The Closers

Bosch had to consider that the investigation of Rebecca Verloren’s murder might have been stunted in deference to keeping the sickness beneath the surface.
    “You ready?”
    Bosch looked up and saw Robert Verloren standing over him. His face was sweating from exertion. He now held the chef’s hat in his hand. There was still a slight tremor in his arm.
    “Yeah, sure. Do you want to sit down?”
    Verloren took the seat across from Bosch.
    “Is it always like this?” Bosch asked. “This crowded?”
    “Every morning. Today we served a hundred sixty-two plates. A lot of people count on us. No, wait, make that a hundred sixty-three plates. I forgot about you. How was it?”
    “It was damn good. Thank you, I needed the fuel.”
    “My specialty.”
    “A little different than cooking for Johnny Carson and the Malibu set, huh?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t miss that. Not at all. Just a stop-off on the road to finding the place where I belong. But I’m here now, thanks to the Lord Jesus, and this is where I want to be.”
    Bosch nodded. Whether intentionally or not, Verloren was communicating to Bosch that his new life had been achieved through the intervention of faith. Bosch had often found that those who talked about it the most had the weakest hold on it.
    “How did you find me?” Verloren asked.
    “My partner and I talked to your wife yesterday and she told us that the last time she had heard anything about you, you were down here. I started looking last night.”
    “I wouldn’t go on these streets at night, if I were you.”
    There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. But it was something that seemed to have receded over time.
    “I thought I was going to find you standing in a line, not feeding the line.”
    “Well, not too long ago I was in the line. I had to stand there to stand where I am today.”
    Bosch nodded again. He had heard these one-day-at-a-time mantras before.
    “How long have you been sober?”
    Verloren smiled.
    “This time? A little over three years.”
    “Look, I don’t want to force you to relive the trauma of seventeen years ago, but we’ve reopened the case.”
    “It’s okay, Detective. I reopen the case every night when I shut my eyes and every morning when I say my prayers to Jesus.”
    Bosch nodded again.
    “Do you want to do this here or take a walk or go over to Parker Center where we can sit in a quiet room?”
    “Here is good. I am comfortable here.”
    “Okay, then let me tell you a little bit about what is going on. I work for the Open-Unsolved Unit. We are currently looking into your daughter’s murder again because we have some new information.”
    “What information?”
    Bosch decided to take a different approach with him. Where he had held information back from the mother, he decided to give it all to the father.
    “We have a match between blood found on the weapon used in the crime and an individual who we are pretty sure was living up there in Chatsworth at the time of the killing. It’s a DNA match. Do you know what that is?”
    Verloren nodded.
    “I know. Like in O.J.”
    “This one’s solid. It doesn’t mean he is the one who killed Rebecca, but it means he was close to the crime, and that makes us closer.”
    “Who is it?”
    “I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, Mr. Verloren, I want to ask you some questions relating to yourself and the case.”
    “What about me?”
    Bosch felt the tension rise. The skin around Verloren’s eyes grew tighter. He realized that he could have been careless with this man, mistaking his position in the kitchen as a sign of health and forgetting the warning Rider had issued about the homeless population.
    “Well,” he said, “I’d like to know a little bit about what has happened to you in the years since Rebecca was taken.”
    “What’s that got to do with anything?”
    “Maybe nothing, but I want to know.”
    “What happened to me is that I tripped and fell into a black hole. Took me a long time to see the light and my way out. You got kids?”
    “One. A girl.”
    “Then you know what I mean. You lose a kid the way I lost my girl and that’s it, my friend. It’s all over. You are like an empty bottle tossed out the window. The car keeps going but you are on the side of the road, broken.”
    Bosch nodded. He did know this. He lived a life of screaming vulnerability, knowing that what might happen in a city far away could cause him to live or die, or fall into the same black hole as