Echo Park

1

THE CALL CAME IN while Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, were sitting at their desks in the Open-Unsolved Unit, finishing the paperwork on the Matarese filing. The day before, they had spent six hours in a room with Victor Matarese discussing the 1996 murder of a prostitute named Charisse Witherspoon. DNA that had been extracted from semen found in the victim’s throat and stored for ten years had been matched to Matarese. It was a cold hit. His DNA profile had been banked by the DOJ in 2002 after a forcible rape conviction. It had taken another four years before Bosch and Rider came along and reopened the Witherspoon case, pulled the DNA and sent it to the state lab on a blind run.

It was a case initially made in the lab. But because Charisse Witherspoon had been an active prostitute the DNA match was not an automatic slam dunk. The DNA could have come from someone who was with her before her killer turned up and hit her repeatedly on the head with a two-by-four.

So the case didn’t come down to the science. It came down to the room and what they could get from Matarese. At 8 a.m. they woke him up at the halfway house where he had been placed upon his parole in the rape case and took him to Parker Center. The first five hours in the interview room were grueling. In the sixth he finally broke and gave it all up, admitting to killing Witherspoon and throwing in three more, all prostitutes he had murdered in South Florida before coming to L.A.

When Bosch heard his name called out for line one, he thought it was going to be Miami calling him back. It wasn’t.

“Bosch,” he said after grabbing the phone.

“Freddy Olivas. Northeast Division Homicide. I’m over in Archives looking for a file and they say you’ve already got it signed out.”

Bosch was silent a moment while his mind dropped out of the Matarese case. Bosch didn’t know Olivas but the name sounded familiar. He just couldn’t place it. As far as signed-out files went, it was his job to review old cases and look for ways to use forensic advances to solve them. At any given time he and Rider could have as many as twenty-five files from Archives.

“I’ve pulled a lot of files from Archives,” Bosch said. “Which one are we talking about?”

“Gesto. Marie Gesto. It’s a ’ninety-three case.”

Bosch didn’t respond right away. He felt his insides tighten. They always did when he thought about Gesto, even thirteen years later. In his mind, he always came up with the image of those clothes folded so neatly on the front seat of her car.

“Yeah, I’ve got the file. What’s happening?”

He noticed Rider look up from her work as she registered the change in his voice. Their desks were in an alcove and pushed up against one another, so Bosch and Rider faced each other while they worked.

“It’s kind of a delicate matter,” Olivas said. “Eyes only. Relates to an ongoing case I’ve got and the prosecutor just wants to review the file. Could I hop on by there and grab it from you?”

“Do you have a suspect, Olivas?”

Olivas didn’t answer at first and Bosch jumped in with another question.

“Who’s the prosecutor?”

Again no answer. Bosch decided not to give in.

“Look, the case is active, Olivas. I’m working it and have a suspect. If you want to talk to me, then we’ll talk. If you’ve got something working, then I am part of it. Otherwise, I’m busy and you can have a nice day. Okay?”

Bosch was about to hang up when Olivas finally spoke. The friendly tone was gone from his voice.

“Tell you what, let me make a phone call, Hotshot. I’ll call you right back.”

He hung up without a good-bye. Bosch looked at Rider.

“Marie Gesto,” he said. “The DA wants the file.”

“That’s your own case. Who was calling?”

“A guy from Northeast. Freddy Olivas. Know him?”

Rider nodded.

“I don’t know him but I’ve heard of him. He’s lead on the Raynard Waits case. You know the one.”

Now Bosch placed the name. The Waits case was high profile. Olivas probably viewed it as his ticket to the show. The LAPD was broken into nineteen geographic divisions, each with a police station and its own detective bureau. Divisional Homicide units worked the less complicated cases and the positions were viewed as stepping-stones to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division squads working out of the police headquarters at Parker Center. That was the show. And one of those squads was the Open-Unsolved Unit. Bosch knew that if Olivas’s interest in the Gesto file was even remotely tied to the Waits case, then he would jealously guard his position from RHD encroachment.

“He didn’t say what he has going?” Rider asked.

“Not yet. But it must be something. He wouldn’t even tell me which prosecutor he’s working with.”

“Ricochet.”

“What?”

She said it slower.

“Rick O’Shea. He’s on the Waits case. I doubt Olivas has anything else going. They just finished the prelim on that and are heading to trial.”

Bosch didn’t say anything as he considered the possibilities. Richard “Ricochet” O’Shea ran the Special Prosecutions Section of the DA’s office. He was a hotshot and he was in the process of getting hotter. Following the announcement in the spring that the sitting district attorney had decided against seeking reelection, O’Shea was one of a handful of prosecutors and outside attorneys who filed as candidates for the job. He had come through the primary with the most votes but not quite a majority. The runoff was shaping up as a tighter race but O’Shea still held the inside track. He had the backing of the outgoing DA, knew the office inside and out, and had an enviable track record as a prosecutor who won big cases-a seemingly rare attribute in the DA’s office in the last decade. His opponent was named Gabriel Williams. He was an outsider who had credentials as a former prosecutor but he had spent the last two decades in private practice, primarily focusing on civil rights cases. He was black, while O’Shea was white. He was running on the promise of watchdogging and reforming the county’s law enforcement practices. While members of the O’Shea camp did their very best to ridicule Williams’s platform and qualifications for the position of top prosecutor, it was clear that his outsider stance and platform of reform were taking hold in the polls. The gap was closing.

Bosch knew what was happening in the Williams-O’Shea campaigns because this year he had been following local elections with an interest he had never exhibited before. In a hotly contested race for a city council seat, he was backing a candidate named Martin Maizel. Maizel was a three-term incumbent who represented a west-side district far from where Bosch lived. He was generally viewed as a consummate politician who made backroom promises and was beholden to big-money interests to the detriment of his own district. Nevertheless, Bosch had contributed generously to his campaign and hoped to see his reelection. His opponent was a former deputy police chief named Irvin R. Irving, and Bosch would do whatever was within his power to see Irving defeated. Like Gabriel Williams, Irving was promising reform and the target of his campaign speeches was always the LAPD. Bosch had clashed numerous times with Irving while he served in the department. He didn’t want to see the man sitting on the city council.

The election stories and wrap-ups that ran almost daily in the Times had kept Bosch up to date on other contests as well as the Maizel-Irving contest. He knew all about the fight O’Shea was involved in. The prosecutor was in the process of bolstering his candidacy with high-profile advertisements and prosecutions designed to show the value of his experience. A month earlier he had parlayed the preliminary hearing in the Raynard Waits case into daily headlines and top-of-the-broadcast reports. The accused double murderer had been pulled over in Echo Park on a late-night traffic stop. Officers spied trash bags on the floor of the man’s van with blood leaking from them. A subsequent search found body parts from two women in the bags. If ever there was a safe, slam-bang case for a prosecutor-candidate to use to grab media attention, the Echo Park Bagman case appeared to be it.

The catch was that the headlines were now on hold. Waits was bound over for trial at the end of the preliminary hearing and, since it was a death penalty case, that trial and the attendant renewal of headlines were still months off and well after the election. O’Shea needed something new to grab headlines and keep momentum going. Now Bosch had to wonder what the candidate was up to with the Gesto case.

“Do you think Gesto could be related to Waits?” Rider asked.

“That name never came up in ’ninety-three,” Bosch said. “Neither did Echo Park.”

The phone rang and he quickly picked it up.

“Open-Unsolved. This is Detective Bosch. How can I help you?”

“Olivas. Bring the file over to the sixteenth floor at eleven o’clock. You’ll meet with Richard O’Shea. You’re in, Hotshot.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Wait a minute. What’s this we shit? I said you, you be there with the file.”

“I have a partner, Olivas. I’ll be with her.”

Bosch hung up without a good-bye. He looked across at Rider.

“We’re in at eleven.”

“What about Matarese?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

He thought about things for a few moments, then got up and went to the locked filing cabinet behind his desk. He pulled the Gesto file and brought it back to his spot. Since returning to the job from retirement the year before, he had checked the file out of Archives three different times. Each time, he read through it, made some calls and visits and talked to a few of the individuals who had come up in the investigation thirteen years before. Rider knew about the case and what it meant to him. She gave him the space to work it when they had nothing else pressing.

But nothing came of the effort. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no lead on Gesto’s whereabouts-though to him there still was no doubt that she was dead-and no solid lead to her abductor. Bosch had leaned repeatedly on the one man who came closest to being a suspect and got nowhere. He was able to trace Marie Gesto from her apartment to the supermarket but no further. He had her car in the garage at the High Tower Apartments but he couldn’t get to the person who had parked it there.

Bosch had plenty of unsolved cases in his history. You can’t clear them all and any Homicide man would admit it. But the Gesto case was one that stuck with him. Each time he would work the case for a week or so, hit the wall and then return the file to Archives, thinking he had done all that could be done. But the absolution only lasted a few months and then there he was at the counter filling out the file request form again. He would not give up.

“Bosch,” one of the other detectives called out. “Miami on two.”

Bosch hadn’t even heard the phone ring in the squad room.

“I’ll take it,” Rider said. “Your head’s somewhere else.”

She picked up the phone and once more Bosch opened the Gesto file.

2

BOSCH AND RIDER WERE ten minutes late because of the backup of people waiting for elevators. He hated coming to the Criminal Courts Building because of the elevators. The wait and the jostling for position just to get on one of them put a layer of anxiety on him that he could live without.

In reception in the DA’s office on the sixteenth floor they were told to wait for an escort back to O’Shea’s office. After a couple minutes a man stepped through the doorway and pointed to the briefcase Bosch was holding.

“You got it?” he asked.

Bosch didn’t recognize him. He was a dark-complected Latino in a gray suit.

“Olivas?”

“Yeah. You brought the file?”

“I brought the file.”

“Then come on back, Hotshot.”

Olivas headed back toward the door he had come through. Rider made a move to follow but Bosch put his hand on her arm. When Olivas looked back and saw they were not following him, he stopped.

“You coming or not?”

Bosch took a step toward him.

“Olivas, let’s get something clear before we go anywhere. You call me ‘Hotshot’ again and I’m going to shove the file up your ass without taking it out of my briefcase.”

Olivas raised his hands in surrender.

“Whatever you say.”

He held the door and they followed him into the internal hallway. They went down a long corridor and took two rights before coming to O’Shea’s office. It was a large space, particularly by district attorney’s office standards. Most of the time prosecutors shared offices, two or four to a room, and held their meetings in strictly scheduled interview rooms at the end of each hallway. But O’Shea’s office was double-sized with room for a piano-crate desk and a separate seating area. Being the head of Special Prosecutions obviously had its perks. Being the heir apparent to the top job did as well.

O’Shea welcomed them from behind his desk, standing up to shake hands. He was about forty and handsome with jet-black hair. He was short, as Bosch already knew, even though he had never met him before. He had noticed while catching some of the TV coverage of the Waits prelim that most of the reporters who gathered around O’Shea in the hallway outside the courtroom were taller than the man they pointed their microphones at. Personally, Bosch liked short prosecutors. They were always trying to make up for something and usually it was the defendant who ended up paying the price.

Everybody took seats, O’Shea behind his desk, Bosch and Rider in chairs facing him, and Olivas to the right side of the desk in a chair positioned in front of a stack of RICK O’SHEA ALL THE WAY posters leaning against the wall.

“Thank you for coming in, Detectives,” O’Shea said. “Let’s start by clearing the air a little bit. Freddy tells me you two got off to a rough start.”

He was looking at Bosch as he spoke.

“I don’t have any problem with Freddy,” Bosch said. “I don’t even know Freddy enough to call him Freddy.”

“I should tell you that any reluctance on his part to fill you in on what we have here came directly from me because of the sensitive nature of what we are doing. So if you are angry, be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry,” Bosch said. “I’m happy. Ask my partner-this is me when I’m happy.”

Rider nodded.

“He’s happy,” she said. “Definitely happy.”

“Okay, then,” O’Shea said. “Everybody’s happy. So let’s get down to business.”

O’Shea reached over and put his hand above a thick accordion file placed on the right side of his desk. It was open and Bosch saw that it contained several individual files with blue tabs on them. Bosch was too far away to read them-especially without putting on the glasses he had recently begun carrying with him.

“Are you familiar with the Raynard Waits prosecution?” O’Shea asked.

Bosch and Rider nodded.

“It would have been kind of hard to miss,” Bosch said.

O’Shea nodded and offered a slight smile.

“Yes, we have pushed it out in front of the cameras. The guy’s a butcher. A very evil man. We’ve said from the start that we are going for the death penalty on it.”

“From what I’ve heard and seen, he’s a poster boy for it,” Rider said encouragingly.

O’Shea nodded somberly.

“That’s one reason why you are here. Before I explain what we have going, let me ask you to tell me about your investigation of the Marie Gesto case. Freddy said you’ve had the file out of Archives three times in the past year. Is there something active?”

Bosch cleared his throat after deciding to give first and then receive.

“You could say I’ve had the case for thirteen years. I caught it back in ’ninety-three, when she went missing.”

“But nothing ever came of it?”

Bosch shook his head.

“We had no body. All we ever found was her car and that was not enough. We never made anybody for it.”

“Not even a suspect?”

“We looked at a lot of people, one in particular. But we couldn’t make the connections and so nobody rose to the level of active suspect. Then I retired in ’oh-two and it went into Archives. A couple years go by and things don’t work out the way I thought they would in retirement and I come back on the job. That was last year.”

Bosch didn’t think it was necessary to tell O’Shea that he had copied the Gesto file and taken it with him, along with several other open cases, when he left his badge behind and walked out the door in 2002. Copying the files had been an infraction of department regs, and the fewer people who knew that the better.

“In the last year I pulled the Gesto file every time I had a little time to work it,” he continued. “But there’s no DNA, no latents. There’s only legwork. I’ve talked to all the principals again-everybody I could find. There’s still the one guy out there who I always felt could be the guy, but I never could make anything out of it. I talked to him twice this year, leaned pretty hard.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“Who is it?”

“His name’s Anthony Garland. He comes from Hancock Park money. You ever heard of Thomas Rex Garland, the oilman?”

O’Shea nodded.

“Well, T. Rex, as he is known, is Anthony’s father.”

“What’s Anthony’s connection to Gesto?”

“‘Connection’ might be too strong a word. Marie Gesto’s car was found in a single garage attached to a Hollywood apartment building. The apartment it corresponded to was empty. Our sense of things at the time was that it wasn’t just coincidence that the car ended up in there. We thought whoever hid the car there knew the apartment was vacant and that he’d get a decent ride out of hiding it there.”

“Okay. Anthony Garland knew about the garage or he knew Marie?”

“He knew about the garage. His former girlfriend had lived in the apartment. She had broken up with him and then moved back to Texas. So he knew the apartment and the garage were empty.”

“That’s pretty thin. That’s all you had?”

“Pretty much. We thought it was thin, too, but then we pulled the ex-girlfriend’s DMV mug and it turned out she and Marie looked a lot alike. We started to think that maybe Marie had been some sort of replacement victim. He couldn’t get to his ex-girlfriend because she had left, so he got to Marie instead.”

“Did you go to Texas?”

“Twice. We talked to the ex and she told us that the main reason she split with Anthony was because of his temper.”

“Was he violent with her?”

“She said no. She said she left before it got to that point.”

O’Shea leaned forward.

“So, did Anthony Garland know Marie?” he asked.

“We don’t know. We are not sure he did. Until his father brought his lawyer into it and he stopped talking to us, he denied ever knowing her.”

“When was this?-the lawyer, I mean.”

“Back then, and now. I came at him again a couple times this year. I pressed him and he lawyered up again. Different lawyers this time. They were able to get a restraining order reissued against me. They convinced a judge to order me to stay away from Anthony unless he had a lawyer with him. My guess is that they convinced the judge with money. It’s the way T. Rex Garland gets things done.”

O’Shea leaned back, nodding thoughtfully.

“Does this Anthony Garland have any kind of criminal record before or after Gesto?”

“No, not a criminal record. He hasn’t been a very productive member of society-he lives off his old man’s handouts, as near as I can tell. He runs security for his father and his various enterprises. But there’s never been anything criminal that I could find.”

“Wouldn’t it stand to reason that someone who had kidnapped and killed a young woman would have other criminal activity on his record? These things usually aren’t aberrations, are they?”

“If you went with the percentages, yeah. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Plus, there’s the old man’s money. Money smooths a lot of things over, makes a lot of things go away.”

O’Shea nodded again like he was learning about criminals and crime for the first time. It was a bad act.

“What was your next move going to be?” he asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I didn’t have one. I sent the file back to Archives and thought that was it. Then a couple weeks ago I went down and pulled it again. I don’t know what I was going to do. Maybe talk to some of Garland’s more recent friends, see if he ever mentioned Marie Gesto or anything about her. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to give up.”

O’Shea cleared his throat and Bosch knew he would now get down to the reason they were there.

“Did the name Ray or Raynard Waits ever come up in all these years of investigating Gesto’s disappearance?”

Bosch looked at him for a moment, his stomach twisting.

“No, it didn’t. Should it have come up?”

O’Shea pulled one of the folders out of the accordion file and opened it on the desk. He lifted a document that looked like a letter off the top.

“As I said, we’ve made it public that we’re going for the death penalty on Waits,” he said. “After the prelim I think he realized the writing was on the wall. He’s got an appeal on the probable cause for the traffic stop. But it will go nowhere and he and his lawyer know it. An insanity defense is a nonstarter as well. This guy’s as calculating and organized as any killer I’ve ever prosecuted. So they responded last week with this. Before I show it to you I have to know that you understand that this is a letter from an attorney. It is a proffer. No matter what happens, whether we move forward with this or not, the information contained in this letter is off the record. If we choose to ignore this offer, no investigation can come of the information in this letter. Do you understand that?”

Rider nodded. Bosch didn’t.

“Detective Bosch?” O’Shea prompted.

“Maybe I shouldn’t see it, then,” Bosch said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

“You were the one who wouldn’t give Freddy the file. If the case means that much to you, then I think you should be here.”

Bosch finally nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

O’Shea slid the paper across the desk and Bosch and Rider leaned forward to read it together. Bosch first unfolded his glasses and put them on.

Sept. 12, 2006

Richard O’Shea, Assistant District Attorney

Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office

Office 16-11

210 West Temple Street

Los Angeles, CA 90012-3210

Re: California v. Raynard Waits

Dear Mr. O’Shea:

This letter is intended to open discussions regarding a disposition in the above-referenced case. All statements made herein and hereafter in connection with these discussions are made with the understanding that they are inadmissible under California Evidence Code §1153, California Penal Code §1192.4 and People v. Tanner, 45 Cal. App.3d 345, 350, 119 Cal. Rptr. 407 (1975).

I suggest to you that Mr. Waits would be willing, on terms and conditions outlined below, to share with you and investigators of your choice information regarding nine homicides, excluding the two in the above-referenced case, and to plead guilty to the charges in the above-referenced case, in exchange for the People’s agreement not to seek the death penalty on the instant homicide charges or to file charges in regard to the homicides about which he would provide information.

Furthermore, in return for the cooperation and information Mr. Waits would provide, you must agree that any and all statements by Mr. Waits and any information derived therefrom will not be used against him in any criminal case; no information provided pursuant to this agreement may be divulged to any other state or federal law enforcement agencies unless and until those agencies, through their representatives, agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this agreement; no statements made or other information provided by Mr. Waits during any “off-the-record” proffer or discussion may be used against him in the prosecution’s case-in-chief; nor may you make derivative use of or pursue any investigative leads suggested by any statements made or information provided by the defendant.

In the event the above-referenced case goes to trial, if Mr. Waits offers testimony materially different from any statements made or other information provided during any proffers or discussion, then you may, of course, impeach him concerning such prior inconsistent statements or information.

