The Closers

possibility of race playing a part in the murder. But the murder weapon’s coming from the burglary of a man being threatened because of his religion seemed to give rise to the possibility of at least a tenuous link to the murder of a girl of mixed races.
    The fact that this was not mentioned in the murder book meant nothing. The aspect of race was always something held close to the vest in the LAPD. To commit something to the paperwork was to make it known within the department-investigative summaries were reviewed all the way up the line on hot cases. It could then be leaked and turned into something else, something political. So its absence was not seen by Bosch as a taint on the investigation. Not yet, at least.
    He returned the photos to the envelope and closed the murder book. He guessed that there were more than three hundred pages of documents and photos in it, and nowhere on any of those pages had he seen the name Roland Mackey. Was it possible that he had escaped even peripheral notice in the investigation so many years before? If so, was it still possible he was indeed the killer?
    These questions bothered Bosch. He always tried to keep faith in the murder book, meaning that he believed the answers usually lay within its plastic sides. But this time he was having difficulty believing the cold hit. Not the science. He had no doubt about Mackey being matched to the blood and tissue found inside the murder weapon. But he believed something was wrong. Something was missing.
    He looked down at his pad. He had taken few notes. He had really only composed a list of people he wanted to talk to.

    Green and Garcia
    Mother/Father
    school/friends/teachers
    former boyfriend
    probation agent
    Mackey-school?

    He knew that every note he had taken was obvious. He realized how little they had besides the DNA match, and once again he was uneasy about building a case without anything else.
    Bosch was staring at his notes when Kiz Rider walked into the office. She was empty-handed and unsmiling.
    “Well?” Bosch asked.
    “Bad news. The murder weapon’s gone. I don’t know if you’ve read the whole book but there’s mention of a journal in there. The girl kept a journal. That’s gone, too. Everything’s gone.”

7
    THEY DECIDED that the best way to deal with and discuss bad news was to eat. Besides that, nothing made Bosch hungrier than sitting in an office all morning and reading through a murder book. They went over to Chinese Friends, a small place on Broadway at the end of Chinatown where they knew they could still get a table this early. It was a place where you could eat well and to capacity and barely go over five bucks. The trouble was that it filled up fast, mostly with headquarters staff from the Fire Department, the gold badges from Parker Center and the bureaucrats from City Hall. If you didn’t get there by noon you ordered takeout and you had to sit and eat on the bus benches out front in the sun.
    They left the murder book in the car so as not to disturb other patrons in the restaurant, where the tables were jammed as close as the desks in a public school. They did bring their notes, and discussed the case in an improvised shorthand designed to keep their conversation private. Rider explained that when she had said the gun and the journal were missing from the ESB what she meant was that no evidence carton from the case could be found during an hour-long search by two evidence clerks. This was not much of a surprise to Bosch. As Pratt had warned earlier, the department had taken haphazard care of evidence for decades. Evidence cartons were booked and filed on shelves in chronological order and without any sort of separation according to crime classification. Consequently, evidence from a murder might sit on a shelf next to evidence from a burglary. And when clerks came through periodically to clear out evidence from cases where the statute of limitations had expired, sometimes the wrong box got tossed. The security of the ESB was also a low priority for many years. It was not difficult for anyone with an LAPD badge to gain access to any piece of evidence in the facility. So the evidence cartons were subject to pilfering. It was not unusual for weapons to be missing, or other kinds of evidence from famous cases like the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, and the Dollmaker crimes.
    There was no indication in the Verloren case of evidence theft. It was probably more a case of carelessness, of trying to find