Echo Park

19

IN THE MORNING Bosch was making coffee for Rachel and himself when he got the call. It was his boss, Abel Pratt.

“Harry, you’re not coming in. I just got the word.”

Bosch had half expected it.

“From who?”

“The sixth floor. OIS hasn’t wrapped it up and because the thing is so hot with the media, they want you to cool it on the sidelines for a few days until they see how it’s going to go.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. The sixth floor was where the department administration was located. The “they” Pratt had referred to was a collective of groupthink commanders who became frozen whenever a case hit big on TV or in politics, and this one had hit both. Bosch wasn’t surprised by the call, just disappointed. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

“Did you watch the news last night?” Pratt asked.

“No. I don’t watch the news.”

“Maybe you should start. We’ve now got Irvin Irving all over the box weighing in on this mess and he’s zeroed in on you specifically. Gave a speech last night on the south side, saying that hiring you back was an example of the chief’s ineptitude and the department’s moral corruption. I don’t know what you did to the guy but he’s got a real hard-on for you, man. ‘Moral corruption,’ that’s taking the gloves off.”

“Yeah, soon he’ll be blaming me for his hemorrhoids. Is the sixth floor sidelining me in reaction to him or to OIS?”

“Come on, Harry, you think I’d be privy to that conversation? I just got the call where I was told to make the call, know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“But look at it this way-with Irving punking you like that, the last thing the chief would do is cut you loose, because it would look like Irving was right. So the way I would read this thing is that they want to go by the numbers and nail it down tight before they close it down. So enjoy home duty and stay in touch.”

“Yeah, and what do you hear about Kiz?”

“Well, they don’t have to worry about home duty with her. She’s not going anywhere.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“And?”

It was like peeling a label off a beer bottle. It never came all at once.

“And I think Kiz could be in some trouble. She was up on top with Olivas when Waits made his move. The question is, why didn’t she take his ass out when she had the chance? It looks like she froze, Harry, and that means she could get hurt in this thing.”

Bosch nodded. Pratt’s political take on the situation seemed on target. It made Bosch feel bad. Right now Rider had to fight to stay alive. Later she’d have to fight to keep her job. He knew that no matter what the fight was he would stand beside her the whole way.

“Okay,” he said. “Anything new on Waits?”

“Nothing, man. He’s in the wind. Probably down in Mexico by now. If that guy knows what’s best for him, he’ll never raise his head above sea level again.”

Bosch wasn’t so sure about that but didn’t express his disagreement. Something, some instinct, told him that Waits was lying low, yes, but that he had not gone very far. He thought about the Red Line subway Waits had apparently disappeared into and its many stops between Hollywood and downtown. He remembered the legend of Reynard the fox and the secret castle.

“Harry, I gotta go,” Pratt said. “You cool?”

“Yeah, right, cool. Thanks for running it down for me, Top.”

“All right, man. Technically, you are supposed to check in with me every day until we get the word you’re back on active.”

“You got it.”

Bosch hung the phone up. A few minutes later when Rachel came into the kitchen, he poured coffee into an insulated cup that came with the Lexus she had leased when she transferred to L.A. She had brought the cup in with her the night before.

She was dressed and ready for work.

“I don’t have anything here for breakfast,” he said. “We could go down the hill to Du-par’s if you have time.”

“No, that’s okay. I need to get going.”

She tore open a pink packet of sugar substitute and dumped it into the coffee. She opened the refrigerator and took out a quart of milk she had brought with her the night before as well. She whitened the coffee and put the top on the cup.

“What was the call you just got?” she asked.

“My boss. I just got sidelined while all of this is going on.”

“Oh, baby…”

She came over and hugged him.

“In a way it’s routine. The media and politics of the case make it a necessity. I’m on home duty until the OIS wraps things up and clears me of any wrongdoing.”

“You going to be okay?”

“I already am.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Home duty doesn’t mean I have to stay home. So I’m going to the hospital to see if they’ll let me hang with my partner for a while. Take it from there, I guess.”

“Want to have lunch?”

“Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”

They had quickly slipped into a domestic comfort that Bosch liked. It was almost as though they didn’t have to talk.

“Look, I’m fine,” he said. “You go to work and I’ll try to come down around lunchtime. I’ll call you.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to you.”

She kissed him on the cheek before leaving through the kitchen door to the carport. He had told her to use the space in the carport on the days she came to stay with him.

Bosch drank a cup of coffee on the back deck while looking over the Cahuenga Pass. The skies were still clear from the rain two days earlier. It would be another beautiful day in paradise. He decided to go to Du-par’s on his own to eat breakfast before heading to the hospital to check on Kiz. He could pick up the papers, see what was reported about the events of the day before and then bring them to Kiz, maybe read them to her if she wanted.

He walked back inside and decided to leave on the suit and tie he had dressed in that morning before getting the call from Pratt. Home duty or not, he was going to act and look like a detective. He did, however, go into the closet in the bedroom and from the shelf above pull down the box containing the case file copies he had made four years earlier, when he had retired. He looked through the stacks until he found the copy of the Marie Gesto murder book. Jackson and Marcia would have the original, since they were running with the investigation now. He decided to take the copy with him in case he needed something to read while visiting with Rider or if Jackson or Marcia called with any questions.

He drove down the hill and up to Ventura Boulevard and followed it west into Studio City. At Du-par’s he bought copies of the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News out of racks in front of the restaurant, then went in and ordered French toast and coffee at the counter.

The Beachwood Canyon story was on the front page of both papers. Both displayed color booking photos of Raynard Waits, and the articles played up the hunt for the mad killer, the formation of an LAPD task force, and a toll-free telephone tip line just for finding Waits. The editors of the newspapers apparently considered that angle more important to the readers and a better selling point than the killing of two cops in the line of duty and the wounding of a third.

The stories contained information released during the numerous press conferences held the day before but very few details about what had actually happened in the woods at the top of Beachwood Canyon. According to the stories it was all under continuing investigation and information was being jealously guarded by those in charge. The short bios of the officers involved in the shooting and Deputy Doolan were sketchy at best. Both of the victims killed by Waits had been family men. The wounded detective, Kizmin Rider, had recently separated from a “life partner”-code for reporting that she was gay. Bosch didn’t recognize the names of the reporters on the stories and thought maybe they were new to the police beat and without sources close enough to the investigation to reveal the inside details.

On the jump pages of both papers he found sidebar stories that focused on the political response to the shooting and escape. Both papers quoted a variety of local pundits who for the most part said it was too early to tell whether the Beachwood incident would help or hinder Rick O’Shea’s candidacy for district attorney. While it was his case that went horribly awry, the reports of his selfless efforts to help save the wounded law officer while an armed killer was loose in the very same woods could be a balancing positive.

Said one pundit: “In this city, politics are like the movie business; nobody knows anything. This could be the best thing that happens to O’Shea. It could be the worst.”

Of course, O’Shea’s opponent, Gabriel Williams, was quoted liberally in both papers, calling the incident an unpardonable disgrace and laying all blame at O’Shea’s feet. Bosch thought about the missing videotape and wondered how much it would be worth to the Williams camp. Perhaps, he thought, Corvin the videographer had already found out.

In both papers Irvin Irving got his licks in and in doing so took a specific swipe at Bosch for being the epitome of what was wrong in the police department, something Irving as a city councilman would right. He said Bosch should never have been hired back into the department the year before and that Irving, as a deputy chief at the time, had lobbied hard against it. The papers said Bosch was under investigation by the department’s OIS squad and could not be reached for comment. Neither noted that the OIS routinely conducted an investigation of every shooting that involved a police officer, so what was presented to the public seemed unusual and therefore suspicious.

