The Closers

the accident. Mackey spoke briefly with the other tow truck driver-a professional courtesy-and went to work on the Toyota. An LAPD patrol car was sitting in the parking lot of the corner plaza and the officer inside was writing up a report. Bosch saw no drivers. He thought this meant that they might have all been transported to an emergency room because of injuries.
    Mackey towed the Toyota to a dealership all the way over on Van Nuys Boulevard. While he was there, letting the wreck down in the service drive, Bosch got another call. Robinson told him that Mackey had been summoned again. This time to the Northridge Fashion Center, where an employee of the Borders bookstore needed a battery jump.
    “This guy isn’t going to have time to read the paper if he stays busy like this,” Rider said after Bosch reported on the phone call.
    “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “I’m wondering if he can even read.”
    “You mean the dyslexia?”
    “Yeah, but not just that. I haven’t seen him do any reading or writing. He told me to fill in the forms for the tow. Then he either didn’t want to or couldn’t fill out a receipt at the end. And then there was this note on the desk for him.”
    “What note?”
    “He picked it up and stared at it for a long time but I wasn’t really sure he knew what it said.”
    “Could you read it? What did it say?”
    “It was a note from the dayshift people. Visa had called to confirm his employment on an application he had made, I guess.”
    Rider wrinkled her brow.
    “What?” Bosch asked.
    “Just seems weird, him applying for a credit card. That would make him findable, which I thought he was trying to avoid.”
    “Maybe he’s starting to feel safe.”
    Mackey went from the Toyota dealership straight to the shopping mall, where he jump-started a woman’s car. He then turned his truck toward the home base. It was almost ten o’clock by the time he pulled back into the station. Bosch’s sagging hopes were buoyed when he looked through the binoculars from the plaza across the street and saw Mackey walking from the truck to the office.
    “We might still be in play,” he said to Rider. “He’s carrying the paper with him.”
    It was hard to keep track of Mackey inside the station. The front office was glass on two sides and that was not a problem. But the garage doors were now closed and oftentimes it seemed that Mackey would disappear into these areas, where Bosch could not see him.
    “You want me to be the eyes for a while?” Rider asked.
    Bosch lowered the binoculars and looked at her. He could barely read her face in the darkness of the car.
    “Nah, I’m okay. You’re doing all the driving anyway. Why don’t you rest? I woke you up early today.”
    He raised the binoculars back up.
    “I’m fine,” Rider said. “But anytime you need a break…”
    “Besides,” Bosch said, “I sort of feel responsible for this guy.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know. This whole thing. I mean, we could’ve just pulled Mackey in and sweated him in the box, tried to break him. Instead we went this way, and it’s my plan. I’m responsible.”
    “We can still sweat him. If this doesn’t work, then that’s probably what we’ll need to do.”
    Bosch’s phone began to chirp.
    “Maybe this is what we’re waiting for,” he said as he answered.
    It was Nord.
    “I thought you told us this guy got his general education degree, Harry.”
    “He did. What’s going on?”
    “He just had to call someone to read the story to him out of the paper.”
    Bosch sat up a little straighter. They were in play. It didn’t matter how the story was communicated to Mackey, the important thing was that he wanted to know what it said.
    “Who did he call?”
    “A woman named Michelle Murphy. Sounded like an old girlfriend. He asked if she still got the paper every day, like he wasn’t sure anymore. She said yeah and he asked her to read the story to him.”
    “Did they talk about it after she read it?”
    “Yeah. She asked him if he knew the girl the story was about. He said no, but then he said, ‘I knew the gun.’ Just like that. Then she said she didn’t want to know anything else and that was it. They hung up.”
    Bosch thought about all of this. The play earlier in the day had worked. It had kicked over a rock that had not been moved in seventeen years. He was excited, and he could feel the charge building in his blood.
    “Can you pipe the recording over the line to us