I suggest that the families of eight young women and one male victim will attain some form of closure with the knowledge of what transpired in regard to their loved ones and, in eight of these instances, be able to conduct proper religious ceremonies and burials after Mr. Waits leads your investigators to the places where these victims now rest. Additionally, these families will find, perhaps, some comfort in knowing that Mr. Waits is serving a prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Mr. Waits offers to provide information in regard to nine known and unknown homicides between 1992 and 2003. As an initial offer of credibility and good faith, he suggests that investigators review the investigation into the death of Daniel Fitzpatrick, 63, who was burned to death in his Hollywood Boulevard pawnshop on April 30, 1992. Investigative files will reveal that Mr. Fitzpatrick was armed and standing behind the roll-down security fence at the front of his store when he was set afire by an assailant using lighter fluid and a butane lighter. The can of EasyLight lighter fluid was left behind, standing upright in front of the security fence. This information was never made public.

Further, Mr. Waits suggests that police investigative files in regard to the September 1993 disappearance of Marie Gesto be reviewed as an additional showing of his credibility and good faith. The records will reveal that while the whereabouts of Ms. Gesto were never determined, her car was located by police in a garage at a Hollywood apartment complex known as the High Tower. The car contained Ms. Gesto’s clothing and equestrian equipment plus a grocery bag containing a one-pound package of carrots. Ms. Gesto intended to use the carrots to feed the horses she groomed in exchange for riding time at the Sunset Ranch stables in Beachwood Canyon. Again, this information was never made public.

I would suggest that if an agreement of disposition could be achieved, such an agreement would fall within the exceptions to California’s prohibition against plea bargaining serious felonies inasmuch as, absent Mr. Waits’s cooperation, there are insufficient evidence and material witnesses to prove the People’s case in regard to these nine homicides. Moreover, the People’s forbearance regarding the death penalty is entirely discretionary and does not represent a substantial change in sentence. (California Penal Code §1192.7a.)

Please contact me at your earliest convenience if the foregoing is acceptable.

Sincerely,

Maurice Swann, PA

101 Broadway

Suite 2

Los Angeles, CA 90013

Bosch realized he had read almost the entire letter without taking a breath. He now gulped down some air but it did not displace the cold tightness that was forming in his chest.

“You’re not going to agree to this, are you?” he asked.

O’Shea held his gaze for a moment before responding.

“As a matter of fact, I am negotiating with Swann right now. That was the initial proffer. I’ve improved the State’s take substantially since that arrived.”

“In what way?”

“He’ll have to plead to all the cases. We’ll get eleven murder convictions.”

And you’ll get more headlines in time for the election, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

“But he still walks?” he asked.

“No, Detective, he doesn’t walk. He never sees the light of day again. Have you ever been up to Pelican Bay, the place they send sex offenders? It only sounds like a nice place.”

“But no death penalty. You’re giving him that.”

Olivas smirked as if Bosch didn’t see the light.

“Yes, that is what we are giving,” O’Shea said. “That’s all we’re giving. No death penalty and he goes away forever and a day.”

Bosch shook his head, looked at Rider and then back at O’Shea. He said nothing because he knew it wasn’t his decision to make.

“But before we agree to such a deal,” O’Shea said, “we need to make damn sure he is good for those nine. Waits is no dummy. This could all be a trick to avoid the needle or it could be the real thing. I want to bring you two into this to work with Freddy in finding out which it is. I’ll make the calls and you will be cut loose. That will be the assignment.”

Neither Bosch nor Rider responded. O’Shea pressed on.

“It is obvious he knows things about the two bait cases cited in the letter. Freddy confirmed the Fitzpatrick thing. He was killed during the riots after the Rodney King verdict came in, burned to death behind the roll-down fence in his pawnshop. He was heavily armed at the time and what is not clear is how his killer got close enough to set him on fire. The can of EasyLight was found just like Waits said, standing upright in front of the security fence.

“The mention of the Gesto case we could not confirm because you’ve got the file, Detective Bosch. You’ve already confirmed the part about the garage. Did he get that right about the clothes and the carrots?”

Bosch reluctantly nodded.

“The car was public information,” he said. “The media was all over it. But the bag of carrots was our ace in the hole. Nobody knew about that except me, my partner at the time and the evidence tech who opened the bag. We held it back because that’s where we ended up thinking she crossed his path. The carrots came from a Mayfair Supermarket on Franklin at the bottom of Beachwood Canyon. Turned out it was her routine to stop there before going up to the stables. The day she disappeared she followed the routine. She came out with the carrots and probably her killer as a trailer. We found witnesses who put her in the store. Nothing else after that. Until we found her car.”

O’Shea nodded. He pointed to the letter, which was still on the desk in front of Bosch and Rider.

“Then this is looking good.”

“No, it’s not,” Bosch said. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t make the deal.”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

“Because if he is the one who took Marie Gesto and killed her and he killed those eight other people, maybe even chopped them up like the two they caught him with, then he isn’t someone who should be allowed to live, whether in a prison cell or not. They ought to strap him down, put the juice in him and send him on down the hole to where he belongs.”

O’Shea nodded as if it were a valid consideration.

“What about all of those open cases?” he countered. “Look, I don’t like the idea of this guy living out his life in a private room at Pelican Bay any more than you do. But we have a responsibility to clear those cases and provide answers to the families of those people. Also, you have to remember, we have announced that we are seeking the death penalty. That doesn’t mean it’s automatic. We have to go to trial and win and then we have to do it all over again to get the jury to recommend death. I’m sure you know that there are any number of things that could go wrong. It only takes one juror to hang a case. And it only takes one to stop the death penalty. It only takes one soft judge to ignore the jury’s recommendation, anyway.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He knew how the system worked, how it could be manipulated and how nothing was a sure thing. Still, it bothered him. He also knew that a life sentence didn’t always mean a life sentence. Every year people like Charlie Manson and Sirhan Sirhan got their shot. Nothing lasts forever, not even a life sentence.

“Plus, there is the cost factor,” O’Shea continued. “Waits doesn’t have money but Maury Swann took the case for publicity value. If we take this to trial he will be ready for battle. Maury’s a damn good lawyer. We can expect experts to cancel out our experts, scientific analysis to cancel out our analysis-the trial will last months and cost the county a fortune. I know you don’t want to hear that money is a consideration here but that is the reality. I have the budget management office already on my back about this one. This proffer could be the safest and best way to make sure this man harms no one else in the future.”

“The best way?” Bosch asked. “Not the right way, if you ask me.”

O’Shea picked up a pen and drummed it lightly on his desk before responding.

“Detective Bosch, why did you sign out the Gesto file so many times?”

Bosch felt Rider turn and look at him. She had asked him the same thing on more than one occasion.

“I told you,” he said. “I pulled it because it had been my case. It bothered me that we never made anybody for it.”

“In other words, it has haunted you.”

Bosch nodded hesitantly.

“Did she have family?”

Bosch nodded again.

“She had parents up in Bakersfield. They had a lot of dreams for her.”

“Think about them. And think about the families of the others. We can’t tell them that Waits was the one unless we know for sure. My guess is that they will want to know and that they are willing to trade that knowledge for his life. It’s better that he plead guilty to all of them than that we get him for only two.”

Bosch said nothing. He had registered his objection. He now knew it was time to go to work. Rider was on the same vibe.

“What is the time frame on this?” she asked.

“I want to move quickly,” O’Shea said. “If this is legit, I want to clean it up and get it done.”

“Gotta get it in before the election, right?” Bosch asked.

He then immediately regretted it. O’Shea’s lips formed a tight line. Blood seemed to collect beneath the skin around his eyes.

“Detective,” he said. “I will give you that. I’m running for election and clearing eleven murders with convictions would be helpful to my cause. But do not suggest the election is my only motivation here. Every night that those parents who carried dreams for their daughter go to bed not knowing where she is or what happened to her is a night of terrible pain as far as I am concerned. Even after thirteen years. So I want to move quickly and assuredly and you can keep your speculations about anything else to yourself.”

“Fine,” Bosch said. “When do we talk to this guy?”

O’Shea looked at Olivas and then back at Bosch.

“Well, I think we should have an exchange of files first. You should come up to speed on Waits and I’d like Freddy to familiarize himself with the Gesto file. Once that is done we’ll set something up with Maury Swann. What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s fine,” Bosch said. “Swann will be there during the interview?”

O’Shea nodded.

“Maury’s riding this one all the way. He’ll milk every angle, probably end up with a book and a movie deal before this thing’s over. Maybe even a guest anchor slot on Court TV.”

“Yeah, well,” Bosch said, “at least then he’d be out of the courtroom.”

“Never thought of it that way,” O’Shea said. “Did you bring the Gesto records?”

Bosch opened his briefcase on his lap and took out the investigation file, which was contained in a three-inch-thick binder generally known as a murder book. He handed it to O’Shea, who turned and gave it to Olivas.

“And I will give you this in return,” O’Shea said.

He slid the file back into the accordion folder and handed it all across the desk.

“Happy reading,” he said. “Are you sure about tomorrow?”

Bosch looked at Rider to see if she had an objection. They had another day before they needed to walk the Matarese filing to the DA. But the work was mostly finished and he knew Rider could handle the rest. When Rider said nothing Bosch looked back at O’Shea.

“We’ll be ready,” he said.

“Then I will call Maury and set it up.”

“Where is Waits?”

“Right here in the building,” O’Shea said. “We’ve got him in high-power on keep-away status.”

“Good,” Rider said.

“What about the other seven?” Bosch asked.

“What about them?”

“Are there no files?”

“The proffer, as well as Maury Swann, indicates that these were women who were never found and possibly never reported missing in the first place,” O’Shea said. “Waits is willing to lead us to them but there is no prep work we can do for them.”

Bosch nodded.

“Any other questions?” O’Shea asked, signaling that the meeting was over.

“We’ll let you know,” Bosch said.

“I know I am repeating myself but I feel I need to,” O’Shea said. “This investigation is all off the record. That file is a proffer that is part of a plea negotiation. Nothing in that file or anything that he tells you can ever be used to make a case against him. If this falls apart, then you will not be able to use the information to pursue him. Is that clearly understood?”

Bosch didn’t answer.

“It’s clear,” Rider said.

“There is one exception that I have negotiated. If he lies, if you catch him at any time in a lie or if any piece of information he gives you during this process proves to be knowingly false, all bets are off and we can go after him for all of it. He has been made quite aware of this, too.”

Bosch nodded. He stood up. Rider did, too.

“Do you need me to call someone to free you two up?” O’Shea asked. “I can flex a muscle if needed.”

Rider shook her head.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Harry was already working the Gesto case. The seven women might be unknown victims but there’s got to be a file in Archives on the man in the pawnshop. It all cuts Open-Unsolved in. We can handle our supervisor.”

“Okay, then. As soon as I have the interview set up I will call. Meantime, all of my numbers are in the file. Freddy’s, too.”

Bosch nodded to O’Shea and threw a glance at Olivas before turning to the door.

“Detectives?” O’Shea said.

Bosch and Rider turned back to him. He was standing now. He wanted to shake their hands.

“I am hoping you are on my side on this,” O’Shea said.

Bosch shook his hand, unsure whether O’Shea was talking about the case or the election.

He said, “If Waits can help me bring Marie Gesto home to her parents, then I’m on your side.”

It wasn’t a completely accurate summation of his feelings, but it got him out of the office.

3

BACK AT OPEN-UNSOLVED they sat in their supervisor’s office and brought him up to date on the day’s developments. Abel Pratt was four weeks away from retirement after twenty-five years on the job. He was attentive to them but not overly so. On the side of his desk was a stack of Fodor’s guidebooks for Caribbean islands. His plan was to pull the pin, leave the city and find an island to live on with his family. It was a common retirement dream among law enforcement officers-to pull back from all the darkness witnessed for so long on the job. The reality, however, was that after about six months on the beach the island got pretty boring.

A detective three from RHD named David Lambkin was set to be the squad’s top after Pratt split. He was a nationally recognized sex crimes expert chosen for the job because so many of the cold cases they were working in the unit were sexually motivated. Bosch was looking forward to working with him and would have liked to be briefing him instead of Pratt but the timing was off.

They went with who they had, and one of the positive things about Pratt was that he was going to give them free rein until he was out the door. He just didn’t want any waves, no blowback in his face. He wanted a quiet, uneventful last month on the job.

Like most cops with twenty-five years in the department, Pratt was a throwback. He was old school. He preferred working on a typewriter over a computer. Rolled halfway up in the IBM Selectric next to his desk was a letter he had been working on when Bosch and Rider stepped in. Bosch had grabbed a quick glance at it while he was sitting down and saw it was a letter to a casino in the Bahamas. Pratt was trying to line up a security gig in paradise, and that about said it all when it came to where his mind was at these days.

After hearing their briefing, Pratt gave his approval for them to work with O’Shea and only became animated when he issued a warning about Raynard Waits’s attorney, Maury Swann.

“Let me tell you about Maury,” Pratt said. “Whatever you do when you meet him do not shake his hand.”

“Why not?” Rider asked.

“I had a case with him once. This is way back. It was a gangbanger on a one-eighty-seven. Every day when we started court, Maury made a big deal of shaking my hand and then the prosecutor’s. He probably would have shaken the judge’s hand, too, if he’d gotten the chance.”

“So?”

“So after his guy was convicted he tried to get a reduced sentence by snitching out the others involved in the murder. One of the things he told me during the debriefing was that he thought I was dirty. He said that during the trial Maury had told him he could buy all of us. Me, the prosecutor, everybody. So the banger had his homegirl get him the cash and Maury explained to him that every time he was shaking our hands he was paying us off. You know, passing the cash palm to palm. He always did those two-handed shakes, too. He was really selling it to his guy while all along he was keeping the cash.”

“Holy shit!” Rider exclaimed. “Didn’t you guys work up a case on him?”

Pratt dismissed the idea with a wave.

“It was after the fact and besides it was a bullshit he-said-he-said case. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere-not with Maury being a member of the bar in good standing and all. But ever since then I heard that Maury likes shaking hands a lot. So when you get in that room with him and Waits, don’t shake his hand.”

They left Pratt’s office, smiling at the story, and returned to their own workstation. The division of labor had been worked out on their walk back from the courthouse. Bosch would take Waits, and Rider would take Fitzpatrick. They would know the files inside and out by the time they sat across the table from Waits in the interview room the following day.

Since Rider had less to read in the Fitzpatrick case she also would finish the filing on Matarese. This meant Bosch was cleared to study full-time the world of Raynard Waits. After pulling out the Fitzpatrick file for Rider, he chose to take the accordion folder O’Shea had given them down to the cafeteria. He knew the lunch crowd would be thinning out and he would be able to spread the files out and work without the distractions of the constantly ringing phones and chatter of the Open-Unsolved squad room. He had to use a napkin to clean a table in the corner but then quickly settled into his review of the materials.

There were three files on Waits. They included the LAPD murder book compiled by Olivas and Ted Colbert, his partner in the Northeast Division Homicide squad, a file on a prior arrest and the prosecution file compiled by O’Shea.

Bosch decided to read the murder book first. He quickly became acquainted with Raynard Waits and the details of his arrest. The suspect was thirty-four years old and lived in a ground-floor apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood. He wasn’t a large man, standing five foot six and weighing 142 pounds. He was the owner-operator of a one-man business-a residential window-cleaning company called ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners. According to the police reports, he came to the attention of two patrol officers, a boot named Arnolfo Gonzalez and his training officer, Ted Fennel, at 1:50 a.m. on the night of May 11. The officers were assigned to a Crime Response Team which was watching a hillside neighborhood in Echo Park because of a recent rash of home burglaries that had been occurring on the nights of Dodgers home games. Though in uniform, Gonzalez and Fennel were in an unmarked cruiser near the intersection of Stadium Way and Chavez Ravine Place. Bosch knew the location. It was at the remote edge of the Dodger Stadium complex and above the Echo Park neighborhood that the CRT teams were watching. He also knew that they were following a standard CRT strategy: to stay out on the perimeter of the target neighborhood and follow in any vehicle or persons who looked suspicious or out of place.

According to the report filed by Gonzalez and Fennel, they grew suspicious as to why a van marked on the sides with signs that said ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners was out and about at two in the morning. They followed at a distance and Gonzalez used night-vision binoculars to get the van’s plate number. He then entered it into the car’s mobile digital terminal-the officers choosing to use the onboard computer rather than the radio in case the burglar working the neighborhood was equipped with a police radio scanner. The computer kicked back a flag. The plate was registered to a Ford Mustang with an address out in Claremont. Believing that the license plate on the van was stolen and that they now had probable cause to stop it, Fennel accelerated, put on the UC car’s grille lights and stopped the van on Figueroa Terrace near the intersection of Beaudry Avenue.

“The driver of the vehicle appeared agitated and leaned out of the van’s window to talk to Officer Gonzalez, an effort to block the officer from conducting a visual survey of the interior of the vehicle,” the arrest summary read. “Officer Fennel approached the vehicle’s passenger side and beamed his flashlight into the van. Without entering the vehicle, Officer Fennel was able to notice what appeared to be several black plastic trash bags on the floorboard in front of the front passenger seat of the vehicle. A substance appearing to be blood could be seen leaking from the cinched mouth of one of the bags and onto the floor of the van.”

According to the report, “The driver was asked if that was blood leaking from one of the bags and he stated that he had cut himself earlier in the day when a large plate glass window he was cleaning shattered. He stated that he had used several glass-cleaning rags to clean up the blood. When asked to show where he was cut the driver smiled and then suddenly made a move to restart the vehicle’s ignition. Officer Gonzalez reached through the window to restrain him. After a short struggle the driver was removed from the vehicle and placed on the ground and handcuffed. He was then moved to the backseat of the unmarked car. Officer Fennel opened the vehicle and inspected the bags. At this time Officer Fennel found the first bag he opened contained human body parts. Investigative units were immediately summoned to the scene.”

The driver’s license of the man taken out of the van identified him as Raynard Waits. He was booked into the holding tank at Northeast Division while an investigation of his van and the plastic trash bags carried on through the night on Figueroa Terrace. Only after Detectives Olivas and Colbert, the on-call team that night, took over the investigation and retraced some of the steps taken by Gonzalez and Fennel was it learned that the rookie officer had typed the wrong license plate number into the MDT, typing an F for an E and getting the plate registration for the Mustang out in Claremont.

In law enforcement terms it was a “good faith error,” meaning the probable cause to have stopped the van should still hold because the officers had been acting in good faith when an honest mistake was committed. Bosch assumed that this was the point of the appeal Rick O’Shea had mentioned earlier.

Bosch put aside the murder investigation file and opened the prosecution file. He quickly looked through the documents until he found a copy of the appeal. He scanned it quickly and found what he had expected. Waits was claiming that typing in the wrong plate number was a custom and practice within the LAPD and often employed when officers on specialty squads wanted to pull over and search a vehicle without legitimate probable cause to do so. Though a Superior Court judge found that Gonzalez and Fennel had acted on good faith and upheld the legality of the search, Waits was appealing that decision to the District Court of Appeal.

Bosch went back to the investigative file. No matter the question of the legality of the traffic stop, the investigation of Raynard Waits had moved rapidly. The morning after the arrest Olivas and Colbert obtained a search warrant for the apartment on Sweetzer where Waits lived alone. A four-hour search and Forensics examination of the apartment produced several samples of human hair and blood taken from the bathroom’s sink and tub traps, as well as a hidden space beneath the floor containing several pieces of women’s jewelry and multiple Polaroid photos of nude young women who appeared to be sleeping, unconscious or dead. In a utility room was an upright freezer which was empty, except for the two samples of pubic hair found by an SID tech.

Meantime, the three plastic bags found in the van had been transported to the coroner’s office and opened. They were found to contain the body parts of two young women, each of whom had been strangled and dismembered after death in the same way. Of note was the fact that the parts from one of the bodies showed indications of having been thawed after being frozen.

