The Closers Read Online Free PDF Page A

the attendant photographs. Unsurprisingly, he found the cause of death listed as a gunshot wound to the chest. The estimated time of death was between midnight and 2 a.m. on July 6. The summary noted that no witness reported hearing the shot, so the time of death estimate was based solely on measuring loss of body temperature.
    The surprises were in the other findings. Rebecca Verloren had long, thick hair. At the right side of the base of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair, the medical examiner found a small circular burn mark that was about the size of a button off an oxford shirt. Two inches from this mark was another burn mark, much smaller than the first. High white cell counts in the blood surrounding these wounds indicated that both had been sustained close to but not at the time of death.
    The report concluded that the burns were caused by a stun gun, a handheld device that emits a powerful electric charge and renders its victims unconscious or incapacitated for several minutes or longer, depending on the charge. Normally, a charge from a stun gun would leave two small and almost unnoticeable marks on the skin indicating the location of the twin contacts. But if the contact points of the device were held unevenly against the skin, the electric charge would arc and often burn the skin in the manner seen on Becky Verloren’s neck.
    The autopsy summary also noted that an examination of the victim’s bare feet found no soil deposits or cuts or bruises, which would be evident had the girl walked barefoot up the mountainside in the dark.
    Bosch drummed his pen on the report and thought about this. He knew this was a mistake made by Green and Garcia. The victim’s feet should have been examined at the scene and they should have made the jump right then to the idea that the suicide was a setup. Instead they missed it and they lost two days waiting for the autopsy on a weekend. Those days plus the two days lost when patrol wrote the parents’ call off as a runaway case added up to a bad number in a murder investigation. There was no doubt that the case was slow out of the blocks. Bosch was beginning to see how badly the department had let Rebecca Verloren down.
    The autopsy report also contained the results of a gunshot residue test conducted on the victim’s hands. While GSR was found on Becky Verloren’s right hand, there was no indication of it on her left. Even though Verloren was right-handed Bosch knew that the GSR test was an indicator that she had not actually fired the gun that killed her. Experience-no matter how limited-and common sense would have told the investigators that the girl would have needed to use both hands to properly hold the heavy gun pointed against her own chest and to pull the trigger. The result would have been GSR on both her hands.
    There was one more notable point in the autopsy summary. The examination of the body determined that the victim had been sexually active, and scarring on the walls of the uterus was indicative of a recent gynecological dilation and curettage procedure to eliminate a pregnancy. The deputy coroner who conducted the autopsy estimated that this had occurred four to six weeks prior to her death.
    Bosch read the first Investigator’s Summary report, which was written and added to the book after the autopsy. Green and Garcia had now classified the death as a murder and established the theory that someone had entered the girl’s bedroom while she was sleeping, incapacitated her with a stun gun and then carried her from the room and the house. She was carried up the mountainside to the location by the fallen oak tree, where the murder was committed and clumsily disguised as a suicide in what was possibly a spur-of-the-moment decision by her killer. The report was filed Monday, July 11-five days after Rebecca Verloren had been left dead on the hillside.
    Bosch moved on to the firearm analysis report. Though the autopsy had produced more than convincing evidence of