The Closers

Sam Weiss. He lived alone and worked as a sound technician at Warner Bros. in Burbank. Bosch scanned the report and found only one other note of interest. In the investigating officer’s comments section it was stated that the burglary victim had recently purchased the gun for protection after being harassed by anonymous phone calls in which the caller threatened him because he was Jewish. The victim reported that he did not know how his unlisted number fell into the hands of his harasser and he did not know what had brought on the threats.
    Bosch quickly read through the next report from the Firearms Unit, which identified the stun gun used in the abduction. The report said the 2-1/4-inch span between contact points-as exhibited by the burn marks on the victim’s flesh-was unique to the Professional 100 model manufactured by a company called SafetyCharge in Downey. The model was sold over the counter and through mail order and there were more than twelve thousand Professional 100 models distributed at the time of the murder. Bosch knew that without the actual device in hand there was no way to connect the marks on Becky Verloren’s body with an ownership trail. That was a dead end.
    He moved on, leafing through a series of 8 x 10 photos taken in the Verloren house after the body was found up on the hillside behind it. Bosch knew these were cover-your-ass photos. The case had been handled-or mishandled-as a runaway situation. The department did not go full field with it until after the body was found and an autopsy concluded the death was a homicide. Five days after the girl was reported missing, the police came back and turned the house into a crime scene. The question was what was lost in those five days.
    The photos included interior and exterior shots of all three doors to the house-front, back, garage-and several close-ups of window locks. There was also a series of shots taken in Becky Verloren’s bedroom. The first thing Bosch noticed was that the bed was made. He wondered if the abductor had made it, thereby further selling the suicide, or Becky’s mother had simply made the bed at some point during the days she hoped and waited for her daughter to come home.
    The bed was a four-poster with a white-and-pink spread with cats on it and a matching pink ruffle. The bedspread reminded Bosch of the one that had covered his own daughter’s bed. It seemed to be something that a child much younger than sixteen would like and he wondered if Becky Verloren had kept it for nostalgic reasons or as some sort of psychological security blanket. The bed’s ruffle did not uniformly skirt the floor. It was a couple inches too long, and so it bunched on the floor and alternately fluffed out or tucked under the bed too far.
    There were photos of her bureau and bed tables. The room was festooned with stuffed animals from her younger years. There were posters on the walls from music groups that had come and gone. There was a poster of a John Travolta movie three comebacks old. The room was very neat and orderly, and again Bosch wondered if this was how it had been on the morning Rebecca Verloren was discovered missing or if her mother had straightened the room while awaiting her daughter’s return.
    Bosch knew the photos had to have been taken as the first step of the crime scene investigation. Nowhere did he see any fingerprint powder or any other indication of the upset that would come with the intrusion of the criminalists.
    The photos were followed in the murder book by a packet of summaries from interviews the detectives conducted with numerous students at Hillside Prep. A checklist on the top page indicated that the investigators had talked to every student in Becky Verloren’s class and every boy who attended the upper grades of the school. There were also summaries from interviews of several of the victim’s teachers and school administrators.
    Included in this section was a summary of a phone interview conducted with a former boyfriend of Becky Verloren’s who had moved with his family to Hawaii the year before her murder. Attached to the summary was an alibi confirmation report stating that the teenager’s supervisor had confirmed that the boy had worked in the car wash and detail facility at a Maui rent-a-car franchise on the days of and after the murder, making it unlikely that he could have been in Los Angeles to kill her.
    There was a separate packet of summaries of interviews with employees of the Island