“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.”

Bosch nodded. She was right. There was not a smooth flow to any of the logic.

“Then again, they knew they had the LAPD on their backs,” he said. “Maybe some of them continued to operate but as sort of an underground movement.”

“Like I said, anything is possible.”

“Okay, so we have Ross Junior supposedly up in Idaho and we have Burkhart in Wayside. The two leaders. Who was left besides Mackey?”

“There are five other names in the file. None of the names jumped out at me.”

“That’s our suspect list for now. We need to run them and see where they went from-wait a minute, wait a minute. Was Burkhart still in Wayside? You said he got a year, right? That meant he’d be out in five or six months unless he got into trouble up there. When exactly did he go in?”

Rider shook her head.

“No, it would have been late March or early April when he checked into Wayside. He couldn’t have -”

“Doesn’t matter when he checked into Wayside. When was he popped? When was the synagogue thing?”

“It was January. Early January. I have the exact date back in the file.”

“All right, early January. You said prints on a paint can tripped them to Burkhart. What did that take back in ’eighty-eight, when they were probably still doing it by hand-a week if it was a hot case like this? If they popped Burkhart by the end of January and he didn’t make bail…”

He held his hands wide, allowing Rider to finish.

“February, March, April, May, June,” she said excitedly. “Five months. With gain time he could easily have been out by July!”

Bosch nodded. The county jail system housed inmates awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less. For decades the system had been overcrowded and under court-ordered maximum population counts. This resulted in the routine early release of inmates through gain-time ratios that fluctuated according to individual jail population but sometimes were as high as three days earned for every one day served.

“This looks good, Harry.”

“Maybe too good. We have to nail it down.”

“When we get back I’ll go on the computer and find out when he left Wayside. What’s this do to the wiretap?”

Bosch thought for a moment about whether they should slow things down.

“I think we go ahead with the wiretap. If the Wayside date fits, then we watch Mackey and Burkhart. We still spook Mackey because he’s the weak one. We do it when he’s at work and away from Burkhart. If we’re right, he’ll call him.”

He stood up.

“But we still have to run down the other names, the other members of the Eights,” he added.

Rider didn’t get up. She looked up at him.

“You think this is going to work?”

Bosch shrugged.

“It has to.”

He looked around the cavernous train station. He checked faces and eyes, looking for any that might quickly turn away from his own. He half expected to see Irving in the crowd of travelers. Mr. Clean on the scene. That’s what Bosch used to think when Irving would show up at a crime scene.