Bosch noticed that the sidebar in the Times had been written by Keisha Russell, who had worked the cop beat for a number of years before finally reaching a level of burnout that led her to ask for a new beat. She had landed in politics-a beat with its own high burnout rate. She had called and left a message for Bosch the night before but he had been in no mood to talk to a reporter, even one he trusted.

He still had her numbers programmed in his cell. When she worked cops he had been her source on a number of occasions, and she had provided him with help several times in return. He put the papers aside and took his first bites of French toast. His breakfast had both powdered sugar and maple syrup on it and he knew the sugar high would help charge him into the day.

After getting through about half of the meal he pulled out his cell and called the reporter’s number. She answered right away.

“Keisha,” he said. “It’s Harry Bosch.”

“Harry Bosch,” she said. “Well, long time no see.”

“Well, with you being a big shot on the political scene now…”

“Ah, but now it is politics and police coming together in a violent collision, isn’t it? How come you didn’t call me back yesterday?”

“Because you know I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation, especially an investigation involving myself. Besides that, you called after my phone died. I didn’t get your message until I got home, and it was probably after your deadline.”

“How is your partner?” she said, putting the banter aside for a serious tone.

“Hanging in.”

“And you came away unscathed as reported?”

“In the physical sense.”

“But not the political.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the story is already in the paper. Calling to comment and defend yourself now doesn’t exactly work.”

“I’m not calling to comment or defend myself. I don’t like my name in the paper.”

“Oh, then I get it. You want to go off the record and be my Deep Throat on this.”

“Not quite.”

He heard her blowing out her breath in frustration.

“Then why are you calling, Harry?”

“First of all, I always like hearing your voice, Keisha. You know that. And second, on the political beat, you probably have direct lines to all of the candidates. You know, so you can get them to give a quick comment on any issue that comes up in the course of a day. Right? Just like yesterday?”

She hesitated before answering, trying to get a read on where this was going.

“Yes, we’re known to be able to get hold of people when we have to. Except cantankerous police detectives. Sometimes they can be a problem.”

Bosch smiled.

“There you go,” he said.

“Which brings us to the reason you are calling.”

“Right. I want the number that will get me directly to Irvin Irving.”

This time the pause was longer.

“Harry, I can’t give you that number. It was entrusted to me and if he knows I gave-”

“Come on. Entrusted to you and every other reporter covering the campaign and you know it. He wouldn’t know who gave it to me unless I told him, and I’m not going to tell him. You know you can trust me when I say that.”

“Still, I just don’t feel comfortable giving it out without his permission. If you want me to call him and ask if I can-”

“He won’t want to talk to me, Keisha. That’s the point. If he wanted to talk to me I could leave a message at campaign headquarters-which is where, by the way?”

“On Broxton in Westwood. I still don’t feel comfortable just giving you the number.”

Bosch quickly grabbed the Daily News, which was folded to the page with the political fallout story. He read the byline.

“Okay, well maybe Sarah Weinman or Duane Swierczynski will feel comfortable giving it to me. They might want to have an IOU from somebody who’s in the middle of this thing.”

“All right, Bosch, all right, you don’t have to go to them, okay? I can’t believe you.”

“I want to talk to Irving.”

“All right, but you don’t say where you got the number.”

“Obviously.”

She gave him the number and he committed it to memory. He promised to call her back when there was something relating to the Beachwood Canyon incident that he could give her.

“Look, it doesn’t have to be political,” she urged. “Anything to do with the case, okay? I can still write a cop story if I’m the one who gets the story.”

“Got it, Keisha. Thanks.”

He closed his phone and left money for the bill and tip on the counter. As he stepped out of the restaurant he reopened the phone and punched in the number the reporter had just given him. Irving answered after six rings without identifying himself.

“Irvin Irving?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“I just wanted to thank you for confirming everything I always thought about you. You are nothing but a political opportunist and hack. That’s what you were in the department and that’s what you are out of it.”

“Is this Bosch? Is this Harry Bosch? Who gave you this number?”

“One of your own people. I guess somebody in your own camp doesn’t like the message you’re putting out.”

“Don’t worry about it, Bosch. Don’t worry about a thing. When I get in, you can start counting the days until you-”

Message delivered, Bosch closed his phone. It felt good to have said what he said, and to not worry that Irving was a superior officer who could say and do whatever he wanted without retribution from those he slighted.

Happy with his response to the newspaper stories, Bosch got in his car and drove to the hospital.

20

ON THE WAY DOWN the hallway in ICU Bosch passed a woman who had just left Kiz Rider’s room. He recognized her as Rider’s former lover. They had met briefly a few years earlier when Bosch happened to see Rider at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl.

He nodded to the woman as she passed but she didn’t stop to talk. He knocked once on Rider’s door and went in. His partner looked much better than she had the day before but still not even close to a hundred percent. She was conscious and alert when Bosch entered her room and her eyes tracked him to the side of her bed. There was no longer a tube in her mouth but the right side of her face drooped and Bosch immediately feared that she had suffered a stroke during the night.

“Don’t worry,” she said in slow, slurred words. “They’ve made my neck numb and it’s working on half of my face, too.”

He squeezed her hand.

“Okay,” he said. “Other than that how do you feel?”

“Not so good. It hurts, Harry. It really hurts.”

He nodded.

“Yeah.”

“I have surgery on my hand in the afternoon. That’s going to hurt, too.”

“But then you’ll be on the road to recovery. Rehab and all of that good stuff.”

“I hope so.”

She sounded depressed and Bosch didn’t know what to say. Fourteen years earlier, when he had been about her age, Bosch had woken up in the hospital after taking a bullet in his left shoulder. He still remembered the screaming pain that had set in every time the morphine started to wear off.

“I brought the papers,” he said. “You want me to read ’em to you?”

“Yeah. Nothing good, I suppose.”

“No, nothing good.”

He held the Times front page up so she could see the mug shot of Waits. He then read the lead story and then the sidebar. When he was finished he looked over at her. She looked distressed.

“You okay?”

“You should’ve left me, Harry, and gone after him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“In the woods. You could’ve gotten him. Instead you saved me. Now look at the shit you’re in.”

“It comes with the territory, Kiz. The only thing I could think about out there was getting you to the hospital. I feel really guilty about everything.”

“What exactly do you have to feel guilty about?”

“A lot. When I came out of retirement last year I made you leave the chief’s office and partner with me again. You wouldn’t have been there yesterday if I-”

“Oh, please! Would you shut your fucking mouth!”

He didn’t remember ever hearing her use such language. He did what she told him.

“Just shut up,” she said. “No more of that. What else did you bring me?”

Bosch held up the copy of the Gesto murder book.

“Oh, nothing. I brought this for me. To read if you were asleep or something. It’s the copy of the Gesto file I made back when I retired the first time.”

“So what are you going to do with that?”

“Like I said, I was just going to read it. I keep thinking there’s something we missed.”

“‘We’?”

“Me. Something I missed. I’ve been listening a lot lately to a recording of Coltrane and Monk playing together at Carnegie Hall. It was right there in the Carnegie archives for like fifty years until somebody found it. The thing is, the guy who found it had to know their sound to know what they had in that box in the archives.”

“And that relates to the file how?”

Bosch smiled. She was in a hospital bed with two bullet wounds and she was still giving him shit.

“I don’t know. I keep thinking there’s something in here and I’m the only one who can find it.”

“Good luck. Why don’t you sit on that chair and read your file. I think I’m going to go to sleep for a while.”

“Okay, Kiz. I’ll be quiet.”

He pulled the chair away from the wall and brought it closer to the bed. As he sat down she spoke again.

“I’m not coming back, Harry.”

He looked at her. It was not what he wanted to hear but he wouldn’t object. Not now, at least.