Though no cutting tools were found in Waits’s apartment or van, it was clear from the evidence gathered that while Officers Gonzalez and Fennel were looking for a burglar, they had stumbled onto what appeared to be a serial killer at work. The belief was that Waits had already discarded or hidden his tools and was in the process of disposing of the bodies of the two victims when he drew the attention of the CRT officers. The indications were that there might be other victims as well. The reports in the file detailed the efforts made in the next several weeks to identify the two bodies as well as the other women in the Polaroids found in the apartment. Waits of course offered no help in this regard, engaging the services of Maury Swann on the morning of his capture and choosing to remain silent as the law enforcement processes continued and Swann mounted an attack on the probable cause of the traffic stop.

Only one of the two known victims was identified. Fingerprints taken from one of the dismembered women drew a hit on the FBI’s latent database. She was identified as a seventeen-year-old runaway from Davenport, Iowa. Lindsey Mathers had left home two months before being found in Waits’s van and had not been heard from during that time by her parents. With photos supplied by her mother, detectives were able to piece together her trail in Los Angeles. She was recognized by youth counselors at several Hollywood shelters. She had been using a variety of names to avoid being identified and possibly sent home. There were indications she was involved in drug use and street prostitution. Needle marks found on her body during the autopsy were believed to have been the result of a long and ongoing practice of injecting drugs. A blood screen taken during the autopsy found heroin and PCP in her bloodstream.

The shelter counselors who helped identify Lindsey Mathers were also shown the Polaroid photographs found in Waits’s apartment and were able to provide a variety of different names for at least three of the women. Their stories were similar to Mathers’s journey. They were runaways possibly engaged in prostitution as a means of earning money for drugs.

It was clear to Bosch from the gathered evidence and information that Waits was a predator who targeted young women who would not be immediately missed, fringe dwellers who were unaccounted for by society in the first place and therefore not missed when they disappeared.

The Polaroids from the hidden space in Waits’s apartment were in the file, encased in plastic sheets, four to a page. There were eight pages with multiple shots of each woman. An accompanying analysis report stated that the photo collection contained shots of nine different women-the two women whose remains were found in Waits’s van and seven unknowns. Bosch knew that the unknowns were likely to be the seven women Waits was offering to tell authorities about in addition to Marie Gesto and the pawnshop man, but he studied the photos anyway for the face of Marie Gesto.

She wasn’t there. The faces in the photos belonged to women who had not caused the same sort of stir that Marie Gesto had. Bosch sat back and took off his reading glasses to rest his eyes for a few moments. He remembered one of his early teachers in Homicide. Detective Ray Vaughn had a special sympathy for the ones he called “murder’s nobodies,” the victims who didn’t count. He taught Bosch early on that in society all victims are not created equal, but to the true detective they must be.

“Every one of them was somebody’s daughter,” Ray Vaughn had told him. “Every one of them counted.”

Bosch rubbed his eyes. He thought about Waits’s offer to clear up nine murders, including Marie Gesto’s and Daniel Fitzpatrick’s and those of seven women who never caused a blip on anybody’s radar. Something seemed not right about that. Fitzpatrick was an anomaly because he was a male and the killing didn’t appear to be sexually motivated. He had always assumed that Marie Gesto was a sex killing. But she was not a throwaway victim. She had hit the radar big time. Had Waits learned from her? Had he honed his craft after her killing to make sure he never drew such police and media heat again? Bosch thought that maybe the heat he had applied on the Gesto case was what caused Waits to change, to become a more skilled and cunning killer. If that was so, then he would have to deal with that guilt at a later time. For now he had to focus on what was in front of him.

He put his glasses on again and went back to the files. The evidence against Waits was solid. Nothing like being caught in possession of body parts. A defense attorney’s nightmare; a prosecutor’s dream. The case sailed through a preliminary hearing in four days, and then the DA’s office upped the ante with O’Shea announcing he would go for the death penalty.

Bosch had a legal pad to the side of the open file so that he could write down questions for O’Shea, Waits or others. It was blank when he came to the end of his review of the investigation and prosecution files. He now wrote the only questions that came to mind.

If Waits killed Gesto, why was there no photo of her in his apartment?

Waits lived in West Hollywood. What was he doing in Echo Park?

The first question could be easily explained. Bosch knew killers evolved. Waits could have learned from the Gesto killing that he needed reminders of his work. The photos could have started after Gesto.

The second question was more troubling to him. There was no report in the file that dealt with this question. It was thought simply that Waits had been on his way to get rid of the bodies, possibly to bury them in the parklands that surrounded Dodger Stadium. No further investigation of this was contemplated or called for. But to Bosch it was something to consider. Echo Park would have been at least a half hour away by car from Waits’s apartment in West Hollywood. That was a long time to be driving with body parts in bags. Additionally, Griffith Park, which was larger and had more pockets of isolated and difficult terrain than the area around the stadium, was far closer to the West Hollywood apartment and would have been the better choice for a body dump.

To Bosch it meant that Waits had a specific destination in mind in Echo Park. This had been missed or dismissed as unimportant in the original investigation.

He next wrote two words.

psych profile?

No psychological study of the defendant had been conducted and Bosch was mildly surprised by this. Perhaps, he thought, it had been a strategic decision by the prosecution. O’Shea might have chosen not to take this route because he didn’t know exactly where it would lead. He wanted to try Waits on the facts and send him to the death chamber. He didn’t want to be responsible for opening a door to a possible insanity defense.

Still, Bosch thought, a psychological study could have been useful for understanding the defendant and his crimes. It should have been done. Whether the subject was cooperative or not, a profile could have been drawn from the crimes themselves as well as from what was known about Waits through his history, appearance, the findings in his apartment and interviews conducted with those he knew and worked for. Such a profile might have also been useful to O’Shea as an edge against a move by the defense to claim insanity.

Now it was too late. The department had a small psych staff and there would be no way for Bosch to get anything done before the interview with Waits the next day. And farming a request out to the FBI would result in a two-month wait at best.

Bosch suddenly had an idea about that but decided to grind it over for a little while before acting on anything. He put the questions aside for the moment and got up to refill his coffee mug. He was using a real coffee mug he had brought down from the Open-Unsolved Unit because he preferred it over Styrofoam. His mug had come from a famous writer and television producer named Stephen Cannell who had spent time with the OU Unit while researching a project. Printed on the side of the mug was Cannell’s favorite piece of writing advice. It said What’s the bad guy up to? Bosch liked it because he thought it was a good question for a real detective to always be considering as well.

He came back to the cafeteria table and looked at the last file. It was thin and the oldest of the three. He put aside thoughts of Echo Park and psychological profiles, sat down and opened the file. It involved the reports and investigation related to Waits’s arrest in February 1993 for prowling. It was the only blip on the radar involving Waits until his arrest in the van with the body parts thirteen years later.

The reports said Waits was arrested in the backyard of a home in the Fairfax District after a neighbor with insomnia happened to look out her window while walking through her dark house. She saw a man looking in the rear windows of the house next door. The woman woke her sleeping husband and he promptly snuck out of the house, jumped the man and held him until police arrived. The man was found in possession of a screwdriver and charged with prowling. He carried no identification and gave the name Robert Saxon to the arresting officers. He said he was only seventeen. But his ruse crumbled and he was identified as Raynard Waits, twenty-one, a short time later when a thumbprint taken during the booking process scored a match in DMV records to a driver’s license issued nine months earlier to Raynard Waits. That license carried the same day and month of birth with one change. It said Raynard Waits was four years older than he had claimed to be as Robert Saxon.

Once identified, Waits admitted to police during questioning that he had been looking for a home to burglarize. However, it was noted in the report that the window he had been seen looking through corresponded to the bedroom of a fifteen- year-old girl who lived in the house. Still, Waits avoided any sort of sex offender jacket in a plea agreement negotiated by his attorney, Mickey Haller. He was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation, which, according to the reports, he completed with high marks and no violations.

Bosch realized that the incident was an early warning of what was to come. But the system was too overburdened and inefficient to recognize the danger that was in Waits. He worked the dates and realized that while Waits was successfully completing probation in the eyes of the justice system, he was also graduating from prowler to murderer. Marie Gesto was taken before he cleared his tail.

“Howzit going?”

Bosch looked up and quickly took off his glasses so he could focus on distance. Rider had come down to get coffee. She was holding an empty What’s the bad guy up to? mug. The writer had given one to everybody in the squad.

“Almost done,” he said. “How about you?”

“I’m done with what O’Shea gave us. I called Evidence Archives for the box on Fitzpatrick.”

“What’s in there?”

“I don’t know for sure but the inventory in the book just lists the contents as pawn records. That’s why I’m having it pulled. And while I’m waiting I’m going to finish up on Matarese and have it ready to walk over tomorrow. Depending on when we get to talk to Waits, I’ll walk Matarese in either first thing or last thing. Did you eat lunch?”

“Forgot. What did you see in the Fitzpatrick file?”

She pulled out the chair opposite Bosch and sat down.

“The case was handled by the short-lived Riot Crimes Task Force, remember them?”

Bosch nodded.

“They had a clearance rate of like ten percent,” she said. “Basically, anybody who did anything during those three days got away with it unless they were caught on camera, like that kid who bricked the truck driver while a news chopper was right on top of him.”

Bosch remembered that there were more than fifty deaths during the three days of riots in 1992 and very few were ever solved or explained. It had been a free-for-all, a lawless time in the city. He remembered walking down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard and seeing flaming buildings on both sides of the street. One of those buildings probably contained Fitzpatrick’s pawnshop.

“It was an impossible task,” he said.

“I know,” Rider said. “Putting together cases out of that chaos. I can tell from the file on Fitzpatrick that they didn’t spend a lot of time with it. They worked the crime scene with a SWAT line guarding the place. The whole thing was pretty quickly written off as random violence, even when there was some stuff they should have routinely looked at.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters, Fitzpatrick looks like he was a straight arrow. He took thumbprints off of everybody who brought in stuff to pawn.”

“His edge against taking in stolen property.”

“Exactly. And what pawnbroker do you know of back then who voluntarily did that? He also kept an eighty-six list-customers who were persona non grata for various reasons and customers who complained or threatened him. Apparently it isn’t uncommon for people to come back in to buy back the property they’ve pawned, only to find they are past the holding period and it’s been sold. They get mad, sometimes they threaten the pawnbroker, and so on. Most of this came from a guy who worked for him in the store. He wasn’t there the night of the fire.”

“So, was the eighty-six list checked out?”

“It looks like they were going down the list when something happened. They stopped and wrote the case off as random violence associated with the riot. Fitzpatrick was set on fire with lighter fluid. Half the stores on the Boulevard that were burned down were started the same way. So they stopped spinning their wheels on it and went on to the next one. There were two guys on it. One’s retired and the other works Pacific. He’s a patrol sergeant now, p.m. watch. I left a message.”

Bosch knew he didn’t have to ask if Raynard Waits was a name on the 86 list. That would have been the first thing Rider said.

“You might have an easier time getting to the retired guy,” Bosch suggested. “Retired guys always want to talk.”

Rider nodded.

“That’s an idea,” she said.

“The other thing is Waits used an alias when he got popped in ’ninety-three on a prowling charge. Robert Saxon. I know you checked for Waits on the eighty-six list. You might want to check Saxon as well.”

“Got it.”

“Look, I know you have all of that going, but do you have time to do an AutoTrack run on Waits today?”

The division of labor in their partnership had her doing most of the computer work. AutoTrack was a computer database that could provide an individual’s address history through utility and cable hookups, DMV records and other sources. It was tremendously useful in tracing people back through time.

“I think I can swing it.”

“I just want to see where he’s lived. I can’t figure out why he was in Echo Park and it looks like nobody else has given it much thought.”

“To dump the bags, I thought.”

“Right, yeah, we know that. But why Echo Park? He lived closer to Griffith Park and that would’ve probably been a better place for burying or dumping bodies. I don’t know, something is missing or doesn’t fit right. I think he was going somewhere he knew.”

“He could have wanted the distance. You know, he thought the farther away from him the better.”

Bosch nodded but he wasn’t convinced.

“I think I’m going to ride over there.”

“And what? You think you’ll find where he was going to bury those bags? You turning psychic on me now, Harry?”

“Not yet. I just want to see if I can get a feel for Waits before we actually talk to the guy.”

Saying the name made Bosch grimace and shake his head.

“What?” Rider asked.

“You know what we’re doing here? We’re helping to keep this guy alive. A guy who cuts women up and keeps them in the freezer until he runs out of room and has to take them out like trash. That’s our job, find the way to let him live.”

Rider frowned.

“I know how you feel, Harry, but I have to tell you, I kind of come down on O’Shea’s side on this. I think it’s better that all the families know and we clear all the cases. It’s like with my sister. We wanted to know.”

When Rider was a teenager her older sister was murdered in a drive-by shooting. The case was cleared and three bangers went away for it. It was the main reason she became a cop.

“It’s probably like you with your mother, too,” she added.

Bosch looked up at her. His mother had been murdered when he was a boy. More than three decades later he solved the crime himself because he wanted to know.

“You’re right,” he said. “But it just doesn’t sit right with me at the moment, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you take that ride and clear your head a little bit. I’ll call you if anything comes up on the AutoTrack.”

“I guess I will.”

He started closing the files and putting them away.

4

IN THE SHADOWS OF downtown’s spires and under the glow of lights from Dodger Stadium, Echo Park was one of L.A.’s oldest and ever-changing neighborhoods. Over the decades it had been the destination of the city’s immigrant underclass-the Italians coming first and then the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Cubans, Ukrainians and all of the others. By day a walk down the main drag of Sunset Boulevard might require skills in five or more languages to read all of the storefronts. By night it was the only place in the city where the air could be split by the sound of gang gunfire, the cheers for a home-run ball, and the baying of the hillside coyotes-all in the same hour.

These days Echo Park was also a favored destination of another class of newcomer-the young and hip. The cool. Artists, musicians and writers were moving in. Cafés and vintage clothing shops were squeezing in next to the bodegas and mariscos stands. A wave of gentrification was washing across the flats and up the hillsides below the baseball stadium. It meant the character of the place was changing. It meant real-estate prices were going up, pushing out the working class and the gangs.

Bosch had lived for a short time in Echo Park when he was a boy. And many years back, there had been a police bar on Sunset called the Short Stop. But cops were no longer welcome there. The place offered valet parking and catered to the Hollywood crowd-two things sure to keep the off-duty officer away. For Bosch the neighborhood of Echo Park had dropped off the radar. To him it wasn’t a destination. It was a drive-through neighborhood, a shortcut on his way to the Medical Examiner’s Office for work or to a Dodgers game for fun.

From downtown he took a quick jog on the 101 Freeway north to Echo Park Road and then took that north again toward the hillside neighborhood where Raynard Waits had been arrested. As he passed Echo Lake he saw the statue known as the Lady of the Lake watching over the water lilies, her hands palms up like the victim of a holdup. As a boy he had lived for almost a year with his mother in the Sir Palmer Apartments across from the lake, but it had been a bad time for her and him and the memory was all but erased. He vaguely remembered that statue but almost nothing else.

At Sunset he turned right and took it down to Beaudry. From there he drove up the hillside to Figueroa Terrace. He pulled to the curb near the intersection where Waits had been pulled over. A few old bungalow homes built in the thirties and forties were still there, but for the most part the houses were postwar concrete-block construction. They were modest with gated yards and barred windows. The cars in the driveways were not new or flashy. It was a working-class neighborhood that Bosch knew would be largely Latino and Asian now. From the back of the homes on the west side there would be nice views of the downtown towers with the DWP Building front and center. The homes on the east side would have backyards that stretched up into the rugged terrain of the hills. And at the top of those hills would be the far parking lots of the baseball stadium complex.

He thought about Waits’s window-washing van and wondered again why he had been on this street in this neighborhood. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where he would have customers. It wasn’t the kind of street where a commercial van would be expected at two in the morning, anyway. The two CRT officers had been correct in taking notice.

Bosch pulled over and put the car in park. He stepped out and looked around and then leaned against the car as he contemplated the questions. He still didn’t get it. Why had Waits chosen this place? After a few moments he opened his cell phone and called his partner.

“You run that AutoTrack yet?” he asked.

“Just did. Where are you?”

“Echo Park. Anything come up near here?”

“Uh-uh, I was just looking. The farthest east it puts him is the Montecito Apartments on Franklin.”

Bosch knew that the Montecito wasn’t near Echo Park but it was not far from the High Tower Apartments, where Marie Gesto’s car had been found.

“When was he at the Montecito?” he asked.

“After Gesto. He moved in, let’s see, in ’ninety-nine, and out the next year. A one-year stay.”

“Anything else worth mentioning?”

“No, Harry. Just the usual. The guy moved house every one or two years. Didn’t like staying put, I guess.”

“Okay, Kiz. Thanks.”

“You coming back to the office?”

“In a little while.”

He closed the phone and got back in the car. He took Figueroa Lane to Chavez Ravine Place and hit another stop sign. At one time the whole area up here was known only as Chavez Ravine. But that was before the city moved all the people out and bulldozed the bungalows and shacks they had called home. A grand housing project was supposed to rise in the ravine, with playgrounds and schools and shopping plazas that would invite back those who had been displaced. But once they cleared it all out the housing project was scratched from the city’s plans and it was a baseball stadium that went in instead. To Bosch it seemed that as far back as he could remember in L.A., the fix was always in.

Bosch had been listening lately to the Ry Cooder CD called Chávez Ravine. It wasn’t jazz but that was okay. It was its own kind of jazz. He liked the song “It’s Just Work for Me,” a dirge about a bulldozer driver who came to the ravine to knock down the poor people’s shacks and refused to feel guilty about it.

You got to go where they send you

When you’re a dozer-drivin’ man…

He took a left on Chavez Ravine and in a few moments he came to Stadium Way and the spot where Waits had first drawn the attention of the CRT patrol as he passed on his way down into Echo Park.

At the stop sign he surveyed the intersection. Stadium Way was the feeder line to the stadium’s huge parking lots. For Waits to have come into the neighborhood this way, as the arrest report stated, he would have to have come in from downtown, the stadium, or the Pasadena Freeway. This would not have been the way in from his home in West Hollywood. Bosch puzzled with this for a few moments but determined there was not enough information to draw any conclusion. Waits could have driven through Echo Park, making sure he was not followed, and then drawn the CRT tail after turning around to go back.

He realized that there was much about Waits he didn’t know and it bothered him that he would come face-to-face with the killer the next day. Bosch felt unprepared. He once again considered the idea he’d had earlier, but this time he didn’t hesitate. He opened his phone and called the FBI field office in Westwood.

“I’m looking for an agent named Rachel Walling,” he told the operator. “I’m not sure what squad she’s with.”

“Hold one.”

By “one” she had apparently meant a minute. As he waited he was honked at by a car that had come up from behind. Bosch moved through the intersection, made a U-turn and then pulled off the road into the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Finally near the two-minute mark his call was transferred and picked up and a male voice said, “Tactical.”

“Agent Walling, please.”

“Hold one.”

“Right,” Bosch said after he heard the click.

But this time the transfer was made quickly and Bosch heard Rachel Walling’s voice for the first time in a year. He hesitated and she almost hung up on him.

“Rachel, it’s Harry Bosch.”

Now she hesitated before responding.

“Harry…”

“So what’s ‘Tactical’ mean?”

“It’s just the squad designation.”

He understood. She didn’t answer because it was eyes-only stuff and the line was probably on tape somewhere.

“Why are you calling, Harry?”

“Because I need a favor. I could use your help, actually.”

“With what? I’m sort of in the middle of something here.”

“Then don’t worry about it. I thought maybe you’d… well, never mind, Rachel. It’s no big deal. I can handle it.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll let you get back to Tactical, whatever that is. You take care.”

He closed the phone and tried not to let her voice and the memory it conjured distract him from the task at hand. He looked back across the intersection and realized he was probably in the same position the CRT car had been in when Gonzalez and Fennel spotted Waits’s van. The eucalyptus tree and night shadows had provided them cover.

