setting up the possibility that some of his detectives would make more than him, even though he was the unit boss.
Pratt turned in his chair and opened a cooler on the floor beside him. He took out another tub of yogurt.
“Fuck it,” he said as he straightened up and opened it.
He didn’t add cornflakes this time. Bosch only had to put up with the slurping as he started spooning the white gunk into his mouth.
“Okay, back to this,” Pratt said, his mouth full of it. “What you are telling me is that at the end of the day you can tie the gun to this mope Mackey. He fired this weapon. But you’ve got nobody who ties him to the victim yet and therefore you cannot tie him to the fatal shot.”
“That and other things,” Rider said.
“So if I was a defense lawyer,” Pratt continued, “I would have Mackey cop to the burglary because the statute of limitations has long expired. He would say the gun bit him when he tried it out so he got rid of the damn thing- long before any murder. He’d say, ‘No sir I didn’t kill that little girl with it and you can’t prove I did. You can’t prove I ever laid eyes on her.’”
Rider and Bosch nodded.
“So you got nothing.”
They nodded again.
“Not bad for a day’s work. What do you want to do about it?”
“We want a wiretap,” Bosch said. “Two, maybe three locations. One on his cell, one on the phone at the gas station. And then one on his home once we find it and if he’s got a line there. We plant a story in the paper that says we’re working the case again and make sure he sees it. Then we see if he talks about it with anybody.”
“And what makes you think he would talk to someone else about a murder he may or may not have committed seventeen years ago?”
“Because, like we said, so far we can’t connect this guy to the girl in any way. So we’re thinking there is somebody in the middle in this thing. Mackey either did this for somebody or he got the gun for that somebody to do it himself.”
“There is a third possibility,” Rider added. “That he helped. That girl was carried up a steep hillside. It was either somebody big or somebody with help.”
Pratt took two spoonfuls of yogurt, frowning as he looked down into the tub, before responding.
“Okay, what about the newspaper? You going to be able to make a plant?”
“We think so,” Rider said. “We’re going to use Commander Garcia of Valley Bureau. He was on the case originally. Haunted by the one that got away, that sort of pitch. He says he’s got a connection at the
“Okay, sounds like a plan. Write up the warrants and give them to me. The captain has to approve them and then they go to the DA’s office for approval before going to the judge. It’s going to take some time. Once we get a judge to okay it we’ll take the other teams off what they’re doing and put them on the wire while you watch our guy.”
Bosch and Rider stood up at the same time. Bosch felt a little charge of adrenaline drop into his blood.
“There’s no chance this guy Mackey is into something right now, is there?” Pratt asked.
“What do you mean?” Bosch asked.
“It’s just that if we could make a case that he was about to commit a crime we could probably expedite the warrants.”
Bosch thought about this.
“We don’t have that now,” he said. “But we could work on it.”
“Good. That would help.”
15
RIDER WAS THE WRITER. She had an ease with the computer as well as the language of law. Bosch had seen her put these skills to use on several previous investigations. So their decision was unspoken. She would write the warrants seeking court authorization to trace and listen to calls made by or to Roland Mackey on his cell phone, the office phone at the service station where he worked, and his home if an additional phone existed there. It would be painstaking work; she had to lay out the case against Mackey, making sure the chain of logic and probable cause had no weak links. Her paper case had to first convince Pratt, then Captain Norona, then a deputy district attorney charged with making sure local law enforcement did not run roughshod over civil liberties, and finally a judge who had the same responsibilities but also answered to the electorate should he make a mistake that blew up in his face. They had one shot at this and they had to do it right. Rather, Rider had to do it right.
But all of that came after the initial hurdle of getting Mackey’s various phone numbers without tipping the suspect to the investigation taking form around him.
They started with Tampa Towing, which ran a half-page ad in the yellow pages that carried two 24-hour phone numbers. Next, a call to directory assistance established that Mackey had no hardwired phone listing private or otherwise in his name. It meant he either had no phone at his home or he was living in a place where the phone was registered to someone else. That could be dealt with later once they established Mackey’s residence.
Last and most difficult was Mackey’s cell phone number. Directory assistance did not carry cell listings. To check every cellular service provider for a listing could take days if not weeks because most required a court- ordered search warrant before revealing a customer’s private number. Instead, law enforcement investigators routinely planned ruses in order to get the numbers they needed. This often entailed leaving innocuous messages at workplaces so that the cell phone number could be captured upon callback. The most popular of these was the standard call-back-for-your-prize message, promising a television or DVD player to the first one hundred people who returned the call. However, this involved setting up a non-police line and could also result in long waiting periods with no guarantee of success if the target had masked his or her cell number. Rider and Bosch did not feel they had the luxury of time. They had put Mackey’s name out into the public. They had to move quickly toward their goal.
“Don’t worry,” Bosch told Rider. “I’ve got a plan.”
“Then I’ll just sit back and watch the master.”
Since he knew Mackey was on duty at the service station Bosch simply called the station and said he needed a tow. He was told to hold on and then a voice he believed belonged to Roland Mackey came onto the line.
“You need a tow?”
“Either a tow or a jump. I can’t get it started.”
“Where?”
“The Albertson’s parking lot on Topanga near Devonshire.”
“We’re all the way over on Tampa. You can get somebody closer.”
“I know but I live by you guys. Right off Roscoe and behind the hospital.”
“Okay, then. What are you driving?”
Bosch thought of the car they had seen Mackey in earlier. He decided to use it to pull Mackey off the fence.
“’Seventy-two Camaro.”
“Restored?”
“I’m working on it.”
“It should be about fifteen minutes before I’m there.”
“Okay, great. What’s your name?”
“Ro.”
“Ro? Like row a boat?”
“Like in Roland, man. I’m on my way.”
He hung up. Bosch and Rider waited five minutes, during which Bosch told her the rest of the plan and what part she would play in it. Her goal was to get two things: Mackey’s cell number and his service provider so that a search warrant authorizing the wiretap could be delivered to the proper company.