“Whatever you want, Kiz.”

“Sheila, my old girl, was just visiting. She saw the news and came in. She says she’ll take care of me until I get better. But she doesn’t want me going back to the cops.”

Which explained why she hadn’t wanted to talk to Bosch out in the hallway.

“That was always a point of contention with us, you know?”

“I remember you told me. Look, you don’t have to tell me any of this stuff now.”

“It’s not just Sheila, though. It’s me. I shouldn’t be a cop. I proved that yesterday.”

“What are you talking about? You are one of the best cops I know.”

He saw a tear roll down her cheek.

“I froze out there, Harry. I fucking froze and I let him… just shoot me.”

“Don’t do this to yourself, Kiz.”

“Those men are dead because of me. When he grabbed Olivas, I couldn’t move. I just watched. I should have put him down, but I just stood there. I just stood there and I let him shoot me next. Instead of raising my gun I raised my hand.”

“No, Kiz. You didn’t have an angle on him. If you had fired you might have hit Olivas. After that it was too late.”

He hoped she understood that he was telling her what to say when the OIS came around.

“No, I have to own up to it. I-”

“Kiz, you want to quit, that’s fine. I’ll back you one hundred percent. But I won’t back you on this other shit. You understand?”

She tried to turn her face away from him but the bandages on her neck prevented her from turning.

“Okay,” she said.

More tears came down and Bosch knew that she had wounds that were far deeper than those in her neck and hand.

“You know, you should have gone up top,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Out there with the ladder. If you had been up top instead of me none of this would’ve happened. Because you wouldn’t have hesitated, Harry. You would’ve blown his shit away.”

Bosch shook his head.

“Nobody knows how they’re going to react in a situation until they’re in that situation.”

“I froze.”

“Look, go to sleep, Kiz. Get better and then make your decision. If you don’t come back I will understand. But I’m always going to be your backup, Kiz. No matter what happens and where you go.”

She used her left hand to wipe her face.

“Thanks, Harry.”

She closed her eyes and he watched as she finally gave it up. She mumbled something he couldn’t understand and then was asleep. Bosch watched her for a while and thought about not having her as a partner anymore. They had worked well together, like family. He would miss it.

He didn’t want to think about the future right now. He opened the murder book and decided to start reading about the past. He started from page one, the initial crime report.

A few minutes later he had it covered and was about to turn to the witness reports when his phone began vibrating in his pocket. He walked out of the room to answer the call in the hallway. It was Lieutenant Randolph from the Officer Involved Shooting Unit.

“Sorry we’re holding you off active while we take our time with this thing,” he said.

“It’s all right. I know why.”

“Yeah, a lot of pressure.”

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

“I was hoping maybe you’d take a ride down here to Parker Center and look at this videotape we’ve got.”

“You have the tape from O’Shea’s cameraman?”

There was a pause before Randolph answered.

“We have a tape from him, yes. I’m not sure it’s a complete tape and that’s what I want you to look at. You know, tell us what might be missing. Can you come down?”

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“Good. I’ll be waiting. How’s your partner?”

Bosch wondered if Randolph knew where he was.

“She’s still hanging in. I’m at the hospital now but she’s still out of it.”

He hoped to delay Rider’s OIS interview as long as possible. In a few days, once she was off the painkillers and clear of mind, maybe she’d think better of volunteering that she had frozen when Waits made his move.

“We’re waiting to hear when we can interview her,” Randolph said.

“Probably be a few days, I would think.”

“Probably. Anyway, see you soon. Thanks for coming down.”

Bosch closed the phone and went back into the room. He picked the murder book up off the chair where he had left it and checked on his partner. She was asleep. He quietly left the room.

He made good time on the drive in and called Rachel to tell her that lunch looked good, since he was already going to be downtown. They agreed to go fancy and she said she would make a reservation at the Water Grill for noon. He said he would see her there.

The OIS squad was on the third floor at Parker Center. It was at the opposite end of the building from the Robbery-Homicide Division. Randolph had a private office with video equipment set up on a stand. He was sitting behind the desk, while Osani was working with the equipment and getting ready to play the tape. Randolph motioned Bosch to the only other seat.

“When did you get the tape?” Bosch asked.

“It was delivered this morning. Corvin said it took him twenty-four hours to remember he had put it in one of those cargo pockets you mentioned. This, of course, came after I had reminded him I had a witness who saw the tape go in the pocket.”

“And you think it’s been doctored?”

“We’ll know for sure after I give it to SID but, yeah, it’s been edited. We found his camera at the crime scene, and Osani here was bright enough to write down the number on the counter. When you roll this tape the counter on the tape doesn’t match. About two minutes of tape are missing. Why don’t you roll it, Reggie.”

Osani started the tape and Bosch watched as it began with the huddle of investigators and techs in the Sunset Ranch parking lot. Corvin had stayed close to O’Shea at all times and there was an uninterrupted flow of raw video footage which seemed to always keep the candidate for district attorney at center. This continued as the group followed Waits into the woods and until they all stopped at the top of the steep drop-off. Then it was clear there was a cut where it was to be presumed that Corvin had turned the camera off and then back on again. There was no discussion on the tape of whether the handcuffs should be removed from Waits’s wrists. The video cut from Kiz Rider saying they could use the SID ladder to Cafarelli returning to the spot with the ladder.

Osani stopped the tape so they could discuss it.

“It’s likely that he did stop the camera while we were waiting for the ladder,” Bosch said. “That probably took ten minutes max. But he probably didn’t stop it until after the back and forth about the cuffs on Waits.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m just assuming. But I wasn’t watching Corvin. I was watching Waits.”

“Right.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I don’t want you to give me anything that wasn’t there.”

“Did any of the other witnesses back me on this? Did they say they heard the discussion about uncuffing him?”

“Cafarelli, the SID tech, heard it. Corvin said he didn’t and O’Shea said it never happened. So you got two from the LAPD saying yes and two from the DA’s office saying no. And no tape to back it up either way. Classic pissing match.”

“What about Maury Swann?”

“He’d be the tiebreaker except he’s not talking to us. Says it is in his client’s best interest to remain mute.”

That didn’t surprise Bosch, coming from a defense lawyer.

“Is there another edit you wanted to show me?”

“Possibly. Go ahead, Reggie.”

Osani started the video again and it took them through the descent on the ladder and then to the clearing where Cafarelli methodically used the probe to mark the location of the body. The shot was uninterrupted. Corvin simply turned the camera on and shot everything, probably with the idea that he would edit it later if the tape was ever needed in a court hearing. Or possibly a campaign documentary.

The tape continued and documented the group’s return to the ladder. Rider and Olivas went up to the top and Waits was uncuffed by Bosch. But as the prisoner started his climb up the ladder, the tape cut off just as he reached the upper rungs and Olivas was leaning down to grab him.

“That’s it?” Bosch asked.

“That’s it,” Randolph said.

“I remember after the shooting, when I told Corvin to leave the camera and come up the ladder to help with Kiz, he had it on his shoulder. He was rolling.”

“Yeah, well, we asked about why the tape ended and he claimed that he thought he was going to run short on tape. He wanted to keep some for when the diggers came in and excavated the body. So he turned the camera off when Waits was going up the ladder.”

“That make sense to you?”

“I don’t know. You?”

“Nope. I think that’s bullshit. He had the whole thing on tape.”

“That’s just an opinion.”

“Whatever,” Bosch said. “The question is, why cut the tape at this point? What was on it?”

“You tell me. You were there.”

“I told you everything I could remember.”

“Well, you better remember more. You’re not in such good shape here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s no discussion on the tape of whether the man should or shouldn’t be cuffed. What is on the tape is Olivas uncuffing him for the climb down and you uncuffing him for the climb back up.”

