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.”