Bosch was hungry now, having missed lunch. He decided he would cross over the freeway into Chinatown and grab takeout to bring back to the squad room. He pulled back onto the street and was debating whether to call the office to see if anybody wanted anything from Chinese Friends when his cell rang. He checked the screen but saw the ID was blocked. He answered anyway.

“It’s me.”

“Rachel.”

“I wanted to switch to my cell.”

There was a pause. Bosch knew he had been right about the phones at Tactical.

“How have you been, Harry?”

“I’ve been fine.”

“So you did like you said you were going to do. You went back to the cops. I read about you last year with that case up in the Valley.”

“Yeah, my first case back. Everything’s been below the radar since then. Until this thing I’ve got working now.”

“And that’s why you called me?”

Bosch noted the tone in her voice. It had been more than eighteen months since they had spoken. And that was at the end of an intense week when they had crossed paths on a case, Bosch working on a private ticket before coming back to the department and Walling working on resuscitating her career with the bureau. The case led Bosch back to the blue fold and Walling to the L.A. field office. Whether Tactical, whatever that was, constituted an improvement over her previous posting in South Dakota was something Bosch didn’t know. What he did know was that before she had fallen from grace and been cast out to the reservation beat in the Dakotas, she had been a profiler in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.

“I called because I thought maybe you’d be interested in putting some of your old skills to work again,” he said.

“You mean a profile?”

“Sort of. Tomorrow I have to go head to head in a room with an admitted serial killer and I don’t know the first thing about what makes him tick. This guy wants to confess to nine murders in a deal to avoid the needle. I have to make sure he’s not playing us. I have to figure out if he’s telling the truth before we turn around and tell all the families-what families we know of-that we’ve got the right guy.”

He waited a moment for her to react. When she didn’t he pressed on.

“I’ve got crimes, a couple crime scenes and forensics. I’ve got his apartment inventory and photos. But I don’t have a handle on him. I was calling because I was wondering if I could show you some of this stuff and, you know, maybe get some ideas from you on how to handle him.”

There was another long silence before she answered.

“Where are you, Harry?” she finally asked.

“Right now? Right now I’m heading into Chinatown to pick up some shrimp fried rice. I missed lunch.”

“I’m downtown. I could meet you. I missed lunch, too.”

“You know where Chinese Friends is?”

“Of course. How about a half hour?”

“I’ll order before you get there.”

Bosch closed the phone and felt a thrill that he knew came from something other than the idea that Rachel Walling might be able to help him with the Waits case. Their last encounter had ended badly but the sting of it had eroded over time. What was left in his memory was the night they had made love in a Las Vegas motel room and he had believed he had connected with a kindred soul.

He looked at his watch. He had time to kill even if he was going to order food before she got there. In Chinatown he pulled to the curb outside the restaurant and opened up his phone again. Before he had turned the Gesto murder book over to Olivas he had written down names and numbers he might need. He now called Bakersfield and the home of Marie Gesto’s parents. The call would not be a complete shock to them. His habit had always been to call them every time he pulled the file to take another look at the case. He thought it was some measure of comfort for them to know he had not given up.

The missing woman’s mother answered the phone.

“Irene, it’s Harry Bosch.”

“Oh!”

There was always that initial note of hope and excitement when one of them answered.

“Nothing yet, Irene,” he responded quickly. “I just have a question for you and Dan, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, of course. It’s just good to hear from you.”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too.”

It had been more than ten years since he had actually seen Irene and Dan Gesto. After two years they had stopped coming to L.A. in hopes of finding their daughter, had given up her apartment and gone home. After that, Bosch always called.

“What is your question, Harry?”

“It’s a name, actually. Do you remember Marie ever mentioning someone named Ray Waits? Maybe Raynard Waits? Raynard is an unusual name. You might remember it.”

He heard her breath catch and he immediately knew he had made a mistake. The recent arrest and court hearings involving Waits had made it into the media in Bakersfield. He should have known that Irene would have a keen eye on such things in L.A. She would know what Waits was accused of. She would know they were calling him the Echo Park Bagman.

“Irene?”

He guessed that her imagination had taken terrible flight.

“Irene, it’s not what you think. I’m just running some checks on this guy. It sounds like you’ve heard of him from the news.”

“Of course. Those poor young girls. Ending up like that. I…”

He knew what she was thinking, maybe not what she was feeling.

“Can you think back before you saw him on the news. The name. Do you remember if your daughter ever mentioned it?”

“No, I don’t remember it, thank God.”

“Is your husband there? Can you check with him?”

“He’s not here. He’s still at work.”

Dan Gesto had given everything of himself to the search for his missing daughter. After two years, when he had nothing left spiritually, physically or financially, he went home to Bakersfield and went back to work at a John Deere franchise. Selling farmers their tractors and tools kept him alive now.

“Can you ask him when he comes home and then call me back if he remembers the name?”

“I will, Harry.”

“One other thing, Irene. Marie’s apartment had that tall window in the living room. You remember that?”

“Of course. That first year we came down for Christmas instead of her coming up. We wanted her to feel like it was a two-way road. Dan put up the tree in that window and you could see its lights from up and down the block.”

“Yes. Do you know if she ever hired a window washer to keep that window clean?”

There was a long silence while Bosch waited. It was a hole in the investigation, an angle he should have followed thirteen years before but hadn’t even thought of.

“I don’t remember, Harry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Irene. It’s okay. Do you remember when you and Dan went back to Bakersfield and you took everything from the apartment?”

“Yes.”

She said it in a strangled voice. He knew that she was crying now and that the couple had felt that in some way they were abandoning their daughter as well as their hope when they had gone home after two years of searching and waiting.

“Did you keep it all? All the records and bills and all of the stuff we gave you when we were finished with it?”

He knew that if there had been a receipt for a window washer, it would have been a lead that was checked out. But he had to ask her anyway to confirm the negative, to make sure it hadn’t slipped through the cracks.

“Yes, we have it. It’s in her room. We have a room with her things in it. In case she…”

Ever came home. Bosch knew their hope would not be fully extinguished until Marie was found, one way or the other.

“I understand,” he said. “I need you to look through that box, Irene. If you can. I want you to look for a receipt from a window washer. Go through her checkbooks and see if she paid a window washer. Look for a company called ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners, or maybe an abbreviation of that. Call me if you find anything. Okay, Irene? Do you have a pen there? I think I got a new cell number since the last time I gave it to you.”

“Okay, Harry,” Irene said. “I have a pen.”

“The number is three-two-three, two-four-four, five-six-three-one. Thank you, Irene. I’m going to go now. Please give your husband my best.”

“I will. How’s your daughter, Harry?”

He paused. Over the years it seemed like he had told them everything about himself. It was a way of keeping solid the bond and his promise to find their daughter.

“She’s fine. She’s great.”

“What grade now?”

“Third, but I don’t get to see her that much. She’s living in Hong Kong with her mother at the moment. I went over last month for a week. They’ve got a Disneyland over there now.”

He didn’t know why he threw in that last line.

“It must be very special when you are with her.”

“Yes. She is also sending me e-mail now. She’s better at it than me.”

It was awkward speaking about one’s daughter to a woman who had lost her own and didn’t know where or why.

“I hope she comes back soon,” Irene Gesto said.

“Me, too. Good-bye, Irene. Call me on the cell whenever you want.”

“Good-bye, Harry. Good luck.”

She always said good luck at the end of every conversation. Bosch sat in the car and thought about the contradiction in his desire for his daughter to live here in Los Angeles with him. He feared for her safety in the far-off place where she lived now. He wanted to be close so that he could protect her. But would bringing her to a city where young girls disappeared without a trace or ended up in pieces in trash bags be a move toward safety? He knew deep down that he was being selfish and that he couldn’t really protect her no matter where she lived. Everybody had to make their own way in this world. It was Darwin’s rules out there and all he could do was hope that her path didn’t cut across the path of someone like Raynard Waits.

He gathered up the files and got out of the car.

5

BOSCH DIDN’T SEE THE CLOSED sign until he got to the door of Chinese Friends. It was only then that he realized the restaurant closed in the late afternoon before the dinner rush started. He opened his phone to call Rachel Walling but remembered she blocked her number when she had called him back. With nothing to do but wait he bought a copy of the Times out of a box at the curb and paged through it while leaning against his car.

He scanned the headlines quickly, feeling that he was somehow wasting time or losing momentum by reading the paper. The only story he read with any interest was a brief item reporting that district attorney candidate Gabriel Williams had picked up the endorsement of the South County Fellowship of Christian Churches. It wasn’t much of a surprise but it was significant because it was an early indication that the minority vote was going with Williams, the civil rights attorney. The story also mentioned that Williams and Rick O’Shea would be appearing the next night at a candidate forum being sponsored by another coalition representing the south side, the Citizens for Sensitive Leadership. The candidates would not debate each other but would give speeches and take questions from the audience. The CSL would announce its endorsement afterward. Also appearing at the forum would be city council candidates Irvin Irving and Martin Maizel.

Bosch lowered the paper and daydreamed for a moment about showing up at the forum and sandbagging Irving from the audience, asking him how his skills as a police department fixer qualified him for elective office.

He came out of the reverie when an unmarked federal cruiser pulled to the curb in front of his car. He watched Rachel Walling step out. She was dressed casually in black slacks and blazer with a cream-colored blouse. Her dark brown hair was down to her shoulders now and that was probably what was most casual of all. She looked good and Bosch jumped back to that night in Vegas.

“Rachel,” he said, smiling.

“Harry.”

He walked toward her. It was an awkward moment. He didn’t know whether to hug her or kiss her or just shake her hand. There was that night in Vegas but it had been followed by that day in L.A., on the back deck of his house, when everything had come apart and things had ended before they really started.

She saved him from making a choice by reaching out and touching him lightly on the arm.

“I thought you were going to go in and order food.”

“For some reason they’re closed. They don’t open up for dinner until five. You want to wait or go somewhere else?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. There’s Philippe’s.”

She shook her head emphatically.

“I’m tired of Philippe’s. We eat there all the time. In fact, I didn’t eat lunch today because everybody in the squad was going there.”

“Tactical, huh?”

If she was tired of a downtown place, then Bosch knew she wasn’t working out of the main field office in Westwood.

“I know a place. I’ll drive and you can look at the files.”

He walked back over and opened the door of his car. He had to grab the files off the passenger seat so she could get in. He then handed her the files and went around to the driver’s side. He tossed his newspaper onto the backseat.

“Wow, this is so Steve McQueen,” she said of the Mustang. “What happened to the SUV?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Just needed a change.”

He revved the engine to humor her and then pulled away from the curb. He went down to Sunset and turned toward Silver Lake. The route would take them through Echo Park on the way.

“So what exactly do you want from me, Harry?”

She opened the top file that was on her lap and started reading.

“I want you to take a look and then tell me your impressions of this guy. I’m talking to him tomorrow and I want to have any edge I can get. I want to make sure that if anybody is manipulated, it’s him and not me.”

“I’ve heard about this guy. He’s the Echo Park Butcher, right?”

“Actually, they call him the Bagman.”

“Got it.”

“I have a previous connection to the case.”

“Which is?”

“Back in ’ninety-three I was working out of Hollywood Division. I caught a case involving a missing girl. Her name was Marie Gesto and she was never found. It was big at the time, a lot of media. This guy I’m going into the room with, Raynard Waits-he says that’s one of the cases he’ll trade us.”

She looked over at him and then back down at the file.

“Knowing how I have seen you take a case straight to heart, Harry, I wonder, then, if it is wise for you to be dealing with this man now.”

“I’m fine. It’s still my case. And taking it straight to heart is the way of the true detective. The only way.”

He glanced over at her in time to see her roll her eyes.

“Spoken like the Zen master of Homicide. Where are we going?”

“A place called Duffy’s in Silver Lake. We’ll be there in five minutes and you’ll love it. Just don’t start taking your bureau buddies there. That’ll ruin it.”

“I promise.”

“You still have the time?”

“I told you, I didn’t take lunch. But I do need to go back to check out at some point.”

“So are you working out of the federal courthouse?”

She answered while continuing to scan and turn pages in the file.

“No, we’re off campus.”

“One of those secret federal locations, huh?”

“You know the story. If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Bosch nodded at the joke.

“That mean you can’t tell me what Tactical is?”

“It’s nothing. Short for Tactical Intelligence. We’re gatherers. We analyze raw data we pull off the Internet, cell transmissions, satellite feeds. It’s actually quite boring.”

“But is it legal?”

“For now.”

“Sounds like a terrorism gig.”

“Except more often than not we end up feeding leads to the DEA. And last year we came up with more than thirty different Internet scams involving hurricane relief. Like I said, it’s raw data. It can lead anywhere.”

“And you traded the wide-open spaces of South Dakota for downtown L.A.”

“As far as the career choice goes, it was the right move. I don’t regret it. But I do miss some things about the Dakotas. Anyway, let me concentrate on this. You do want my take on it, right?”

“Yes, sorry. Have at it.”

He drove silently for the last few minutes and then pulled to a stop in front of the small storefront restaurant. He brought the newspaper in with him. She told him to order her what he was having. But when the waiter came and Bosch ordered an omelet she changed her mind and started scanning the menu.

“I thought you said we were having lunch, not breakfast.”

“I missed breakfast, too. And the omelets are good.”

She ordered a turkey sandwich and handed back the menu.

“My warning is that my take is going to be very superficial,” she said when they were left alone. “There is obviously not going to be enough time for me to do a full psychological. I’ll only be scratching the surface.”

Bosch nodded.

“I know that,” he said. “But I don’t have the time to give you, so I will take whatever you can give me.”

She said nothing else and went back to the files. Bosch glanced at the sports pages but wasn’t that interested in the rundown on the Dodgers game the night before. His appreciation for the game had dropped markedly in recent years. He used the newspaper section mostly as a blind so that he could hold it up and appear to be reading while he was actually looking at Rachel. Other than the longer hair, she had changed little since he had last been with her. Still vibrantly attractive with an intangible sense of damage about her. It was in the eyes. They weren’t the hardened cop’s eyes he had seen in so many other faces, including his own when he looked in the mirror. They were eyes that were hurt from the inside out. She had a victim’s eyes and that drew him to her.

“Why are you staring at me?” she suddenly said.

“What?”

“You’re so obvious.”

“I was just-”

He was saved by the waiter, who appeared and put down plates of food. Walling moved the files aside and he detected a small smile on her face. They continued their silence as they began to eat.

“This is good,” she finally said. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“So what were you looking for?”

“When?”

“When you were acting like you were reading the newspaper but you really weren’t.”

“Um, I… I guess I was trying to see if you were really interested in looking at this. You know, it sounds like you have a lot going. Maybe you don’t want to get into this sort of stuff again.”

She held up half her sandwich but stopped herself from taking a bite.

“I hate my job, okay? Or rather, I hate what I am doing right now. But it will get better. Another year and it will be better.”

“Fine. And this? This is okay?”

He pointed to the files on the table next to her plate.

“Yes, but there is too much. I can’t even begin to help you. It’s information overload.”

“I only have today.”

“Why can’t you delay the interview?”

“Because it’s not my interview to delay. And because it’s got politics on it. The prosecutor is running for DA. He needs headlines. He’s not going to wait for me to get up to speed.”

She nodded.

“All the way with Rick O’Shea.”

“I had to push my way into the case because of Gesto. They’re not going to slow down to let me catch up.”

She put her hand on top of the stack of files as if taking some sort of measure from them that would help her make a decision.

“Let me keep the files when you drive me back. I’ll finish my work, clock out and continue with this. I’ll come see you tonight at your place and give you what I’ve got. Everything.”

He stared at her, looking for the hidden meaning.

“When?”

“I don’t know, as soon as I get through it. Nine o’clock at the latest. I have an early start tomorrow. Will that work?”

He nodded. He wasn’t expecting this.

“Do you still live in that house up on the hill?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m there. Woodrow Wilson.”

“Good. My place is down off Beverly, not too far. I’ll come up to your place. I remember the view.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure what he had just invited into his life.

“Can I give you something to think about until then?” she asked. “Maybe do some checking?”

“Sure, what?”

“The name. Is that his real name?”

Bosch frowned. He had never considered the name. He assumed it was real. Waits was incarcerated. His fingerprints would have been run through the system to confirm identity.

“I assume so. His fingerprints matched a previous arrest. That previous time he tried to give a false name but a DMV thumbprint made him as Waits. Why?”

“Do you know what a reynard is? Reynard spelled R-e-y instead of R-a-y.”

Bosch shook his head. This was coming from left field. He hadn’t even been thinking about the name.

“No, what is it?”

“It’s a name for a young male fox. A young female is a vixen and the male is a reynard. I studied European folklore in college-back when I thought I wanted to be a diplomat. In medieval French folklore there is a character that is a fox named Reynard. He is a trickster. There are stories and epics about the scheming fox named Reynard. The character has appeared repeatedly through the centuries in books-children’s books mostly. You can Google it when you get back to the office and I am sure you will get many hits.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her he didn’t know how to Google. He barely knew how to e-mail his eight-year-old daughter. She tapped a finger on the stack of files.

“A young fox would be a small fox,” she said. “In the description Mr. Waits is small in stature. You take it all in context of the full name and-”

“The little fox waits,” Bosch said. “The young fox waits. The trickster waits.”

“For the vixen. Maybe that’s how he saw it with his victims.”

Bosch nodded. He was impressed.

“We missed that. I can do some checking on the ID as soon as I get back.”

“And hopefully I will have more for you tonight.”

She went back to eating and Bosch went back to watching her.

6

AS SOON AS BOSCH dropped Rachel Walling at her car he opened his phone and called his partner. Rider reported that she was finishing up the paperwork on the Matarese case and that they would soon be good to go on it and able to file charges at the DA’s office the following day.

“Good. Anything else?”

“I got the box on Fitzpatrick from Evidence Archives and it turned out to be two boxes.”

“Containing what?”

“Mostly old pawn records that I can tell were never even looked at. They were sopping wet back then from when the fire was put out. The guys from Riot Crimes put them in plastic tubs and they’ve been moldering in them ever since. And, man, do they stink.”

Bosch nodded as he computed this. It was a dead end and it didn’t matter. Raynard Waits was about to confess to the killing of Daniel Fitzpatrick anyway. He could tell that Rider was looking at it the same way. An uncoerced confession is a royal flush. It beats everything.

“Have you heard from Olivas or O’Shea?” Rider asked.

“Not yet. I was going to call Olivas but wanted to talk to you first. Do you know anybody in city licensing?”

“No, but if you want me to call over there I can in the morning. They’re closed now. What are you looking for?”

Bosch checked his watch. He didn’t realize how late it had gotten. He guessed that the omelet at Duffy’s was going to count as breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“I was thinking we should run Waits’s business and see how long he’s had it, whether there were ever any complaints, that sort of thing. Olivas and his partner should have done it but there is nothing in the files about it.”

She was silent for a while before speaking.

“You think that could have been the connection to the High Tower?”

“Maybe. Or maybe to Marie. She had a nice big picture window in her apartment. It isn’t something I remember coming up back then. But maybe we missed it.”

“Harry, you never miss a thing, but I’ll get on it right away.”

“The other thing is the guy’s name. It could be phony.”

“How so?”

He told her about contacting Rachel Walling and asking her to look at the files. This was initially met with resounding silence because Bosch had crossed one of those invisible LAPD lines by inviting the FBI into the case without command approval, even if the invitation to Walling was unofficial. But when Bosch told Rider about Reynard the Fox she dropped her silence and became skeptical.

“You think our window-washing serial killer was schooled in medieval folklore?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Walling says he could have picked it up from a children’s book. Doesn’t matter. There is enough there that I think we’ve got to look at birth certificates, make sure there is someone named Raynard Waits. In the first file, when he was popped for prowling in ’ninety-three, he was booked under the name Robert Saxon-the name he gave-but then they got Raynard Waits when his thumbprint hit the DMV computer.”

“What are you seeing there, Harry? If they had his thumb on file back then, I’m thinking maybe the name isn’t phony after all.”

