“Okay, let’s review for a minute, make sure I have it all straight. Back in ’eighty-eight we have a bunch of these Valley boys calling themselves the Eights and running around in their football jerseys trying to kick-start a racial holy war. The department takes a look and pretty soon finds out that the brains behind this group is the son of our own Captain Ross of IAD. Commander Irving puts his finger into the wind and thinks, ‘Hmmm, I think I can use this to my advantage.’ So he puts the kibosh on going after Richard Junior and they sacrifice William ‘Billy Blitz’ Burkhart to the Justice Gods instead. The Eights are splintered, score one for the good guys. And Richard Junior skates away, score one for Irving because now he has Richard Senior in his pocket. Everybody lives happily ever after. Am I missing anything?”
“Actually, it’s Billy
“Blitzkrieg, then. So all of this gets wrapped up by early spring, right?”
“By the end of March. And by early May Richard Ross Junior has moved to Idaho.”
“Okay, so then in June somebody breaks into Sam Weiss’s house and steals his gun. Then in July-the day after our nation’s birthday, no less-a girl of mixed race is taken out of her house and murdered. Not raped, but murdered-which is important to remember. The murder is made to look like a suicide. But it is done badly, by all appearances by someone who was new at this. Garcia and Green catch the case, eventually see through it and conduct an investigation that leads them nowhere because, whether knowingly or not, they are pushed in that direction. Now, seventeen years later, the murder weapon is incontrovertibly tied to someone who just a few months before the killing was running around with the Eights. What am I missing here?”
“I think you’ve got it all.”
“So the question is, could it be that the Eights were not finished? That they continued to foment, only they tried to disguise their signature now? And that they raised the ante to include murder?”
Rider slowly shook her head.
“Anything is possible, but it doesn’t make much sense. The Eights were about statements-public statements. Burning crosses and painting synagogues. But it’s not much of a statement if you murder somebody and then try to disguise it as a suicide.”
Bosch nodded. She was right. There was not a smooth flow to any of the logic.
“Then again, they knew they had the LAPD on their backs,” he said. “Maybe some of them continued to operate but as sort of an underground movement.”
“Like I said, anything is possible.”
“Okay, so we have Ross Junior supposedly up in Idaho and we have Burkhart in Wayside. The two leaders. Who was left besides Mackey?”
“There are five other names in the file. None of the names jumped out at me.”
“That’s our suspect list for now. We need to run them and see where they went from-wait a minute, wait a minute.
Rider shook her head.
“No, it would have been late March or early April when he checked into Wayside. He couldn’t have -”
“Doesn’t matter when he checked into Wayside. When was he popped? When was the synagogue thing?”
“It was January. Early January. I have the exact date back in the file.”
“All right, early January. You said prints on a paint can tripped them to Burkhart. What did that take back in ’eighty-eight, when they were probably still doing it by hand-a week if it was a hot case like this? If they popped Burkhart by the end of January and he didn’t make bail…”
He held his hands wide, allowing Rider to finish.
“February, March, April, May, June,” she said excitedly. “Five months. With gain time he could easily have been out by July!”
Bosch nodded. The county jail system housed inmates awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less. For decades the system had been overcrowded and under court-ordered maximum population counts. This resulted in the routine early release of inmates through gain-time ratios that fluctuated according to individual jail population but sometimes were as high as three days earned for every one day served.
“This looks good, Harry.”
“Maybe too good. We have to nail it down.”
“When we get back I’ll go on the computer and find out when he left Wayside. What’s this do to the wiretap?”
Bosch thought for a moment about whether they should slow things down.
“I think we go ahead with the wiretap. If the Wayside date fits, then we watch Mackey
He stood up.
“But we still have to run down the other names, the other members of the Eights,” he added.
Rider didn’t get up. She looked up at him.
“You think this is going to work?”
Bosch shrugged.
“It has to.”
He looked around the cavernous train station. He checked faces and eyes, looking for any that might quickly turn away from his own. He half expected to see Irving in the crowd of travelers. Mr. Clean on the scene. That’s what Bosch used to think when Irving would show up at a crime scene.
Rider stood up. They dropped their empty cups into a nearby trash can and walked toward the front doors of the station. When he got there Bosch looked behind them, again searching for a follower. He knew they now had to consider such possibilities. The place that had been so warm and inviting to him twenty minutes before was now suspicious and forbidding. The voices inside were no longer graceful whispers. There was a sharp edge to them. They sounded angry.
When they got outside he noticed that the sun had moved behind the clouds. He wouldn’t need his sunglasses for the walk back.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Rider said.
“For what?”
“I just thought that it would be different, you coming back. Now here we are, your first case back and what do you get, a case with high jingo all over it.”
Bosch nodded as they crossed to the front walkway. He saw the sundial and the words etched in granite beneath it. His eyes held on the last line.
Courage to Do
“I’m not worried,” he said. “But they should be.”
22
GOOD TO GO,” Commander Garcia replied when Bosch asked if he was ready.
Bosch nodded and went to the door to usher in the two women from the
“Hi, I’m McKenzie Ward,” said the one leading the way. She was obviously the reporter. The other woman was carrying a camera bag and a tripod.
“I’m Emmy Ward,” said the photographer.
“Sisters?” Garcia asked, though the answer was obvious because of how much the two women, both in their twenties, looked alike: both attractive blondes with big smiles.
“I’m older,” said McKenzie. “But not by much.”
They all shook hands.
“How did two sisters get on the same paper together, then the same story together?” Garcia said.
