7

THEY DECIDED that the best way to deal with and discuss bad news was to eat. Besides that, nothing made Bosch hungrier than sitting in an office all morning and reading through a murder book. They went over to Chinese Friends, a small place on Broadway at the end of Chinatown where they knew they could still get a table this early. It was a place where you could eat well and to capacity and barely go over five bucks. The trouble was that it filled up fast, mostly with headquarters staff from the Fire Department, the gold badges from Parker Center and the bureaucrats from City Hall. If you didn’t get there by noon you ordered takeout and you had to sit and eat on the bus benches out front in the sun.

They left the murder book in the car so as not to disturb other patrons in the restaurant, where the tables were jammed as close as the desks in a public school. They did bring their notes, and discussed the case in an improvised shorthand designed to keep their conversation private. Rider explained that when she had said the gun and the journal were missing from the ESB what she meant was that no evidence carton from the case could be found during an hour-long search by two evidence clerks. This was not much of a surprise to Bosch. As Pratt had warned earlier, the department had taken haphazard care of evidence for decades. Evidence cartons were booked and filed on shelves in chronological order and without any sort of separation according to crime classification. Consequently, evidence from a murder might sit on a shelf next to evidence from a burglary. And when clerks came through periodically to clear out evidence from cases where the statute of limitations had expired, sometimes the wrong box got tossed. The security of the ESB was also a low priority for many years. It was not difficult for anyone with an LAPD badge to gain access to any piece of evidence in the facility. So the evidence cartons were subject to pilfering. It was not unusual for weapons to be missing, or other kinds of evidence from famous cases like the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson, and the Dollmaker crimes.

There was no indication in the Verloren case of evidence theft. It was probably more a case of carelessness, of trying to find a box that had been stored seventeen years ago in an acre-sized room crowded with matching boxes.

“They’ll find it,” Bosch said. “Maybe you can even get your buddy up on six to put the fear of God into them. Then they’ll find it for sure.”

“They better. The DNA is no good to us without that gun.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Harry, it’s the chain of evidence. You can’t go into trial with the DNA and not be able to show the jury the weapon it came from. We can’t even go into the district attorney’s office without it. They’ll throw us right out on our asses.”

“Look, all I’m saying is, right now we’re the only ones who know we don’t have the gun. We can fake it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you think that this is all going to come down to Mackey and us in a little room? I mean, even if we had the gun in evidence we can’t prove beyond a doubt that he left his blood in it during the shooting of Becky Verloren. All we can prove is that the blood is his. So if you ask me, it’s going to come down to a confession. We’re going to put him in the room, hit him with the DNA and see if he cops to it. That’s it. So all I’m saying is, we put together a few props for the interview. We go to the armory and borrow a Colt forty-five and we pull that out of the box when we’re in the room with him. We convince him we have the chain and he cops or he doesn’t.”

“I don’t like tricks.”

“Tricks are part of the trade. There’s nothing illegal about that. The courts have even said so.”

“I think we’re going to need more than the DNA to turn him anyway.”

“Me too. I was thinking we -”

Bosch stopped and waited while the waitress put down two steaming plates. Bosch had ordered shrimp fried rice. Rider ordered pork chops. Without a word he lifted his plate and pushed half of its contents onto her plate. He then used a fork to take three of her six pork chops. He almost smiled while he did this. He was back on the job with her less than a day and they had already dropped back into the easy rhythm of their prior partnership. He was happy.

“Hey, what’s Jerry Edgar up to?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a while. We never really got over that thing.”

Bosch nodded. When Bosch had worked at Hollywood Division with Rider the homicide table had been divided into teams of three. Jerry Edgar had been the third partner. Then Bosch retired and soon after Rider was promoted downtown. It left Edgar still in Hollywood, feeling isolated and passed over. And now that Bosch and Rider were working again and assigned to RHD, there had been only silence from Edgar.

“What were you going to say, Harry, when the food came?”

“Just that you’re right. We’ll need more. One thing I was thinking was that I heard that since Nine-Eleven and the Patriot Act it’s easier for us to get a wiretap.”

She ate a piece of shrimp before responding.

“Yes, that’s true. It’s one of the things I was monitoring for the chief. Our request filings have gone up about three thousand percent. The approvals are way up, too. The word’s sort of gotten around that this is a tool we can use now. How is it going to work here?”

“I was thinking we put a tap on Mackey and then we plant a story in the paper. You know, it says we’re working the case again, mention the gun, maybe mention the DNA-you know, something new. Not that we have a match but that we could get a match. Then we sit back and watch him and listen to him and see what happens. We could follow up by paying him a visit, see if that stirs things up any.”

Rider thought about this while eating a pork chop with her fingers. She seemed uneasy about something and it couldn’t be the food.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Who would he call?”

“I don’t know. Whoever he did it with or did it for.”

Rider nodded thoughtfully while chewing.

“I don’t know, Harry. You’re back on the job less than a day after three years in the fun and sun and already you are reading things into a case I don’t see. I guess you are still the teacher.”

“You’re just rusty from sitting up there behind a big desk on six.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Sort of. I think I’ve waited so long for this that I’m sort of on full alert, I guess.”

“Just tell me how you see this, Harry. You don’t have to make up excuses for your instincts.”

“I actually don’t see it yet and that’s part of the problem. Roland Mackey’s name is nowhere in that book and that’s a problem starting out the door. We know he was in the vicinity but we have nothing connecting him to the victim.”

“What are you talking about? We have the gun with his DNA in it.”

“The blood connects him to the gun, not the girl. You read the book. We can’t prove his DNA was deposited at the time of the killing. That single report could blow this whole case out of the water. It’s a big hole, Kiz. So big a jury could drive through it. All Mackey has to do at trial is get up there on the stand and say, ‘Yeah, I stole the gun during a burglary on Winnetka. I then went up into the hills and shot it a few times, and I was making like Mel Gibson and the next thing I knew the damn thing bit me, took a chunk right out of my hand. I never saw that happen to Mel before. So I got so mad I threw that damn gun into the bushes and went home to get some Band-Aids.’ The SID report-our own damn report-backs him up and that is the end of it.”

Rider didn’t smile during the story at all. He could tell she was seeing his point.

“That’s all he has to say, Kiz, and he’s got reasonable doubt and we can’t prove otherwise. We’ve got no prints at the scene, we’ve got no hair, no fiber, we’ve got nothing. But added to this we do have his profile. And if you looked at his sheet before we were on this and knew about the DNA you would have never pegged this guy as a killer. Maybe spur-of-the-moment or heat of passion. But not something like this, something planned, and certainly not at age eighteen.”