The Closers

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