“Dyslexic?”
“I’d say.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Even with the giveaways in the Verloren scene, I’m not seeing this guy.”
“I agree. I think he had a part but not the main part. He doesn’t have it between the ears.”
Bosch decided to drop Mackey and double back to the beginning of her report.
“So if they had all of this intel on these guys, how come only Burkhart went down?”
“I’m getting to that.”
“This is where the high jingo comes in?”
“You got it. You see, Burkhart was a leader of the Eights but he wasn’t the leader.”
“Ah.”
“The leader was identified as a guy named Richard Ross. He was older than the others. A true believer. He was twenty-one and was the smooth talker who recruited Burkhart and then most of the other Eights and got the whole thing going.”
Bosch nodded. Richard Ross was a common name but he thought he knew where this was going.
“This Richard Ross, was that as in Richard Ross Junior?”
“Exactly. The good Captain Ross’s prodigy.”
Captain Richard Ross had been the longtime head of Internal Affairs Division during the early part of Bosch’s career in the department. He was now retired.
For Bosch the rest of the story tumbled into place.
“So they kept Junior out of it and saved Senior and the department all the embarrassment,” he said. “They laid it all on Burkhart, Ross’s second in command. He went away to Wayside and the group was broken up. Chalk it all up to youthful misadventure.”
“You got it.”
“And let me guess: all the intel came from Richard Ross Junior.”
“You’re good. It was part of the deal. Richard Junior gave up everybody and it was all PDU needed to quietly splinter the group. Junior then got to walk away from it.”
“All in a day’s work for Irving.”
“And you know what’s funny? I think Irving is a Jewish name.”
Bosch shook his head.
“Whether it is or isn’t, it’s not very funny,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Not if Irving saw an angle.”
“Reading between the lines of the report, I would say he saw all the angles.”
“This deal gave him control of IAD. I mean real, absolute control over who was investigated and how investigations were conducted. It put Ross deep in his pocket. It explains a lot about what was going on back then.”
“It was mostly before my time.”
“So they take care of the Eights and Irving gets a nice big prize in having Richard Ross Senior wearing a collar on the poodle squad,” Bosch said, thinking out loud. “But then Rebecca Verloren ends up dead by a gun stolen from a guy the Eights had been harassing, a gun likely stolen by one of the little runts they let run free. Their whole deal could fall apart if the murder came back on the Eights and then on them.”
“That’s right. So they step in and push the investigation. They steer it away and nobody ever goes down for it.”
“Motherfuckers,” Bosch whispered.
“Poor Harry. You still must have a lot of rust from your lay-off. You thought maybe they pushed the case because they were trying to save the city from burning. It was nothing so heroic.”
“No, they were just trying to save their own asses and the position the deal with Ross had given them. Given Irving.”
“This is all supposition,” Rider cautioned.
“Yeah, just reading between the fucking lines.”
Bosch felt the strongest craving for a cigarette he’d had in at least a year. He looked over at the newsstand and saw all of the packages in the racks behind the counter. He looked away. He looked up at the balloon trapped at the ceiling. He thought he knew how Nemo felt being stuck up there.
“When did Ross retire?” he asked.
“’Ninety-one. He rode it out until he hit twenty-five years-they allowed him that-and then he retired. I checked-he moved up to Idaho. I ran Junior on the box, too, and he’d already moved up there ahead of him. Probably one of those gated white enclaves where he felt right at home.”
“And he was probably up there laughing his ass off when this place came apart after Rodney King in ’ninety-two.”
“Probably, but not for long. He was killed in a DUI in ’ninety-three. He was coming back from an antigovernment rally out in the boonies. What goes around comes around, I guess.”
A dull thud hit Bosch in the stomach. He had started liking Richard Ross Jr. for the Verloren killing. He could have used Mackey to procure the weapon and maybe help carry the victim up the hill. But now he was dead. Could their investigation be leading them to such a dead end? Would they end up going back to Rebecca Verloren’s parents and telling them their long-dead daughter had been taken from them by someone who also was long dead? What kind of justice would that be?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rider said. “He could have been our guy. But I don’t think so. According to the box, he got his Idaho driver’s license in May of ’eighty-eight. He was supposedly already up there when Verloren went down.”
“Yeah, supposedly.”
Bosch wasn’t convinced by a simple DMV computer check. He pushed all of the information through the filters again to see if anything else jumped out at him.
“Okay, let’s review for a minute, make sure I have it all straight. Back in ’eighty-eight we have a bunch of these Valley boys calling themselves the Eights and running around in their football jerseys trying to kick-start a racial holy war. The department takes a look and pretty soon finds out that the brains behind this group is the son of our own Captain Ross of IAD. Commander Irving puts his finger into the wind and thinks, ‘Hmmm, I think I can use this to my advantage.’ So he puts the kibosh on going after Richard Junior and they sacrifice William ‘Billy Blitz’ Burkhart to the Justice Gods instead. The Eights are splintered, score one for the good guys. And Richard Junior skates away, score one for Irving because now he has Richard Senior in his pocket. Everybody lives happily ever after. Am I missing anything?”
“Actually, it’s Billy Blitzkrieg.”
“Blitzkrieg, then. So all of this gets wrapped up by early spring, right?”
“By the end of March. And by early May Richard Ross Junior has moved to Idaho.”
“Okay, so then in June somebody breaks into Sam Weiss’s house and steals his gun. Then in July-the day after our nation’s birthday, no less-a girl of mixed race is taken out of her house and murdered. Not raped, but murdered-which is important to remember. The murder is made to look like a suicide. But it is done badly, by all appearances by someone who was new at this. Garcia and Green catch the case, eventually see through it and conduct an investigation that leads them nowhere because, whether knowingly or not, they are pushed in that direction. Now, seventeen years later, the murder weapon is incontrovertibly tied to someone who just a few months before the killing was running around with the Eights. What am I missing here?”
“I think you’ve got it all.”
“So the question is, could it be that the Eights were not finished? That they continued to foment, only they tried to disguise their signature now? And that they raised the ante to include murder?”
Rider slowly shook her head.
“Anything is possible, but it doesn’t make much sense. The Eights were about statements-public statements. Burning crosses and painting synagogues. But it’s not much of a statement if you murder somebody and then try to disguise it as a suicide.”