Bosch realized that Randolph was right and that the tape made him look like he had uncuffed Waits without even discussing it with the others.

“O’Shea’s setting me up.”

“I don’t know if anyone is setting anyone up. Let me ask you something. When the shit hit the fan out there and Waits grabbed the gun and started shooting, do you remember seeing O’Shea at that point?”

Bosch shook his head.

“I ended up on the ground with Olivas on top of me. I was worried about where Waits was, not O’Shea. I don’t know where O’Shea was. All I can tell you is that he wasn’t in my picture. He was behind me somewhere.”

“Maybe that’s what Corvin had on the tape. O’Shea running away like a coward.”

Randolph’s use of the word coward sparked something in Bosch.

He now remembered. From on top of the embankment Waits had called someone, presumably O’Shea, a coward. Bosch remembered hearing the sound of running behind him. O’Shea had run.

Bosch thought about this. First of all, O’Shea had no weapon with which to protect himself from the man he was going to put in prison for life. By all rights, running from the gun would not be unexpected or unreasonable. It would have been an act of self-preservation, not cowardice. But since O’Shea was a candidate for top prosecutor in the county, running away under any circumstances would probably not look so good-especially if it was on video on the six o’clock news.

“I remember now,” Bosch said. “Waits called somebody a coward for running. It must’ve been O’Shea.”

“Mystery solved,” Randolph said.

Bosch turned back to the monitor.

“Can we back it up and look at that last part again?” he asked. “Just before it cuts off, I mean.”

Osani worked the video and they watched it silently from the moment Waits was uncuffed for the second time.

“Can you stop it right before the cut?” Bosch asked.

Osani froze the image on the screen. It showed Waits past the halfway point on the ladder and Olivas reaching down to grab him. The angle of Olivas’s body had caused his windbreaker to fall open. Bosch could see his pistol in a pancake holster on his left hip, grips out so that he could take the gun with an across-the-body pull.

Bosch stood up and walked to the monitor. He took out a pen and tapped it on the screen.

“You notice that?” he said. “It looks like he’s got the snap on his holster open.”

Randolph and Osani studied the screen. The safety snap was something they obviously hadn’t noticed before.

“Could’ve been that he wanted to be ready if the prisoner made a move,” Osani said. “It’s within regs.”

Neither Bosch nor Randolph responded. Whether it fell within department regulations or not, it was a curiosity that could not be explained, since Olivas was dead.

“You can turn it off, Reg,” Randolph finally said.

“No, can you show it one more time?” Bosch asked. “Just this part at the ladder.”

Randolph nodded to Osani and the tape was backed up and replayed. Bosch tried to use the images on the monitor to build momentum and carry him into his own memory of what happened when Waits got to the top. He remembered looking up and watching Olivas being swung around so that his back was to those below and there was no clear shot at Waits. He now remembered wondering where Kiz was and why she wasn’t reacting.

Then there were shots and Olivas was falling backwards down the ladder toward him. Bosch raised his hands to try to lessen the impact. On the ground with Olivas on top of him he heard more shots and then the yelling.

The yelling. Forgotten in all the adrenaline rush and panic. Waits had come to the precipice and fired down at them. And he had yelled. He called O’Shea a coward for running. But he had said more than just that.

“Run, you coward! How’s your bullshit deal looking now?”

Bosch had forgotten the taunt in the commotion and confusion of the shooting, escape and effort to save Kiz Rider. In the charge of fear that came with those moments.

What did that mean? What was Waits saying by calling the agreement a “bullshit deal”?

“What is it?” Randolph asked.

Bosch looked at him, coming out of his thoughts.

“Nothing. I was just trying to concentrate on what happened during the moments where there’s no tape.”

“It looked like you remembered something.”

“I just remembered how close I came to getting killed like Olivas and Doolan. Olivas landed on me. He ended up shielding me.”

Randolph nodded.

Bosch wanted to get out of there. He wanted to take his discovery-“How’s your bullshit deal looking now?”-and work it. He wanted to grind it down to a powder and analyze it under the microscope.

“Lieutenant, you have anything else for me right now?”

“Not right now.”

“Then I’m going to go. Call me if you need me.”

“You call me when you remember what you can’t remember.”

He gave Bosch a knowing look. Bosch looked away.

“Right.”

Bosch left the OIS office and went out to the elevator lobby. He should have left the building then. But instead he pushed the button to go up.

21

REMEMBERING WHAT WAITS had yelled changed things. To Bosch it meant something had been going on up there in Beachwood Canyon and it was something he’d had no clue about. His first thought now was to retreat and consider everything before making a move. But the appointment at OIS had given him a reason to be in Parker Center and he planned to make the most of it before leaving.

He entered room 503, the offices of the Open-Unsolved Unit, and headed toward the alcove where his desk was located. The squad room was almost vacant. He checked the workstation shared by Marcia and Jackson and saw that they were out. Bosch had to walk by the open door of Abel Pratt’s office to get to his own workstation, so he decided to be up-front. He stuck his head in the door and saw his boss ensconced at his desk. He was eating raisins out of a little red box that looked like it was meant for a child. He looked surprised to see Bosch.

“Harry, what are you doing here?” he asked.

“OIS called me down to look at the video O’Shea’s guy took of the Beachwood field trip.”

“He’s got the shooting on it?”

“Not quite. He claimed the camera was off.”

Pratt’s eyebrows arched.

“Randolph doesn’t believe him?”

“Hard to tell. The guy sat on the tape until this morning and it looks like it might have been altered. Randolph’s going to have SID check it. Anyway, listen, I thought that while I was here I would take a bunch of files and stuff back to Archives so it’s not all lying around. Kiz had some files out, too, and it will be a while before she gets back to them.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

Bosch nodded.

“Hey,” Pratt said, his mouth full of raisins. “I just heard from Tim and Rick. They’re leaving Mission right now. The autopsy was this morning and they got the ID. Marie Gesto, confirmed. They got it on the dental.”

Bosch nodded again as he considered the finality of this news. The search for Marie Gesto was over.

“I guess that’s it, then.”

“They said you were going to make the next-of-kin call on it. You wanted to do it.”

“Yeah. But I’ll probably wait until tonight, when Dan Gesto comes home from work. It’ll be better if both parents are together.”

“However you want to handle it. We’ll keep the lid on it from this end. I’ll call the ME and tell them not to put it out until tomorrow.”

“Thanks. Did Tim or Rick tell you if they got a cause of death?”

“Looks like manual strangulation. Hyoid was fractured.”

He touched the front of his neck in case Bosch didn’t remember where the fragile hyoid bone was located. Bosch had only worked about a hundred strangulation cases in his time but he didn’t bother saying anything.

“Sorry, Harry. I know you’re close to this one. When you started pulling the file every couple of months, I knew it meant something to you.”

Bosch nodded more to himself than to Pratt. He went to his desk, thinking about the confirmation of the body’s identification and remembering how thirteen years earlier he had been all but convinced that Marie Gesto would never be found. It was always strange how things turned out. He started gathering all the files associated with the Waits investigation. Marcia and Jackson had the Gesto murder book but this didn’t bother Bosch, because he had his own copy in his car.

He walked around to his partner’s desk to gather the files she had on Daniel Fitzpatrick, the Hollywood pawnbroker Waits said he murdered during the 1992 riots, and saw two plastic cartons on the floor. He opened one and found it contained the pawn records salvaged from the burned-out pawnshop. Bosch remembered Rider mentioning these. The musty smell of the once-wet documents hit him and he quickly snapped the top back on the carton. He decided he would take these as well, but it would mean two trips past Pratt’s open door to get everything down to his car, and that would give his boss two opportunities to become curious about what Bosch was really up to.

