The Closers

criminal and drug user. It appeared that Mackey never went to state prison for any of his crimes. He was often given second chances and then, through plea agreements, was sentenced to probation or to short stints in county jail. It appeared that the longest he ever stayed in stir was six months served after pleading guilty to receiving stolen property when he was twenty-eight years old. He served his time at the county-run Wayside Honor Rancho.
    Bosch leaned back after he was finished scrolling through the computer records. He felt uneasy about what he had just read. Mackey had the kind of record that might be seen as a pathway to murder. But in this case the murder came first-when Mackey was only eighteen years old-and the petty crimes came after. It didn’t seem to quite fit.
    “What?” Rider asked, sensing his mood.
    “I don’t know. I thought there’d be more, I guess. It’s backwards. This guy goes from murder to petty crime? Doesn’t seem to hold.”
    “Well, this is all he’s ever gotten popped for. Doesn’t mean it’s all he ever did.”
    He nodded.
    “Juvenile?” he asked.
    “Maybe. Probably. But we’ll never get those records now. They’re probably long gone.”
    It was true. The state went out of its way to protect the privacy of juvenile offenders. Crimes rarely tailed offenders into the adult justice system. Nevertheless, Bosch thought that there had to be childhood crimes that would fit better with the seemingly cold-blooded murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been incapacitated with a stun gun and abducted from her home. Bosch began to have an uneasy feeling about the cold hit they were working. He was beginning to sense that Mackey was not the target. He was a means to the target.
    “Did you run him through DMV for an address?” he asked.
    “Harry, that’s old-school. You only have to update your driver’s license every four years. You want to find somebody you go to AutoTrack.”
    She opened the murder book and slid a loose piece of paper across to him. It was a computer printout that said AutoTrack at the top. Rider said it was a private company the police department contracted with. It provided computer searches of all public records, including DMV, public utility and cable service databases, as well as private databases such as credit reporting services, to determine an individual’s past and current addresses. Bosch saw that the printout contained a listing of Roland Mackey’s various addresses dating back to when he was eighteen. His current listing on all current data, including driver’s license and car registration, was the address in Panorama City. But on the page, Rider had circled the address ascribed to Mackey when he was eighteen through twenty years old-the years 1988 through 1990. It was an apartment on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Chatsworth. This meant that at the time of the murder Mackey was living very close to Rebecca Verloren’s home. This made Bosch feel a little better about things. Proximity was a key piece to the puzzle. Bosch’s misgivings over Mackey’s criminal pedigree aside, knowing that he was in the immediate vicinity in 1988 and therefore could have seen or even known Rebecca Verloren was a large check mark in the positive column.
    “Make you feel any better, Harry?”
    “A little bit.”
    “Good. I’m going, then.”
    “I’ll be here.”
    After Rider left, Bosch jumped back into his review of the murder book. The third Investigator’s Summary focused on how the intruder got into the house. The door and window locks showed no signs of having been compromised and all known keys to the home were accounted for among family members and a housekeeper who was cleared of any suspicion. The investigators theorized that the killer came in through the garage, which had been left open, and then entered the house through the connecting door, which was usually not locked until after Robert Verloren came home from work at night.
    According to Robert Verloren the garage was open when he came home from his restaurant about ten-thirty on the night of July fifth. The connecting door from the garage into the house was unlocked. He entered his home, closed the garage and locked the connecting door. The investigators theorized that by then the killer was already in the house.
    The Verlorens’ explanation for the open garage was that their daughter had recently received her driver’s license and was on occasion allowed to use her mother’s car.