The Closers (2005)

by Michael Connelly

  1968

  1974

  1989

  1998

  Bosch studied the listing of years for which they would be responsible. He had been out of the city and in Vietnam for most of the first block.

  "The summer of love," he said. "I missed it. Maybe that's what's wrong with me."

  He said it just to be saying something. He noticed that the second block included 1972, the year he had come onto the force. He remembered a call out to a house off of Vermont on his second day on the job in patrol. A woman back east asked police to check on her mother, who was not answering the phone. Bosch found her drowned in a bathtub, her hands and feet bound with dog leashes. Her dead dog was in the tub with her. Bosch wondered if the old woman's murder was one of the open cases he would now be charged with solving.

  "How was this arrived at? I mean, why did we get these years?"

  "They came from the other teams. We lightened their caseload. In fact, they already started the ball rolling on cases from a lot of those years. And I heard on Friday that a cold hit came in from 'eighty-eight. We're supposed to run with it starting today. I guess you could say it's your welcome-back present."

  "What's a cold hit?"

  "When a DNA stamp or a latent we send through the computers or the DOJ makes a blind match."

  "What's ours?"

  "I think it's a DNA match. We'll find out this morning."

  "They didn't tell you anything last week? I could have come in over the weekend, you know."

  "I know that, Harry. But this is an old case. There was no need to start running the minute a piece of paper came in the mail. Working Open-Unsolved is different."

  "Yeah? How come?"

  Rider looked exasperated, but before she could answer they heard the door open and the squad room started filling with voices. Rider stepped out of the alcove and Bosch followed. She introduced Bosch to the other members of the squad. Two of the detectives, Tim Marcia and Rick Jackson, Bosch knew well from previous cases. The other two pairs of partners were Robert Renner and Victor Robleto, and Kevin Robinson and Jean Nord. Bosch knew them, as well as Abel Pratt, the officer in charge of the unit, by reputation. Every one of them was a top-notch homicide investigator.

  The greeting was cordial and subdued, a bit overly formal. Bosch knew that his posting in the unit was probably viewed with suspicion. An assignment on the squad would have been highly coveted by detectives throughout the department. The fact that he had gotten the posting after nearly three years in retirement raised questions. Bosch knew, as the chief of police had reminded him, that he had Rider to thank for the job. Her last posting had been in the chief's office as a policy analyst. She had cashed in whatever markers she had accrued with the chief in order to get Bosch back inside the department and working open-unsolved cases with her.

  After all the handshakes, Pratt invited Bosch and Rider back into his office for a private welcome-aboard speech. He sat behind his desk and they took the side-by-side chairs in front of it. There was no room in the closet-sized space for other furnishings.

  Pratt was a few years younger than Bosch, on the south side of fifty. He kept himself in shape and carried the esprit de corps of the vaunted Robbery-Homicide Division, of which the Open-Unsolved Unit was just one branch. Pratt appeared confident in his skills and his command of the unit. He had to be. The RHD took on the city's most difficult cases. Bosch knew that if you did not believe you were smarter, tougher and more cunning than the people you were after then you didn't belong.

  "What I really should do is split you two up," he began. "Make you work with guys already established here in the unit because this is different from what you've done in the past. But I got the word from six and I don't mess with that. Besides, I understand you two have a prior chemistry that worked. So forget what I should do and let me tell you a little bit about working open-unsolveds. Kiz, I know you already got this speech last week but you'll just have to suffer along, okay?"

  "Of course," Rider said.

  "First of all, forget closure. Closure is bullshit. Closure is a media term, something they put in newspaper articles about cold cases. Closure is a joke. It's a fucking lie. All we do here is provide answers. Answers have to be enough. So don't mislead yourself about what you are doing here. Don't mislead the family members you deal with on these cases and don't be misled by them."

  He paused for reaction, got none and moved on. Bosch noticed that the crime scene photo framed on the wall was of a man collapsed in a bullet-riddled phone booth. It was the kind of phone booth you only saw in old movies and at the Farmers Market or over at Phillippe's.

  "Without a doubt," Pratt said, "this squad is the most noble place in the building. A city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost. This is where we don't forget. We're like the guys they bring in in the bottom of the ninth inning to win or lose the game. The closers. If we can't do it, nobody can. If we blow it, the game is over because we're the last resort. Yes, we're outnumbered. We've got eight thousand open-unsolveds since nineteen sixty. But we are undaunted. Even if this whole unit clears only one case a month-just twelve a year-we are doing something. We're the closers, baby. If you're in homicide, this is the place to be."

  Bosch was impressed by his fervor. He could see sincerity and even pain in his eyes. He nodded. He immediately knew that he wanted to work for this man, a rarity in his experience in the department.

  "Just don't forget that closure isn't the same as being a closer," Pratt added.

  "Got it," Bosch said.

