The Closers

that. It was Muriel mostly-the mother-who I had talked to. The father… there was something going on with him. He didn’t do well. He left home, they divorced, the whole thing. Lost the restaurant. Last I heard, he was living on the street. He would show up at the house from time to time and ask Muriel for money.”
    “What made you guess it was somebody from the restaurant when we came in here?”
    Garcia shook his head like he was frustrated by reaching for a memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. It was more like a feeling. There was stuff wrong with the case. Something was hinky about it.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, you read the book, I’m sure. She wasn’t raped. She was carried up that hill and it was made to look like a suicide. It was done badly. It was really an execution. So we weren’t talking about the random intruder. Somebody she knew wanted her dead. And they either went in that house or sent somebody in that house.”
    “You think it was related to the pregnancy?” Rider asked.
    Garcia nodded.
    “We thought that was tied in but we could never nail it down.”
    “MTL-you never figured that one out.”
    Garcia looked at her, confusion on his face.
    “Empty L?”
    “No, M-T-L. The initials Rebecca used in her journal. You mentioned it in the formal interview with the parents. ‘My true love,’ remember?”
    “Oh, yeah, the initials. It was like a code. We never knew for sure. We never found out who that was. Are you looking for the journal?”
    Bosch nodded and Rider spoke.
    “We’re looking for everything. The journal, the gun, the whole evidence carton is lost somewhere in the ESB.”
    Garcia shook his head like a man who had spent a career dealing with the department’s frustrations.
    “That is not surprising. Par for the course, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Tell you one thing, though. If they find the carton there won’t be any journal in it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I gave it back.”
    “To the parents?”
    “To the mother. Like I said, I made lieutenant and was shipping out, going to South Bureau. Ron Green had already retired. I was passing the case off and I knew that was going to be the end of it. Nobody was going to pay attention to it like we did. So I told Muriel I was leaving and I gave her the journal…
    “That poor woman. It was like time stood still for her on that day in July. She became frozen. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. I remember I went to see her before I left. This was a year or so after the murder. She had me look at Becky’s bedroom. It was untouched. It was exactly the way it was on the night she was taken.”
    Rider nodded somberly. Garcia said nothing else. Bosch finally cleared his throat, leaned forward and spoke, hitting Garcia with the same question again.
    “When we first came in and said we got a DNA match, you guessed it was somebody from the restaurant. Why?”
    Bosch looked at Rider to see if she was annoyed that he was entering the questioning. She didn’t appear to be.
    “I don’t know why,” Garcia said. “Like I said, I always sort of thought that it might have come from that side of things, because I never felt we nailed everything down over there.”
    “You’re talking about the father?”
    Garcia nodded.
    “The father was hinky. I don’t know if you even say that anymore. But back then the word was hinky.”
    “How so?” Rider asked. “How was the father hinky?”
    Before Garcia could answer the question one of the uniformed adjutants came into the office.
    “Commander? They’re all in the conference room and ready to start.”
    “Okay, Sergeant. I’ll be there shortly.”
    After the sergeant left, Garcia looked back at Rider as if he had forgotten the question.
    “There is nothing in the murder book that casts any suspicion on the father,” Rider said. “Why did you think he was hinky?”
    “Oh, I don’t really know. Sort of a gut feeling. He never really acted like you would think a father would act, you know? He was too quiet. He never got mad, never yelled-I mean, somebody took his little girl. He never once took Ron or me aside and said, ‘I want first shot at the guy when you find him.’ I expected that.”
    As far as Bosch was concerned, everybody was still a suspect, even with the cold hit tying Mackey to the murder weapon. This certainly included Robert Verloren. But he immediately dismissed Garcia’s gut instinct based on the father’s