It was worth a shot. Bosch went to the kitchen and called SID and asked for Raj Patel.

“Raj, what are you doing?”

“I am cataloging the evidence we gathered last night on the freeway.”

“I need your best latents man to meet me back up there in Chatsworth.”

“Now?”

“Right now, Raj. I might not even have a job later. We have to do this now.”

“What is it we are to do?”

“I want to lift a bed and look underneath it. It’s important, Raj. If we find something, it will lead us to the killer.”

There was a short silence and then Patel replied.

“I am my best latents man, Harry. Give me the address.”

“Thanks, Raj.”

He gave Patel the address and then hung up the phone. He drummed his fingers on the counter, wondering if he should call Kiz Rider. She had been so distressed and discouraged as they had walked out of Parker Center that she said all she wanted to do was go home to sleep. Should he wake her for the second day in a row? He knew that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether he should wait to see if there was anything beneath the bed before telling her and getting her hopes up.

He decided to hold off on the call until there was something solid to tell her. Instead he picked up the phone and woke up Muriel Verloren. He told her he was on his way.

36

BOSCH GOT TO THE SQUAD meeting at the Pacific Dining Car late because of traffic coming in from the Valley. Everyone was in a private area in the back of the restaurant. Most of them already had plates of food in front of them.

His excitement must have showed. Pratt interrupted a report from Tim Marcia to look at Bosch and say, “You either got lucky during the time you had off or you just don’t care about the deep shit we’re in here.”

“I got lucky,” Bosch said as he took the only empty chair and sat down. “But not in the way you mean. Raj Patel just pulled a palm print and two fingers off a wood slat that was beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed.”

“That’s good,” Pratt said dryly. “What’s it mean?”

“It means that as soon as Raj runs it through the database we might have our killer.”

“How so?” Rider asked.

Bosch had never called her. He could already feel a hostile vibe from her.

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” Bosch said to her. Then to the others, he said, “I was looking through the original latents report in the murder book. I realized that they went in there for prints the day after the girl’s body was found. They never went back after it became a strong possibility that the abductor had come into the house earlier in the day when the garage was left open and hid somewhere until everybody was asleep.”

“So why the bed?” Pratt asked.

“The crime scene photos showed the ruffle at the foot of the bed had been pushed in. Like somebody had crawled underneath. They missed it because they weren’t looking for it.”

“Good work, Harry,” Pratt said. “If Raj gets a hit we change directions and move with it. All right, let’s get back to our reports. You can check with your partner on what you’ve missed so far.”

Pratt then turned to Robinson and Nord at the other end of the long table and said, “What did you come up with on the call for the tow truck?”

“Not a lot that helps,” Nord said. “Because the call was made after we had switched our monitoring to the line at the Burkhart property, we don’t have an audio recording of it. But we do have the pen registers and they show that the call came directly to Tampa Towing before being bounced over to the Triple A answering service. The call came from a pay phone outside the Seven-Eleven on Tampa by the freeway entrance. He probably made the call, then drove down the entrance and waited.”

“Prints on the phone?” Pratt asked.

“We asked Raj to take a look after he cleared the scene,” Robinson said. “The phone had been wiped.”

“Figures,” Pratt said. “You talked to Triple A?”

“Yes. No help other than to say the caller was a male.”

He turned to Bosch.

“You have anything to add that your partner didn’t already tell us?”

“Probably just more of the same. Burkhart looks like he is clear on last night and he looks like he’s clear on Verloren as well. Both nights he happened to be under LAPD surveillance.”

Rider gave him her knotted-brow look. He had even more information she didn’t know. He looked away.

“Well, that’s just perfect,” Pratt said. “So who, what and where does that leave us, people?”

“Well, basically, our newspaper plant backfired,” Rider said. “It may have worked in terms of getting Mackey to want to talk about Verloren, but he never got the chance. Somebody else saw the story.”

“That somebody being the actual killer,” Pratt said.

“Exactly,” Rider said. “The person Mackey helped and/or gave the gun to seventeen years ago. That person also saw the story and knew it wasn’t his blood on the gun, so that meant it had to be Mackey’s. He knew Mackey was the link to him, so Mackey had to go.”

“So how did he set it up?” Pratt asked.

“He was either smart enough to figure the story was a plant and we were watching Mackey, or he just figured the best way to get to Mackey was the way he did it. Get him out there alone. Like I said, he was smart. He picked a time and place that would result in Mackey being alone and vulnerable. On that entrance ramp you are up above the freeway. Even with the tow truck’s lights on, nobody would see up there.”

“It was also a good spot in case Mackey had a tail,” Nord added. “The killer knew a tail car would have to just keep moving by, and then he’d have Mackey alone.”

“Aren’t we giving this guy a little too much credit?” Pratt asked. “How would he know the cops were onto this guy? Just from a newspaper article? Come on.”

Neither Bosch nor Rider answered and everyone else silently digested the unspoken suggestion that the killer had a connection to the department or, more specifically, the investigation.

“All right, what’s next?” Pratt said. “I think the containment on this is maybe another twenty-four hours tops. After that it’s going to be in the papers and upstairs on six, and there’s going to be hair on the walls if we don’t wrap it up first. What do we do?”

“We’ll take the pen registers,” Bosch said, speaking for himself and Rider. “And go from there.”

Bosch had been thinking about the note to Mackey he had seen on the desk in the service station the day before. A call to verify employment from Visa. As Rider had pointed out when she first heard about it, Mackey wasn’t into leaving trails like credit cards. It was something that didn’t fit and therefore he wanted to go after it.

“We have all of the printouts right here,” Robinson said. “The line that was busiest was the one into the station. All kinds of business calls.”

“Okay, Harry, Kiz, you want the registers?” Pratt asked.

Rider looked at Bosch and then at Pratt.

“If that’s what Harry wants. He seems to be on a roll today.”

As if on cue Bosch’s phone began to chirp. He looked at the screen. It was Raj Patel.

“We’ll see what kind of a roll right now,” he said as he opened the phone.

Patel said he had good and bad news.

“The good news is we still had the exemplar skid from the house in records here. The latents we recovered this morning did not match any of them. You found somebody new, Harry. It could be your killer.”

What this meant was that fingerprint examples from the members of the Verloren family and others who had appropriate access to the house were still on file in the SID print lab. None of those examples matched the fingerprints and palm print recovered that morning from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. Of course fingerprints could not be dated, and it was possible that the prints discovered that morning had been left by whoever had installed the bed. But it seemed unlikely. The prints were taken off the underside of the wooden slat. Whoever had left them had most likely been under the bed.