smudging that routinely occurred when knobs were turned.
It was in what was not included in the report that Bosch saw the crack through which a killer might have escaped. The SID team had gone into the house a day after the victim’s body was discovered. This would have been after the case had been misread twice, first as a missing-persons case and second as a suicide. Added to this, when a murder investigation was finally mounted the latents team was sent in blind. There was no understanding of the case at that point. The idea that the killer might have hidden in the garage or somewhere else in the house for several hours had not been formulated yet. The search for fingerprints and other evidence, such as hairs and fibers, never went beyond the obvious, beyond the surface.
Bosch knew it was too late now. Too many years had passed. A cat roamed the house and who knows what objects from yard sales had come in and gone out of the house where a killer had hidden and waited.
Then his eyes fell to the spread of photos on the table and he realized something. Rebecca’s bedroom was the one place that had not been contaminated over time. It was like a museum with its artwork encased and almost hermetically sealed.
Bosch spread all the crime scene photos of the bedroom in front of him. There had been something gnawing at him about these photos since the first time he had seen them. He still couldn’t get to it but now he felt urgent about it. He studied the shots of the bureau and the bed table and then the open closet. Last he studied the bed.
He thought of the photo that had run in the newspaper and took the second copy of the paper out of the file containing all reports and documents accumulated during the reinvestigation of the case. He unfolded the paper and studied Emmy Ward’s photo and then compared it to the photographs of seventeen years before.
The room seemed exactly the same, as if untouched by the grief emanating from it like heat from an oven. Then Bosch noticed a small difference. In the
Bosch’s eyes moved back and forth from one photo to the other. He felt something breaking loose inside. He felt a little charge drop into his blood. This was what had bothered him. It was the something that was not right.
“In and out,” he said to himself.
It was possible, he knew, that the ruffle had been pushed inward at the bottom of the bed by someone crawling underneath it. That would make it likely that the outward fluffing of the ruffle at the side of the bed would have occurred when that same person slid or crawled out.
After everyone was asleep.
Bosch got up and started pacing as he worked it through again. In the photo taken after the abduction and murder, the bed clearly showed the possibility of entrance and exit. Rebecca’s killer could have been waiting right below her as she fell asleep.
“In and out,” Bosch said again.
He worked it further. He knew that no readable fingerprints had been recovered at the house. But only obvious surfaces had been checked. This did not necessarily mean the killer had worn gloves. It only meant he was smart enough not to touch obvious places with his bare hands, or smudged the prints when he needed to. Even if gloves had been worn during the entry to the house, might not the killer have removed them while waiting-possibly for hours-under the bed?
It was worth a shot. Bosch went to the kitchen and called SID and asked for Raj Patel.
“Raj, what are you doing?”
“I am cataloging the evidence we gathered last night on the freeway.”
“I need your best latents man to meet me back up there in Chatsworth.”
“Now?”
“Right now, Raj. I might not even have a job later. We have to do this now.”
“What is it we are to do?”
“I want to lift a bed and look underneath it. It’s important, Raj. If we find something, it will lead us to the killer.”
There was a short silence and then Patel replied.
“I am my best latents man, Harry. Give me the address.”
“Thanks, Raj.”
He gave Patel the address and then hung up the phone. He drummed his fingers on the counter, wondering if he should call Kiz Rider. She had been so distressed and discouraged as they had walked out of Parker Center that she said all she wanted to do was go home to sleep. Should he wake her for the second day in a row? He knew that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether he should wait to see if there was anything beneath the bed before telling her and getting her hopes up.
He decided to hold off on the call until there was something solid to tell her. Instead he picked up the phone and woke up Muriel Verloren. He told her he was on his way.
36
BOSCH GOT TO THE SQUAD meeting at the Pacific Dining Car late because of traffic coming in from the Valley. Everyone was in a private area in the back of the restaurant. Most of them already had plates of food in front of them.
His excitement must have showed. Pratt interrupted a report from Tim Marcia to look at Bosch and say, “You either got lucky during the time you had off or you just don’t care about the deep shit we’re in here.”
“I got lucky,” Bosch said as he took the only empty chair and sat down. “But not in the way you mean. Raj Patel just pulled a palm print and two fingers off a wood slat that was beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed.”
“That’s good,” Pratt said dryly. “What’s it mean?”
“It means that as soon as Raj runs it through the database we might have our killer.”
“How so?” Rider asked.
Bosch had never called her. He could already feel a hostile vibe from her.
“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bosch said to her. Then to the others, he said, “I was looking through the original latents report in the murder book. I realized that they went in there for prints the day after the girl’s body was found. They never went back after it became a strong possibility that the abductor had come into the house earlier in the day when the garage was left open and hid somewhere until everybody was asleep.”
“So why the bed?” Pratt asked.
“The crime scene photos showed the ruffle at the foot of the bed had been pushed in. Like somebody had crawled underneath. They missed it because they weren’t looking for it.”
“Good work, Harry,” Pratt said. “If Raj gets a hit we change directions and move with it. All right, let’s get back to our reports. You can check with your partner on what you’ve missed so far.”
Pratt then turned to Robinson and Nord at the other end of the long table and said, “What did you come up with on the call for the tow truck?”
“Not a lot that helps,” Nord said. “Because the call was made after we had switched our monitoring to the line at the Burkhart property, we don’t have an audio recording of it. But we do have the pen registers and they show that the call came directly to Tampa Towing before being bounced over to the Triple A answering service. The call came from a pay phone outside the Seven-Eleven on Tampa by the freeway entrance. He probably made the call, then drove down the entrance and waited.”
“Prints on the phone?” Pratt asked.
“We asked Raj to take a look after he cleared the scene,” Robinson said. “The phone had been wiped.”
“Figures,” Pratt said. “You talked to Triple A?”
“Yes. No help other than to say the caller was a male.”
He turned to Bosch.
“You have anything to add that your partner didn’t already tell us?”
“Probably just more of the same. Burkhart looks like he is clear on last night and he looks like he’s clear on Verloren as well. Both nights he happened to be under LAPD surveillance.”
