A single tear rolled down Verloren’s left cheek, almost imperceptible against the dark skin. A man in dirty kitchen whites came into the break area with a clipboard in hand but Bosch quickly waved him away from Verloren. Bosch waited and finally Verloren spoke.
“I chose myself over her and in the end I lost myself anyway,” he said.
“How did that happen?”
Verloren covered his mouth with his hand, as if to try to keep the secrets from being dispelled. Finally he dropped it and spoke.
“I read one day in the newspaper that my daughter had been killed with a gun that came from a burglary. Green and Garcia, they hadn’t told me that. So I asked Detective Green about it and he told me the man with the gun had it because he was afraid. He was a Jewish man and there had been threats against him. I thought…”
He stopped there and Bosch had to prompt him.
“You thought that maybe Rebecca had been targeted because of her mixed races? Because her father was black?”
Verloren nodded.
“I thought, yes, because from time to time there would be a comment or something. Not everybody saw the beauty in her. Not like we did. I wanted to live on the Westside, but Muriel, she was from up there. It was home to her.”
“What did Green tell you?”
“He told me, no, that it wasn’t there. They had looked at that and it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t… it didn’t seem right to me. They were ignoring this, it seemed to me. I kept calling and asking. I was pushing it. Finally I went to a customer I had at the restaurant who was a member of the police commission. I told him about this thing and he said he would check into it for me.”
Verloren nodded, more to himself than to Bosch. He was fortifying his faith in his actions as a father seeking justice for his daughter.
“And then what happened?” Bosch prompted.
“Then I got a visit from two police.”
“Not Green and Garcia?”
“No, not them. Different police. They came to my restaurant.”
“What were their names?”
Verloren shook his head.
“They never gave me their names. They just showed me their badges. They were detectives, I think. They told me I was wrong about what I was pushing Green about. They told me to back off it because I was just stirring the pot. That is what they called it, stirring the pot. Like it was about me and not my daughter.”
He shook his head tightly, that anger still sharp after all the years. Bosch asked an obvious question, obvious because he knew so well how the LAPD worked back then.
“Did they threaten you?”
Verloren snorted.
“Yes, they threatened me,” he said quietly. “They told me that they knew my daughter had been pregnant but they couldn’t find the clinic she had gone to to get it taken care of. So there was no tissue they could use to identify the father. No way to tell who it was or wasn’t. They said that all it would take was for them to ask a few questions about me and her, like with my customer on the police commission, and the rumors would start to run. They said just a few questions in the right places and pretty soon people would think it was me.”
Bosch didn’t interrupt. He felt his own anger tightening his throat.
“They said it would be hard for me to keep my business if everybody thought I had… I had done that to my daughter…”
Now more tears came down his dark face. He did nothing to stop their flow.
“And so I did what they wanted. I backed off and dropped it. Stopped stirring the pot. I told myself it didn’t matter; it wouldn’t bring Becky back to us. So I never called Detective Green again… and they never solved the case. After a while I started drinking to forget what I had lost and what I had done, that I had put myself and my pride and my reputation and my business ahead of my daughter. And pretty soon, before you knew it, I came to that black hole I was telling you about. I fell in and I’m still climbing out.”
After a moment he turned and looked at Bosch.
“How’s that for a story, Detective?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Verloren. I’m sorry that happened. All of it.”
“Is that the story you wanted to hear, Detective?”
“I just wanted to know the truth. Believe it or not, it is going to help me. It will help me speak for her. Can you describe these two men who came to you?”
Verloren shook his head.
“It’s been a long time. I probably wouldn’t recognize them if they stood in front of me. I just remember they were both white men. One of them I always thought of as Mr. Clean because his head was shaved and he stood with his arms folded like the guy on the bottle.”
Bosch nodded and he felt his anger working into the muscles of his shoulders. He knew who Mr. Clean was.
“How much of all this did your wife know?” he asked in a calm tone.
Verloren shook his head.
“Muriel didn’t know anything about this. I kept it from her. It was my water to carry.”
Verloren wiped his cheeks and seemed to have earned some relief from finally telling the story.
Bosch reached into his back pocket and came up with the old photograph of Roland Mackey. He put it down on the table in front of Verloren.
“Do you recognize this kid?”
Verloren looked for a long moment before shaking his head in the negative.
“Should I? Who is he?”
“His name is Roland Mackey. He was a couple years older than your daughter in ’eighty-eight. He didn’t go to school at Hillside but he lived in Chatsworth.”
Bosch waited for a response but didn’t get any. Verloren just stared at the photo on the table.
“That’s a mug shot. What did he do?”
“Stole a car. But he has a record of associating with white power extremists. In and outside of jail. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just asking. Can you remember if your daughter ever mentioned his name or maybe somebody named Ro?”
Verloren shook his head.
“What we are trying to do is figure out if they could have intersected anywhere. The Valley’s a big place. They could’ve -”
“What school did he go to?”
“He went to Chatsworth High but never finished. He got a GED.”
“Rebecca went to Chatsworth High for driver’s ed the summer before she was taken.”
“You mean ’eighty-seven?”
Verloren nodded.
“I’ll check it out.”
But Bosch didn’t think it was a good lead. Mackey had dropped out before the summer of 1987 and didn’t come back for his general education degree until 1988. Still, it was worth a thorough look.
“What about the movies? Did she like to go to movies and the mall?”
Verloren shrugged.
“She was a sixteen-year-old girl. Of course she liked movies. Most of her friends had cars. Once they hit sixteen and got mobile they were all over the place. My wife called it the three Ms-movies, malls, and Madonna.”
“Which malls? Which theaters?”
“They went to the Northridge Mall because it was close, you know. They also liked to go to the drive-in over on Winnetka. That way they could sit in the car and talk during the movie. One of the girls had a convertible and they