“Maybe. But you know it isn’t impossible to get a DL with a false name on it in this state. What if Saxon actually was his real name but the computer spit out his alias and he just went with it? We’ve seen it happen before.”

“Then why keep the name after? He had a record under Waits. Why not go back to Saxon or whatever his real name is?”

“Good questions. I don’t know. But we’ve got to check it out.”

“Well, we’ve got him no matter what his name is. I’ll Google Raynard the Fox right now.”

“Spell it with an e.”

He waited and could hear her fingers on the computer keyboard.

“Got it,” she finally said. “There’s a lot of stuff about Reynard the Fox.”

“That’s what Walling said.”

There was silence for a long moment while Rider read. Then she spoke.

“Says here that part of the legend is that Reynard the Fox had a secret castle that nobody could find. He used all kinds of trickery to draw his victims close. Then he would take them back to the castle and eat them.”

That hung out there untouched for a while. Finally Bosch spoke.

“Do you have time to run another AutoTrack and see if you can get anything on Robert Saxon?”

“Sure.”

There was not a lot of conviction in her tone. But Bosch wasn’t going to let her off the hook. He wanted to keep things in motion.

“Read me his DOB off the arrest report,” Rider said.

“I can’t. I don’t have it here.”

“Where is it? I don’t see it on your desk.”

“I gave the files to Agent Walling. I’ll get them back later tonight. You’ll have to go on the computer to pull the arrest report.”

A lengthy silence went by before Rider responded.

“Harry, those are official investigative files. You know you shouldn’t have parted with them. And we’re going to need them tomorrow for the interview.”

“I told you, I’ll have them back tonight.”

“Let’s hope so. But I’ve gotta tell you, partner, you’re doing the cowboy thing again and I don’t like it very much.”

“Kiz, I’m just trying to keep things moving. And I want to be ready for this guy in that room tomorrow. What Walling is giving me will give us an edge.”

“Fine. I trust you. Maybe at some point you will trust me enough to ask my opinion before you go off and make decisions that affect both of us.”

Bosch felt his cheeks flare hot, mostly because he knew she was right. He didn’t say anything because he knew that apologizing for leaving her out of the loop wasn’t going to cut it.

“Call me back if Olivas gives us a time for tomorrow,” she said.

“You got it.”

After closing the phone Bosch thought about things for a moment. He tried to move on from his embarrassment over Rider’s indignation. He focused on the case and what he had left out of the investigation so far. After a few minutes he reopened the phone, called Olivas and asked if a time and place had been set for the Waits interview.

“Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock,” Olivas said. “Don’t be late.”

“Were you going to tell me, Olivas, or was I supposed to pick it up telepathically?”

“I just found out myself. You called me before I could call you.”

Bosch ignored his excuse.

“Where?”

“The DA’s office. We’ll have him brought down from high-power and set him up in an interview room here.”

“You’re at the DA’s now?”

“I had some things to go over with Rick.”

Bosch let that float out there without a response.

“Anything else?” Olivas asked.

“Yeah, I have a question,” Bosch said. “Where’s your partner in all of this, Olivas? What happened to Colbert?”

“He’s in Hawaii. He’ll be back next week. If this thing carries over till then he’ll be part of it.”

Bosch wondered if Colbert even knew what was happening or that he was missing out on a potentially career-making case while he was off on vacation. From everything Bosch knew about Olivas, there would be no surprise if he was scheming to ace out his own partner on a glory case.

“Ten o’clock, then?” Bosch asked.

“Ten.”

“Anything else I should know, Olivas?”

He was curious about why Olivas was at the DA’s office but didn’t want to directly ask why.

“Matter of fact, there is one more thing. Sort of a delicate thing, you could say. I’ve been talking to Rick about it.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, take a guess at what I’m looking at here.”

Bosch blew out his breath. Olivas was going to string it out. Bosch had known him less than one day and already knew without a doubt that he didn’t like the man and never would.

“I have no idea, Olivas. What?”

“Your fifty-ones from Gesto.”

He was referring to the Investigative Chronology, a master listing kept by date and time of all aspects of a case, ranging from an accounting of detectives’ time and movements to notations on routine phone calls and messages to media inquiries and tips from citizens. Usually, these were handwritten with all manner of shorthand and abbreviations employed as they were updated throughout each day, sometimes hourly. Then, when a page became full, it was typed up on a form called a 51, which would be complete and legible when and if the case ever moved into the courts, and lawyers, judges and juries needed to review the investigative files. The original handwritten pages were then discarded.

“What about them?” Bosch asked.

“I’m looking at the last line on page fourteen. The listing is for September twenty-ninth, nineteen ninety-three, at six-forty p.m. Must’ve been quitting time. The initials on the entry are JE.”

Bosch felt the bile rising in his throat. Whatever it was Olivas was getting at, he was enjoying milking it.

“Obviously,” he said impatiently, “that would’ve been my partner at the time, Jerry Edgar. What’s the entry say, Olivas?”

“It says… I’ll just read it. It says, ‘Robert Saxon DOB eleven/three/’seventy-one. Saw Times story. Was at Mayfair and saw MG alone. Nobody following.’ It gives Saxon’s phone number and that’s all it says. But that’s enough, Hotshot. You know what it means?”

Bosch did. He had just given the name Robert Saxon to Kiz Rider to background. It was either an alias or perhaps the real name of the man known currently as Raynard Waits. That name on the 51s now connected Waits to the Gesto case. It also meant that thirteen years ago Bosch and Edgar had at least a shot at Waits/Saxon. But for reasons he didn’t recall or didn’t know about they never took it. He did not recall the specific entry in the 51s. There were dozens of pages in the Investigative Chronology filled with one- and two-line entries. Remembering them all-even with his frequent returns to the investigation over the years-would have been impossible.

It took him a long moment to find his voice.

“That’s the only mention in the murder book?” he asked.

“That I’ve seen,” Olivas said. “I’ve been through everything twice. I even missed it the first time through. Then the second time I said, ‘Hey, I know that name.’ It’s an alias Waits used back in the early nineties. It should be in the files you have.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“It meant he called you guys, Bosch. The killer called you, and you and your partner blew it. Looks like nobody ever followed up with him or ran his name through the box. You had the killer’s alias and a phone number and didn’t do anything. ’Course, you didn’t know he was the killer. Just some citizen calling in about what he saw. He must’ve been trying to play you guys in some way, trying to find out about the case. Only Edgar didn’t play. It was late in the day and he probably wanted to get to that first martini.”

Bosch said nothing and Olivas was only too happy to continue to fill the void.

“Too bad, you know? Maybe this whole thing could’ve ended right then. I guess we’ll ask Waits about it in the morning.”

Olivas and his petty world no longer mattered to Bosch. The barbs couldn’t penetrate the thick, dark cloud that was already coming down on him. For he knew that if the name Robert Saxon had come up in the Gesto investigation, then it should have been routinely run through the computer. It would have scored a match in the alias database and taken them to Raynard Waits and his prior arrest for prowling. That would have made him a suspect. Not just a person of interest like Anthony Garland. A strong suspect. And that would have undoubtedly taken the investigation in a whole new direction.

But that never happened. Apparently neither Edgar nor Bosch had run the name through the box. It was an oversight that Bosch now knew had probably cost the lives of the two women who ended up in trash bags and the seven others Waits was going to tell them about the next day.

“Olivas?” Bosch said.

“What, Bosch?”

“Make sure you bring the book with you tomorrow. I want to see the fifty-ones.”

“Oh, I will. We’ll need it to do the interview.”

Bosch closed his phone without another word. He felt the pace of his breathing increase. Soon he was close to hyperventilating. His back felt hot against the car seat and he was starting to sweat. He opened the windows and tried to slow the measure of each breath. He was close to Parker Center but pulled to a stop at the curb.

It was every detective’s nightmare. The worst-case scenario. A lead ignored or bungled, allowing something awful to be loose in the world. Something dark and evil, destroying life after life as it moved through the shadows. It was true that all detectives made mistakes and had to live with the regrets. But Bosch instinctively knew that this one was malignant. It would grow and grow inside until it darkened everything and he became the last victim, the last life destroyed.

He pulled out from the curb and into traffic to get air moving through the windows. He made a screeching U-turn and headed home.

7

FROM THE REAR DECK OF HIS HOUSE Bosch watched the sky start to dim. He lived up on Woodrow Wilson Drive in a cantilevered house that clung to the side of the hill like a cartoon character hanging on to the edge of a cliff. Sometimes Bosch felt like that character. Like on this night. He was drinking vodka sprinkled liberally over ice, the first time he’d gone with hard liquor since coming back on the job the year before. The vodka made his throat feel as though he had swallowed a torch, but that was okay. He was trying to burn away his thoughts and cauterize his nerve endings.

Bosch considered himself a true detective, one who took it all inside and cared. Everybody counts or nobody counts. That’s what he always said. It made him good at the job but it also made him vulnerable. The mistakes could get to him and this one was the worst of all mistakes.

He shook the ice and vodka and took another deep drink until he finished the glass. How could anything so cold burn so intensely hot on the way down? He walked back inside the house to put more vodka on the ice. He wished he had some lemon or lime to squeeze in the drink but he had made no stops on his way home. In the kitchen, with fresh drink in hand, he picked up the phone and called Jerry Edgar’s cell phone. He still knew the number by heart. A partner’s number was something you never forgot.

Edgar answered and Bosch could hear TV noise in the background. He was at home.

“Jerry, it’s me. I gotta ask you something.”

“Harry? Where are you?”

“Home, man. But I’m working on one of our old ones.”

“Oh, well let me go down the list of Harry Bosch obsessions. Let’s see, Fernandez?”

“No.”

“That kid, Spike whatever-her-name-was?”

“Nope.”

“I give up, man. You’ve got too many ghosts for me to keep track of.”

“Gesto.”

“Shit, I should’ve gone with her first. I know you’ve been working it on and off since you’ve been back. What’s the question?”

“There’s an entry in the fifty-ones. It’s got your initials on it. Says a guy named Robert Saxon called and said he saw her in the Mayfair.”

Edgar waited a moment before replying.

“That’s it? That’s the entry?”

“That’s it. You remember talking to the guy?”

“Shit, Harry, I don’t remember entries in cases I worked last month. That’s why we have the fifty-ones. Who is Saxon?”

Bosch shook his glass and took a drink before answering. The ice tumbled against his mouth, and vodka spilled down his cheek. He wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket and then brought the phone back to his mouth.

“He’s the guy… I think.”

“You’ve got the killer, Harry?”

“Pretty sure. But… we could’ve had him back then. Maybe.”

“I don’t remember anybody named Saxon calling me. He must’ve been trying to get his rocks off, calling us. Harry, are you drunk, man?”

“Gettin’ there.”

“What’s wrong, man? If you got the guy it’s better late than never. You should be happy. I’m happy. Did you call her parents yet?”

Bosch was leaning against the kitchen counter and felt the need to sit down. But the phone was on a cord and he couldn’t go out to the living room or the deck. Being careful not to spill his drink, he slid down to the floor, his back against the cabinets.

“No, I haven’t called them.”

“What am I missing here, Harry? You’re fucked up and that means something’s wrong.”

Bosch waited a moment.

“What’s wrong is that Marie Gesto wasn’t the first and she wasn’t the last.”

Edgar was silent as it registered. The background sound of television went quiet and he then spoke in the weak voice of a child asking what his punishment will be.

“How many came after?”

“Looks like nine,” Bosch said in an equally quiet voice. “I’ll probably know more tomorrow.”

“Jesus,” Edgar whispered.

Bosch nodded. Part of him was angry with Edgar and wanted to blame him for everything. But the other part said they were partners and they shared the good and the bad. Those 51s were in the murder book for both of them to read and react to.

“So you don’t remember the call?”

“No, nothing. It’s too far back. All I can say is that if there was no follow-up, then the call didn’t sound legit or I got all there was to get from the caller. If he was the killer, he was probably just fucking with us anyway.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t put the name in the box. It would have drawn a match in the alias files. Maybe that’s what he wanted.”

They were both silent as their minds sifted the sands of disaster. Finally, Edgar spoke.

“Harry, did you come up with this? Who knows about it?”

“A Homicide guy from Northeast came up with it. He has the Gesto file. He knows and a DA working the suspect knows. It doesn’t matter. We fucked up.”

And people are dead, he thought but didn’t say.

“Who is the DA?” Edgar asked. “Can this be contained?”

Bosch knew that Edgar had already moved on to thinking about how to limit the career damage something like this could cause. Bosch wondered whether Edgar’s guilt over the nine victims that came after Marie Gesto had simply vanished or just been conveniently compartmentalized. Edgar was not a true detective. He kept his heart out of it.

“I doubt it,” Bosch said. “And I don’t really care. We should have been onto this guy in ’ninety-three but we missed it and he’s been out there cutting up women ever since.”

“What are you talking about, cutting up? Is this the Echo Park Bagman you’re talking about? What’s his name, Waits? He was our guy?”

Bosch nodded and held the cold glass against his left temple.

“That’s right. He’s going to confess tomorrow. Eventually it will get out because Rick O’Shea is going to run with it. There will be no way to hide it because some smart reporter is going to ask whether Waits ever came up way back when in the Gesto case.”

“So we say no, because that’s the truth. Waits’s name never came up. It was an alias and we don’t need to tell them about that. You have to make O’Shea see that, Harry.”

His voice had an urgent tone to it. Bosch now regretted making the call. He wanted Edgar to share the burden of guilt with him, not figure out a way to avoid blame.

“Whatever, Jerry.”

“Harry, that’s easy for you to say. You’re downtown on your second ride. I’m up for one of the D-two slots in RHD and this thing will fuck up any chance I have if it gets out.”

Bosch now wanted to get off the line.

“Like I said, whatever. I’ll do what I can, Jerry. But you know, sometimes when you fuck up you have to take the consequences.”

“Not this time, partner. Not now.”

It angered Bosch that Edgar had pulled the old “partner act,” calling on Bosch to protect him out of loyalty and the unwritten rule that the bond of partnership lasts forever and is stronger than even a marriage.

“I said I’d do what I can,” he told Edgar. “I have to go now, partner.”

He got up off the floor and hung the phone on the wall.

Before returning to the back deck he educated the ice in his glass once more with vodka. Outside, he went to the rail and leaned his elbows down on it. The traffic noise from the freeway far down the hill was a steady hiss that he was used to. He looked up at the sky and saw that the sunset was a dirty pink. He saw a red-tailed hawk floating on an upper current. It reminded him of the one he had seen way back on the day they had found Marie Gesto’s car.

His cell phone started to chime and he struggled to pull it out of his jacket pocket. Finally, he got it out and opened it before he lost the call. He hadn’t had time to look at the caller ID on the screen. It was Kiz Rider.

“Harry, did you hear?”

“Yeah, I heard. I just talked to Edgar about it. All he cares about is protecting his career and his chances at RHD.”

“Harry, what are you talking about?”

Bosch paused. He was confused.

“Didn’t that asshole Olivas tell you? I thought by now he would have told the whole world.”

“Told me what? I was calling to see if you heard whether the interview’s been set for tomorrow.”

Bosch realized his mistake. He walked to the edge of the deck and dumped his drink over the side.

“Ten o’clock tomorrow at the DA’s office. They’ll put him in a room there. I’m sorry, Kiz, I guess I forgot to call you.”

“Are you all right? It sounds like you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m home, Kiz. I’m entitled.”

“What did you think I was calling about?”

Bosch held his breath and composed his thoughts, then spoke.

“Edgar and I, we should have had Waits or Saxon or whatever his name is back in ’ninety-three. Edgar spoke to him on the phone and he used the name Saxon. But neither of us ran the name on the computer. We screwed up bad, Kiz.”

Now she was silent as she tracked what he had said. It didn’t take her long to realize the connection the alias would have given them to Waits.

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Tell it to the nine victims that followed.”

He was staring down at the brush beneath the deck.

“You going to be all right?”

“I’m all right. I just have to figure out how to get past this so I’m ready for tomorrow.”

“Do you think you should stick with it at this point? Maybe one of the other OU teams should take over for us.”

Bosch responded immediately. He wasn’t sure how he was going to deal with the fatal mistake of thirteen years ago but he wasn’t going to walk away now.

“No, Kiz, I’m not leaving the case. I might have missed him in ’ninety-three but I’m not going to miss him now.”

“Okay, Harry.”

She didn’t hang up but she didn’t say anything after that. Bosch could hear a siren from far down in the pass below.

“Harry, can I make a suggestion?”

He knew what was coming.

“Sure.”

“I think you should put away the booze and start thinking about tomorrow. When we get into that room it’s not going to matter what mistakes were made in the past. It will be all about the moment with this man. We’ll need to be frosty.”

Bosch smiled. He didn’t think he’d heard that term since he’d been on a patrol in Vietnam.

“Stay frosty,” he said.

“That’s right. You want to meet in the squad and walk over from there?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there early. I want to go by the Hall of Records first.”

Bosch heard a knock at his front door and started into the house.

“Me, too, then,” Rider said. “I’ll meet you in the squad. Are you going to be all right tonight?”

Bosch opened the front door and Rachel Walling was standing there holding the files with both hands.

“Yes, Kiz,” he said into the phone. “I’ll be fine. Good night.”

He closed the phone and invited Rachel in.

8

SINCE RACHEL HAD BEEN in his home before, she didn’t bother looking around. She put the files down on the small table in the dining area and looked at Bosch.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I sort of forgot you were coming by.”

“I can leave if-”

“No, I’m glad you’re here. Did you find more time to look at the stuff?”

“A little bit. I have some notes and some thoughts that might help you tomorrow. And if you want me to be there, I can make arrangements to be there-unofficially.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Officially, unofficially doesn’t matter. This is Rick O’Shea’s ticket and if I bring an FBI agent into it, then that will be my ticket out.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Everybody thinks that all the bureau wants are the headlines. It’s not always like that.”

“I know but I can’t turn this into the test case for O’Shea. Do you want something to drink?”

He gestured to the table so that she could sit down.

“What are you having?”

“I was having vodka. I think I’m going to switch to coffee now.”

“Can you make a vodka tonic?”

He nodded.

“I can make one without tonic,” he said.

“Tomato juice?”

“Nope.”

“Cranberry juice?”

“Just vodka.”

“Hard-core Harry. I think I’ll have coffee.”

He went into the kitchen to get a pot brewing. He heard her pull out a chair at the table and sit down. When he came back he saw that she had spread the files out and had a page of notes in front of her.

“Did you do anything about the name yet?” she asked.

“In motion. We’ll start early tomorrow and hopefully we’ll know something before we get into the room with this guy at ten.”

She nodded and waited for him to sit down across from her.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Ready.”

She leaned forward and looked at her notes, talking at first without looking up from them.

“Whoever he is, whatever his name is, he’s obviously smart and manipulative,” she said. “Look at his size. Short and slightly built. This means he had a good act. He somehow was able to get these victims to go with him. That’s the key thing. It is unlikely he used physical force-at least not at the start. He is too small for that. Instead, he employed charm and cunning and he was practiced and polished at it. Even if a girl is just off the bus on Hollywood Boulevard she is going to be wary and have some measure of street smarts. He was smarter.”

Bosch nodded.

“The trickster,” he said.

She nodded and referred to a short stack of documents.

“I did a little Internet work on that,” she said. “In the Reynard epic he is often depicted as a member of the clergy and he is able to woo his audience closer to him that way so that he can grab them. The clergy at the time-we’re talking about the twelfth century-was the ultimate authority. Today it would be different. The ultimate authority would be the government, notably represented by the police.”

“You’re saying he might have posed as a cop?”

“Just a thought, but it’s possible. He had to have had something that worked.”

“What about a weapon? Or money? He could have just flashed the green. These women… these girls would have gone for money.”

“I think it was more than a weapon and more than money. To use either of them you still need to get close. Money doesn’t lower the safety threshold. It had to be something else. His style or patter, something more than or in addition to money. When he got them close, then he would use the weapon.”

