“Did they meet boys there?”
“I would assume so. You see, this is all just second-guessing. There was nothing wrong or unnatural about our daughter going to the movies with her friends and meeting up with boys and whatnot. It is only after the worst-case scenario happens that people ask, ‘Why don’t you know who she was with?’ We thought everything was fine. We sent her to the best school we could find. Her friends were from nice families. We couldn’t watch her every minute of the day. Friday nights-hell, most nights-I worked late at the restaurant.”
“I understand. I am not judging you as a parent, Mr. Verloren. I see nothing wrong with that, okay? I am just dragging a net. I’m collecting as much information as I can because you never know what might become important.”
“Yeah, well, that net got snagged and ripped on the rocks a long time ago.”
“Maybe not.”
“You think this Mackey fellow is the one, then?”
“He’s connected somehow, that’s all we know for sure. We’ll know more soon enough. I promise you that.”
Verloren turned and looked directly into Bosch’s eyes for the first time during the interview.
“When you get to that point, you will speak for her, won’t you, Detective?”
Bosch nodded slowly. He thought he knew what Verloren was asking.
“Yes sir, I will.”
21
KIZ RIDER SAT at her desk with her arms folded, as if she had been waiting for Bosch all morning. She had a somber look on her face and Bosch knew something was up.
“You get the PDU file?” he asked.
“I got to look at it. I wasn’t allowed to take it.”
Bosch nodded. He slid into his seat across from her.
“Good stuff?” he asked.
“Depends on how you look at it.”
“Well, I got some stuff, too.”
He looked around. Abel Pratt’s door was open and Bosch could see him in there, bending over to the little cooler he kept next to his desk. Pratt was in earshot. It wasn’t that Bosch didn’t trust Pratt. He did. But he didn’t want to put him in a position of hearing something he didn’t want to or was not ready to hear. Same as Rider when they had spoken on the phone earlier.
He looked back at his partner.
“You want to take a walk?”
“Yes, I do.”
They got up and headed out. When Bosch went past the OIC’s door he leaned in. Pratt was now on the phone. Bosch caught his attention and pantomimed drinking from a cup and then pointed to Pratt. Shaking his head no to the offer of coffee, Pratt held up a tub of yogurt as if to say he had what he needed. Bosch saw little chunks of green in the gunk. He tried to think of a green fruit and only came up with kiwi. He walked away thinking that the only possible way to make yogurt taste worse was to put kiwi into it.
They took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out front to where the memorial fountain was.
“So where do you want to go?” Kiz asked.
“Depends on how much there is to talk about.”
“Probably a lot.”
“Last time I worked in Parker Center I was a smoker. When I needed to walk and think I’d go over to Union Station and buy smokes in the shop over there. I liked that place. It’s got those comfortable chairs in the main hall. Or it used to, at least.”
“Sounds good to me.”
They headed that way, taking Los Angeles Street to the north. The first building they passed was the federal office building, and Bosch noticed that the concrete barriers erected in 2001 to keep potential vehicle bombs away from the building were still in place. The threat of danger didn’t seem to bother the people in the line stretching across the front of the building. They were waiting to get into the immigration offices, each clutching paperwork and ready to make a case for citizenship. They waited beneath the tile mosaics on the front façade that depicted people dressed like angels, their eyes skyward, waiting on heaven.
“Why don’t you start, Harry,” Rider said. “Tell me about Robert Verloren.”
Bosch walked a little further before beginning.
“I liked the guy,” he said. “He’s digging himself out of the hole. He cooks a hundred or so breakfasts a day over there. I had a plate and it was pretty good stuff.”
“And I’m sure it beats the hell out of the prices at Pacific Dining Car. What did he give you that’s made you so angry?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You read me, I read you. I know he told you something that’s got you going.”
Bosch nodded. It sure didn’t seem like three years since they had worked together.
“ Irving. Or at least I think he gave me Irving.”
“Tell it.”
Bosch took her through the story Verloren had told him less than an hour before. He finished with Verloren’s description, limited as it was, of the two men with badges who came to his restaurant and threatened him in order to make him back off the racial angle.
“Sounds like Irving to me, too,” Rider said.
“And one of his poodles. Maybe it was McClellan.”
“Maybe. So you think Verloren was straight? He’s been on the Nickel a long time.”
“I think so. He claims to have been sober for three years this time. But you know, grinding over something for seventeen years, pretty soon perceptions become facts. Still, everything he said just seems to fit into the underpinnings of this. I think they pushed this case, Kiz. It was going in one direction and they pushed it the other way. Maybe they knew what was coming, that the city was going to burn. Rodney King wasn’t the gasoline. He was only the match. Things had been building and maybe the powers that be looked at this case and said for the public good, we have to go the other way. They sacrificed justice for Rebecca Verloren.”
They were crossing over the 101 Freeway on the Los Angeles Street overpass. Eight lanes of crawling traffic smoked beneath them. The sun was bright, reflecting off windshields and buildings and concrete. Bosch put on his Ray-Bans.
The traffic was loud, too, and Rider had to raise her voice.
“That’s not like you, Harry.”
“What isn’t?”
“Looking for a good reason for them to have done something so wrong. You usually look for the sinister angle.”
“Are you telling me you found the sinister angle in that PDU file?”
She nodded glumly.
“I think so,” she said.
“And they just let you waltz in there and get it?”
“I got in to see the man first thing this morning. I brought him a cup of coffee from Starbucks-he hates the cafeteria crap. That got me in. Then I told him what we had and what I wanted to do, and the bottom line is he trusts me. So he more or less let me have a look around in Special Archives.”
“The Public Disorder Unit came and went long before he was here. Did he know about it?”
“I’m sure after he took the job he was briefed. Maybe even before he took it.”
“Did you tell him specifically about Mackey and the Chatsworth Eights?”
“Not specifically. I just told him the case we caught was connected to an old PDU investigation and I needed to get into Special Archives to look for a file. He sent Lieutenant Hohman with me. We went in, found the file and I had to look through it while Hohman sat across a table from me. You know what, Harry? There are a hell of a lot of files in Special Archives.”
“Where all the bodies are buried…”
Bosch wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure how to say it. Rider looked at him and read him.
“What, Harry?”
He didn’t say anything at first but she waited him out.
“Kiz, you said the man on six trusts you. Do you trust him?”
She looked him in the eye when she answered.
“Like I trust you, Harry. Okay?”
Bosch looked at her.
“That’s good enough for me.”
Rider made a move to turn down Arcadia but Bosch pointed toward the old pueblo, the place where the City of Angels was founded. He wanted to take the long way and walk through.