Bosch was considering leaving the cartons behind when he got lucky. Pratt stepped out of his office and looked over at him.

“I don’t know who decided raisins are a good snack food,” he said. “I’m still hungry. You want anything from downstairs, Harry? A doughnut or something?”

“No thanks, I’m fine. I’m going to take this stuff over and then get out of here.”

Bosch noticed that Pratt was holding one of the guidebooks usually stacked on his desk. It said West Indies on the cover.

“Doing some research?” he asked.

“Yeah, checking things out. You ever heard of a place called Nevis?”

“Uh-uh.”

Bosch had heard of few of the places Pratt asked about during his researches.

“Says here you can buy an old sugar mill on eight acres for less than four hundred. Shit, I’ll clear more than that on my house alone.”

It was probably true. Bosch had never been to Pratt’s home but knew that he owned a property up in Sun Valley that was big enough to keep a couple horses on. He’d lived there nearly twenty years and was sitting on a gold mine in real-estate value. There was only one problem, though. A few weeks earlier Rider had been at her desk and had overheard Pratt on the phone in his office asking questions about child custody and communal property. She told Bosch about the call and they both assumed that Pratt had been talking to a divorce lawyer.

“You want to make sugar?” Bosch asked.

“No, man, it’s just what the property was used for at one time. Now you’d probably buy it, fix it up, and make it a bed-and-breakfast or something.”

Bosch just nodded. Pratt was moving into a world he knew and cared nothing about.

“Anyway,” Pratt said, sensing he didn’t have an audience, “I’ll see you. And by the way, it’s nice that you got dressed up for the OIS. Most guys on home duty would’ve slogged in here in jeans and a T-shirt, looking more like a suspect than a cop.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Pratt left the office and Bosch waited thirty seconds for him to get the elevator. He then put a stack of files on one of the evidence cartons and carried it all out the door. He was able to take it down and out to his car and get back before Pratt returned from the cafeteria. He then took the second carton and left. No one questioned what he was doing or where he was going with the materials.

After pulling out of the pay lot Bosch checked his watch and saw that he had less than an hour to kill before he was supposed to meet Rachel for lunch. It wasn’t enough time to drive home, drop the documents and come back-besides, that would be a waste of time and gas. He thought about canceling the lunch so he could go home right away and get going on the review of the records, but he decided against it because he knew Rachel would be a good sounding board and might even have some ideas about what Waits had meant when he yelled during the shooting.

He could also get to the restaurant early and start his review while waiting at the table for Rachel. But he knew that might cause a problem if a customer or waiter happened to catch a glimpse of some of the photos in the murder books.

The city’s main library was located in the same block as the restaurant, and he decided he would go there. He could do some file work in one of the private cubicles and then meet Rachel on time at the restaurant.

After parking in the garage beneath the library he carried the murder books from the Gesto and Fitzpatrick cases with him onto the elevator. Once inside the confines of the sprawling library, he found an open cubicle in a reference room and set to work reviewing the documents he had brought. Since he had begun rereading the Gesto files in Rider’s hospital room, he decided to stick with them and finish his review.

Moving through the book in the order the documents and reports were filed, he didn’t reach the Investigative Chronology-usually filed at the back of a murder book-until the end. He casually read through the 51 forms, and nothing about the investigative moves made, the subjects interviewed or the calls received hit him as any more important than when they had been originally added to the chrono.

Then suddenly he was struck by what he had not seen in the chronology. He quickly flipped pages backwards until he came to the 51 for September 29, 1993, and looked for the entry on the call Jerry Edgar had taken from Robert Saxon.

It wasn’t there.

Bosch leaned forward to read the document more clearly. This made no sense. In the official murder book the entry was there. Raynard Waits’s alias, Robert Saxon. The entry date was September 29, 1993, and the time of the call was 6:40 p.m. Olivas had found it during his review of the case and the next day in O’Shea’s office Bosch had seen it clear as day. He had studied it, knowing that it was confirmation of an error that allowed Waits another thirteen years of freedom to kill.

But the entry was not in Bosch’s copy of the murder book.

What the hell?

At first Bosch couldn’t put it together. The copy of the chronology in front of him was made four years earlier, when Bosch had decided to retire. He had secretly copied murder books from a handful of open cases that still gnawed at his insides. They were his retirement cases. His plan had been to work them on his own and at his leisure, to solve them before he could finally let the mission go and sit on a beach in Mexico with a fishing pole in one hand and a Corona in the other.

But it didn’t work out that way. Bosch learned that the mission was best served with a badge and he came back to the job. After he was assigned with Rider to the Open-Unsolved Unit, one of the first murder books he pulled out of Archives was the Gesto case. The book he pulled was the live record, the investigative file that was updated each time he or anybody else worked it. What he had in front of him was a copy that had sat on a shelf in his closet and had not been updated in four years. Even so, how could one have a notation entered on a 51 form in 1993, while the other one didn’t?

The logic of it dictated only one answer.

The official record of the investigation had been tampered with. The notation entering the name Robert Saxon into the murder book was added after Bosch had made his copy of the book. That of course left a four-year window during which the false notation could have been added, but common sense told Bosch he was dealing with days, not years.

Just a few days earlier Freddy Olivas had called him, looking for the murder book. Olivas took possession of the book and then became the one who discovered the Robert Saxon entry. It was Olivas who had brought it to light.

Bosch flipped through the chronology. Almost all of the pages corresponding with the dates of the initial investigation were filled in completely with time-marked notations. Only the page marked September 29 had space at the bottom. This would have allowed Olivas to remove the page from the binder, type in the Saxon entry and then return it to its place, setting the stage for his supposed discovery of this link between Waits and Gesto. Back in 1993 Bosch and Edgar did the 51s on a typewriter in the Hollywood squad room. It was all done on computer now but there were still plenty of typewriters around most squad rooms for the old-school cops-like Bosch-who couldn’t quite grasp the idea of working on a computer.

Bosch felt a heavy mixture of relief and anger start to overtake him. The burden of guilt over the mistake he and Edgar had supposedly made was lifting. They were in the clear and he needed to tell Edgar as soon as he could. But Bosch couldn’t embrace the feeling-not yet-because of the growing rage he felt at being victimized by Olivas. He stood up and walked away from the cubicle. He stepped out of the reference room and into the library’s main rotunda, where a circular mosaic high up on the walls told the story of the city’s founding.

Bosch felt like yelling something, exorcising the demon, but he kept quiet. A security guard walked quickly across the floor of the cavernous structure, maybe on his way to put the collar on a book thief or a flasher in the stacks. Bosch watched him go and then went back to his own work.

Back in the cubicle he tried to think through what had happened. Olivas had tampered with the murder book, typing a two-line entry into the chronology that would make Bosch believe he had made a profound mistake in the early stages of the investigation. The entry said that Robert Saxon had called to report seeing Marie Gesto at the Mayfair Supermarket on the afternoon she had disappeared.

That was all. It wasn’t the content of the call that was important to Olivas. It was the caller. Olivas had wanted to somehow get Raynard Waits into the murder book. Why? To put Bosch on some sort of a guilt trip that would allow Olivas the upper hand and control of the current investigation?

Bosch dismissed this. Olivas already had the upper hand and control. He was lead investigator in the Waits case and Bosch’s proprietary hold on the Gesto case would not change that. Bosch was along for the ride, yes, but he wasn’t steering the car. Olivas was steering, and therefore the Robert Saxon name plant was not necessary.

There had to be another reason.

Bosch worked it over for a while but only came to the weak conclusion that Olivas needed to connect Waits to Gesto. By putting the killer’s alias into the book, he was going back thirteen years in time and firmly tying Raynard Waits to Marie Gesto.

