Harry Bosch #11 - The Closers by Michael Connelly

Author:Michael Connelly [Connelly, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-05T21:50:34+00:00

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.

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