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