The Closers

from the area.
    Becky Verloren had died less than a quarter mile from her house. It was likely that her father had passed within yards or even feet of her body when he was hiking the hillside and calling out her name. But on that morning there had been no odor yet to draw his attention.
    Bosch was the father of a young girl. Though she lived far away from him with her mother, she was never far from his thoughts. He thought now of a father climbing a steep hillside, calling for a daughter who would never come home.
    He tried to concentrate on the murder book.
    The victim had been shot once in the chest by a high-powered pistol. The weapon, a.45 caliber Colt semiautomatic, was lying in the leaves by her left ankle. As Bosch studied the crime scene photos he saw what appeared to be a burn from a contact shot on the fabric of her light blue nightgown. The bullet hole was located directly above the heart, and Bosch knew by the size of the gun and the entry wound that death was likely immediate. Her heart would have been shattered by the round as it blasted through her body.
    For a long time Bosch studied the photographs of the body as it had been found. The victim’s hands were not bound. She was not gagged. Her face was turned in toward the trunk of the fallen tree. There were no indications of defensive wounds of any nature. There was no indication of sexual molestation or any other assault.
    The police misinterpretation of the girl’s disappearance was initially compounded by the misinterpretation of the death scene. The assessment at the scene resulted in the death being viewed as a probable suicide. As such the case was kept by the local division’s homicide squad and the two detectives who rolled on the body call, Ron Green and Arturo Garcia. Devonshire Division was at that time and still is the LAPD’s quietest station. Representing a large bedroom community with high property values and mostly upper-middle-class residents, Devonshire always had crime tables that were among the lowest in the city. Inside the department the station was known as Club Dev. It was a highly sought-after posting by officers and detectives who had put in many years and were tired or had simply seen enough action. Devonshire Division also represented the part of the city closest to Simi Valley, a quiet, relatively crime-free community in Ventura County where hundreds of LAPD officers chose to live. A posting at Devonshire made the commute a breeze and the workload the lightest in the department.
    The Club Dev pedigree played in the back of Bosch’s mind as he read the reports. He knew part of his task here was to make a judgment on Green and Garcia’s work, to determine if they had been up to the task. He did not know them and had no experience with them. He had no idea what level of skills and dedication they had brought to the case. There was the initial misinterpretation of the death as a suicide. But by the appearance of the records, the two investigators seemed to recover quickly and move on with the case. Their reports seemed to be well written, thorough and complete. They seemed to have taken the extra step wherever possible.
    Still, Bosch knew that a murder book could be manipulated to give this impression. The truth would be revealed as he delved deeper and continued his own investigation. He knew there could be a vast difference between what was recorded and what was not.
    According to the murder book, Green and Garcia quickly reversed investigative directions when suicide was dismissed after the autopsy was completed and the gun found with the body was analyzed. The case was reclassified as a homicide that had been disguised as a suicide.
    Bosch first came to the autopsy findings in the murder book. He had read a thousand autopsy protocols and had attended several hundred of the procedures as well. He knew to skip all the weights and measurements and descriptions of the actual procedure and go right to the summary section and the attendant photographs. Unsurprisingly, he found the cause of death listed as a gunshot wound to the chest. The estimated time of death was between midnight and 2 a.m. on July 6. The summary noted that no witness reported hearing the shot, so the time of death estimate was based solely on measuring loss of body temperature.
    The surprises were in the other findings. Rebecca Verloren had long, thick hair. At the right side of the base of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair, the medical examiner