The Closers

Bosch and Rider had just studied in the yearbook. The hair was darker and shorter now, the body wider and heavier. Like Stoddard, she wore glasses. Bosch knew she was only thirty-two or thirty-three but she looked older.
    There was one last student in the room. She was a pretty blonde girl who was shoving books into a backpack. When she was finished she zipped the pack closed and headed to the door.
    “See you tomorrow, Mrs. Sable.”
    “Good-bye, Kaitlyn.”
    The student gave Bosch and Rider a curious look as she went by them. The detectives stepped into the classroom and Bosch pulled the door closed. That made Bailey Sable look up from her papers.
    “Can I help you?” she asked.
    Bosch took the lead.
    “You might be able to,” he said. “Mr. Stoddard said it would be all right if we came to your classroom.”
    He approached the desk. The teacher looked up at him warily.
    “Are you parents?”
    “No, we’re detectives, Mrs. Sable. My name is Harry Bosch and this is Kizmin Rider. We wanted to ask you a few questions about Becky Verloren.”
    She reacted as if she had just been punched in the gut. All these years and it was still that close to the surface.
    “Oh my God, oh my God,” she said.
    “We’re sorry to hit you with this out of the blue,” Bosch said.
    “Is something happening? Did you find who…?”
    She didn’t finish.
    “Well, we’re working on it again,” Bosch said. “And you might be able to help us.”
    “How?”
    Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the mug shot taken from Roland Mackey’s DOC probation file. It was a portrait of Mackey as an eighteen-year-old car thief. Bosch put it down on top of the paper she had been grading. She looked down at it.
    “Do you recognize the person in that photo?” Bosch asked.
    “It was taken seventeen years ago,” Rider added. “About the time of Becky’s death.”
    The teacher looked down at Mackey’s defiant glare into the police camera. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Bosch looked at Rider and nodded, a signal that maybe she should take over.
    “Does it look like anyone you or Becky or any of your friends may have encountered back then?” Rider asked.
    “Did he go to school here?” Sable asked.
    “No, we don’t think so. But we know he lived in this area.”
    “Is he the killer?”
    “We don’t know. We’re just trying to see if there is a connection between Becky and him.”
    “What is his name?”
    Rider looked at Bosch and he nodded again.
    “His name is Roland Mackey. Does he look familiar?”
    “Not really. It is hard for me to remember back then. Remember the faces of strangers, I mean.”
    “So he definitely is not someone you knew, right?”
    “Definitely.”
    “Do you think Becky could have known him without you being aware of it?”
    She thought for a long moment before answering.
    “Well, it’s possible. You know, it came out that she’d gotten pregnant. I didn’t know about that, so I guess I might not have known about him. Was he the father?”
    “We don’t know.”
    Unbidden, she had jumped the interview forward to Bosch’s next line of questioning.
    “Mrs. Sable, you know, it’s been a lot of years since then,” he said. “If you were sort of sticking up for a friend back then, we understand that. But if there is more you know, you can tell us now. This is probably the last shot that anybody is going to take at solving this thing.”
    “You mean about her being pregnant? I really didn’t know about it. I’m sorry. I was just as shocked as everybody else when the police started asking about that.”
    “If Becky were going to confide in someone about that, would it have been you?”
    Again, she didn’t answer right away. She gave it some thought.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “We were very close but she was that way with a few other girls, too. There were four of us who had been together since first grade here. In first grade we called ourselves the Kitty Cat Club because we all had pet cats. At different times and different years one of us would be closer to one of the others. It changed all the time. But as a group we always stuck together.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “That summer when Becky was taken, who would you say was closest to her?”
    “It was probably Tara. She took it the hardest.”
    Bosch looked at Rider, trying to remember the names of the girls Becky had been with two nights before her death.
    “Tara Wood?” Rider asked.
    “Yes, that’s Tara. They