  "Now, I know you both have long experience working homicides. What you are going to find different here is your relationship with the cases."

  "Relationship?" Bosch asked.

  "Yes, relationship. What I mean is that working fresh kills is a completely different animal. You have the body, you have the autopsy, you carry the news to the family. Here you are dealing with victims long dead. There are no autopsies, no physical crime scenes. You deal with the murder books-if you can find them-and the records. When you go to the family-and believe me you don't go until you are good and ready-you find people who have already suffered the shock and found or not found ways to get past it. It wears on you. I hope you are prepared for that."

  "Thanks for the warning," Bosch said.

  "With fresh kills it is clinical because things move fast. With old cases it is emotional. You are going to see the toll of violence over time. Be prepared for it."

  Pratt pulled a thick blue binder from the side of his desk to the center of his calendar blotter. He started to push it across to them then stopped.

  "Another thing to be prepared for is the department. Count on files being incomplete or even missing. Count on physical evidence being destroyed or disappeared. Count on starting from scratch with some of these. This unit was put together two years ago. We spent the first eight months just going through the case logs and pulling out open-unsolveds. We fed what we could into the forensics pipelines, but even when we've gotten a hit we have been handicapped by the lack of case integrity. It has been abysmal. It has been frustrating. Even though there is no statute of limitations on murder we are finding that evidence and even files were routinely disposed of during at least one administration.

  "What I am saying is that you are going to find that your biggest obstacle on some of these cases may very well be the department itself."

  "Somebody said we have a cold hit that came out of one of our time blocks," Bosch said.

  He'd heard enough. He just wanted to get moving on something.

  "Yes, you do," Pratt said. "We'll get to that in a second. Let me just finish up with my little speech. After all, I don't get to make it that often. In a nutshell, what we try to do here is apply new technology and techniques to old cases. The technology is essentially threefold. You have DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics. In all three areas the advancements in comparative analysis have been phenomenal in the last ten years. The problem with this department is that it never t
ook any of these advances and looked backward at old cases. Consequently, we have an estimated two thousand cases in which there is DNA evidence that has never been typed and compared. Since nineteen sixty we have four thousand cases with fingerprints that have never been run through a computer. Ours, the FBI's, DOJ's, anybody's computer. It's almost laughable but it's too fucking sad to laugh about. Same with ballistics. We are finding the evidence is still there in most of these cases but it has been ignored."

  Bosch shook his head, already feeling the frustration of all the families of the victims, the cases swept away by time, indifference and incompetence.

  "You will also find that techniques are different. Today's homicide copper is just plain better than one from, say, nineteen sixty or seventy. Even nineteen eighty. So even before you get to the physical evidence and you review these cases you are going to see things that seem obvious to you now, but that weren't obvious to anyone back at the time of the kill."

  Pratt nodded. His speech was finished.

  "Now, the cold hit," he said, pushing the faded blue murder book across the desk. "Run with that baby. It's all yours. Close it down and put somebody in jail."

  3

  AFTER LEAVING PRATT'S office they decided that Bosch would go get the next round of coffee while Rider started in on the murder book. They knew from prior experience that she was the faster reader and it didn't make sense to split the book up. They both needed to read it front to back, to have the investigation presented to them in the linear fashion in which it occurred and was documented.

  Bosch said he would give her a good head start. He told her he might drink a cup in the cafeteria just because he missed the place. The place, not the coffee.

  "Then I guess that gives me a few minutes to go down the hall," she said.

  After she left the office for the restroom Bosch took the page listing the years that were assigned to them and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He left 503 and took the elevator down to the third floor. He then walked through the main RHD squad room to the captain's office.

  The captain's office suite was broken into two rooms. One room was his actual office and the other was called the murder room. It was furnished with a long meeting table where murder investigations were discussed, and its walls on two sides were lined with shelves containing legal books and the city's murder logs. Every homicide that had occurred in Los Angeles, going back more than one hundred years, had a listing in these leather-bound journals. The routine over the decades was to update the journals every time one of the murders was cleared. It was the easy reference in the department for determining what cases were still open or had been closed.

  Bosch ran his finger along the cracked spines of the books. Each one simply said HOMICIDES followed by the listing of the years the book recorded. Several years fit into each of the early books. But by the 1980s there were so many murders committed in the city that each book contained the accounts of only one year. He then noted that the year 1988 was reported in two books, and he suddenly had a very good idea why that year had been assigned to him and Rider as the new members of the Open-Unsolved Unit. The high point for murders in the city would certainly also mean the high point for unsolved cases.

  When his finger found the book containing cases from 1972 he pulled the tome out and sat down with it at the table. He leafed through it, skimming the stories, hearing the voices. He found the old lady who was drowned in her bathtub. It was never solved. He moved on, through 1973 and 1974, then he went through the book containing 1966, '67 and '68. He read about Charles Manson and Robert Kennedy. He read about people whose names he had never heard or known. Names that were taken away from them along with everything else they'd had or would ever have.