But Waits was about to admit he murdered Gesto. There could be no stronger tie than an uncoerced confession. He was even going to lead authorities to the body. The notation in the chronology would be a minor connection compared with these two. So then why put it in?

Ultimately, Bosch was confounded by the risk Olivas had taken. He had tampered with the official record of the murder investigation for seemingly little reason or gain. He had run the risk that Bosch would discover the deceit and call him on it. He had run the risk of the deceit possibly being revealed by a smart lawyer like Maury Swann in court one day. And he did all of this knowing that he didn’t have to, knowing that Waits would be tied solidly into the case with a confession.

Now Olivas was dead and could not be confronted. There was no one to answer why.

Except maybe Raynard Waits.

“How’s your bullshit deal looking now?”

And maybe Rick O’Shea.

Bosch thought about everything and all in a moment it came together. Bosch suddenly knew why Olivas had taken the risk and put the specter of Raynard Waits into the Marie Gesto murder book. He saw it with a clarity that left him no room for doubt.

Raynard Waits didn’t kill Marie Gesto.

He jumped up and started gathering the files together. Clutching them with both hands, he hurried through the rotunda toward the exit. His footfalls echoed behind him in the great room like a crowd of people chasing him. He looked back but there was nobody there.

22

BOSCH HAD LOST TRACK of time while in the library. He was late. Rachel was already seated and waiting for him. She was holding a large one-sheet menu that obscured the look of annoyance on her face as Bosch was led to the table by a waiter.

“Sorry,” Bosch said as he sat down.

“It’s okay,” she replied. “But I already ordered for myself. I didn’t know if you were going to show or not.”

She handed the menu across to him. He immediately handed it to the waiter.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” he said. “And just the water is fine.”

He drank from the glass already poured for him while the waiter hurried away. Rachel smiled at him, but not in a nice way.

“You’re not going to like it. You’d better call him back.”

“Why? I like seafood.”

“Because I ordered the sashimi. You told me the other night that you like your seafood cooked.”

The news gave him momentary pause but he decided he deserved to pay for his mistake of arriving late.

“It all goes to the same place,” he said, dismissing the issue. “But why do they call this place the Water Grill if they’re not grilling the food?”

“Good question.”

“Forget about it. We need to talk. I need your help, Rachel.”

“With what? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t think Raynard Waits killed Marie Gesto.”

“What do you mean? He led you to her body. Are you saying that wasn’t Marie Gesto?”

“No, ID was confirmed today at the autopsy. It was definitely Marie Gesto in that grave.”

“And Waits was the one who led you to it, right?”

“Right.”

“And Waits was the one who confessed to killing her, right?”

“Right.”

“At autopsy, was the cause of death in agreement with that confession?”

“Yeah, from what I hear, it was.”

“Then, Harry, you’re not making sense. With all of that, how can he not be the killer?”

“Because something is going on that we don’t know about, that I don’t know about. Olivas and O’Shea had some sort of play going with him. I’m not sure what it was but it all went to shit in Beachwood Canyon.”

She held up her hands in a hold-it-right-there gesture.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning. Only tell me facts. No theory, no conjecture. Just give me what you’ve got.”

He told her everything, starting with the tampering with the murder book by Olivas and concluding with the detail-by-detail accounting of what had happened when Waits started to climb up the ladder in Beachwood Canyon. He told her what Waits had yelled at O’Shea and what had been edited out of the field trip video.

It took him fifteen minutes and during that time their lunch was served. Of course it came fast, Bosch thought. It didn’t have to be cooked! He felt lucky to be the one doing all the talking. It gave him a ready excuse not to eat the raw fish put down in front of him.

By the time he was finished recounting the story he could see that Rachel’s mind had gone to work on everything. She was grinding it down.

“Putting Waits in the murder book doesn’t make sense,” she said. “It connects him to the case, yes, but he is already connected through his confession and his leading you to the body. So why bother with the murder book?”

Bosch leaned across the table to respond.

“Two things. One, Olivas thought he might need to sell the confession. He had no idea if I’d be able to punch holes in it, so he wanted some insurance. He put Waits in the file. And it put me in a position of being preconditioned to believe the confession.”

“Okay, and two?”

“This is where it gets tricky,” he said. “Putting Waits in the book was a way of preconditioning me but it was also about knocking me off my game.”

She looked at him, but what he was saying didn’t register.

“You’d better explain that.”

“This is where we go off the known facts and talk about what the facts might mean. Theory, conjecture, whatever you want to call it. Olivas put that line in the chronology and then threw it in my face. He knew that if I saw it and believed it, then I would believe that my partner and I had horribly messed up back in ’ninety-three, that I would believe people were dead because of our mistake. The weight of all those women Waits killed since then would be on me.”

“Okay.”

“And it would connect me with Waits on an emotional level of pure hate. Yes, I’ve wanted the guy who killed Marie Gesto for thirteen years. But adding in all those other women and putting their deaths on me would bring things to a raw edge when I finally came face-to-face with the guy. It would distract me.”

“From what?”

“From the fact that Waits didn’t kill her. He was confessing to killing Marie Gesto but he didn’t kill her. He made some sort of deal with Olivas and probably O’Shea to take the fall for it because he was already going down for all the others. I was so overcome with my hatred that I didn’t have my eyes on the prize. I wasn’t paying attention to the details, Rachel. All I wanted to do was jump across the table and choke the guy out.”

“You are forgetting something.”

“What?”

Now she leaned across the table, keeping her voice down so as not to disturb the other diners.

“He led you to her body. If he didn’t kill her, how did he know where to go in the woods? How did he lead you right to her?”

Bosch nodded. It was a good point but one he had already thought about.

“It could have been done. He could have been schooled in his cell by Olivas. It could’ve been a Hansel and Gretel trick, a trail marked in such a way that only he would notice the markers. I’m going back up to Beachwood this afternoon. My guess is that when I go through there this time, I’ll find the markers.”

Bosch reached over and took her empty plate and exchanged it with his untouched plate. She didn’t object.

“So you’re saying that the whole field trip was a setup to convince you,” she said. “That Waits was fed the basic information about the Marie Gesto murder and he just regurgitated it all in the confession, then happily led you like Little Red Riding Hood through the woods to the spot where she was buried.”

He nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what I am saying. When you boil it all down to that, it sounds a little far-fetched, I know, but-”

“More than a little.”

“What?”

“More than a little far-fetched. First of all, how did Olivas know the details to give Waits? How did he know where she was buried so he could mark a trail for Waits to follow? Are you saying Olivas killed Marie Gesto?”

Bosch shook his head emphatically. He thought she was going over the top with her devil’s advocate logic and he was getting annoyed.

“No, I’m not saying that Olivas was the killer. I am saying he was gotten to by the killer. He and O’Shea. The real killer came to them and made some sort of a deal.”

“Harry, this just sounds so…”

She didn’t finish. She pushed the sashimi on her plate around with her chopsticks but ate very little of it. The waiter used the moment to approach the table.

“You didn’t like your sashimi?” he said to her in a trembling voice.

“No, I-”

She stopped when she realized she had almost a full portion on the plate in front of her.

“I guess I wasn’t very hungry.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s missing,” Bosch said, smiling. “I thought it was great.”

The waiter took the plates off the table and said he would be back with dessert menus.

“‘I thought it was great,’” Walling said in a mocking voice. “You jerk.”

“Sorry.”

The waiter brought the dessert menus and they both handed them back and ordered coffee. Walling remained quiet after that and Bosch decided to wait her out.

“Why now?” she finally asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I don’t know exactly.”

“When was the last time you pulled the case and actively worked it?”

