The Closers

was strong back then,” he said in a whisper.
    The patrol car pulled through the opening in the concrete block wall that surrounded the back of Devonshire Division. Stoddard looked out the window. Seeing all of the patrol cars and the back of the station must have brought an awakening to him. He realized his situation.
    “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said.
    “That’s fine,” Bosch said. “We’ll put you in a holding room and get you a lawyer if you want.”
    The car stopped in front of a set of double doors and Bosch got out. He came around and got Stoddard out and then walked him in through the doors. The detective bureau was on the second floor. They took an elevator and were met by the lieutenant in charge of Devonshire detectives. Bosch had called him from the Verloren house. An interview room was waiting for Stoddard. Bosch put him in a seat and cuffed one of his wrists to a metal ring bolted to the center of the table.
    “Sit tight,” Bosch said. “I’ll be back.”
    At the door, he looked back at Stoddard. He decided to make one last play.
    “And for what it’s worth, I think your story is bullshit,” he said.
    Stoddard looked at him, surprise on his face.
    “What do you mean? I loved her. I didn’t want -”
    “You stalked her with one purpose. To kill her. She rejected you and you couldn’t take it, so you wanted her dead. And now seventeen years later you’re going to try to tell it different, like it’s Romeo and Juliet or something. You’re a coward, Stoddard. You stalked her and killed her and you should own up to it.”
    “No, you’re wrong. I had the gun for myself.”
    Bosch came back into the room and leaned down on the table.
    “Yeah? What about the stun gun, Stoddard? Was that for yourself, too? You left that out of your story, didn’t you? Why’d you need a stun gun if you went in there to kill yourself?”
    Stoddard was silent. It was almost as if after seventeen years he had been able to erase the Professional 100 from his memory.
    “We got first degree and we got lying in wait,” Bosch said. “You’re going down for the whole ride, Stoddard. You were never going to kill yourself. Back then, or even today.”
    “I think I want a lawyer now,” Stoddard said.
    “Yeah, of course you do.”
    Bosch left the room and walked down the hallway to an open door. It was the monitoring room. The lieutenant and one of the patrol officers from the ride in were in the small space. There were two active video screens. On one Bosch saw Stoddard sitting in the interview room. The camera angle was from an upper corner of the room. Stoddard seemed to be staring blankly at the wall.
    The image on the other screen was frozen. It showed Bosch and Stoddard in the backseat of the patrol car.
    “How’s the sound?” Bosch asked.
    “Beautiful,” the lieutenant said. “We got it all. Taking off the cuffs was a nice touch. Brought his face up into the camera.”
    The lieutenant hit a switch and the picture started moving. Bosch could hear Stoddard’s voice clearly. He nodded. The patrol car had been equipped with a dashboard camera used for filming traffic stops and prisoner transports. For the ride in with Stoddard the car’s interior microphone was turned on and the exterior was cut off.
    It had worked perfectly. Stoddard’s admissions in the backseat would help seal the case. Bosch felt no worries from that direction at all. He thanked the lieutenant and the patrolman and asked if he could borrow a desk to make some calls.
    Bosch called Abel Pratt to update him and to assure him that Rider was shaken up but otherwise okay. He told Pratt that he needed to get SID teams to both Stoddard’s and Muriel Verloren’s homes to process crime scenes. He said a search warrant should be applied for and approved before the SID team entered Stoddard’s house. He said that Stoddard was about to be booked and his fingerprints taken. The prints would need to be compared to those found on the slat from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. He finished by telling Pratt about the video taken during the ride to the station and the admissions Stoddard had made.
    “It’s all solid and it’s on tape,” Bosch said. “It all came after Miranda.”
    “Good going, Harry,” Pratt said. “I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about on this.”
    “Not with the case, at least.”
    Meaning that Stoddard was going to go down without a problem, but Bosch wasn’t sure how he would fare in