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.Find the person who did this.GARCIA: Thank you, sir.We will.[End of interview, 2:40 p.m.]Bosch read the transcript a second time, this time writing down notes on his pad as he went.He then moved on to three more formal interview transcripts.These were conducted with Becky Verloren’s three closest friends, Tara Wood, Bailey Koster and Grace Tanaka.But none of the girls-girls at the time-said they had knowledge of Becky’s pregnancy or the secret relationship that produced it.All three said they did not see her the week after school got out because she was not answering her phone and when they called the house’s main number Muriel Verloren told them her daughter was sick.Tara Wood, who was splitting a work schedule as a hostess at the Island House Grill with Becky, said that her friend was moody and incommunicative in the weeks prior to her murder, but the reason for this was unknown because she rebuffed Wood’s efforts to find out what was wrong.The last entry in the murder book was the media file.It was where Garcia and Green kept the newspaper stories that accumulated in the early stages of the case.The crime played bigger in the Daily News than in the Times.This was understandable because the News circulated primarily in the San Fernando Valley and the Times usually treated the Valley as an unwanted stepchild, relegating the news emanating from its environs to the inside pages.There was no coverage of Becky Verloren’s initial disappearance.The newspapers had obviously viewed it in the same way as the police had.But once the body was found there were several stories on the investigation, the funeral and the impact the young girl’s death had at her school.There was even a mood piece set at the Island House Grill.This story had been in the Times and had apparently been a stab at making the case meaningful to the paper’s Westside circulation base.A restaurant in Malibu was something the Westsiders could relate to.Both newspapers linked the murder weapon to a burglary that occurred a month before the killing but neither had the anti-Semitic angle.Neither reported on the blood evidence recovered from the weapon either.Bosch guessed that the blood and tissue recovery was the investigators’ ace in the hole, the one piece of evidence held close to the vest to give them the advantage if a prime suspect was ever identified.Finally Bosch noticed that there were no media interviews with the grieving parents.The Verlorens apparently chose not to hold their loss out for public consumption.Bosch liked that about them.It seemed to him that increasingly the media forced the victims of tragedy to grieve in public, in front of cameras and in newspaper stories.Parents of murdered children became talking heads who appeared on the tube as experts the next time there was another child murdered and another set of parents grieving.It all didn’t sit well with Bosch.It seemed to him that the best way to honor the dead was to keep them close to the heart, not to share them with the world across the electronic spectrum.At the back of the murder book there was a pocket containing a manila envelope with the Times’s eagle insignia and address in the corner.Bosch pulled it out and opened it and found a series of 8 x 10 color photos taken at Rebecca Verloren’s funeral one week after her murder.Apparently there had been a deal cut, the photos traded for access.Bosch remembered making such deals in the past when he was unable because of scheduling or budget to get a police photographer out to a funeral.He would promise the reporter working the story that he or she would be in line for an exclusive if the newspaper photographer wouldn’t mind running off a complete set of crowd shots of the people attending the service.You never knew when the killer might show up to get a rise out of the anguish and grief he had caused.Reporters always went for the deal.Los Angeles was one of the most competitive media markets in the world and reporters lived and died by the access they had.Bosch studied the photos but was handicapped in looking for Roland Mackey because he didn’t know what he looked like in 1988
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