“About five months ago. The last video I showed you the other night-that was the last time I worked it. I was just about to make another run at it.”

“What did you do besides pull Garland in again?”

“Everything. I talked to everybody. I knocked on all the same doors again. I only brought Garland in at the end.”

“You think it was Garland who got to Olivas?”

“For Olivas and maybe O’Shea to make a deal, it would have had to be somebody with juice. Lots of money and power. The Garlands have both.”

The waiter came with their coffee and the check. Bosch put a credit card on it but the waiter had already left.

“You want to at least split it?” Rachel asked. “You didn’t even eat.”

“It’s okay. Hearing what you have to say makes it worth it.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only the ones who are federal agents.”

She shook her head. He saw the doubt creep back into her eyes.

“What?”

“I don’t know, it’s just…”

“Just what?”

“What if you look at it from Waits’s view of things?”

“And?”

“It’s such a long shot, Harry. It’s like one of those mumbo-jumbo conspiracies. You take all the facts after it’s over and move them around to fit some far-fetched theory. Marilyn Monroe didn’t overdose, the Kennedys used the mob to kill her. Like that.”

“So what about Waits’s point of view?”

“I’m just saying, why would he do it? Why would he confess to a murder he didn’t commit?”

Bosch made a dismissive gesture with his hands, as if he were pushing something away.

“That’s an easy one, Rachel. He would do it because he had nothing to lose. He was already going down as the Echo Park Bagman. If he went to trial, he was no doubt going to get the Jesus juice, just like Olivas reminded him out there yesterday. So his only shot at living was to confess to his crimes, and if, say, the investigator and the prosecutor wanted him to add another killing in for good measure, what was Waits going to say about that? No deal? Don’t kid yourself, they had the leverage and if they told Waits to jump, he would’ve nodded his head and said, ‘On who?’”

She nodded.

“And there was something else,” Bosch added. “He knew there would be a field trip and I’ll bet that gave him hope. He knew he might get a shot at an escape. Once they told him that he’d be leading us through the woods, that shot got a little bigger and no doubt his cooperation got a little better. His whole motivation was probably getting to the field trip.”

She nodded again. He couldn’t tell whether he had convinced her of anything. They were silent for a long moment. The waiter came and took his credit card. Lunch was over.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Like I told you, next stop Beachwood Canyon. After that, I’m going to find the man who can explain everything to me.”

“O’Shea? He’ll never talk to you.”

“I know. That’s why I’m not going to talk to him. Not yet, at least.”

“You’re going to find Waits?”

He could hear the doubt in her voice.

“That’s right.”

“He’s long gone, Harry. You think he would stay around here? He killed two cops. His life expectancy in L.A. is zero. You think he’d stick around with every person with a gun and badge in this county looking for him with a license to kill?”

He nodded slowly.

“He’s still here,” he said with conviction. “Everything you said is right, except you forgot one thing. He’s got the leverage now. When he escaped, the leverage shifted to Waits. And if he is smart, and it appears he is, he’ll use it. He’ll stick around and he’ll use O’Shea to maximum potential.”

“You mean blackmail?”

“Whatever. Waits carries the truth. He knows what went down. If he can make it believable that he’s a danger to O’Shea and his whole election machine, and if he can contact O’Shea, he can now make the candidate do the jumping.”

She nodded.

“You raise a good point about leverage,” she said. “What if this grand conspiracy of yours had gone down as planned? You know, Waits takes the fall for Gesto and all the others and heads off to Pelican Bay or San Quentin to do his life without. Then the conspirators have this guy sitting in a cell and he has all the answers-and the leverage. He’s still a danger to O’Shea and his whole political machine. Why would the future district attorney of Los Angeles County put himself in that position?”

The waiter brought back the credit card and the final bill. Bosch added a tip and signed it. It had to be the most expensive lunch he had never eaten.

He looked up at Rachel when he was finished scribbling his name.

“Good question, Rachel. I don’t know the exact answer to it but I assume O’Shea or Olivas or somebody had a plan for an endgame. And maybe that’s why Waits decided to run.”

She frowned.

“You can’t be talked out of this, can you?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, good luck. I think you are going to need it.”

“Thanks, Rachel.”

He stood up and so did she.

“Did you valet?” she asked.

“No, I’m over in the library garage.”

It meant they would leave the restaurant by different doors.

“Will I see you tonight?” he asked.

“If I’m not held up. There’s word of a case coming our way from Washington headquarters. How about if I call you?”

He said that was fine and walked with her to the door that led to the garage where the valets waited. He hugged her there and said good-bye.

23

ON THE WAY OUT of downtown Bosch took Hill Street up to Caesar Chavez and turned left. It soon became Sunset Boulevard and he drove it through Echo Park. He wasn’t expecting to see Raynard Waits crossing at the light or coming out of a medicina clinic or one of the migra offices that lined the street. But Bosch was running way out on his instincts on this case and they told him Echo Park was still in play. The more he drove through, the more he would get a feel for the neighborhood and the better he would be at his search. Instincts or not, he was sure of one thing. Waits had originally been arrested while on his way to a specific destination in Echo Park. Bosch was going to find it.

He pulled into a no-parking zone near Quintero Street and walked up to the Pescado Mojado grill. He ordered camarones a la diabla and showed the booking photo of Waits to the man who took his order and to the patrons waiting in line. He got the usual shake of the head from each customer, and the Spanish conversation among them died off. Bosch took his shrimp plate to a table and finished his food quickly.

From Echo Park he drove home to change from his suit into jeans and a pullover shirt. Then he drove over to Beachwood Canyon and made his way to the top of the hill. The parking clearing below Sunset Ranch was empty and Bosch wondered if all the activity and media attention from the day before had kept riders away. He got out of his car and went to its trunk. He pulled out a coiled thirty-foot length of rope and headed into the brush on the same path he had taken behind Waits the day before.

He was only a few steps down the path when his cell phone started vibrating. He stopped, dug the phone out of his blue jeans and saw on the screen that it was Jerry Edgar calling. Bosch had left him a message earlier while driving home.

“How’s Kiz?”

“Doing better. You ought to go visit her, man. Get over whatever it is you two need to get over and visit her. You didn’t even call yesterday.”

“Don’t worry, I will. In fact, I was thinking about cutting out of here early and dropping by. You going to be there?”

“I might. Give me a call when you’re going and I’ll try to meet you. Anyway, that’s not really why I called. There’s a couple things I wanted to tell you. First, they got a confirmation on the ID at the autopsy today. It was Marie Gesto.”

Edgar was silent a moment before responding.

“Have you talked to her parents?”

“No, not yet. Dan’s got that job selling tractors. I was going to call up there tonight when he’s home and they’re together.”

“That’s what I’d do. What else you got, Harry? I got a guy in a room here and I’m about to go in and break his ass down on a murder-rape we’re working.”

“Sorry to interrupt. I thought you called me.”

“I did, man, but I was calling you back real quick in case it was important.”

“It is important. I thought you’d want to know, I think that line that was found in the fifty-ones on this case was phonied. I think when it all shakes out we’ll be clear on it.”

This time there was no hesitation in his old partner’s response.

“What are you saying, Waits never called us back then?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how’d that entry get in the chrono?”

“Somebody added it. Recently. Somebody trying to fuck with me.”

“Goddamn it!” Bosch could hear the anger and relief in Edgar’s voice. “I haven’t slept since you called me up and told me that shit, Harry. They didn’t only fuck with you, man.”

“That’s what I figured. That’s why I called. I haven’t figured it all out, but that’s the way it’s looking. When I get the whole story I’ll let you know. Now go back to your interview and nail that guy.”

“Harry, my man, you just made my day. I’m going to go into the room and crunch this asshole’s bones.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Call me if you’re going to see Kiz.”

