The Closers

survey of the department’s unsolved murders. The DOJ operated the state’s primary DNA database. The backlog of comparison requests to the underfunded and undermanned lab was running more than a year at the time. But thanks to the tide of requests from the new LAPD unit it took almost eighteen months before the Verloren evidence was re-typed by DOJ analysts and compared to thousands of DNA profiles in the state data bank. It produced a single match, a “cold hit” in the parlance of DNA work.
    Bosch looked at the single-page DOJ report unfolded in front of him. It stated that twelve of a possible fourteen markers matched the DNA from the weapon used to murder Rebecca Verloren to a now thirty-five-year-old man named Roland Mackey. He was a native of Los Angeles whose last known address was in Panorama City. Bosch felt his blood start moving a little faster as he read the cold hit report. Panorama City was in the San Fernando Valley, not more than fifteen minutes from Chatsworth, even in bad traffic. It added a level of credibility to the match. It was not that Bosch didn’t believe the science. He did. But he also believed you needed more than the science to convince a jury beyond a doubt. You needed to bolster the scientific fact with connections of circumstantial evidence and common sense. This was one of those connections.
    Bosch noticed the date on the cover letter of the DOJ report.
    “You said we just got this?” he asked Rider.
    “Yeah. I think it came in Friday. Why?”
    “The date on it is from two Fridays ago. Ten days.”
    Rider shrugged.
    “Bureaucracy,” she said. “I guess it took its time getting down here from Sacramento.”
    “I know the case is old but you’d think they’d move a little faster than that.”
    Rider didn’t respond. Bosch dropped it and read on. Mackey’s DNA was in the DOJ computer base because all offenders convicted of any sex-related crime in California were forced under state law to submit blood and oral swabs for typing and inclusion in the DNA data bank. The offense that resulted in Mackey’s DNA going into the bank was on the far margin of the state mandate. Two years earlier Mackey was convicted of lewd behavior in Los Angeles. The DOJ report did not offer details of the crime but stated Mackey was placed on twelve months probation, an indication that his was a minor offense.
    Bosch was about to write a note on his pad when he looked up and saw Rider closing the murder book on the second half of the documents.
    “Done?”
    “Done.”
    “Now what?”
    “I figured that while you were finishing the book I’d go over to the ESB and pick up the box.”
    Bosch had no trouble remembering the meaning of what she said. He had slipped easily back into the world of acronyms and copspeak. The ESB was the Evidence Storage Building over at the Piper Tech compound. She would go there to pick up the physical evidence that would have been stored from the case. Items like the murder weapon, the victim’s clothing and anything else accumulated while the case was initially worked. It was usually stored in a taped cardboard box and put on a shelf. The exception to this was storage of perishable and biological evidence-such as the blood and tissue recovered from the Verloren murder weapon-which was stored in lab vaults in the Scientific Investigation Division.
    “Sounds like a good idea,” Bosch said. “But first why don’t you run this guy through DMV and NCIC and see if we can get a location?”
    “Already did that.”
    She turned her laptop around on her desk so Bosch could see the screen. He recognized the National Crime Index Computer template on the screen. He reached across and started scrolling down the screen, his eyes scanning the information.
    Rider had run Roland Mackey through NCIC and gotten his criminal record. His conviction two years earlier for lewd behavior was only the latest in a string of recorded arrests dating back to when he was eighteen-the same year as Rebecca Verloren’s murder. Anything prior would not be listed because juvenile protection laws shielded that part of his record. Most of the crimes listed were property and drug-related crimes, beginning with car theft and a burglary at eighteen and leading to two drug-possession raps, two driving under the influence arrests, another burglary charge and a receiving stolen property hit. There was also an early solicitation of prostitution arrest. Overall it was the pedigree of a small-time