The Closers

yogurt as if to say he had what he needed. Bosch saw little chunks of green in the gunk. He tried to think of a green fruit and only came up with kiwi. He walked away thinking that the only possible way to make yogurt taste worse was to put kiwi into it.
    They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out front to where the memorial fountain was.
    “So where do you want to go?” Kiz asked.
    “Depends on how much there is to talk about.”
    “Probably a lot.”
    “Last time I worked in Parker Center I was a smoker. When I needed to walk and think I’d go over to Union Station and buy smokes in the shop over there. I liked that place. It’s got those comfortable chairs in the main hall. Or it used to, at least.”
    “Sounds good to me.”
    They headed that way, taking Los Angeles Street to the north. The first building they passed was the federal office building, and Bosch noticed that the concrete barriers erected in 2001 to keep potential vehicle bombs away from the building were still in place. The threat of danger didn’t seem to bother the people in the line stretching across the front of the building. They were waiting to get into the immigration offices, each clutching paperwork and ready to make a case for citizenship. They waited beneath the tile mosaics on the front façade that depicted people dressed like angels, their eyes skyward, waiting on heaven.
    “Why don’t you start, Harry,” Rider said. “Tell me about Robert Verloren.”
    Bosch walked a little further before beginning.
    “I liked the guy,” he said. “He’s digging himself out of the hole. He cooks a hundred or so breakfasts a day over there. I had a plate and it was pretty good stuff.”
    “And I’m sure it beats the hell out of the prices at Pacific Dining Car. What did he give you that’s made you so angry?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You read me, I read you. I know he told you something that’s got you going.”
    Bosch nodded. It sure didn’t seem like three years since they had worked together.
    “ Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving.”
    “Tell it.”
    Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren’s description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.
    “Sounds like Irving to me, too,” Rider said.
    “And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan.”
    “Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He’s been on the Nickel a long time.”
    “I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn’t the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren.”
    They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.
    The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.
    “That’s not like you, Harry.”
    “What isn’t?”
    “Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle.”
    “Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?”
    She nodded glumly.
    “I think so,” she said.
    “And they just let you waltz in there and get it?”
    “I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives.”
    “The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?”
    “I’m sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it.”
    “Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?”
    “Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was