COMMANDER ARTURO GARCIA was standing behind his desk waiting as Bosch and Rider were led into his office by the uniformed assistant. Garcia was in uniform, too, and he wore it well and proudly. He had steel gray hair and a matching bottle-brush mustache. He exuded the confidence that the department used to carry and was fighting to recover.
“Detectives, come in, come in,” he said. “Sit down here and tell an old homicide dick how it’s hanging.”
They took the chairs in front of the desk.
“Thank you for seeing us so quickly,” Rider said.
Bosch and Rider had decided that she would take the lead with Garcia since she was more familiar with him through her liaison work in the chief’s office. Bosch also wasn’t sure he would be able to disguise his distaste for Garcia and the mistakes and missteps he and his partner had made on the Verloren investigation.
“Well, when Robbery-Homicide calls, you make the time, right?”
He smiled again.
“We actually work in the Open-Unsolved Unit,” Rider said.
Garcia lost his smile and for a moment Bosch thought he saw a flash of pain enter his eyes. Rider had made the appointment through an assistant in the commander’s office and had not revealed what case they were working.
“Becky Verloren,” the commander said.
Rider nodded.
“How did you know?”
“How did I know? I was the one who called that guy down there, the OIC, and I told him there was DNA on that case and they ought to send it through.”
“Detective Pratt?”
“Yeah, Pratt. As soon as that unit was up and operational I called him and said check out Becky Verloren, nineteen eighty-eight. What have you got? You got a match, right?”
Rider nodded.
“We got a very good match.”
“Who? I’ve been waiting seventeen years for this. Somebody from the restaurant, right?”
This gave Bosch pause. In the murder book there were interview summaries from people who worked in Robert Verloren’s restaurant but nothing that rose above the routine. Nothing that indicated suspicion or follow-up. Nothing in the investigative summaries that pointed the case toward the restaurant. To now hear one of the original investigators voice a long-held suspicion that the killer had come from that direction was incongruous with what they had spent the morning reading.
“Actually, no,” Rider said. “The DNA matches a man named Roland Mackey. He was eighteen at the time of the murder. He was in Chatsworth at the time. We don’t think he worked at the restaurant.”
Garcia frowned as though he was puzzled or maybe disappointed.
“Does that name mean anything to you?” Rider asked. “We didn’t come across it anywhere in the book.”
Garcia shook his head.
“I don’t place it, but it’s been a long time. Who is he?”
“We don’t know who he is yet. We’re circling him. We’re just starting.”
“I’m sure I would have remembered the name. His blood was on the gun, right?”
“That’s what we got. He’s got a history. Burglaries, receiving, drugs. We’re thinking he might be good for the burglary when the gun was taken.”
“Absolutely,” Garcia said, as if his excitement for the idea could make it so.
“We can connect him to the gun, no doubt,” Rider said. “But we’re looking for the connection to the girl. We thought maybe you’d remember something.”
“Have you talked to the mother and father yet?”
“Not yet. You’re our first stop.”
“That poor family. That was it for them.”
“You stayed in touch with the parents?”
“Initially, yeah. As long as I had the case. But once I made lieutenant and went back to patrol I had to give up the case. I kind of lost contact with them after that. It was Muriel mostly-the mother-who I had talked to. The father… there was something going on with him. He didn’t do well. He left home, they divorced, the whole thing. Lost the restaurant. Last I heard, he was living on the street. He would show up at the house from time to time and ask Muriel for money.”
“What made you guess it was somebody from the restaurant when we came in here?”
Garcia shook his head like he was frustrated by reaching for a memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. It was more like a feeling. There was stuff wrong with the case. Something was hinky about it.”
“How so?”
“Well, you read the book, I’m sure. She wasn’t raped. She was carried up that hill and it was made to look like a suicide. It was done badly. It was really an execution. So we weren’t talking about the random intruder. Somebody she knew wanted her dead. And they either went in that house or sent somebody in that house.”
“You think it was related to the pregnancy?” Rider asked.
Garcia nodded.
“We thought that was tied in but we could never nail it down.”
“MTL-you never figured that one out.”
Garcia looked at her, confusion on his face.
“Empty L?”
“No, M-T-L. The initials Rebecca used in her journal. You mentioned it in the formal interview with the parents. ‘My true love,’ remember?”
“Oh, yeah, the initials. It was like a code. We never knew for sure. We never found out who that was. Are you looking for the journal?”
Bosch nodded and Rider spoke.
“We’re looking for everything. The journal, the gun, the whole evidence carton is lost somewhere in the ESB.”
Garcia shook his head like a man who had spent a career dealing with the department’s frustrations.
“That is not surprising. Par for the course, right?”
“Right.”
“Tell you one thing, though. If they find the carton there won’t be any journal in it.”
“Why?”
“Because I gave it back.”
“To the parents?”
“To the mother. Like I said, I made lieutenant and was shipping out, going to South Bureau. Ron Green had already retired. I was passing the case off and I knew that was going to be the end of it. Nobody was going to pay attention to it like we did. So I told Muriel I was leaving and I gave her the journal…
“That poor woman. It was like time stood still for her on that day in July. She became frozen. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. I remember I went to see her before I left. This was a year or so after the murder. She had me look at Becky’s bedroom. It was untouched. It was exactly the way it was on the night she was taken.”
Rider nodded somberly. Garcia said nothing else. Bosch finally cleared his throat, leaned forward and spoke, hitting Garcia with the same question again.
“When we first came in and said we got a DNA match, you guessed it was somebody from the restaurant. Why?”
Bosch looked at Rider to see if she was annoyed that he was entering the questioning. She didn’t appear to be.
“I don’t know why,” Garcia said. “Like I said, I always sort of thought that it might have come from that side of things, because I never felt we nailed everything down over there.”
“You’re talking about the father?”
