“We spoke to Commander Garcia,” Rider said. “He told us that several years ago he returned your daughter’s journal to you. Do you still have that?”
Muriel looked alarmed.
“I read part of it every night. You’re not going to take that away from me are you? It’s my bible!”
“We need to borrow it and make a copy of it. Commander Garcia should have made a copy back then but he didn’t.”
“I don’t want to lose it.”
“You won’t, Mrs. Verloren. I promise. We’ll copy it and get it right back to you.”
“Do you want it now? It’s by my bed.”
“Yes, if you could get it.”
Muriel Verloren left them and disappeared down a hallway that led toward the left side of the house. Bosch looked at Rider and raised his eyebrows in a what-do-you-think sort of way. Rider shrugged, meaning that they would talk about it later.
“Once my daughter wanted to get another cat,” Bosch whispered. “My ex said no, one was enough. Now I know why.”
Rider was smiling inappropriately when Muriel came back in, carrying a small book with a flowery cover and the words My Journal embossed in gold on it. The gold was flaking off. The book had been handled a lot. She gave it to Rider, who went out of her way to handle it reverently.
“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Verloren, we’d like to look around,” Bosch said. “To sort of connect what we’ve seen and read in the book with the actual layout of the house.”
“What book?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. That’s copspeak. All the investigative records from the case are kept in a large binder. We call it a book.”
“A murder book?”
“Yes, that’s right. Is it all right if we look around? I would like to look at the back door and look around out back, too.”
She signaled with a raised arm which way they should go. Bosch and Rider got up.
“It’s changed,” Muriel said. “It used to be there were no houses up there. You’d go out our door and walk straight up the mountain. But they terraced it. Now there are houses. Millions of dollars. They built a mansion on the spot where my baby was found. I hate it.”
There was nothing to say to that. Bosch just nodded and followed her down a short hallway and into the kitchen. There was a door with a glass window in it. It led to the backyard. Muriel unlocked the door and they all stepped out. The yard was on a steep incline that led to a grove of eucalyptus trees. Through the trees Bosch could see the Spanish-tiled roofline of a large house.
“It used to be all open up there,” Muriel said. “Just trees. Now there are houses. It’s got a gate. They don’t let me walk up there like I used to. They think I’m a bag lady or something because I liked to go up there sometimes and have a picnic at Becky’s spot.”
Bosch nodded and thought for a moment about a mother having a picnic at the spot where her daughter was murdered. He tried to drop the idea and instead study the terrain of the hillside. The autopsy had said Becky Verloren weighed ninety-six pounds. Even as light as that, it would have been a struggle taking her up that incline. He wondered about the possibility that there had been more than one killer. He thought of Bailey Sable saying they.
He looked at Muriel Verloren, who was standing still and silent, her eyes closed. She had canted her head so that the late afternoon sun warmed her face. Bosch wondered if this was some form of communion with her lost daughter. As if sensing that they were looking at her, she spoke, keeping her eyes closed.
“I love this place. I’ll never leave.”
“Can we look at your daughter’s bedroom?” Bosch asked.
She opened her eyes.
“Just wipe your feet when we go back inside.”
She led them back through the kitchen and into the hallway. The stairway up began next to the door that led to the garage. The door was open and Bosch caught a glimpse of a battered minivan surrounded by stacks of boxes and things Muriel Verloren had apparently collected on her rounds. He also noted how close the door to the garage was to the stairs. He didn’t know whether this meant anything. But he recalled the summary report in the murder book that suggested the killer had hidden somewhere in the house and waited for the family to go to sleep. The garage was the likely place.
The stairway was narrow because there were boxes of yard sale purchases lining one side all the way up. Rider went first. Muriel signaled for Bosch to go next and when he passed by her she whispered to him.
“Do you have children?”
He nodded, knowing his answer would hurt.
“A daughter.”
She nodded back.
“Never let her out of your sight.”
Bosch didn’t tell her that she lived with her mother far out of his sight. He just nodded and started up the stairs.
On the second floor there was a landing and two bedrooms with a bathroom in between them. Becky Verloren’s bedroom was to the rear, with windows that looked up the hillside.
The door was closed and Muriel opened it. When they stepped inside they stepped into a time warp. The room was unchanged from the seventeen-year-old photos Bosch had studied in the murder book. The rest of the house was crowded with junk and the detritus from a disintegrated life, but the room where Becky Verloren had slept and talked on the phone and written in her secret journal was unchanged. It had now been preserved longer than the girl had actually lived.
Bosch stepped further into the room and looked around silently. Even the cat didn’t intrude here. The air smelled clean and fresh.
“This is just how it was on the morning she was gone,” Muriel said. “Except I made the bed.”
Bosch looked at the quilt with the cats on it. It flowed over the edges and draped down to the bed skirt, which flowed neatly to the floor.
“You and your husband were sleeping on the other side of the house, right?” Bosch asked.
“Yes. Rebecca was at that age where she wanted her privacy. There are two bedrooms downstairs, on the other side of the house. Her first bedroom was down there. But when she was fourteen she moved up here.”
Bosch nodded and looked around before asking anything else.
“How often do you come up here, Mrs. Verloren?” Rider asked.
“Every single day. Sometimes when I can’t sleep-which is a lot of the time-I come in here and lie down. I don’t get under the covers, though. I want it to be her bed.”
Bosch realized he was nodding again, as if what she had said made some sort of sense to him. He stepped over to the vanity. There were photos slid into the frame of the mirror. Bosch recognized a young Bailey Sable in one of them. There was also a photo of Becky by herself in front of the Eiffel Tower. She was wearing a black beret. None of the other kids from the Art Club trip were present.
Also on the mirror was a photo of a boy with Becky. It looked like they were on a ride at Disneyland, or maybe just down at the Santa Monica pier.
“Who is this?” he asked.
Muriel came over and looked.
“The boy? That’s Danny Kotchof. Her first boyfriend.”
Bosch nodded. The boy who had moved to Hawaii.
“When he moved away it just broke her heart,” Muriel added.
“When exactly was that?”
“The summer before, in June. Right after her freshman year and his sophomore. He was a year older.”
“Why did the family move, do you know?”
“Danny’s dad worked for a rent-a-car company and he got transferred to a new franchise in Maui. It was a promotion.”
Bosch glanced at Rider to see if she picked up on the significance of the information Muriel had just given them. Rider subtly shook her head once. She didn’t get it. But Bosch wanted to pursue it.
“Did Danny go to Hillside Prep?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s where they met,” Muriel said.
Bosch looked down at the vanity and noticed a cheap souvenir snow globe with the Eiffel Tower in it. Some of the water had evaporated, leaving a bubble in the top of the globe and the tip of the tower poking from the water into the air pocket.