The Closers

above them in two rows. Rider looked up, too.
    Bosch then pointed to two side-by-side seats open near the newsstand. They sat down on the soft padded leather and put their cups on the wide wooden armrests.
    “You ready to talk about this now?” Rider asked.
    “If you are,” he answered. “What was in the file you saw in Special Archives? What was so sinister?”
    “For one thing, Mackey is in there.”
    “As a suspect in Verloren?”
    “No, the file has nothing to do with Verloren. Verloren was not even a blip on the screen as far as the file goes. It’s all about an investigation that went down and was buttoned up before Rebecca Verloren was even pregnant, let alone snatched from her bed in the night.”
    “All right, then what’s it got to do with us?”
    “Maybe nothing and maybe everything. You know the guy Mackey lives with, William Burkhart?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s in there, too. Only back then he was better known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That was his moniker in this gang, the Eights.”
    “Okay.”
    “In March of ’eighty-eight Billy Blitzkrieg went away for a year for vandalizing a synagogue in North Hollywood. Property damage, graffiti, defecation, the whole thing.”
    “The hate crime. He was the only one they bagged?”
    She nodded.
    “They got a latent off a spray can they found in a gutter trap about a block from the synagogue. So he went down for it. Took a plea or they would have made an example of him and he knew it.”
    Bosch nodded. He didn’t want to say anything that would interrupt her flow.
    “In the reports and in the press Burkhart-or Blitzkrieg or whatever you want to call him-was portrayed as the leader of the Eights. They said he called for nineteen eighty-eight to be a year of racial and ethnic upheaval to honor their beloved Adolf Hitler. You know the crap. RaHoWa, revenge of the white trash and all that. They all ran around in Minnesota Vikings jerseys-the Vikings apparently were a pure race. They all wore number eighty-eight.”
    “I’m getting the picture.”
    “Anyway, they had a lot on Burkhart. They had him cold on the synagogue and they had the feds chomping at the bit to do a civil rights dance on his pointy little head. There were a lot of crimes, beginning right at the start of the year, when they toasted New Year’s by burning a cross on a black family’s lawn in Chatsworth. After that there were more cross burnings, threatening phone calls, bomb scares. The synagogue break-in. They even trashed a Jewish daycare center in Encino. This was all in early January. They also started going to street corners, picking up Mexican laborers and taking them out into the desert, where they assaulted or abandoned them or both, usually both. To use their terminology, they were fomenting disharmony, which they believed would help lead to a separation of the races.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard the song.”
    “Okay, well, like I said, they were ready to make Burkhart the poster boy for all of this and, if they went with it to Justice, he could have ended up going away for a ten-year minimum in a federal pen.”
    “So it was a no-brainer. He took a deal.”
    Rider nodded.
    “He took a year in Wayside and a five-year tail, and the rest of it went away. And the Eights went away with it. They were broken up and that was the end of the threat. All of this went down by the end of March, long before Verloren.”
    As he thought about all of this Bosch watched a woman in a hurry as she pulled a young girl by the hand toward the gateway to the Metroline tracks. The woman was also lugging a heavy suitcase and her focus was only on the gate ahead. The child was pulled along with her face turned upward as she looked at the ceiling. She was smiling at something. Bosch looked up and saw a child’s balloon trapped in one of the ceiling’s vaulted squares. One child’s disaster was another’s secret smile. The balloon was orange and white and shaped like a fish, and Bosch knew because of his daughter that it was an animated character named Nemo. He had a flash of his daughter but just as quickly pushed it away so he could concentrate. He looked at Rider.
    “So where was Mackey in all of this?” he asked.
    “He was sort of the runt of the litter,” Rider answered. “One of the minions. He was thought to be the perfect recruit. High school dropout with no life and no prospects. He was on probation for burglary and his juvie jacket was full of pops for car theft, burglary and drugs.