Bosch nodded and wrote a few notes on a page of a notebook he grabbed off a shelf behind where he sat.

“What else?” he asked.

“Do you know how long he’s had his business?”

“No, but we’ll know tomorrow morning. Why?”

“Well, because it shows another dimension of his skills. But my interest in it is not just because he ran his own business. I’m also curious about the choice of business. It allowed him to be mobile and to travel throughout the city. If you saw his van in your neighborhood, there would be no cause for concern-except late at night, which obviously led to his downfall. And the job also allowed him inside people’s homes. I’m curious as to whether he started the job to help him fulfill his fantasies-the killings-or already had the business before he began acting on these impulses.”

Bosch made a few more notes. Rachel had a good point with her questions about the job. He had questions that ran along the same lines. Could Waits have had his business thirteen years before? Had he cleaned windows at the High Tower and known about the vacant apartment? Maybe it was another mistake, a connection they had missed.

“I know I don’t need to tell you this, Harry, but you are going to have to be careful and cautious with him.”

He looked up from his notes.

“Why?”

“Something about what I see here-and obviously this is a very rushed response to a lot of material-but something doesn’t fit right about this.”

“What?”

She composed her thoughts before answering.

“You have to remember that it was a fluke that he was even caught. Officers looking for a burglar stumbled onto a killer. Up until the moment those officers found the bags in his van, Waits was completely unknown to law enforcement. He had been flying below the radar for years. As I said, it shows he had a certain level of cunning and skill. And it says something about the pathology as well. He wasn’t sending notes to the police like the Zodiac or BTK. He wasn’t displaying his victims as an affront to society or a taunt to police. He was quiet. He moved below the surface. And he chose victims, with the exception of the first two killings, who could be pulled under without leaving so much as a ripple behind. You understand what I mean?”

Bosch hesitated for a moment, not sure he wanted to tell her about the mistake he and Edgar had made so many years ago.

She read him.

“What?”

He didn’t answer.

“Harry, I don’t want to be spinning my wheels here. If there is something you know that I need to know, then tell me or I might as well get up and go.”

“Just hold on until I get the coffee. I hope you like it black.”

He got up and went into the kitchen and poured coffee into two mugs. He found some packets of sugar and sweetener in a basket where he threw condiments that came with to-go orders and brought them out for Rachel. She put sweetener in her mug.

“Okay,” she said after the first sip. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“My partner and I made a mistake back when we worked this in ’ninety-three. I don’t know if it contradicts what you just said about Waits staying beneath the radar but it looks like he called us back then. About three weeks into the case. He talked to my partner on the phone and he used an alias. At least we think it was an alias. With this Reynard the Fox thing you’ve brought up, maybe he used his real name. Anyway, we blew it. We never checked him out.”

“What do you mean?”

He slowly, reluctantly, told her in detail about the call from Olivas and his finding of Waits’s alias in the 51s. She cast her eyes down at the table and nodded as he told it. She worked the pen she was holding in a circle on the page of notes in front of her.

“And the rest is history,” he said. “He kept right on going… and killing people.”

“When did you find this out?” she asked.

“Right after I left you today.”

She nodded.

“Which explains why you were hitting the vodka so hard.”

“I guess so.”

“I thought… never mind what I thought.”

“No, it wasn’t because of seeing you, Rachel. Seeing you was-I mean, is-actually very nice.”

She took up her mug and drank from it, then looked down at her work and seemed to steel herself to move on.

“Well, I don’t see how his calling you back then changes my conclusions,” she said. “Yes, it does seem out of character for him to have made contact under any name. But you have to remember the Gesto case took place in the early stages of his formation. There are a number of aspects involving Gesto that don’t fit with the rest. So for it to be the only case where he made contact would not be all that unusual.”

“Okay.”

She referred to her notes again, continuing to avoid his eyes since he had told her of the mistake.

“So where was I before you brought that up?”

“You said that after the first two killings he chose victims he could pull beneath the surface without notice.”

“Exactly. What I’m saying is that he was getting his satisfaction in the work. He didn’t need anybody else to know he was doing it. He wasn’t getting off on the attention. He wanted no attention. His fulfillment was self-contained. It needed no outside or public component.”

“So then, what bothers you?”

She looked up at him.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. But you look like something about your own profile of the guy bothers you. Something you don’t believe.”

She nodded, acknowledging that he had read her correctly.

“It’s just that his profile doesn’t support someone who would cooperate at this stage of the game, who would tell you about the other crimes. What I see here is someone who would never admit to it. Any of it. He would deny it, or at the very least keep quiet about it, until they put the needle in his arm.”

“All right, so that’s a contradiction. Don’t all of these guys have contradictions? They’re all messed up in some way. No profile is ever a hundred percent, right?”

She nodded.

“That’s true. But it still doesn’t fit and so I guess what I am trying to say is that from his point of view, there is something else. A higher goal, if you will. A plan. This whole confession thing is indicative of manipulation.”

Bosch nodded like what she had said was obvious.

“Of course it is. He’s manipulating O’Shea and the system. He’s using this to avoid the needle.”

“Maybe so, but there may be other motives as well. Be careful.”

She said the last two words sternly, as if she were correcting a subordinate or even a child.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Bosch said.

He decided not to dwell on it.

“What do you think about the dismemberment?” he asked. “What’s it say?”

“I actually spent most of my time studying the autopsies. I have always believed that you learn the most about a killer from his victims. Cause of death in each case was determined to be strangulation. There were no stab wounds on the bodies. There was just the dismemberment. These are two different things. I think the dismemberment was simply part of the cleanup. It was a way for him to easily dispose of the bodies. Again, it shows his skills, planning and organization. The more I read, the more I realized how lucky we were to get him that night.”

She ran a finger down the sheet of notes she had written and then continued.

“I find the bags very intriguing. Three bags for two women. One bag held both heads and all four hands. It was as if he possibly had a separate destination or plan for the bag containing the identifiers; the heads and the hands. Have they been able to determine where he was going when they pulled him over?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Not really. The assumption was that he was going to bury the bags somewhere around the stadium, but that doesn’t really work because they saw him drive off of Stadium Way and into a neighborhood. He was driving away from the stadium and the woods and the places he could bury the bags. There were some open lots down in the neighborhood and access to the hillsides below the stadium, but it seems to me that if he was going to bury them he would not have gone into a neighborhood. He would go deep into the park, where there was less chance of being noticed.”

“Exactly.”

She glanced at some of her other documents.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Well, this Reynard the Fox thing might have nothing to do with all of this. It may all be coincidence.”

“But in the epic Reynard had a castle that was his secret hideaway.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I didn’t think you had a computer, let alone knew how to research on line.”

“I don’t. My partner did the search. But I gotta tell you, I was over in the neighborhood right before I called you today. I didn’t see any castle.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t take everything so literally,” she said.

“Well, there’s still a big question about the Reynard stuff,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Did you look at the booking sheet in the file? He wouldn’t talk to Olivas and his partner but he did answer the protocol questions at the jail when he was booked. He listed his education level as high school. No higher education. I mean, look, the guy’s a window washer. How would he even know about this medieval fox?”

“I don’t know. But as I said, the character has popped up repeatedly in all cultures. Children’s books, television shows, there are any number of ways the character could have made an impact on this man. And don’t underestimate this man’s intelligence because he washed windows for a living. He owned and operated a business. That is significant in terms of showing some of his capabilities. The fact that he operated as a killer with impunity for so long is another strong indicator of intelligence.”

Bosch wasn’t completely convinced. He fired off another question that would take her in a new direction.

“How do the first two fit in? He went from public spectacle with the riots and then a big media splash with Marie Gesto to, as you say, diving completely beneath the surface.”

“Every serial killer’s MO changes. The simple answer is that he was on a learning curve. I think the first killing-with the male victim-was an opportunity killing. Like a spree killing. He had thought about killing for a long time but wasn’t sure he could do it. He found himself in a situation-the chaos of the riots-where he could test himself. It was an opportunity to see if he could actually kill someone and then get away with it. The sex of the victim was not important. The identity of the victim was not important. At that moment he just wanted to find out if he could do it and almost any victim would do.”

Bosch could see that. He nodded.

“So he did,” he said. “And then we come to Marie Gesto. He picks a victim who draws the police and the media’s attention.”

“He was still learning, forming,” she said. “He knew he could kill and now he wanted to go out and hunt. She was his first victim. She crossed his path, something about her fit his fantasy program and she simply became prey. At that time his focus was on victim acquisition and self-protection. In that case he chose badly. He chose a woman who would be sorely missed and whose disappearance would draw an immediate response. He probably didn’t know this going into it. But he learned from it, from the heat he brought upon himself.”

Bosch nodded.

“Anyway, after Gesto he learned to add a third element to his focus: victim backgrounding. He made sure that he chose victims who not only met the needs of his program but who would also come from a societal fringe, where their comings and goings would not be cause for notice, let alone alarm.”

“And he went beneath the surface.”

“Exactly. He went under and he stayed there. Until we got lucky in Echo Park.”

Bosch nodded. All of this was helpful.

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” he asked. “About how many of these guys are out there. The under-the-surface killers.”

Walling nodded.

“Yes. Sometimes it scares me to death. Makes me wonder how long this guy would have gone on killing if we hadn’t gotten so lucky.”

She checked her notes and said nothing further.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Bosch asked.

Walling looked up at him sharply and he realized he had chosen his words poorly.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly. “This is all great and it’s going to help me a lot. I just meant is there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

She held his eyes for a moment before replying.

“Yes, there is something else. It’s not about this, though.”

“Then, what is it?”

“You’ve got to give yourself a break on that phone call, Harry. You can’t let that bring you down. The work ahead is too important.”

Bosch nodded insincerely. It was easy for her to say that. She wouldn’t have to live with the ghosts of all the women Raynard Waits would begin to tell them about the next morning.

“Don’t just nod it off like that,” Rachel said. “Do you know how many cases I worked in Behavioral where the guy kept killing? How many times we got calls and notes from these creeps but still couldn’t get to them before the next victim was dead?”

“I know, I know.”

“We all have ghosts. It’s part of the job. With some jobs it’s a bigger part than with others. I had a boss once, he used to say, if you can’t stand the ghosts, get out of the haunted house.”

He nodded again, this time while looking directly at her. He meant it this time.

“How many murders have you solved, Harry? How many killers have you put away?”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep track.”

“Maybe you should.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is, how many of those killers would have done it again if you hadn’t taken them down? More than a few, I bet.”

“Probably.”

“There you go. You’re way ahead in the long run. Think about that.”

“Okay.”

His mind flashed on one of those killers. Bosch had arrested Roger Boylan many years before. He drove a pickup with a camper shell on the back. He had used marijuana to entice a couple young girls into the back while parked up at Hansen Dam. He raped and killed them, injecting them with an overdose of a horse tranquilizer. He then threw their bodies into the dry bed of the nearby slough. When Bosch put the cuffs on him Boylan had only one thing to say.

“Too bad. I was just getting started.”

Bosch wondered how many victims there would have been if he hadn’t stopped him. He wondered if he could trade Roger Boylan for Raynard Waits and call it even. On the one hand, he thought he could. On the other hand, he knew it wasn’t a zero-sum game. The true detective knew that coming out even in homicide work was not good enough. Not by a long shot.

“I hope I’ve helped,” Rachel said.

He looked up from the memory of Boylan to Rachel’s eyes.

“I think you did. I think I’ll know better who and what I am dealing with when I go into the room with him tomorrow.”

She stood up from the table.

“I meant about the other thing.”

Bosch stood.

“That, too. You’ve helped a lot.”

He came around the table so he could walk her to the door.

“Be careful, Harry.”

“I know. You said that. But you don’t have to worry. It will be a full-security situation.”

“I don’t mean the physical danger as much as I mean the psychological. Guard yourself, Harry. Please.”

“I will,” he said.

It was time to go to the door but she was hesitating. She looked down at the contents of the file spread across the table and then at Bosch.

“I was hoping you would call me sometime,” she said. “But not about a case.”

Bosch had to take a few moments before coming back.

“I thought because of what I said-what we said-that…”

He wasn’t sure how to finish. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. She reached up and put her hand lightly on his chest. He took a step closer, coming into her space. He then put his arms around her and pulled her close.

9

LATER, AFTER THEY HAD made love, Bosch and Rachel remained in bed, talking about anything they could think of except what they had just done. Eventually they came back around to the case and the next morning’s interview with Raynard Waits.

“I can’t believe that after all this time I’m going to sit down face-to-face with her killer,” Bosch said. “It’s kind of like a dream. I actually have dreamed of catching the guy. I mean, it was never Waits in the dream but I dreamed about closing out the case.”

“Who was it in the dream?” she asked.

Her head was resting on his chest. He couldn’t see her face but he could smell her hair. Under the sheets she had one leg over one of his.

“It was this guy I always thought could be good for it. But I never had anything on him. I guess because he was always an asshole, I wanted it to be him.”

“Well, did he have any connection to Gesto?”

Bosch tried to shrug but it was difficult with their bodies so entwined.

“He knew about the garage where we found the car and had an ex-girlfriend who was a ringer for Gesto. And he had anger-management issues. No real evidence. I just thought it was him. I followed him once way back during the first year of the investigation. He was working as a security guard up in the oil fields behind Baldwin Hills. You know where that is?”

“You mean where you see the oil pumps when you’re coming in on La Cienega from the airport?”

“Yeah, right. That’s the place. Well, this kid’s family owned a chunk of those fields, and his old man was trying to straighten him out, I guess. You know, make him work for a living even though they had all the money in the world. So he was working security up there and I was watching him one day. He came across these kids who were fooling around up in there, just trespassing and messing around. They were just kids, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Two boys from the nearby neighborhood.”

“What did he do to them?”

“He drew down on them, then handcuffed them to one of the pumps. Their backs were to each other and they were cuffed around this pole that was sort of like an anchor for the pump. And then he got back in his pickup and drove away.”

“He just left them there?”

“That’s what I thought he was doing but he was coming back. I was watching with binoculars from a ridge all the way across La Cienega and could see the whole oil field from up there. He had another guy with him and they drove over to this shack where I guess they kept samples of the oil they were pumping out of the ground. They went in there and came out with two buckets of this stuff, put ’em in the back of the pickup and drove back. They then dumped that shit all over the two kids.”

Rachel got up on one elbow and looked at him.

“And you just watched this happen?”

“I told you, I was clear across La Cienega on the next ridge. Before they built houses up there. If he went any further I was going to try to intervene somehow, but then he let them go. Besides, I didn’t want him to know I was watching him. At that point he didn’t know I was thinking of him for Gesto.”

She nodded like she understood and no longer questioned his lack of action.

“He just let them go?” she asked.

“He uncuffed them, kicked one of them in the butt and let them go. I could tell they were crying and scared.”

Rachel shook her head in disgust.

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“Anthony Garland. His father is Thomas Rex Garland. You might have heard of him.”

Rachel shook her head, not recognizing the name.

“Well, Anthony might not have been Gesto’s killer but he sounds like a complete asshole.”

Bosch nodded.

“He is. You want to see him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got a ‘greatest hits’ video. I’ve had him in an interview room three times in thirteen years. Each interview was on tape.”

“You have the tape here?”

Bosch nodded, knowing that she might find it strange or off-putting that he studied interrogation tapes at home.

“I had them copied onto one tape. I brought it home to watch the last time I worked the case.”

Rachel seemed to consider his answer before she responded.

“Then pop it in. Let’s take a look at this guy.”

Bosch got out of bed, slipped on his boxer shorts and turned on the lamp. He went out to the living room and looked in the cabinet beneath the television. He had several crime scene tapes from old cases, as well as various other tapes and DVDs. He finally located a VHS tape marked GARLAND on the box and took it back to the bedroom.

He had a television with a built-in VCR on the bureau. He turned it on, slid in the tape and sat on the edge of the bed with the remote. He kept his boxers on now that he and Rachel were working. Rachel stayed under the covers and as the tape was cuing up she reached a foot toward him and tapped her toes on his back.

“Is this what you do with all the girls you bring here? Show them your interrogation techniques?”

Bosch glanced back at her and was almost serious with his response.

“Rachel, I think you’re the only person in the world I could do this with.”

She smiled.

“I think I get you, Bosch.”

He looked back at the screen. The tape was playing. He hit the mute with the remote.

“This first one is March eleventh of ’ninety-four. It’s about six months after Gesto disappeared and we were grasping for anything. We didn’t have enough to arrest him-it wasn’t even close-but I was able to convince him to come into the station to give a statement. He didn’t know I had the bead on him. He thought he was just going to talk about the apartment where his ex-girlfriend had lived.”

On the screen was a grainy color picture of a small room with a table at which two men sat. One was a much younger-looking Harry Bosch and the other was a man in his early twenties with wavy surfer-white hair. Anthony Garland. He was wearing a T-shirt that said Lakers across the chest. The sleeves were tight on his arms, and tattoo ink was visible on his left biceps. Black barbed wire wrapped the muscles of the arm.

“He came in voluntarily. He came in looking like he was headed to a day at the beach. Anyway…”

He brought up the sound. On the screen, Garland was looking all around the room with a slight smile on his face.

“So this is where it happens, huh?” he asked.

“Where what happens?” Bosch asked.

“You know, you break the bad guys down and they confess to all the crimes.”

He smiled coyly.

“Sometimes,” Bosch said. “But let’s talk about Marie Gesto. Did you know her?”

“No, I told you I didn’t know her. Never saw her before in my life.”

“Before what?”

“Before you showed me her picture.”

“So if somebody told me you knew her, then they’d be lying.”

“Fucking-A right. Who told you that shit?”

“But you knew about the empty garage at the High Tower, right?”

“Yeah, well, my girlfriend had just moved out and so, yeah, I knew the place was empty. That doesn’t mean I stashed the car in there. Look, you asked me all of this stuff at the house. I thought there was something new going on here. Am I under arrest or something?”

“No, Anthony, you are not under arrest. I just wanted you to come down so we could go over some of this stuff.”

“I’ve already gone over it with you.”

“But that was before we knew some other things about you and about her. Now it’s important to go over the same ground again. Make a formal record of it.”

Garland’s face seemed to momentarily contort in anger. He leaned across the table.

“What things? What the fuck are you talking about? I had nothing to do with this. I’ve told you that at least twice now. Why aren’t you out there looking for the person who did it?”

Bosch waited until Garland calmed a bit before answering.

“Because maybe I think I’m with the person who did it.”

“Fuck you, man. You’ve got nothing on me because there’s nothing to get. I’ve told you this from day one. I’m not the guy!”

Now Bosch leaned across the table. Their faces were a foot apart.

“I know what you told me, Anthony. But that was before I went to Austin and talked to your girlfriend. She told me some things about you that, frankly, Anthony, require me to pay a little more attention.”

“Fuck her. She’s a whore!”

“Yeah? If she’s all of that, then why’d you get angry with her when she left you? Why did she have to run from you? Why didn’t you just let her go?”

“Because nobody leaves me. I leave them. Okay?”

Bosch leaned back and nodded.

“Okay. So in as much detail as you can remember, tell me what you did on September ninth of last year. Tell me where you went and who you saw.”

Using the remote, Bosch started fast-forwarding the tape.

“He didn’t have an alibi for the time we believed Marie was grabbed outside the supermarket. But we can skip ahead here because that part of the interview took forever.”

Rachel was now sitting up in the bed behind him with the sheet wrapped around her. Bosch looked back at her.

“What do you think of this guy so far?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders.

“He seems like a typical rich asshole. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

Bosch nodded.

“This now is two years later. The lawyers from his daddy’s firm slapped a TRO on me and I could only interview the kid if he had counsel present. So there’s nothing much here but there’s one thing I want you to see. His lawyer in this is Dennis Franks, an associate of Cecil Dobbs, a big-shot Century City guy who handles things for T. Rex.”

“T. Rex?”

“The father. Thomas Rex Garland. Likes to be called T. Rex.”

“Figures.”

