The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  After McClellan left, Bosch sat down again, thinking about the idea that Rebecca Verloren's killer had been hiding in the house. He got up and went to the dining room table, where the files from the murder book were spread out. The photos from the dead girl's room were at center in the spread. He looked through the reports until he found the SID report on latent fingerprint analysis.

  The report was several pages long and contained the analysis of several fingerprints lifted from surfaces in the Verloren household. The main summary concluded that no print lifted from the house was an unknown, therefore it was likely the suspect or suspects wore gloves or simply avoided touching surfaces likely to retain prints.

  The summary said that all latent fingerprints lifted from the house were matched to samples from members of the Verloren family or people who had an appropriate reason to have been in the house and touching the surfaces where the prints were found.

  This time Bosch read the report differently and in its entirety. This time he was no longer interested in the analysis. He wanted to know where the SID techs had looked for prints.

  The report was dated a day after the discovery of Rebecca's body. It detailed a routine search for fingerprints in the household. All topical surfaces were examined. All doorknobs and locks. All windowsills and frames. Every place it was logical to think that the killer/kidnapper might have touched a surface during the crime. While several prints on windowsills and latches were recovered and matched to Robert Verloren, the report stated that no usable prints at all were recovered from doorknobs in the house. It noted that this was not unusual because of the smudging that routinely occurred when knobs were turned.

  It was in what was not included in the report that Bosch saw the crack through which a killer might have escaped. The SID team had gone into the house a day after the victim's body was discovered. This would have been after the case had been misread twice, first as a missing-persons case and second as a suicide. Added to this, when a murder investigation was finally mounted the latents team was sent in blind. There was no understanding of the case at that point. The idea that the killer might have hidden in the garage or somewhere else in the house for several hours had not been formulated yet. The search for fingerprints and other evidence, such as hairs and fibers, never went beyond the obvious, beyond the surface.

  Bosch knew it was too late now. Too many years had passed. A cat roamed the house and who knows what objects from yard sales had come in and gone out of the house where a killer had hidden and waited.

  Then his eyes fell to the spread of photos on the table and he realized something. Rebecca's bedroom was the one place that had not been contaminated over time. It was like a museum with its artwork encased and almost hermetically sealed.

  Bosch spread all the crime scene photos of the bedroom in front of him. There had been something gnawing at him about these photos since the first time he had seen them. He still couldn't get to it but now he felt urgent about it. He studied the shots of the bureau and the bed table and then the open closet. Last he studied the bed.

  He thought of the photo that had run in the newspaper and took the second copy of the paper out of the file containing all reports and documents accumulated during the reinvestigation of the case. He unfolded the paper and studied Emmy Ward's photo and then compared it to the photographs of seventeen years before.

  The room seemed exactly the same, as if untouched by the grief emanating from it like heat from an oven. Then Bosch noticed a small difference. In the Daily News shot the bed had been carefully straightened and smoothed by Muriel before the photograph was taken. In the older SID shots the bed was made, but the ruffle fluffed outward along one side of the bed and inward along the foot.

  Bosch's eyes moved back and forth from one photo to the other. He felt something breaking loose inside. He felt a little charge drop into his blood. This was what had bothered him. It was the something that was not right.

  "In and out," he said to himself.

  It was possible, he knew, that the ruffle had been pushed inward at the bottom of the bed by someone crawling underneath it. That would make it likely that the outward fluffing of the ruffle at the side of the bed would have occurred when that same person slid or crawled out.

  After everyone was asleep.

  Bosch got up and started pacing as he worked it through again. In the photo taken after the abduction and murder, the bed clearly showed the possibility of entrance and exit. Rebecca's killer could have been waiting right below her as she fell asleep.

  "In and out," Bosch said again.

  He worked it further. He knew that no readable fingerprints had been recovered at the house. But only obvious surfaces had been checked. This did not necessarily mean the killer had worn gloves. It only meant he was smart enough not to touch obvious places with his bare hands, or smudged the prints when he needed to. Even if gloves had been worn during the entry to the house, might not the killer have removed them while waiting-possibly for hours-under the bed?

  It was worth a shot. Bosch went to the kitchen and called SID and asked for Raj Patel.

  "Raj, what are you doing?"

  "I am cataloging the evidence we gathered last night on the freeway."

  "I need your best latents man to meet me back up there in Chatsworth."

  "Now?"

  "Right now, Raj. I might not even have a job later. We have to do this now."

  "What is it we are to do?"

  "I want to lift a bed and look underneath it. It's important, Raj. If we find something, it will lead us to the killer."

  There was a short silence and then Patel replied.

  "I am my best latents man, Harry. Give me the address."