  As he read through the catalogs of the city's horrors, Bosch felt a familiar power begin to take hold of him and move in his veins again. Only an hour back on the job and he was already chasing a killer. It didn't matter how long ago the blood had fallen. There was a killer in the wind and Bosch was coming. Like the prodigal son returning, he knew he was back in his place now. He was baptized again in the waters of the one true church. The church of the blue religion. And he knew that he would find his salvation in those who were long lost, that he would find it in these musty bibles where the dead lined up in columns and there were ghosts on every page.

  "Harry Bosch!"

  Jarred by the intrusion, Bosch slammed the book closed and looked up. Captain Gabe Norona was standing in the doorway of the inner office.

  "Captain."

  "Welcome back!"

  He came forward and vigorously shook Bosch's hand.

  "Good to be back."

  "I see they already have you doin' your homework."

  Bosch nodded.

  "Just sort of getting acquainted with it."

  "New hope for the dead. Harry Bosch is on the case again."

  Bosch didn't say anything. He didn't know if the captain was being sarcastic or not.

  "It's the name of a book I read once," Norona said.

  "Oh."

  "Well, good luck to you. Get out there and lock 'em up."

  "That's the plan."

  The captain shook his hand again and then disappeared back into his office and closed the door.

  His sacred moment ruined by the intrusion, Bosch stood up. He started returning the heavy murder catalogs to their places on the shelves. When he was finished, he left the office for the cafeteria.

  4

  KIZ RIDER WAS almost halfway through the murder book when Bosch got back with the fresh round of coffees. She took her cup directly out of his hand.

  "Thanks. I need something to keep me awake."

  "What, you're going to sit there and tell me that this is boring compared to pushing paper in the chief's office?"

  "No, it's not that. It's just all the catching up, the reading. We've got to know this book inside and out. We've got to be alert for the possibilities."

  Bosch noticed she had a legal tablet next to the murder book and the top page was almost full of notes. He couldn't read the notes but could see that most of the lines were followed by question marks.

  "Besides," she added, "I'm using different muscles now. Muscles I didn't use on the sixth floor."

  "I get it," he said. "All right if I start in behind you now?"

  "Be my guest."

  She popped open the rings of the binder and pulled out the two-inch-thick sheaf of documents she had already read through. She handed them across to Bosch, who had sat down at his desk.

  "You got an extra pad like that?" he asked. "I just have a little notebook."

  She sighed in an exaggerated way. Bosch knew it was all an act and that she was happy they were working together again. She had spent most of the last two years evaluating policy and troubleshooting for the new chief. It wasn't the real cop work that she was best at. This was.

  She slid a pad across the desk to him.

  "You need a pen, too?"

  "No, I think I can handle that."

  He put the documents down in front of him and started reading. He was ready to go and he didn't need the coffee to stay charged.

  THE FIRST PAGE of the murder book was a color photograph in a plastic three-hole sleeve. The photo was a yearbook portrait of an exotically attractive young girl with almond-shaped eyes that were startling green against her mocha skin. She had tightly curled brown hair with what looked like natural blonde highlights that caught the flash of the camera. Her eyes were bright and her smile genuine. It was a grin that said she knew things nobody else did. Bosch didn't think she was beautiful. Not yet. Her features seemed to compete with one another in an uncoordinated way. But he knew that teenage awkwardness often smoothed over and became beauty later.

  But for sixteen-year-old Rebecca Verloren there would be no later. Nineteen eighty-eight would be her last year. The cold hit had come from her murder.

  Becky, as she was known by family and friends, was the only child of Robert and Murie
l Verloren. Muriel was a homemaker. Robert was the chef and owner of a popular Malibu restaurant called the Island House Grill. They lived on Red Mesa Way off of Santa Susana Pass Road in Chatsworth, at the northwest corner of the sprawl that made up Los Angeles. The backyard of their house was the wooded incline of Oat Mountain, which rose above Chatsworth and served as the northwest border of the city. That summer Becky was between her sophomore and junior years at Hillside Preparatory School. It was a private school in nearby Porter Ranch, where she was on the honor roll and her mother volunteered in the cafeteria and often brought jerk chicken and other specialties from her husband's restaurant for the faculty lunchroom.

  On the morning of July 6, 1988, the Verlorens discovered their daughter missing from their home. They found the back door unlocked, though they were sure it had been secured the night before. Thinking the girl might have gone for a walk they waited worriedly for two hours but she did not return. That day she was scheduled to go to the restaurant with her father to work the lunch shift as an assistant hostess and it was well past the time to leave for Malibu. While her mother called her friends hoping to locate her, her father went up the hillside behind the house looking for her. When he came back down the hill without finding a sign of her they decided it was time to call the police.