Bosch slowed the fast-forward down a notch so he could better see where the action on the tape was. On the screen was Garland sitting at a table with a man right next to him. As the image moved in fast motion the lawyer and his client conferred many times in mouth-to-ear communications. Bosch finally slowed it to normal speed and the audio came back up. It was Franks, the lawyer, doing the talking.

“My client has fully cooperated with you but you continue to harass him at work and home with these suspicions and questions that have not one ounce of evidentiary support.”

“I’m working on that part of it, Counselor,” Bosch said. “And when I get it, there won’t be a lawyer in the world who can help him.”

“Fuck you, Bosch!” Garland said. “You better hope you never come for me alone, man. I’ll put you down in the dirt.”

Franks put a calming hand on Garland’s arm. Bosch was silent for a few moments before responding.

“You want to threaten me now, Anthony? You think I’m like one of those teenagers you cuff out in the oil fields and dump crude on? You think I’m going to go away with my tail between my legs?”

Garland’s face pinched together and turned dark. His eyes looked like frozen black marbles.

Bosch hit the pause button on the VCR remote.

“There,” he said to Rachel, pointing at the screen with the remote. “That’s what I wanted you to see. Look at his face. Pure, perfect rage. That’s why I thought it was him.”

Walling didn’t respond. Bosch glanced at her and she looked as though she had seen the face of pure, perfect rage before. She looked to be almost intimidated by it. Bosch wondered if she had seen it in one of the killers she had faced, or in someone else.

Bosch turned back to the television and hit the fast-forward button again.

“Now we jump almost ten years, to when I brought him in last April. Franks was gone and a new guy had the case in Dobbs’s office. He dropped the ball and never went back to the judge when the first restraining order expired. So I took another shot at him. He was surprised to see me. I grabbed him when he came out of Kate Mantilini’s at lunch one day. He probably thought I was long gone from his life.”

He stopped the fast-forward and played the tape. On the screen Garland looked older and wider. His face had spread and he wore his now-thinning hair cropped short. He wore a white shirt with a tie. The taped interviews had followed him from the end of boyhood to well into manhood.

This time he sat in a different interview room. This one was at Parker Center.

“If I’m not under arrest, then I should be free to go,” he said. “Am I free to go?”

“I was hoping you’d answer a few questions first,” Bosch replied.

“I answered all your questions years ago. This is a vendetta, Bosch. You will not give up. You will not leave me alone. Am I free to go or not?”

“Where did you hide her body?”

Garland shook his head.

“My God, this is unbelievable. When will this end?”

“It will never end, Garland. Not until I find her and not until I lock you up.”

“This is fucking crazy! You’re crazy, Bosch. What can I say to make you believe me? What can-”

“You can tell me where she is and then I’ll believe you.”

“Well, that’s the one thing I can’t tell you, because I don’t-”

Bosch suddenly killed the TV with the remote. For the first time, he realized how case-blind he had been, going after Garland as relentlessly as a dog chasing a car. He was unaware of the traffic, unaware that right in front of him in the murder book was the clue to the real killer. Watching the tape with Walling had heaped humiliation upon humiliation. He had thought by showing her the tape she would see why he had focused on Garland. She would understand and absolve him of the mistake. But now seeing it through the prism of Waits’s impending confession he couldn’t even absolve himself.

Rachel leaned toward him and touched his back, her soft fingers tracing down his spine.

“It happens to all of us,” she said.

Bosch nodded. Not to me, he thought.

“I guess when this is all over I’m going to have to find him and apologize,” he said.

“Fuck him. He’s still an asshole. I wouldn’t bother.”

Bosch smiled. She was trying to make it easy for him.

“You think?”

She pulled back the elastic waistband on his boxers and then snapped them against his back.

“I think I have at least another hour before I should be thinking about getting home.”

Bosch turned to look at her and she smiled.

10

THE NEXT MORNING Bosch and Rider walked from the Hall of Records to the CCB and despite the wait for an elevator still got to the DA’s office twenty minutes early. O’Shea and Olivas were ready for them. Everyone took the same seats as before. Bosch noticed that the posters that had been leaning against the wall were gone. They had probably been put to good use somewhere, maybe sent to the public hall where the candidates’ forum was scheduled for that night.

As he sat down Bosch saw the Gesto murder book on O’Shea’s desk. He took it without asking and immediately opened it to the chronological record. He combed through the 51s until he found the page for September 29, 1993. He looked at the entry Olivas had told him about the evening before. It was, as it had been read to Bosch, the last entry of the day. Bosch felt the deep sense of regret tug at him all over again.

“Detective Bosch, we all make mistakes,” O’Shea said. “Let’s just move on from it and do the best we can today.”

Bosch looked up at him and eventually nodded. He closed the book and put it back on the desk. O’Shea continued.

“I am told that Maury Swann is in the interview room with Mr. Waits and is ready to go. I have been thinking about this and I want to take the cases one at a time and in order. We start with Fitzpatrick and when we are satisfied by the confession, we move on to the Gesto case, and when we are satisfied there, we move on to the next one and so on.”

Everybody nodded except for Bosch.

“I am not going to be satisfied until we have her remains,” he said.

Now O’Shea nodded. He lifted a document off his desk.

“I understand that. If you can locate the victim based on the statements from Waits, then fine. If it is a matter of him leading us to the body, I have a release order ready to go to the judge. I would say that if we reach a point where we are taking this man out of lockup, then the security should be extraordinary. There will be a lot riding on this and we cannot have any mistakes.”

O’Shea took the time to look from detective to detective to make sure they understood the gravity of the situation. He would be gambling his campaign and political life on the security of Raynard Waits.

“We’ll be ready for anything,” Olivas said.

The look of concern on O’Shea’s face didn’t change.

“You’re going to have a uniformed presence, right?” he asked.

“I don’t think it is necessary-uniforms draw attention,” Olivas said. “We can handle him. But if you want it we’ll have it.”

“I think it would be good to have, yes.”

“No problem, then. We’ll either get a car from Metro to go with us or a couple deputies from the jail.”

O’Shea nodded his approval.

“Then, are we ready to start?”

“There’s one thing,” Bosch said. “We’re not sure who that is in the interview room waiting for us, but we’re pretty sure his name isn’t Raynard Waits.”

A look of surprise played off O’Shea’s face and immediately became contagious. Olivas dropped his mouth open an inch and leaned forward.

“We made him on fingerprints,” Olivas protested. “On the prior.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yes, the prior. As you know, when he was popped thirteen years ago for prowling, he first gave the name Robert Saxon along with the birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-five. This is the same name he used later that year when he called about Gesto, only then he gave the birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-one. But when he was pulled in on the prowling and they ran his prints through the computer, they matched the thumb to the DL of Raynard Waits, with a birth date of eleven/three/’seventy-one. So we keep getting the same month and day but different years. Anyway, when confronted with the thumbprint he copped to being Raynard Waits, saying he had given the false name and year because he was hoping to be handled as a juvenile. This is all in the file.”

“But where does all of it go?” O’Shea said impatiently.

“Just let me finish. He got probation for the prowling because it was a first offense. In the probation report bio he said he was born and raised in L.A., okay? We just came from the Hall of Records. There is no record of Raynard Waits being born in L.A. on that date or any other. There have been a lot of Robert Saxons born in L.A. but none on November third of either of the years mentioned in the files.”

“The bottom line,” Rider said, “is we don’t know who the man we are about to talk to is.”

O’Shea pushed back from his desk and stood up. He paced around the spacious office as he thought and spoke about this latest information.

“Okay, so what are you saying, that the DMV had the wrong prints on file or there was some sort of a mix-up?”

Bosch turned in his seat so he could look at O’Shea while he answered.

“I’m saying that this guy, whoever he really is, could have gone to the DMV thirteen, fourteen, years ago to set up a false ID. What do you need to get a driver’s license? Proof of age. Back then, you could buy phony IDs and birth certificates on Hollywood Boulevard, no problem. Or he could have bribed a DMV employee, could have done a lot of things. The point is, there is no record of him being born here in L.A., as he said he was. That puts all the rest in doubt.”

“Maybe that’s the lie,” Olivas said. “Maybe he is Waits and he lied about being born here. It’s like when you’re born out in Riverside, you tell everybody you’re from L.A.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t accept the logic Olivas was slinging.

“The name is false,” Bosch insisted. “Raynard is a take on a character from medieval folklore known as Reynard the Fox. It’s spelled with an e but it’s pronounced the same. Put that with the last name and you have ‘the little fox waits.’ Get it? You can’t convince me somebody gave him that name at birth.”

That brought a momentary silence to the room.

“I don’t know,” O’Shea said, thinking out loud. “Seems a little far-fetched, this medieval connection.”

“It’s only far-fetched because we can’t nail it down,” Bosch countered. “You ask me, it’s more far-fetched that this would be his given name.”

“So what are you saying?” Olivas asked. “That he changed his name and continued to use it, even after he had an arrest tail on it? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. But we don’t know the story behind it yet.”

“Okay, so what are you suggesting we do?” O’Shea asked.

“Not much,” Bosch said. “I’m just bringing it up. But I do think we ought to go on the record with it up there. You know, ask him to state his name, DOB, and place of birth. As if it is the routine way to start one of these interviews. If he gives us Waits, then we might be able to catch him in the lie down the road and prosecute him for everything. You said that was the deal; if he lies, he fries. We can turn it all against him.”

O’Shea was standing by the coffee table behind where Bosch and Rider sat. Bosch turned again, to watch him take in the suggestion. The prosecutor was grinding it over and nodding.

“I don’t see where it could hurt,” he finally said. “Just get it on the record but let it go at that. Real subtle and routine. We can come back to him on it later-if we find out more about this.”

Bosch looked at Rider.

“You’ll be the one starting out with him, asking about the first case. Your first question can be about his name.”

“Fine,” she said.

O’Shea came back around the desk.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Are we ready? It’s time to go. I will try to stay with it as long as my schedule allows. Don’t be offended if I jump in from time to time with a question.”

Bosch answered by standing up. Rider followed suit and then Olivas.

“One last thing,” Bosch said. “We picked up a Maury Swann story yesterday that maybe you guys ought to know.”

Both Bosch and Rider took turns telling the story Abel Pratt had told them. By the end, Olivas was laughing and shaking his head and Bosch could tell by O’Shea’s face that he was trying to count how many times he had shaken Maury Swann’s hand in court. Maybe he was worrying about potential political fallout.

Bosch headed to the door of the office. He felt a mixture of excitement and dread rising. He was excited because he knew he was finally about to find out what had happened to Marie Gesto so long ago. At the same time, he dreaded finding out. And he dreaded the fact that the details he would soon learn would place a heavy burden on him. A burden he would have to transfer to a waiting mother and father up in Bakersfield.

11

TWO UNIFORMED SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES stood at the door to the interview room in which sat the man who called himself Raynard Waits. They stepped aside and allowed the prosecutorial entourage to enter. The room contained one long table. Waits and his defense attorney, Maury Swann, were sitting on one side of it. Waits was directly in the middle and Swann was to his left. When the investigators and the prosecutor entered, only Maury Swann stood. Waits was held to the arms of his chair with plastic snap cuffs. Swann, a thin man with black-framed glasses and a luxurious mane of silver hair, offered his hand but no one shook it.

Rider took the chair directly across the table from Waits, and Bosch and O’Shea sat on either side of her. Since Olivas would not be up in the interview rotation for some time, he took the last remaining chair, which was next to the door.

O’Shea handled the introductions but again nobody bothered shaking anybody else’s hand. Waits was in an orange jumpsuit that had black letters stenciled across the chest.

L.A. COUNTY JAIL

KEEP AWAY

The second line was not intended as a warning but it was just as good as one. It meant that Waits was on keep-away status within the jail, indicating he was housed by himself and not allowed into the general inmate population. This status was taken as a protective measure for both Waits and the other inmates.

As Bosch studied the man he had been hunting for thirteen years he realized that the most frightening thing about Waits was how ordinary he looked. Slightly built, he had an everyman’s face. Pleasant, with soft features and short dark hair, he was the epitome of normality. The only hint of the evil that lay within was found in the eyes. Dark brown and deeply set, they carried an emptiness that Bosch recognized from other killers he had sat face-to-face with over the years. Nothing there. Just a hollowness that could never be filled, no matter how many other lives he stole.

Rider turned on the tape recorder that was on the table and started the interview perfectly, giving Waits no reason to suspect he was stepping into a trap with the very first question of the session.

“As was probably explained to you already by Mr. Swann, we are going to record each session with you and then turn the tapes over to your attorney, who will hold them until we have a completed agreement. Is that understood and approved by you?”

“Yes, it is,” Waits said.

“Good,” Rider said. “Then let’s begin with an easy one. Can you state your name, birth date and place of birth for the record?”

Waits leaned forward and made a face like he was stating the obvious to schoolchildren.

“Raynard Waits,” he said impatiently. “Born November third, nineteen seventy-one, in the city of angles-oh, I mean angels. The city of angels.”

“If you mean Los Angeles, could you please say it?”

“Yes, Los Angeles.”

“Thank you. Your first name is unusual. Could you spell it for the tape?”

Waits complied. Again, it was a good move by Rider. It would make it even more difficult for the man in front of them to argue later that he had not knowingly lied during the interview.

“Do you know where the name came from?”

“My father pulled it out of his ass, I guess. I don’t know. I thought we were here to talk about dead people, not the piddly basic shit.”

“We are, Mr. Waits. We are.”

Bosch felt an enormous sense of relief inside. He knew that they were about to sit through a retelling of horrors but he felt they already had Waits caught in a lie that might spring a fatal trap on him. There was now a chance that he was not going to walk away from this to a private cell and a life of public maintenance and celebrity.

“We want to take these in order,” Rider said. “Your attorney’s proffer suggests that the first homicide you were ever involved in was the death of Daniel Fitzpatrick in Hollywood on April thirtieth, nineteen ninety-two. Is that correct?”

Waits answered with the sort of matter-of-fact demeanor one would expect from someone giving directions to the nearest gas station. His voice was cold and calm.

“Yes, I burned him alive behind his security cage. It turned out that he wasn’t so secure back there. Not even with all of his guns.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted to see if I could. I had been thinking about it for a long time and I just wanted to prove myself.”

Bosch thought about what Rachel Walling had said to him the night before. She had called it a “spree killing.” It looked like she had been right.

“What do you mean by ‘prove yourself,’ Mr. Waits?” Rider asked.

“I mean there is a line out there that everybody thinks about but not many have the guts to cross. I wanted to see if I could cross it.”

“When you say you had been thinking about it for a long time, had you been thinking about Mr. Fitzpatrick in particular?”

Annoyance flared in Waits’s eyes. It was as if he were putting up with her.

“No, you stupid cunt,” he replied calmly. “I had been thinking about killing someone. You understand? All my life I had wanted to do it.”

Rider shook off the insult without a flinch and kept moving.

“Why did you choose Daniel Fitzpatrick? Why did you choose that night?”

“Well, because I was watching TV and I saw the whole city coming apart. It was chaos out there and I knew the police couldn’t do anything about it. It was a time when people were doing just what they wanted. I saw a guy on the tube talking about Hollywood Boulevard and how places were burning and I decided to go out to see it. I didn’t want the TV showing it to me. I wanted to see it for myself.”

“Did you drive there?”

“No, I could walk. Back then I lived on Fountain near LaBrea. I just walked up.”

Rider had the Fitzpatrick file open in front of her. She glanced down at it for a moment while collecting her thoughts and formulating the next set of questions. That gave O’Shea the opportunity to jump in.

“Where did the lighter fluid come from?” he asked. “Did you take it with you from your apartment?”

Waits shifted his focus to O’Shea.

“I thought the dyke was asking the questions,” he said.

“We’re all asking the questions,” O’Shea said. “And could you please keep the personal attacks out of your responses?”

“Not you, Mr. District Attorney. I don’t want to talk to you. Only her. And them.”

He pointed to Bosch and Olivas.

“Let me just back up a little bit before we get to the lighter fluid,” Rider said, smoothly pushing O’Shea to the side. “You said you walked up to Hollywood Boulevard from Fountain. Where did you go and what did you see?”

Waits smiled and nodded at Rider.

“I got that right, didn’t I?” he said. “I can always tell. I can always smell it on a woman, when she likes pussy.”

“Mr. Swann,” Rider said, “can you please tell your client that this is about him answering our questions, not the other way around?”

Swann put his hand on Waits’s left forearm, which was bound to the arm of his chair.

“Ray,” he said. “Don’t play games. Just answer the questions. Remember, we want this. We brought it to them. It’s our show.”

Bosch saw a slow burn move across Waits’s face as he turned and looked at his lawyer. But then it quickly disappeared and he looked back at Rider.

“I saw the city burning, that’s what I saw.”

He smiled after giving the answer.

“It was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.”

He turned to Bosch as he said this. It froze Bosch for a moment. How did he know?

Waits nodded toward Bosch’s chest.

“It’s on your ID card.”

Bosch had forgotten that they’d had to clip their IDs on once they entered the DA’s office. Rider moved in quickly with the next question.

“Okay, which way did you walk once you got to Hollywood Boulevard?”

“I took a right and headed east. The bigger fires were down that way.”

“What was in your pockets?”

The question seemed to give him pause.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. My keys, I guess. Cigarettes and a lighter, that was all.”

“Did you have your wallet?”

“No, I didn’t want to have ID with me. In case the police stopped me.”

“Did you already have the lighter fluid with you?”

“That’s right, I did. I thought I might join in the fun, help burn the city to the ground. Then I walked by that pawnshop and got a better idea.”

“You saw Mr. Fitzpatrick?”

“Yeah, I saw him. He was standing inside his security fence holding a shotgun. He also was wearing a holster like he was Wyatt Earp or something.”

“Describe the pawnshop.”

Waits shrugged.

“A small place. It was called Irish Pawn. It had this neon sign out front that flashed a green three-leaf clover and then the three balls, you know, that are like the symbol for a pawnshop, I guess. Fitzpatrick was standing there, watching me when I passed by.”

“And you kept walking?”

“At first I did. I passed by and then I thought about the challenge, you know? How could I get to him without getting shot by that big fucking bazooka he was holding.”

“What did you do?”

“I took the can of EasyLight out of my jacket pocket and filled my mouth with it. Squirted it right in, like those flame breathers do on the Venice boardwalk. I then put the can away and got out a cigarette and my lighter. I don’t smoke anymore. It’s a terrible habit.”

He looked at Bosch as he said this.

“Then what?” Rider asked.

“I went back to the asshole’s shop and walked into the alcove in front of the security fence. I acted like I was just looking for a blind to try to light my smoke. It was windy that night, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“So he started yelling at me to get the fuck away. He came right up to the fence to yell at me. And I was counting on that.”

He smiled, proud of how well his plan worked.

“The guy hit the stock of his shotty against the steel fence to get my attention. You see, he saw my hands, so he didn’t realize the danger. And when he was about two feet away I got a flame on the lighter and looked him right in the eyes. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and spit all of that lighter fluid into his face. Of course, it hit the lighter on the way and I was a fucking flamethrower. He had a face full a’ flames before he knew what hit him. He dropped the shotty pretty fast so he could try to slap at the flames. But his clothes went up and pretty soon he was one crispy critter. It was like being hit by napalm, man.”

Waits tried to raise his left arm but couldn’t. It was bound to the armrest at the wrist. He turned and raised his hand instead.

“Unfortunately, I burned my hand a little bit. Blisters, the whole thing. It really hurt, too. I can’t imagine what that asshole Wyatt Earp felt. Not a good way to go, if you ask me.”

Bosch looked at the upraised hand. He saw a discoloration in the skin tone, but not a scar. The burn had not gone deep.

After a long measure of silence, Rider asked another question.

“Did you seek medical attention for your hand?”

“No, I didn’t think that would be too smart, considering the situation. And from what I heard, the hospitals were overflowing. So I went on home and took care of it myself.”

“When did you place the can of lighter fluid in front of the store?”

