mrs. Verloren's grief, has been untouched by time."

  Beneath the photo and above the body of the story was what a reporter had once told Bosch was a deck headline-a fuller description of the story. It read: "HAUNTED: Muriel Verloren has waited 17 years to learn who took her daughter's life. In a renewed effort the LAPD may be close to finding out."

  Bosch thought the deck was perfect. If and when Mackey saw it, he would feel the cold finger of fear poke him in the chest. Bosch anxiously read the story.

  By McKenzie Ward, Staff Writer Seventeen years ago this summer, a young and beautiful high-school girl named Rebecca Verloren was stolen away from her Chatsworth home and brutally murdered on Oat Mountain. The case was never solved, leaving in its wake a splintered family, haunted police officers and a community with no sense of closure from the crime.

  But in a measure of hope for the victim's mother, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched a new investigation of the case that may see results and closure for Muriel Verloren. This time out the detectives have something they didn't in 1988: the killer's DNA.

  The LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit began the intense refocus on the Verloren case after one of the original detectives-now a Valley area commander-urged that it be reopened two years ago when the squad was formed to investigate cold cases.

  "As soon as I heard we were going to start looking at cold cases I was on the phone to them," Cmdr. Arturo Garcia said yesterday from his office in the Valley Bureau command center. "This was the case that always stuck with me. That beautiful young girl taken from her home like that. No murder in our society is acceptable, but this one hurt more than most. It haunted me all these years."

  So, too, Muriel Verloren. Rebecca's mother has continued to live in the house on Red Mesa Way from which her 16-year-old daughter was taken. Rebecca's bedroom remains unaltered from the night she was carried out a back door, never to return.

  "I don't want to change anything," the tearful mother said yesterday while smoothing the spread on her daughter's bed. "It's my way of remaining close to her. I will never change this room and I will never leave this house."

  Det. Harry Bosch, who is assigned to the renewed investigation, told the News that there are several promising leads in the case now. The greatest aid in the case has been the technological advances made since 1988. Blood that did not belong to Rebecca Verloren was actually found inside the murder weapon. Bosch explained that the pistol's hammer "bit" the shooter on the hand, taking a sample of blood and tissue. In 1988 it could only be analyzed, typed and preserved. Now it can be directly matched to a suspect. The challenge is finding that suspect.

  "The case was thoroughly investigated previously," Bosch said. "Hundreds of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were followed. We are backtracking on all of that but our real hope lies in the DNA. It will be the case breaker, I think."

  The detective explained that while the victim was not sexually assaulted, there were elements to the crime of a psychosexual nature. Ten years ago the state Department of Justice started a database containing DNA samples from every person convicted of a sexually related crime. The DNA from the Verloren case is in the process of being compared to those samples. Bosch believes it is likely that Rebecca Verloren's killing was not an isolated crime.

  "I think it is unlikely that this killer only committed this one crime and then led a law-abiding existence. The nature of this offense indicates to us that this person likely committed other crimes. If he was ever caught and his DNA put into a data bank, then it's only a matter of time before we identify him."

  Rebecca was carried from her home in the dead of night on July 5, 1988. For three days police and community members searched for her. A woman riding a horse on Oat Mountain found the body secreted by a fallen tree. While the investigation revealed many things, including that Rebecca had terminated a pregnancy about six weeks before her death, the police were unable to determine who her killer was and how he got into the house.

  In the years since, the crime has echoed through many lives. The victim's parents have split up and Muriel Verloren could not say where her husband, Robert Verloren, a former Malibu restaurateur, is now located. She said the disintegration of their marriage was directly attributed to the strain and grief brought on by their daughter's murder.

  One of the original investigators on the case, Ronald Green, retired early from the department and later committed suicide. Garcia said he believes the unsolved Verloren case played a part in his former partner's decision to end his life.

  "Ronnie took things to heart, and I think this one always bothered him," Garcia said.

  And at Hillside Preparatory School, where Rebecca Verloren was a popular student, there is a daily reminder of her life and death. A plaque erected by her classmates remains affixed to the wall in the exclusive school's main hallway.

  "We don't ever want to forget someone like Rebecca," said Principal Gordon Stoddard, who was a teacher when Verloren was a student at the school.

  One of Rebecca's friends and classmates is now a teacher at Hillside. Bailey Koster Sable spent an evening with Rebecca just two days before she was murdered. The loss has haunted her, and she says she thinks about her friend all the time.

  "I think about it because it feels like it could have happened to anybody," Sable said after classes yesterday. "So it leads me to always ask the same thing: why her?"

  That is a question the Los Angeles police hope to finally answer soon.

  Bosch looked at the photo on the inside page where the story jumped to. It showed Bailey Sable and Gordon Stoddard standing on either side of the plaque on the wall at Hillside Prep. Emerson Ward was credited with this photo as well. The caption read: "FRIEND AND TEACHER: Bailey Sable went to school with Rebecca Verloren, and Gordon Stoddard taught her science class. Now school principal, Stoddard said, 'Becky was a good kid. This shouldn't have happened.'"

  Bosch poured coffee into a mug and then read the story again while sipping his breakfast. He then excitedly grabbed the phone off the counter and called Kizmin Rider's home number. She answered with a blurry voice.

  "Kiz, the story is perfect. She put in everything we wanted."

  "Harry? What time is it, Harry?"

  "Almost seven. We're in business."

  "Harry, we have to work all night. What are you doing awake? What are you doing calling me at seven o'clock?"

  Bosch realized his mistake.

  "I'm sorry. I'm just excited about it."

  "Call me back in two hours."

  She hung up. There had not been a pleasant tone in her voice.

  Undaunted, Bosch pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. It was the sheet of numbers Pratt had passed out during the staff meeting. He called Tim Marcia's cell number.

  "It's Bosch," he said. "You gu
ys in position?"

  "Yeah, we're here."

  "Anything shaking?"

  "It's a sleepy hollow right now. We figure if this guy worked till midnight last night, then he's going to be sleeping late."

  "His car is there? The Camaro?"

  "Yes, Harry, it's here."

  "Okay. Did you read the story in the paper?"

  "Not yet. But we've got two teams sitting on this house for Mackey and Burkhart. We're about to break off to get coffee and pick up the paper."

  "It's good. It's going to work."