  "Thanks, Raj."

  He gave Patel the address and then hung up the phone. He drummed his fingers on the counter, wondering if he should call Kiz Rider. She had been so distressed and discouraged as they had walked out of Parker Center that she said all she wanted to do was go home to sleep. Should he wake her for the second day in a row? He knew that wasn't really the question. The question was whether he should wait to see if there was anything beneath the bed before telling her and getting her hopes up.

  He decided to hold off on the call until there was something solid to tell her. Instead he picked up the phone and woke up Muriel Verloren. He told her he was on his way.

  36

  BOSCH GOT TO THE SQUAD meeting at the Pacific Dining Car late because of traffic coming in from the Valley. Everyone was in a private area in the back of the restaurant. Most of them already had plates of food in front of them.

  His excitement must have showed. Pratt interrupted a report from Tim Marcia to look at Bosch and say, "You either got lucky during the time you had off or you just don't care about the deep shit we're in here."

  "I got lucky," Bosch said as he took the only empty chair and sat down. "But not in the way you mean. Raj Patel just pulled a palm print and two fingers off a wood slat that was beneath Rebecca Verloren's bed."

  "That's good," Pratt said dryly. "What's it mean?"

  "It means that as soon as Raj runs it through the database we might have our killer."

  "How so?" Rider asked.

  Bosch had never called her. He could already feel a hostile vibe from her.

  "I didn't want to wake you up," Bosch said to her. Then to the others, he said, "I was looking through the original latents report in the murder book. I realized that they went in there for prints the day after the girl's body was found. They never went back after it became a strong possibility that the abductor had come into the house earlier in the day when the garage was left open and hid somewhere until everybody was asleep."

  "So why the bed?" Pratt asked.

  "The crime scene photos showed the ruffle at the foot of the bed had been pushed in. Like somebody had crawled underneath. They missed it because they weren't looking for it."

  "Good work, Harry," Pratt said. "If Raj gets a hit we change directions and move with it. All ri
ght, let's get back to our reports. You can check with your partner on what you've missed so far."

  Pratt then turned to Robinson and Nord at the other end of the long table and said, "What did you come up with on the call for the tow truck?"

  "Not a lot that helps," Nord said. "Because the call was made after we had switched our monitoring to the line at the Burkhart property, we don't have an audio recording of it. But we do have the pen registers and they show that the call came directly to Tampa Towing before being bounced over to the Triple A answering service. The call came from a pay phone outside the Seven-Eleven on Tampa by the freeway entrance. He probably made the call, then drove down the entrance and waited."

  "Prints on the phone?" Pratt asked.

  "We asked Raj to take a look after he cleared the scene," Robinson said. "The phone had been wiped."

  "Figures," Pratt said. "You talked to Triple A?"

  "Yes. No help other than to say the caller was a male."

  He turned to Bosch.

  "You have anything to add that your partner didn't already tell us?"

  "Probably just more of the same. Burkhart looks like he is clear on last night and he looks like he's clear on Verloren as well. Both nights he happened to be under LAPD surveillance."

  Rider gave him her knotted-brow look. He had even more information she didn't know. He looked away.

  "Well, that's just perfect," Pratt said. "So who, what and where does that leave us, people?"

  "Well, basically, our newspaper plant backfired," Rider said. "It may have worked in terms of getting Mackey to want to talk about Verloren, but he never got the chance. Somebody else saw the story."

  "That somebody being the actual killer," Pratt said.

  "Exactly," Rider said. "The person Mackey helped and/or gave the gun to seventeen years ago. That person also saw the story and knew it wasn't his blood on the gun, so that meant it had to be Mackey's. He knew Mackey was the link to him, so Mackey had to go."

  "So how did he set it up?" Pratt asked.

  "He was either smart enough to figure the story was a plant and we were watching Mackey, or he just figured the best way to get to Mackey was the way he did it. Get him out there alone. Like I said, he was smart. He picked a time and place that would result in Mackey being alone and vulnerable. On that entrance ramp you are up above the freeway. Even with the tow truck's lights on, nobody would see up there."

  "It was also a good spot in case Mackey had a tail," Nord added. "The killer knew a tail car would have to just keep moving by, and then he'd have Mackey alone."

  "Aren't we giving this guy a little too much credit?" Pratt asked. "How would he know the cops were onto this guy? Just from a newspaper article? Come on."

  Neither Bosch nor Rider answered and everyone else silently digested the unspoken suggestion that the killer had a connection to the department or, more specifically, the investigation.

