The Closers

pain in his eyes. He nodded. He immediately knew that he wanted to work for this man, a rarity in his experience in the department.
    “Just don’t forget that closure isn’t the same as being a closer,” Pratt added.
    “Got it,” Bosch said.
    “Now, I know you both have long experience working homicides. What you are going to find different here is your relationship with the cases.”
    “Relationship?” Bosch asked.
    “Yes, relationship. What I mean is that working fresh kills is a completely different animal. You have the body, you have the autopsy, you carry the news to the family. Here you are dealing with victims long dead. There are no autopsies, no physical crime scenes. You deal with the murder books-if you can find them-and the records. When you go to the family-and believe me you don’t go until you are good and ready-you find people who have already suffered the shock and found or not found ways to get past it. It wears on you. I hope you are prepared for that.”
    “Thanks for the warning,” Bosch said.
    “With fresh kills it is clinical because things move fast. With old cases it is emotional. You are going to see the toll of violence over time. Be prepared for it.”
    Pratt pulled a thick blue binder from the side of his desk to the center of his calendar blotter. He started to push it across to them then stopped.
    “Another thing to be prepared for is the department. Count on files being incomplete or even missing. Count on physical evidence being destroyed or disappeared. Count on starting from scratch with some of these. This unit was put together two years ago. We spent the first eight months just going through the case logs and pulling out open-unsolveds. We fed what we could into the forensics pipelines, but even when we’ve gotten a hit we have been handicapped by the lack of case integrity. It has been abysmal. It has been frustrating. Even though there is no statute of limitations on murder we are finding that evidence and even files were routinely disposed of during at least one administration.
    “What I am saying is that you are going to find that your biggest obstacle on some of these cases may very well be the department itself.”
    “Somebody said we have a cold hit that came out of one of our time blocks,” Bosch said.
    He’d heard enough. He just wanted to get moving on something.
    “Yes, you do,” Pratt said. “We’ll get to that in a second. Let me just finish up with my little speech. After all, I don’t get to make it that often. In a nutshell, what we try to do here is apply new technology and techniques to old cases. The technology is essentially threefold. You have DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics. In all three areas the advancements in comparative analysis have been phenomenal in the last ten years. The problem with this department is that it never took any of these advances and looked backward at old cases. Consequently, we have an estimated two thousand cases in which there is DNA evidence that has never been typed and compared. Since nineteen sixty we have four thousand cases with fingerprints that have never been run through a computer. Ours, the FBI’s, DOJ’s, anybody’s computer. It’s almost laughable but it’s too fucking sad to laugh about. Same with ballistics. We are finding the evidence is still there in most of these cases but it has been ignored.”
    Bosch shook his head, already feeling the frustration of all the families of the victims, the cases swept away by time, indifference and incompetence.
    “You will also find that techniques are different. Today’s homicide copper is just plain better than one from, say, nineteen sixty or seventy. Even nineteen eighty. So even before you get to the physical evidence and you review these cases you are going to see things that seem obvious to you now, but that weren’t obvious to anyone back at the time of the kill.”
    Pratt nodded. His speech was finished.
    “Now, the cold hit,” he said, pushing the faded blue murder book across the desk. “Run with that baby. It’s all yours. Close it down and put somebody in jail.”

3
    AFTER LEAVING PRATT’S office they decided that Bosch would go get the next round of coffee while Rider started in on the murder book. They knew from prior experience that she was the faster reader and it didn’t make sense to split the book up. They both needed to read it front to back, to have the investigation presented to them in the linear fashion in which