a city of invention and reinvention. A place where the dream seemed as easy to reach as the sign they put up on the hill, but a place where the reality was always something different. The road to that sign on the hill had a locked gate across it.
It was a city full of haves and have-nots, movie stars and extras, drivers and the driven, predators and prey. The fat and the hungry and little room in between. A city that despite all of that still had them lining up and waiting every day behind the bomb barriers to get in and stay in.
Bosch pulled the fold of money from his pocket and dropped a five in the old musician’s basket. He and Rider then cut through the old Cucamonga Winery, its cask rooms converted into galleries and artists’ stalls, and out to Alameda. They crossed the street to the train station, its clock tower rising in front of them. In the front walkway they passed a sundial with an inscription cut into its granite pedestal.
Vision to See
Faith to Believe
Courage to Do
Union Station was designed to mirror the city it served and the way in which it was supposed to work. It was a melting pot of architectural styles-Spanish Colonial, Mission, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, Southwestern and Moorish design flourishes among them. But unlike the rest of the city, where the pot more often than not boiled over, the styles at the train station blended smoothly into something unique, something beautiful. Bosch loved it for that.
Through the glass doors they came into the cavernous entry hall, and an archway three stories tall led to the immense waiting room beyond. As Bosch took it in he remembered that he used to walk over here not only for cigarettes, but also to renew himself a little bit. Going to Union Station was like paying a visit to church, a cathedral where the graceful lines of design and function and civic pride all intersected. In the central waiting room the voices of travelers rose into its high empty spaces and were transformed into a choir of languid whispers.
“I love this place,” Rider said. “Did you ever see the movie Blade Runner?”
Bosch nodded. He had seen it.
“This was the police station, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever see True Confessions?” he asked.
“No, was it good?”
“Yeah, you should see it. Another take on the Black Dahlia and LAPD conspiracy.”
She groaned.
“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s what I need right now.”
They got cups of coffee at Union Bagel and then walked into the waiting room, where rows of brown leather seats were lined up like luxurious pews. Bosch looked up as he was always drawn to do. Six huge chandeliers hung forty feet above them in two rows. Rider looked up, too.
Bosch then pointed to two side-by-side seats open near the newsstand. They sat down on the soft padded leather and put their cups on the wide wooden armrests.
“You ready to talk about this now?” Rider asked.
“If you are,” he answered. “What was in the file you saw in Special Archives? What was so sinister?”
“For one thing, Mackey is in there.”
“As a suspect in Verloren?”
“No, the file has nothing to do with Verloren. Verloren was not even a blip on the screen as far as the file goes. It’s all about an investigation that went down and was buttoned up before Rebecca Verloren was even pregnant, let alone snatched from her bed in the night.”
“All right, then what’s it got to do with us?”
“Maybe nothing and maybe everything. You know the guy Mackey lives with, William Burkhart?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s in there, too. Only back then he was better known as Billy Blitzkrieg. That was his moniker in this gang, the Eights.”
“Okay.”
“In March of ’eighty-eight Billy Blitzkrieg went away for a year for vandalizing a synagogue in North Hollywood. Property damage, graffiti, defecation, the whole thing.”
“The hate crime. He was the only one they bagged?”
She nodded.
“They got a latent off a spray can they found in a gutter trap about a block from the synagogue. So he went down for it. Took a plea or they would have made an example of him and he knew it.”
Bosch nodded. He didn’t want to say anything that would interrupt her flow.
“In the reports and in the press Burkhart-or Blitzkrieg or whatever you want to call him-was portrayed as the leader of the Eights. They said he called for nineteen eighty-eight to be a year of racial and ethnic upheaval to honor their