“Oh, that was when I was walking away. I just took it out, wiped it off and put it down.”

“Did Mr. Fitzpatrick call out for help at any time?”

Waits paused as if to ponder the question.

“Well, that’s hard to say. He was yelling something, but I am not sure it was for help. He just kind of sounded like an animal to me. I closed the door on my dog’s tail once when I was kid. It sort of reminded me of that.”

“What were you thinking as you were walking home?”

“I was thinking, Far-fucking-out! I finally did it! And I knew I was going to get away with it, too. I felt like I was pretty goddamn invincible, if you want to know the truth.”

“How old were you?”

“I was… I was twenty, man, and I fuckin’ did it!”

“Did you ever think about the man you killed, who you burned to death?”

“No, not really. He was just there. There for the taking. Like the rest of them that came after. It was like they were there for me.”

Rider spent another forty minutes questioning him, eliciting smaller details that nonetheless matched those contained in the investigative reports. Finally, at 11:15 she seemed to relax her posture and pull back from her place at the table. She turned to look at Bosch and then at O’Shea.

“I think I have enough for the moment,” she said. “Maybe we could take a short break at this point.”

She turned off the tape recorder, and the three investigators and O’Shea stepped out into the hallway to confer. Swann stayed in the interview room with his client.

“What do you think?” O’Shea said to Rider.

She nodded.

“I’m satisfied. I don’t think there is any doubt that he did it. He solved the mystery of how he got to him. I don’t think he’s telling us everything but he knows enough of the details. He either did it or he was right there.”

O’Shea looked at Bosch.

“Should we move on?”

Bosch thought about this for a moment. He was ready. As he had watched Rider interview Waits his anger and disgust had grown. The man in the interview room showed such a callous disregard for his victim that Bosch recognized it as the classic profile of a psychopath. As before, he dreaded what he would next hear from the man but he was ready to hear it.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

They all moved back into the interview room and Swann immediately suggested that they break for lunch.

“My client is hungry.”

“Gotta feed the dog,” Waits added with a smile.

Bosch shook his head, taking charge of the room.

“Not yet,” he said. “He’ll eat when we all eat.”

He took the seat directly across from Waits and turned the recorder back on. Rider and O’Shea took the wing positions and Olivas sat once again in the chair by the door. Bosch had taken the Gesto file back from Olivas but had it closed in front of him on the table.

“We’re going to move on now to the Marie Gesto case,” he said.

“Ah, sweet Marie,” Waits said.

He looked at Bosch with a brightness in his eyes.

“Your attorney’s proffer suggests that you know what happened to Marie Gesto when she disappeared in nineteen ninety-three. Is that true?”

Waits frowned and nodded.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said with mock sincerity.

“Do you know the current whereabouts of Marie Gesto or the location of her remains?”

“Yes, I do.”

Here it was, the moment Bosch had waited on for thirteen years.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Waits looked at him and nodded.

“Is that a yes?” Bosch asked for the tape.

“That is a yes. She’s dead.”

“Where is she?”

Waits broke into a broad smile, the smile of a man who had not an atom of regret or guilt in his DNA.

“She’s right here, Detective,” he said. “She’s right here with me. Just like all the others. Right here with me.”

His smile turned into a laugh and Bosch almost went across the table at him. But Rider moved her hand under the table and put it on his leg. It immediately calmed him.

“Hold on a second,” O’Shea said. “Let’s step out again, and this time I would like you to join us, Maury.”

12

O’SHEA CHARGED INTO THE hallway first and managed to pace back and forth twice before all the others were out of the interview room. He then instructed the two deputies to go into the room and keep an eye on Waits. The door was then closed.

“What the fuck, Maury?” O’Shea barked. “We’re not going to spend our time in there laying the groundwork for an insanity defense for you. This is a confession, not a defense maneuver.”

Swann turned his palms up in a what-can-I-do gesture.

“The guy obviously has issues,” he said.

“Bullshit. He’s a stone-cold killer and he’s in there vamping like Hannibal Lecter. This isn’t a movie, Maury. This is real. You hear what he said about Fitzpatrick? He was more worried about a little burn on his hand than he was about the guy whose face he spit flames into. So I’ll tell you what, you go back in there and take five minutes with your client. Set him straight or we walk away from this and everybody takes their chances.”

Bosch was unconsciously nodding. He liked the anger in O’Shea’s voice. He also liked the way this was going.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Swann said.

He went back into the interview room and the deputies came back out to give the attorney and his client privacy. O’Shea continued to pace while he cooled down.

“Sorry about that,” he said to no one in particular. “But I’m not going to let them control this thing.”

“They already are,” Bosch said. “Waits is, at least.”

O’Shea looked at him, ready for a fight.

“What are you saying?”

“I mean we’re all here because of him. The bottom line is, we are engaged in an effort to save his life-at his own request.”

O’Shea emphatically shook his head.

“I’m not going to go back and forth on that issue with you again, Bosch. The decision has been made. At this point, if you’re not on board, the elevator’s right down the hall to the left. I’ll handle your part of the interview. Or Freddy will.”

Bosch waited a beat before answering.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t on board. Gesto is my case and I will see it through.”

“Nice to hear it,” O’Shea said with full sarcasm. “Too bad you weren’t so attentive back in ’ninety-three.”

He reached over and knocked harshly on the interview room door. Bosch stared at his back with anger welling up from some place deep inside. Swann opened the door almost immediately.

“We’re ready to continue,” he said as he stepped back to let them in.

After everyone retook their seats, and the recorder was turned back on, Bosch shook off his anger at O’Shea and locked eyes with Waits again. He repeated the question.

“Where is she?”

Waits smiled slightly, like he was tempted to set things off again, but then the smile turned into a smirk and he answered.

“Up in the hills.”

“Where in the hills?”

“Up near the stables. That’s where I got her. Right when she was getting out of her car.”

“Is she buried?”

“Yes, she is buried.”

“Exactly where is she buried?”

“I would have to show you. It’s a place I know but I can’t describe… I would just have to show you.”

“Try to describe it.”

“It’s just a place in the woods near where she parked. You go in and there’s a path and then I went off the path. Way off the path. You could go look and either find it right away or maybe never find it. There’s a lot of territory up there. You remember, they searched up there but they never found her.”

“And after thirteen years you believe you could lead us to this spot?”

“It hasn’t been thirteen years.”

A sudden rush of horror came over Bosch. The idea that he had held her captive was too abhorrent to think about.

“It’s not what you think, Detective,” Waits said.

“How do you know what I am thinking?”

“I just do. But it’s not what you think. Marie has been buried for thirteen years. But it has not been thirteen years since I was there. That’s what I’m saying. I visited her, Detective. I visited her there quite often. So I can certainly lead you there.”

Bosch paused, took out a pen and wrote a note on the inside flap of the Gesto file. It wasn’t a note of any importance. It just gave him a moment to disengage from the emotions that were coming up.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” he said. “Did you know Marie Gesto before September nineteen ninety-three?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Had you ever seen her before the day you abducted her?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Where did you first cross paths with her?”

“At the Mayfair. I saw her in there shopping and she was just my type. I followed her.”

“Where?”

“She got in her car and drove up Beachwood Canyon. She parked in the gravel lot below the stables. I believe it is called Sunset Ranch. There was no one around when she was getting out, so I decided to take her.”

“It wasn’t planned before you saw her in the store?”

“No, I went there to buy some Gatorade. It was a hot day. I saw her and decided right then that I had to have her. You know, it was an impulse. I couldn’t do anything about it, Detective.”

“You approached her in the lot below the stables?”

He nodded.

“I pulled in right next to her in my van. She didn’t think a thing about it. The parking area is down the hill from the ranch, from the stables. There was no one around, no one who could see. It was perfect. It was like God said I could have her.”

“What did you do?”

“I went into the back of the van and I opened the sliding door on the side where she was. I had a knife and I just stepped out and told her to get in. She did. It was a simple operation really. She was no trouble at all.”

He spoke as if he were a babysitter reporting on a child’s behavior when the parents have returned home.

“Then what?” Bosch asked.

“I asked her to remove her clothes and she complied. She told me she would do whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t hurt her. I agreed to that deal. She folded her clothes very nicely. As if she thought she would get the chance to put them back on again.”

Bosch rubbed a hand over his mouth. The most difficult part of his job were the times he was face-to-face with a killer, when he saw firsthand the intersection of their warped and terrifying world with reality.

“Go on,” he said to Waits.

“Well, you know the rest. We had sex but she was no good at it. She couldn’t relax. So I did what I had to do.”

“Which was what?”

Waits locked eyes with Bosch.

“I killed her, Detective. I put my hands around her neck and I squeezed and then I squeezed harder and I watched her eyes go still. Then I finished up.”

Bosch stared at him but couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth. It was moments like these that made him feel inadequate as a detective, moments when he was cowed by the depravity that was possible in the human form. They stared at each other for a long moment until O’Shea spoke.

“You had sex with her body?” he asked.

“That’s right. While she was still warm. I always say a woman is at her best when she is dead but still warm.”

Waits glanced at Rider to see if he had gotten a reaction. She showed nothing.

“Waits,” Bosch said. “You are a worthless piece of trash.”

Waits looked back at Bosch and put the smirk back on his face.

“If that is your best shot, Detective Bosch, then you’ll have to do much better. Because it will only get worse for you from here. Sex is nothing. Alive or dead, it is transitory. But I took her soul and no one will ever get that back from me.”

Bosch looked down at the open file in front of him but did not see the words printed on the documents.

“Let’s move on,” he finally said. “What did you do next?”

“I tidied up the van. I always had plastic drop sheets in the back. I wrapped her up and prepared her for burial. I then got out and locked the van. I took her things back to her car. I had her keys, too. I got in her car and drove it away. I thought that would be the best way to throw the police off.”

“Where did you go?”

“You know where I went, Detective. The High Tower. I knew there was an empty garage that I could use there. A week or so before, I had gone to look for work there and the manager happened to mention there was an open apartment. He showed it to me because I acted like I was interested.”

“He showed you the garage, too?”

“No, just pointed it out. On my way out I noticed that there was no lock on the latch.”

“So you drove Marie Gesto’s car there and stashed it in the garage.”

“That’s right.”

“Did anyone see you? Did you see anyone?”

“No and no. I was very careful. Remember, I had just killed someone.”

“What about your van? When did you go back up Beachwood to get it?”

“I waited until that night. I thought that would be better because I had some digging to do. You understand, I’m sure.”

“Was this van painted with the name of your business?”

“No, not then. I had just started and was not trying to draw attention yet. I worked mostly off referrals. I didn’t have a city license yet. All of that came later. In fact, that was another van altogether. That was thirteen years ago. I’ve gotten a new van since then.”

“How did you get back up to the stables to get your van?”

“Took a cab.”

“You remember which cab company?”

“I don’t remember because I didn’t call for it. After dropping off the car at the High Tower I walked over to a restaurant I used to enjoy when I lived on Franklin. Bird’s-have you ever been there? Good roasted chicken. Anyway, it was a long walk. I had dinner and when it was late enough I had them call me a cab. I went up to my van, only I had him drop me up at the stables so it wouldn’t look like the van was mine. When I was sure there was no one around I went to the van and I found a nice private spot to plant my little flower.”

“And this is a spot you will still be able to find?”

“Absolutely.”

“You dug a hole.”

“I did.”

“How deep?”

“I don’t know, not too deep.”

“What did you use to dig it?”

“I had a shovel.”

“You always carried a shovel in your window-washing van?”

“No, actually. I found it leaning against the barn up at the stables. I think it was for cleaning out the stalls, that sort of thing.”

“You put it back when you were finished?”

“Of course, Detective. I steal souls, not shovels.”

Bosch looked at the files in front of him.

“When was the last time you were at the place where you buried Marie Gesto?”

“Mmmm, a little over a year ago. I usually made the trip every September ninth. You know, to celebrate our anniversary. This year I was a bit tied up, as you know.”

He smiled good-naturedly.

Bosch knew he had covered everything in general terms. It would all come down to whether Waits could lead them to the body and if Forensics would then match his story.

“There came a time after the murder when the media paid a lot of attention to Marie Gesto’s disappearance,” Bosch said. “Do you remember that?”

“Of course. That taught me a good lesson. I never acted so impulsively again. I was more careful about the flowers I picked after that.”

“You called the investigators on the case, didn’t you?”

“As a matter of fact I did. I remember that. I called and told them that I had seen her in the Mayfair store and that she hadn’t been with anybody.”

“Why did you call?”

Waits shrugged.

“I don’t know. I just thought it would be fun. You know, to actually talk to one of the men who was hunting me. Was it you?”

“My partner.”

“Yes, I thought I might be able to shift the focus away from the Mayfair. After all, I had been in there and I thought, who knows, maybe someone could describe me.”

Bosch nodded.

“You gave the name Robert Saxon when you called. Why?”

Waits shrugged again.

“It was just a name I used from time to time.”

“It’s not your real name?”

“No, Detective, you know my real name.”

“What if I told you I don’t believe a fucking word you’ve said here today? What would you say to that?”

“I would say, take me to Beachwood Canyon and I will prove every word of what I have said here.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”

Bosch pushed back his chair and told the others he would like to confer with them in the hallway. Leaving Waits and Swann behind, they stepped out of the room into the cooler air of the hallway.

“Can you guys give us some space?” O’Shea said to the two deputies.

When everybody else was in the hallway and the interview room door was closed, O’Shea continued.

“Getting stuffy in there,” he said.

“Yeah, with all of his bullshit,” Bosch said.

“What now, Bosch?” the prosecutor asked.

“‘What now’ is that I don’t believe him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he knows every answer. And some of them don’t work. We spent a week with the cab companies going over records for every pickup and drop. We knew that if the guy moved her car to the High Tower, then he needed some kind of ride back to his own car. The stables were one of the points we checked. Every cab company in the city. Nobody made a pickup or a drop-off up there that day or night.”

Olivas injected himself into the conversation by stepping up next to O’Shea.

“That’s not a hundred percent and you know it, Bosch,” he said. “A cabbie could’ve given him a ride off the books. They do it all the time. There’s also gypsy cabs. They hang outside restaurants all over the city.”

“I still don’t buy his bullshit stories. He’s got an answer for everything. The shovel just happens to be leaning against the barn. How was he going to bury her if he didn’t happen to see it?”

O’Shea spread his arms wide.

“There’s one way to test him,” he said. “We take him out on a field trip and if he leads us to that girl’s body, then the little details that bother you aren’t going to matter. On the other hand, if there is no body, then there is no deal.”

“When do we go?” Bosch asked.

“I’ll go see the judge today. We’ll go tomorrow morning if you want.”

“Wait a minute,” Olivas said. “What about the other seven? We still have a lot to talk to this bastard about.”

O’Shea held one hand up in a calming motion.

“Let’s make Gesto the test case. He either puts up or shuts up with this one. Then we’ll go from there.”

O’Shea turned and looked directly at Bosch.

“You going to be ready for this?” he asked.

Bosch nodded.

“I’ve been ready for thirteen years.”

13

THAT NIGHT, RACHEL brought dinner up to the house after calling first to see if Bosch was home. Bosch put some music on the stereo, and Rachel laid the dinner out on the dining room table on plates from the kitchen. The dinner was pot roast with a side of creamed corn. She’d brought a bottle of Merlot, too, and it took Bosch five minutes of hunting through kitchen drawers to find a corkscrew. They didn’t talk about the case until they were sitting across from each other at the table.

“So,” she said, “how did it go today?”

Bosch shrugged before answering.

“It went okay. Your take on everything was very helpful. Tomorrow’s the field trip, and in Rick O’Shea’s words, it will be put-up or shut-up time.”

“Field trip? Where to?”

“The top of Beachwood Canyon. He says that’s where he buried her. I drove up there today after the interview and looked around-couldn’t find anything, even using his description. Back in ’ninety-three we had the cadets looking in the canyon for three days and they found nothing. The woods are thick up there but he says he can find the spot.”

“Do you believe he’s the guy?”

“It looks like it. He’s convinced everybody else and there’s that call he made to us back then. That’s pretty convincing.”

“But what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s my ego not being ready to accept I was so wrong, that for thirteen years I was looking at one guy and I was wrong about him. Nobody wants to face that, I guess.”

Bosch concentrated on eating for a few moments. He then chased a mouthful of pot roast with some wine and wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“Man, this stuff is great. Where’d you get it?”

She smiled.

“Just another restaurant.”

“No, this is the best pot roast I think I’ve ever had.”

“It’s a place called Jar. They say it stands for Just Another Restaurant.”

“Oh, I get it.”

“It’s off Beverly near my place. They’ve got a long bar where you can eat. After moving out here I ate there a lot at first. Alone. Suzanne and Preech always take care of me. They let me take food to go and it’s not that kind of place.”

“They’re the cooks?”

“Chefs. Suzanne’s also the owner. I love sitting there at the bar and watching the people come in, watching their eyes scanning the place to see who’s who. A lot of celebrities go there. You also get the foodies and you get the regular people. They’re the most interesting.”

“Somebody once said that if you circle around a murder long enough you get to know a city. Maybe it’s the same with sitting at the counter in a restaurant.”

“And easier to do. Harry, are you changing the subject or are you going to tell me about Raynard Waits’s confession?”

“I’m getting to it. I thought we’d finish eating first.”

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s not that. I think I just need a break from it. I don’t know.”

She nodded like she understood. She poured more wine into their glasses.

“I like the music. Who is this?”

Bosch nodded, his mouth full once again.

“I call this ‘miracle in a box.’ It’s John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall. The concert was recorded in nineteen fifty-seven and the tape sat in an unmarked box in archives for almost fifty years. Just sat there, forgotten. Then some Library of Congress guy was going through all the boxes and performance tapes and recognized what they had there. They finally put this out last year.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s more than nice. It’s a miracle to think it was there all that time. It took the right person to find it. To recognize it.”

He looked at her eyes for a moment. He then looked down at his plate and saw he was down to his last bite.

“What would you have done for dinner if I hadn’t called?” Rachel asked.

Bosch looked back at her and shrugged. He finished eating and started telling her about Raynard Waits’s confession.

“He’s lying,” she said when he was finished.

“About the name? We’ve got that covered.”

“No, about the plan. Rather, the lack of a plan. He tells you he just saw her in the Mayfair, followed her and grabbed her. Uh-uh, no way. I don’t buy that. The whole thing doesn’t feel like a spur-of-the-moment thing. There was a plan to this, whether he’s telling you or not.”

Bosch nodded. He had the same misgivings about the confession.

“We’ll know more tomorrow, I guess,” he said.

“I wish I could be there.”

Bosch shook his head.

“I can’t make a federal case out of this. Besides, it’s not what you do anymore. Your own people wouldn’t let you go, even if you were invited.”

“I know. I can still wish.”

Bosch got up and started clearing the plates. They worked side by side at the sink and after everything was cleaned and put away they took the bottle out on the deck. There was enough left for them each to have a half glass.

The evening chill drew them close to one another as they stood at the railing and looked down at the lights in the Cahuenga Pass.

“Are you staying tonight?” Bosch asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to call, you know. I’ll give you a key. Just come up.”

She turned and looked at him. He put his arm around her waist.

“That fast? Are you saying all is forgiven?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. The past is past and life’s too short. You know, all of those clichés.”

She smiled and they sealed it with a kiss. They finished their wine and went inside to the bedroom. They made love slowly and quietly. At one point Bosch opened his eyes and looked at her and lost his rhythm. She noticed.

“What?” she whispered.

“Nothing. It’s just that you keep your eyes open.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“No, you’re not.”

She smiled and turned her face away from him.

“This is sort of an awkward time for a discussion,” she said.

He smiled and used his hand to turn her face to his. He kissed her and they both kept their eyes open now. Halfway through the kiss they started laughing.

Bosch craved the intimacy and reveled in the escape it brought. He knew she knew this, too. Her gift to him was in taking him away from the world. And that was why the past no longer mattered. He closed his eyes but didn’t stop smiling.