The Closers

House Grill, the restaurant owned by Robert Verloren. His daughter had just started a part-time summer job at the restaurant. She was an assistant hostess during lunch. Her job was to lead customers to their tables and to put down the menus. Though Bosch knew restaurants often drew a variety of drifters to the low-level kitchen jobs, Robert Verloren avoided hiring men with criminal records, instead drawing on the population of surfers and other free spirits who flocked to the beaches of Malibu. These people would have had limited contact with Rebecca, who worked in the dining room, but they were interviewed just the same and seemingly dismissed by the investigators.
    There was also a victim’s chronology in which the investigators outlined Rebecca Verloren’s movements in the days leading up to her murder. In 1988 July Fourth fell on a Monday. Rebecca spent most of the holiday weekend at home, except for a Sunday-night sleepover with three girlfriends at one of their houses. The attached summaries of interviews with these three girls were long but contained no information of investigative value.
    On Monday, the holiday, she stayed home until she and her parents went to Balboa Park to watch a fireworks display. It was a rare night off for Robert Verloren and he insisted that the family stay together, much to Becky’s reported upset at missing out on a friend’s party in the Porter Ranch area.
    On Tuesday the summer routine began again with Rebecca going to the restaurant with her father to work the lunch shift as a hostess. At three o’clock her father drove her home. He stayed at home through the afternoon and then headed back to the restaurant for the dinner shift at about the same time Rebecca used her mother’s car to run the errand of collecting the dry cleaning.
    Bosch saw nothing in the schedule that raised suspicions, nothing that was missed by the original investigators.
    He next came to a transcript of a formal interview with the parents. It was taken at Devonshire Division on July 14, more than a week after their daughter was discovered missing. By this point the detectives had accumulated a lot of case knowledge and were specific with their questions. Bosch carefully read this transcript, as much for the answers as for the insight it would give to the investigators’ view of the case at that point.

    Case No. 88-641, Verloren, Rebecca (DOD 7-6-88), I/O A. Garcia, #993
    7/14/88 – 2:15 p.m., Devonshire Homicide
    GARCIA: Thank you for coming in. I hope you don’t mind but we are recording this so we will have a record. How are you managing?
    ROBT. VERLOREN: About as well as expected. We’re devastated. We don’t know what to do.
    MURIEL VERLOREN: We keep thinking, what could we have done to prevent this from happening to our little girl?
    GREEN: We’re truly sorry, ma’am. But you can’t blame yourself for this. As far as we can tell it was nothing you did or didn’t do. It just happened. Don’t blame yourself. Blame the person who did this.
    GARCIA: And we are going to get him. You don’t have to worry about that. Now, we have some questions we need to ask. Some of these might be painful but we need the answers if we are going to get this guy.
    ROBT. VERLOREN: You keep saying “guy.” Is there a suspect? Do you know it was a man?
    GARCIA: We don’t know anything for sure, sir. We’re mostly going with the percentages there. But also you have that steep hill behind your house. Becky was definitely carried up that hill. She wasn’t a big girl but we definitely think it would have to be a man.
    MURIEL VERLOREN: But you said she wasn’t… that there was no sexual assault.
    GARCIA: That is true, ma’am. But that does not preclude this from being a sexually motivated or related crime.
    ROBT. VERLOREN: How do you mean?
    GARCIA: We will get to that, sir. If you don’t mind, let us ask our questions and then we will get to your questions if you would like.
    ROBT. VERLOREN: Go ahead, please. I’m sorry. It’s just that we cannot understand what has happened. It’s like we are underwater all the time.
    GARCIA: That is completely understandable. As I said, you have our deepest sympathy. From the department, too. We have the upper echelon of this department watching over this case very closely.
    GREEN: We would like to start by going back before her disappearance. Maybe a month before. Did your daughter go away at all during that time?
    ROBT. VERLOREN: What do you mean, away?
    GARCIA: Was