The Closers

to those old files we were talking about.”
    Bosch noticed that she hadn’t mentioned that they were PDU files. He wondered if Pratt or someone else was nearby and she was taking precautions against being overheard.
    “Is somebody there, Kiz?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Take all precautions, right?”
    “You got it.”
    “Good. Good luck. By the way, did you find a phone on Mariano?”
    “Yes,” she said. “There’s one phone and it’s under the name William Burkhart. Must be a roommate. This guy is just a few years older than Mackey and has a record that includes a hate crime. Nothing in recent years but the hate crime was in ’eighty-eight.”
    “And guess what,” Bosch said, “he was also Sam Weiss’s neighbor. I must’ve left that out last night when we talked.”
    “Too much information coming in.”
    “Yeah. You know I was wondering about something. How come Mackey’s cell didn’t come up on the AutoTrack?”
    “I’m ahead of you on that. I ran a check on the number and it’s not his. It’s held in the name of Belinda Messier. Her address is over on Melba, also in Woodland Hills. Her record’s clean except for some traffic stuff. Maybe she’s his girlfriend.”
    “Maybe.”
    “When I get time I will try to track her down. I’m sensing something here, Harry. It’s all coming together. All of this eighty-eight stuff. I tried to pull the file on the hate crime but -”
    “Public Disorder?”
    “Exactly. And that’s why I’m going up to six.”
    “Okay, anything else?”
    “I checked with the ESB first thing. They still haven’t found the evidence box. We still don’t have the gun. I’m now wondering if it got misplaced or if it was taken.”
    “Yeah,” Bosch said, thinking the same thing. If this case went inside the department, the evidence could have been purposely and permanently lost.
    “All right,” Bosch said. “Before I do this interview let’s go back to the journal for a minute. Is there anything in it about the pregnancy?”
    “No, she didn’t write about it. The entries are dated and she stopped writing in the book in late April. Maybe it was when she found out. I think maybe she stopped writing in it in case her parents were secretly reading it.”
    “Does she mention any hangouts? You know, places she would go?”
    “She does mention a lot of movies,” Rider said. “Not who she went with but just that she saw specific movies and what she thought of them. What are you thinking, target acquisition?”
    They needed to know where Mackey and Rebecca Verloren could have crossed paths. It was a hole in the case no matter what the motivation was. Where did Mackey come into contact with Verloren in order to target her?
    “Movie theaters,” he said. “It could have been where they intersected.”
    “Exactly. And I think all the theaters up there in the Valley are in malls. That makes the crossing zone even wider.”
    “It’s something to think about.”
    Bosch said he would come into the office after talking with Robert Verloren, and they hung up. Bosch went back into the break room and the noise from the dishwashing room seemed louder. The meal service was almost over and the dishwashers were getting slammed. Bosch sat down at the table again and noticed that someone had cleared his empty plate. He tried to think about the conversation with Rider. He knew that a shopping mall would be a huge crossroads, a place where it would be easy to see someone like Mackey crossing paths with someone like Rebecca Verloren. He wondered if the crime could have all come down to a chance encounter-Mackey seeing a girl with the obvious mix of races in her face and hair and eyes. Could this have incensed him to the point that he followed her home and later came back alone or with others to abduct and kill her?
    It seemed like a long shot but most theories began as long shots. He thought about the original investigation and the possibility of it having been tainted from within the department. There had been nothing in the murder book that played to the racial angle. But in 1988 the department would have gone out of its way not to play to it. The department and the city had a blind spot. An infection of racial animosities was festering beneath the surface in 1988 but the department and the city looked away. The skin over the seething wound finally broke a few years later and the city was torn apart by three days of rioting, the worst in the country in a quarter-century.