Rider gave him her knotted-brow look. He had even more information she didn’t know. He looked away.
“Well, that’s just perfect,” Pratt said. “So who, what and where does that leave us, people?”
“Well, basically, our newspaper plant backfired,” Rider said. “It may have worked in terms of getting Mackey to want to talk about Verloren, but he never got the chance. Somebody else saw the story.”
“That somebody being the actual killer,” Pratt said.
“Exactly,” Rider said. “The person Mackey helped and/or gave the gun to seventeen years ago. That person also saw the story and knew it wasn’t his blood on the gun, so that meant it had to be Mackey’s. He knew Mackey was the link to him, so Mackey had to go.”
“So how did he set it up?” Pratt asked.
“He was either smart enough to figure the story was a plant and we were watching Mackey, or he just figured the best way to get to Mackey was the way he did it. Get him out there alone. Like I said, he was smart. He picked a time and place that would result in Mackey being alone and vulnerable. On that entrance ramp you are up above the freeway. Even with the tow truck’s lights on, nobody would see up there.”
“It was also a good spot in case Mackey had a tail,” Nord added. “The killer knew a tail car would have to just keep moving by, and then he’d have Mackey alone.”
“Aren’t we giving this guy a little too much credit?” Pratt asked. “How would he know the cops were onto this guy? Just from a newspaper article? Come on.”
Neither Bosch nor Rider answered and everyone else silently digested the unspoken suggestion that the killer had a connection to the department or, more specifically, the investigation.
“All right, what’s next?” Pratt said. “I think the containment on this is maybe another twenty-four hours tops. After that it’s going to be in the papers and upstairs on six, and there’s going to be hair on the walls if we don’t wrap it up first. What do we do?”
“We’ll take the pen registers,” Bosch said, speaking for himself and Rider. “And go from there.”
Bosch had been thinking about the note to Mackey he had seen on the desk in the service station the day before. A call to verify employment from Visa. As Rider had pointed out when she first heard about it, Mackey wasn’t into leaving trails like credit cards. It was something that didn’t fit and therefore he wanted to go after it.
“We have all of the printouts right here,” Robinson said. “The line that was busiest was the one into the station. All kinds of business calls.”
“Okay, Harry, Kiz, you want the registers?” Pratt asked.
Rider looked at Bosch and then at Pratt.
“If that’s what Harry wants. He seems to be on a roll today.”
As if on cue Bosch’s phone began to chirp. He looked at the screen. It was Raj Patel.
“We’ll see what kind of a roll right now,” he said as he opened the phone.
Patel said he had good and bad news.
“The good news is we still had the exemplar skid from the house in records here. The latents we recovered this morning did not match any of them. You found somebody new, Harry. It could be your killer.”
What this meant was that fingerprint examples from the members of the Verloren family and others who had appropriate access to the house were still on file in the SID print lab. None of those examples matched the fingerprints and palm print recovered that morning from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. Of course fingerprints could not be dated, and it was possible that the prints discovered that morning had been left by whoever had installed the bed. But it seemed unlikely. The prints were taken off the underside of the wooden slat. Whoever had left them had most likely been under the bed.
“And the bad news?” Bosch asked.
“I just ran them through the California system. No matches.”
“What about the FBI?”
“That’s next but that won’t be so fast. They have to process it. I will send it through with an expedite request but you know how that goes.”
“I do, Raj. Let me know when you know, and thanks for the effort.”
Bosch closed the phone. He felt a steep letdown and his face showed it. He could already tell the others knew the score before he delivered the news.
“No match on the DOJ database,” he said. “He’ll try the bureau’s base but that will take a while.”
“Shit!” said Renner.
“Speaking of Raj Patel,” Pratt said, “his brother scheduled the autopsy for two o’clock today. I want one team there. Who wants to take it?”
Renner weakly raised his hand. He and Robleto would take it. It was an easy assignment if you didn’t mind the visuals.
The meeting soon broke up after Pratt assigned Robinson and Nord the service station and the interviews of the people Mackey worked with there. Marcia and Jackson would work on pulling reports together and into a murder book. They were still the lead investigators and would coordinate things from room 503.
Pratt looked at the bill, divided it by nine and told everyone to put in ten. This meant Bosch had to throw in a ten even though he hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. He didn’t protest. It was the price of being late and being the guy who put them on this path.
As everyone stood Bosch caught Rider’s eye.
“Did you come directly here or did you ride with somebody?”
“Abel gave me a lift.”
“Want to ride back together?”
“Sure.”
Outside the restaurant she gave Bosch the silent treatment while they waited for his car from the valet. She stared at the large plastic steer that was atop the restaurant’s sign. Under her arm was a file containing the printouts from the pen registers.
Finally the car came and they got in. Before pulling out of the lot Bosch turned and looked at her.
“All right, say it,” he said.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you want to say so you can feel better.”
“You should’ve called me, Harry, that’s all.”
“Look, Kiz, I called you yesterday and you chewed me out. I was just working off of recent experience.”
“This was different and you know it. You called me yesterday because you were excited about something. Today you were following a lead. I should have been with you. And then to not find out what you came up with until you went in there and told everybody. That was embarrassing, Harry. Thanks for that.”
Bosch nodded his contrition.
“You’re right about that part. I’m sorry. I should’ve called you when I was coming in. I just forgot. I knew I was late and I had both hands on the wheel and was just trying to get here.”
She didn’t say anything, so he finally did.
“Can we get back to solving this case now?”
She shrugged and he finally put the car in drive. On the way to Parker Center he tried to fill her in on all the details he hadn’t mentioned during the breakfast meeting. He told her about McClellan’s visit to his house and how that led him to the discovery of the prints under the bed.
Twenty minutes later they were in their alcove in room 503. Bosch finally had a cup of coffee in front of him. They sat across from each other and had the pen register printouts spread between them.
Bosch was concentrating on the reports on the service station phones. The listing was at least a couple hundred entries-calls going in or out on the station’s two phones-between 6 a.m., when the surveillance started, and 4 p.m., when Mackey reported for work and Renner and Robleto started live-monitoring the line.
Bosch scanned down the list. Nothing looked immediately familiar. Many of the calls were to or from business listings with some automobile connection clearly apparent in the name. Many others came in from the AAA dispatch center and these were likely tow calls.
There were also several calls that came from personal phones. Bosch looked closely at these names but saw nothing that jumped out at him. No one listed was an already established player in the case.
There were four entries on the list that were attributed to Visa, all the same number. Bosch picked up the