  "All right, what's next?" Pratt said. "I think the containment on this is maybe another twenty-four hours tops. After that it's going to be in the papers and upstairs on six, and there's going to be hair on the walls if we don't wrap it up first. What do we do?"

  "We'll take the pen registers," Bosch said, speaking for himself and Rider. "And go from there."

  Bosch had been thinking about the note to Mackey he had seen on the desk in the service station the day before. A call to verify employment from Visa. As Rider had pointed out when she first heard about it, Mackey wasn't into leaving trails like credit cards. It was something that didn't fit and therefore he wanted to go after it.

  "We have all of the printouts right here," Robinson said. "The line that was busiest was the one into the station. All kinds of business calls."

  "Okay, Harry, Kiz, you want the registers?" Pratt asked.

  Rider looked at Bosch and then at Pratt.

  "If that's what Harry wants. He seems to be on a roll today."

  As if on cue Bosch's phone began to chirp. He looked at the screen. It was Raj Patel.

  "We'll see what kind of a roll right now," he said as he opened the phone.

  Patel said he had good and bad news.

  "The good news is we still had the exemplar skid from the house in records here. The latents we recovered this morning did not match any of them. You found somebody new, Harry. It could be your killer."

  What this meant was that fingerprint examples from the members of the Verloren family and others who had appropriate access to the house were still on file in the SID print lab. None of those examples matched the fingerprints and palm print recovered that morning from beneath Rebecca Verloren's bed. Of course fingerprints could not be dated, and it was possible that the prints discovered that morning had been left by whoever had installed the bed. But it seemed unlikely. The prints were taken off the underside of the wooden slat. Whoever had left them had most likely been under the bed.

  "And the bad news?" Bosch asked.

  "I just ran them through the California system. No matches."

  "What about the FBI?"

  "That's next but that won't be so fast. They have to process it. I will send it through with an expedite request but you know how that goes."

  "I do, Raj. Let me know when you know, and thanks for the effort."

  Bosch closed the phone. He felt a steep letdown and his face showed it. He could already tell the others knew the score before he delivered the news.

  "No match on the DOJ database," he said. "He'll try the bureau's base but that will take a while."

  "Shit!" said Renner.

  "Speaking of Raj Patel," Pratt said, "his brother scheduled the autopsy for two o'clock today. I want one team there. Who wants to take it?"

  Renner weakly raised his hand. He and Robleto would take it. It was an easy assignment if you didn't mind the visuals.

  The meeting soon broke up after Pratt assigned Robinson and Nord the service station and the interviews of the people Mackey worked with there. Marcia and Jackson would work on pulling reports together and into a murder book. They were still the lead investigators and would coordinate things from room 503.

  Pratt looked at the bill, divided it by nine and told everyone to put in ten. This meant Bosch had to throw in a ten even though he hadn't even had a cup of coffee. He didn't protest. It was the price of being late and being the guy who put them on this path.

  As everyone stood Bosch caught Rider's eye.

  "Did you come directly here or did you ride with somebody?"

  "Abel gave me a lift."

  "Want to ride back together?"

  "Sure."

  Outside the restaurant she gave Bosch the silent treatment while they waited for his car from the valet. She stared at the large plastic steer that was atop the restaurant's sign. Under her arm was a file containing the printouts from the pen registers.

  Finally the car came and they got in. Before pulling out of the lot Bosch turned and looked at her.

  "All right, say it," he said.

  "Say what?"

  "Whatever it is you want to say so you can feel better."

  "You should've called me, Harry, that's all."

  "Look, Kiz, I called you yesterday and you chewed me out. I was just working off of recent experience."

  "This was different and you know it. You called me yesterday because you were excited about something. Today you were following a lead. I should have been with you. And then to not find out what you came up with until you went in there and told everybody. That was embarrassing, Harry. Thanks for that."

  Bosch nodded his contrition.

  "You're right about that part. I'm sorry. I should've called you when I was coming in. I just forgot. I knew I was late and I had both hands on the wheel and was just trying to get here."

  She didn't say anything, so he finally did.

  "Can we get back to solving this case now?"

  She shrugged and he finally put the car in drive. On the way to Parker Center he tried to fill her in on all the details he hadn't mention
ed during the breakfast meeting. He told her about McClellan's visit to his house and how that led him to the discovery of the prints under the bed.

  Twenty minutes later they were in their alcove in room 503. Bosch finally had a cup of coffee in front of him. They sat across from each other and had the pen register printouts spread between them.

  Bosch was concentrating on the reports on the service station phones. The listing was at least a couple hundred entries-calls going in or out on the station's two phones-between 6 a.m., when the surveillance started, and 4 p.m., when Mackey reported for work and Renner and Robleto started live-monitoring the line.