“As a matter of fact, I have great recall of that time period. You have to understand something. I was a detective first grade assigned to the PDU. If I was given a job, I did it. You don’t question command in that situation. You do and you’re out.”
“So you were a good soldier just doing your job. I get it. What about the Chatsworth Eights and the Verloren murder? What about the alibis?”
“There were eight principal players in the Eights. I cleared them all. And don’t think I wanted to clear them and so I just did. I was told to see if any of these little pissants could have been involved. And I checked it out, but they all came up clean-on the murder at least.”
“Tell me about William Burkhart and Roland Mackey.”
McClellan sat down on a chair by the television. He put his glass of water, which he had yet to drink from, down on the coffee table. Bosch turned off Miles Davis in the middle of “Freddie Freeloader” and stood with his hands in his pockets near the sliding doors.
“Well, first of all, Burkhart was easy. We were already watching him that night.”
“Explain that.”
“He had just gotten out of Wayside a few days before. We had gotten tipped that while he was up there he was re-upping on the racial religion, so it was thought to be prudent to keep an eye on him to see if he was going to try to start things up again.”
“Who ordered that?”
McClellan just looked at him.
“ Irving, of course,” Bosch answered. “Keeping the deal safe. So PDU was watching Burkhart. Who else?”
“Burkhart got out and hooked up with two guys from the old group. A guy named Withers and another named Simmons. It looked like they might’ve been planning something, but on the night in question they were in a pool hall on Tampa drinking themselves into oblivion. It was solid. Two undercovers were in there with them the whole time. That’s what I’m here to tell you. They were all solid, Detective.”
“Yeah? Well, tell me about Mackey. The PDU wasn’t watching him, was it?”
“No, not Mackey.”
“Then how was he so solid?”
“What I remember about Mackey was that on the night the girl was taken he was getting tutored at Chatsworth High. He was going to night school, getting his high school degree.”
“Actually, his general education degree. Not exactly the same thing.”
“That’s right. A judge had ordered it as a condition of probation. Only he had to pass and he wasn’t doing too good. But he was getting tutored on the off nights-when there was no school. And the night the girl got grabbed, he was with his tutor. I confirmed it.”
Bosch shook his head. McClellan was trying to feed him a line.
“You’re telling me Mackey was getting tutored through the middle of the night? Either you’re full of shit or you believed a line of bullshit from Mackey and his tutor. Who was the tutor?”
“No, no, they were together earlier in the evening. I don’t remember the guy’s name now, but they were done by like eleven at the latest and then they went their separate ways. Mackey went home.”
Bosch looked astonished.
“That’s no alibi,
“Of course I did. But time of death wasn’t the only alibi point. I was given the summaries put together by the guys on the case. There was no forced entry to that house. And the father had gone around and checked all the doors and locks after he got home at ten that night. That meant the killer had to have been inside the house at that point. He was in there hiding, waiting for everybody to go to sleep.”
Bosch sat down on the couch and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He suddenly realized that McClellan was right and that everything was now different. He had seen the same report McClellan had seen seventeen years before but its meaning had not registered. The killer had been inside by the time Robert Verloren came home from work.
This changed a lot, Bosch knew. It changed how he looked not only at the first investigation, but also at his own.
Not registering Bosch’s inner turmoil, McClellan continued.
“So Mackey couldn’t have gotten into that house because he was with his tutor. He checked out. All those little assholes checked out. So I gave my boss a verbal report and then he told the two guys working the case. And that was the end of it until this DNA thing came up.”
Bosch was nodding to what McClellan was saying but he was thinking about other things.
“If Mackey was clean, how do you explain his DNA on the murder weapon?” he asked.
McClellan looked dumbfounded. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t explain it. I cleared him of involvement in the actual murder, but he must’ve…”
He didn’t finish. Bosch thought that he actually looked wounded by the idea that he might have helped a murderer or at least the person who provided the weapon for a murder to get away with it. He looked as though he knew all at once that he had been corrupted by Irving. He looked crushed.
“Is Irving still planning to tip the media and IAD to all of this?” Bosch asked quietly.
McClellan slowly shook his head.
“No,” he said. “He told me to give you a message. He said to tell you an agreement is only an agreement if both sides keep their end of it. That’s it.”
“One last question,” Bosch said. “The evidence box on the Verloren case is gone. You know anything about that?”
McClellan stared at him. Bosch could tell he had badly insulted the man.
“I had to ask,” Bosch said.
“All I know is that stuff disappears from the place,” McClellan said through a tight jaw. “Anybody could have walked off with it in seventeen years. But it wasn’t me.”
Bosch nodded. He stood up.
“Well, I have to get back to work on this,” he said.
McClellan took the cue and stood. He seemed to swallow his anger over the last question, maybe accepting Bosch’s explanation that it had to be asked.
“All right, Detective,” he said. “Good luck with this thing. I hope you catch the guy. And I really mean that.”
He held his hand out to Bosch. Bosch didn’t know McClellan’s story. He didn’t know all the circumstances of life in the PDU in 1988. But it looked like McClellan was leaving the house with a greater burden than he had come in with. So Bosch decided he could shake his hand.
After McClellan left, Bosch sat down again, thinking about the idea that Rebecca Verloren’s killer had been hiding in the house. He got up and went to the dining room table, where the files from the murder book were spread out. The photos from the dead girl’s room were at center in the spread. He looked through the reports until he found the SID report on latent fingerprint analysis.
The report was several pages long and contained the analysis of several fingerprints lifted from surfaces in the Verloren household. The main summary concluded that no print lifted from the house was an unknown, therefore it was likely the suspect or suspects wore gloves or simply avoided touching surfaces likely to retain prints.
The summary said that all latent fingerprints lifted from the house were matched to samples from members of the Verloren family or people who had an appropriate reason to have been in the house and touching the surfaces where the prints were found.
This time Bosch read the report differently and in its entirety. This time he was no longer interested in the analysis. He wanted to know where the SID techs had looked for prints.
The report was dated a day after the discovery of Rebecca’s body. It detailed a routine search for fingerprints in the household. All topical surfaces were examined. All doorknobs and locks. All windowsills and frames. Every place it was logical to think that the killer/kidnapper might have touched a surface during the crime. While several prints on windowsills and latches were recovered and matched to Robert Verloren, the report stated that no usable prints at all were recovered from doorknobs in the house. It noted that this was not unusual because of the
