separation of the races.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the song.”
“Okay, well, like I said, they were ready to make Burkhart the poster boy for all of this and, if they went with it to Justice, he could have ended up going away for a ten-year minimum in a federal pen.”
“So it was a no-brainer. He took a deal.”
Rider nodded.
“He took a year in Wayside and a five-year tail, and the rest of it went away. And the Eights went away with it. They were broken up and that was the end of the threat. All of this went down by the end of March, long before Verloren.”
As he thought about all of this Bosch watched a woman in a hurry as she pulled a young girl by the hand toward the gateway to the Metroline tracks. The woman was also lugging a heavy suitcase and her focus was only on the gate ahead. The child was pulled along with her face turned upward as she looked at the ceiling. She was smiling at something. Bosch looked up and saw a child’s balloon trapped in one of the ceiling’s vaulted squares. One child’s disaster was another’s secret smile. The balloon was orange and white and shaped like a fish, and Bosch knew because of his daughter that it was an animated character named Nemo. He had a flash of his daughter but just as quickly pushed it away so he could concentrate. He looked at Rider.
“So where was Mackey in all of this?” he asked.
“He was sort of the runt of the litter,” Rider answered. “One of the minions. He was thought to be the perfect recruit. High school dropout with no life and no prospects. He was on probation for burglary and his juvie jacket was full of pops for car theft, burglary and drugs. So he was just the kind of guy they were looking for. A loser they could mold into a white warrior. But once they jumped him in they found out he was-to use a quote from Burkhart-dumber than a nigger off the boat. He apparently was so stupid that they had to take him off the graffiti runs because he couldn’t even spell their basic racist vocabulary. In fact, his homey name in the group became Wej. Not like you wedge your way into a door. Wej like Jew spelled backwards because that was how he sprayed it once on a synagogue wall.”
“Dyslexic?”
“I’d say.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Even with the giveaways in the Verloren scene, I’m not seeing this guy.”
“I agree. I think he had a part but not the main part. He doesn’t have it between the ears.”
Bosch decided to drop Mackey and double back to the beginning of her report.
“So if they had all of this intel on these guys, how come only Burkhart went down?”
“I’m getting to that.”
“This is where the high jingo comes in?”
“You got it. You see, Burkhart was a leader of the Eights but he wasn’t
“Ah.”
“The leader was identified as a guy named Richard Ross. He was older than the others. A true believer. He was twenty-one and was the smooth talker who recruited Burkhart and then most of the other Eights and got the whole thing going.”
Bosch nodded. Richard Ross was a common name but he thought he knew where this was going.
“This Richard Ross, was that as in Richard Ross Junior?”
“Exactly. The good Captain Ross’s prodigy.”
Captain Richard Ross had been the longtime head of Internal Affairs Division during the early part of Bosch’s career in the department. He was now retired.
For Bosch the rest of the story tumbled into place.
“So they kept Junior out of it and saved Senior and the department all the embarrassment,” he said. “They laid it all on Burkhart, Ross’s second in command. He went away to Wayside and the group was broken up. Chalk it all up to youthful misadventure.”
“You got it.”
“And let me guess: all the intel came from Richard Ross Junior.”
“You’re good. It was part of the deal. Richard Junior gave up everybody and it was all PDU needed to quietly splinter the group. Junior then got to walk away from it.”
“All in a day’s work for Irving.”
“And you know what’s funny? I think Irving is a Jewish name.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Whether it is or isn’t, it’s not very funny,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Not if Irving saw an angle.”
“Reading between the lines of the report, I would say he saw all the angles.”
“This deal gave him control of IAD. I mean real, absolute control over who was investigated and how investigations were conducted. It put Ross deep in his pocket. It explains a lot about what was going on back then.”
“It was mostly before my time.”
“So they take care of the Eights and Irving gets a nice big prize in having Richard Ross Senior wearing a collar on the poodle squad,” Bosch said, thinking out loud. “But then Rebecca Verloren ends up dead by a gun stolen from a guy the Eights had been harassing, a gun likely stolen by one of the little runts they let run free. Their whole deal could fall apart if the murder came back on the Eights and then on them.”
“That’s right. So they step in and push the investigation. They steer it away and nobody ever goes down for it.”
“Motherfuckers,” Bosch whispered.
“Poor Harry. You still must have a lot of rust from your lay-off. You thought maybe they pushed the case because they were trying to save the city from burning. It was nothing so heroic.”
“No, they were just trying to save their own asses and the position the deal with Ross had given them. Given Irving.”
“This is all supposition,” Rider cautioned.
“Yeah, just reading between the fucking lines.”
Bosch felt the strongest craving for a cigarette he’d had in at least a year. He looked over at the newsstand and saw all of the packages in the racks behind the counter. He looked away. He looked up at the balloon trapped at the ceiling. He thought he knew how Nemo felt being stuck up there.
“When did Ross retire?” he asked.
“’Ninety-one. He rode it out until he hit twenty-five years-they allowed him that-and then he retired. I checked-he moved up to Idaho. I ran Junior on the box, too, and he’d already moved up there ahead of him. Probably one of those gated white enclaves where he felt right at home.”
“And he was probably up there laughing his ass off when this place came apart after Rodney King in ’ninety- two.”
“Probably, but not for long. He was killed in a DUI in ’ninety-three. He was coming back from an antigovernment rally out in the boonies. What goes around comes around, I guess.”
A dull thud hit Bosch in the stomach. He had started liking Richard Ross Jr. for the Verloren killing. He could have used Mackey to procure the weapon and maybe help carry the victim up the hill. But now he was dead. Could their investigation be leading them to such a dead end? Would they end up going back to Rebecca Verloren’s parents and telling them their long-dead daughter had been taken from them by someone who also was long dead? What kind of justice would that be?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rider said. “He could have been our guy. But I don’t think so. According to the box, he got his Idaho driver’s license in May of ’eighty-eight. He was supposedly already up there when Verloren went down.”
“Yeah, supposedly.”
Bosch wasn’t convinced by a simple DMV computer check. He pushed all of the information through the filters again to see if anything else jumped out at him.
