The Closers

here?” he asked. “I want to hear it.”
    “I think we can,” Nord said. “Let me get one of the techs who are floating around here to-hey, Harry, I gotta call you back. Mackey’s making a call.”
    “Call me back.”
    Bosch quickly closed the phone so Nord could get back to her monitor. He excitedly recounted for Rider the report on Mackey’s phone call to Michelle Murphy. He could tell Rider caught the charge as well.
    “We might be in business, Harry.”
    Bosch was looking through the binoculars at Mackey. He was sitting behind the desk in the office and talking on his cell phone.
    “Come on, Mackey,” Bosch whispered. “Spill it. Tell us the story.”
    But then Mackey closed the phone. Bosch knew the call was too short.
    Ten seconds later Nord called Bosch back.
    “He just called Billy Blitzkrieg.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said, ‘I might be in trouble’ and ‘I might need to make a move,’ and then Burkhart cut him off and said, ‘I don’t care what it is, don’t talk about it on the phone.’ So they agreed to meet after Mackey gets off work.”
    “Where?”
    “Sounded like at the house. Mackey said, ‘You’ll be up?’ and Burkhart said he would be. Mackey then said, ‘What about Belinda, she still there?’ and Burkhart said she’d be asleep and not to worry about her. They ended it like that.”
    Bosch immediately felt a crushing blow to his hopes of breaking the case that night. If Mackey met Burkhart inside the house, they would not hear what transpired inside. They’d be locked out of the confession they had set up the surveillance to get.
    “Call me if he makes any other calls,” he said quickly and then hung up.
    He looked at Rider, who was waiting expectantly in the dark.
    “Not good?” she asked. She had obviously read something in his tone to Nord.
    “Not good.”
    He told her about the calls and the obstacle they would face if Mackey met with Burkhart to discuss his “trouble” behind closed doors.
    “It’s not all bad, Harry,” she said after hearing everything. “He made a solid admission to the Murphy woman and a lesser admission to Burkhart. But we’re getting close so don’t get depressed. Let’s figure this out. What can we do to make them meet outside of the house? Like at a Starbucks or something.”
    “Yeah, right. Mackey ordering a latte.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Even if we roust them out of the house, how are we going to get close? We can’t. We need this to be a phone call. It’s the blind spot-my blind spot-to this whole thing.”
    “We just need to sit tight and see what happens. It’s all we can do right now. Look, it would be good to have an ear on this but maybe it’s not the end of the world. We already have Mackey on the phone saying he might have to make a move. If he does, if he runs, then that could be seen by a jury as a shading of guilt. And if you take that and what we already have on tape it might be enough to squeeze more out of him when we finally bring him in. So all is not lost here, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “You want me to call it in to Abel? He’d want to know.”
    “Yeah. Fine, call it in. There’s nothing to call in, but go ahead.”
    “Just cool down, Harry.”
    Bosch shut her out by raising the binoculars and looking at Mackey. He was still behind the desk and appeared deep in thought. The other night man, the one Bosch assumed was Kenny, was sitting on another chair and his face was angled up for viewing the television. He was laughing at something he was watching.
    Mackey was not laughing or watching. His face was cast down. He was looking at something in memory.
    The wait until midnight was the longest ninety minutes of surveillance Bosch had ever spent. As they waited for the station to close and Mackey to head to his rendezvous with Burkhart, nothing happened. The phones were silent, Mackey did not move from his spot at the desk and Bosch came up with no plan to either avert the rendezvous or infiltrate it in some way. It was as though they were all frozen until the clock struck twelve.
    Finally, the exterior lights of the station went off and the two men closed the business for the night. When Mackey walked out, he was carrying the newspaper he could not read. Bosch knew he was going to show it to Burkhart and most likely discuss the murder.
    “And we won’t be there,” Bosch mumbled as he tracked Mackey through the binoculars.
    Mackey got into his Camaro and revved the engine loudly