“You got it.”

But Bosch knew Edgar was just paying lip service to the idea. He wouldn’t be visiting Kiz, not if he was in the middle of a breaking case like he said. After closing and pocketing the phone, Bosch looked around and took in his surroundings. He looked high and low, from the ground to the overhead canopy, and didn’t see any obvious markings. He guessed that there would’ve been no need for a Hansel and Gretel trail while Waits had been on the clearly defined path. If there were markers, they would be at the bottom of the mud slide embankment. He headed that way.

At the top of the precipice he looped the rope around the trunk of the white oak at the top and was able to rappel down the sheer surface to the lower level. He left the rope in place and once again assessed the area from floor to canopy. He saw nothing that readily marked the way to the grave site, where Marie Gesto had been found. He started walking toward the grave site, looking for carvings in the trunks of the trees, ribbons in the branches, anything that Waits might have used to lead the way.

Bosch got to the grave site without seeing a single indication of a marked trail. He was disappointed. His lack of findings went against the theory he had outlined for Rachel Walling. But Bosch was sure he was right in his thinking and he refused to believe there was no trail. He thought it was possible that whatever markings had been there had been trampled over and obliterated by the army of investigators and technicians who had descended on the woods the day before.

Refusing to give up, he made his way back to the embankment and then turned and looked toward the grave site. He tried to put his mind into the position Waits was in. He had never been to the spot before, yet he had to readily choose a direction to go in while everyone else watched.

How did he do it?

Bosch stood motionless, thinking and looking off into the woods in the direction of the grave site. He did not move for five minutes. After that he had the answer.

In the middle distance on the sight line to the grave site was a tall eucalyptus tree. It was split at ground level and two fully mature trunks rose at least fifty feet through the canopy of other trees. In the split, about ten feet off the ground, was a branch that had fallen and become lodged horizontally between the trunks. The formation of split trunk and branch created an inverted A that was clearly recognizable and could have been noticed quickly by someone scanning the woods and looking specifically for it.

Bosch headed toward the eucalyptus, certain that he had the first marker that Waits had followed. When he reached the position, he looked again in the direction of the grave site. He slowly scanned until he again picked up on an anomaly that was obvious and unique in terms of the immediate vicinity. He walked toward it.

It was a young California oak. What made it noticeable to Bosch from a distance was that its natural balance was off. It had lost the symmetrical spread of its branches because one of the lower limbs was missing. Bosch walked to it and looked up at a broken outcropping on the trunk where a four-inch-thick limb had been attached about eight feet up. By grabbing a lower branch and pulling himself up into the tree he was able to examine the break more closely and found that it was not a natural break. The outcropping showed a smooth cut through the top half of the branch. Someone had sawed across the top of the branch and then pulled down on it to break it. Bosch was no tree surgeon but he thought the cut and break looked recent. The exposed inner wood was light in color and there was no indication of regrowth or natural repair.

Bosch dropped to the ground and looked around in the brush. The fallen limb was nowhere to be found. It had been dragged away so as not to be noticed and cause suspicion. To him it was further proof that a Hansel and Gretel trail had been left for Waits to follow.

He turned and looked in the direction of the final clearing. He was less than twenty yards from the grave site and he was easily able to pick out what he believed to be the last marker. High up in the oak tree that shaded the grave site was a nest that looked like the home of a large bird, an owl or a hawk.

He walked to the clearing and looked up. The hair scrunchy Waits had said marked the spot had been removed by the Forensics team. Looking further up into the tree, Bosch could not see the nest from directly beneath. Olivas had planned it well. He had used three markers recognizable only from a distance. Nothing that would draw a second glance from those following Waits, yet three markers that could easily lead him to the grave site.

As his eyes dropped to the open grave at his feet he remembered that he had noticed a disturbance in the soil the day before. He had credited it to animals foraging in the dirt. Now he believed the disturbance had been left by the first digging into the soil to confirm the grave site. Olivas had been out here before any of them. He had come out to mark the trail and confirm the grave. He had either been told where to find it or had been led to it by the real killer.

Bosch had been staring at the grave and putting the scenario together for several seconds before he realized he was hearing voices. At least two men in conversation, their voices approaching. Bosch could hear them moving through the brush, their footfalls heavy in the mud and on the bed of fallen leaves. They were coming from the same direction Bosch had come from.

He moved quickly across the small clearing and got behind the massive trunk of the oak tree. He waited and soon he could tell that the men had reached the clearing.

“Right here,” said the first voice. “She was right here for thirteen years.”

“No shit! This is spooky.”

Bosch didn’t dare look around the tree and risk exposing himself. No matter who it was-media, cops or even tourists-he didn’t want to be seen here.

The two men stayed in the clearing and batted meaningless conversation back and forth for a few moments. Luckily, neither approached the trunk of the oak and Bosch’s position. Then finally Bosch heard the first voice say, “Well, let’s go get this done and get out of here.”

The men trod off in the direction from which they had come. Bosch looked around the tree and caught a glimpse of them just before they disappeared back into the brush. He saw Osani and another man he assumed was also from the OIS Unit. After giving them a head start Bosch moved from around the tree and crossed the clearing. He took a position behind an old eucalyptus and watched as the OIS men walked back to the sheer facing left by the mud slide.

Osani and his partner made so much noise walking through the brush that it was quite easy for Bosch to pick and move his way toward the embankment as well. Under cover of their noise he got to the eucalyptus that was Waits’s first marker and watched the two men as they set up to take measurements from the bottom of the embankment to the top. There was a ladder on the facing now, positioned much like the ladder had been the day before. Bosch realized that the two men were cleaning up the official report. They were taking distance measurements that had either been forgotten or deemed unnecessary the day before. Today, in light of the political fallout involved, everything was necessary.

Osani climbed the ladder to the top while his partner remained below. He then took a tape measure off his belt and pulled out several lengths, passing the end down to his partner. They took measurements with Osani calling out the lengths and his partner writing them down in a notebook. It looked to Bosch as though they were measuring various lengths from the spot on the ground where he had been the day before to the positions where Waits, Olivas and Rider had been. Bosch had no idea what the importance of such measurements would be to the investigation.

Bosch’s phone started to vibrate in his pocket and he quickly pulled it out and shut it off. As the screen died he saw that the incoming number had a 485 prefix, which he knew meant Parker Center.

A few seconds later Bosch heard the ringing of a cell phone in the clearing where Osani and the other man were working. Bosch peeked around the tree and saw Osani take a phone off his belt. He listened to the caller and then took a sweeping look around the woods, doing a 360-degree turn. Bosch ducked back.

“No, Lieutenant,” Osani said. “We don’t see him. The car’s in the lot but we don’t see him. We don’t see anybody out here.”

Osani listened some more and said yes several times before closing the phone and returning it to his belt. He went back to work with the tape measure and within another minute or so the two OIS men had what they needed.

Osani’s partner climbed the ladder and then both men pulled it up the embankment. It was at that moment that Osani noticed the rope looped around the trunk of the white oak at the edge of the embankment. He put the ladder down on the ground and went to the tree. He pulled the rope from around the trunk and started coiling it. He looked out into the woods as he did this and Bosch moved back behind one of the eucalyptus’s two trunks.

A few minutes later they were gone, loudly trudging back through the woods to the parking clearing, the ladder carried between them. Bosch went to the embankment but waited until he could no longer hear the OIS men before using the roots as handholds to climb up.

When he got to the parking clearing, there was no sign of Osani and his partner. Bosch turned his phone back on and waited for it to boot up. He wanted to see if the caller from Parker Center had left a message. Before he could listen, the phone started vibrating in his hand. He recognized the number as one of the lines from the Open-Unsolved Unit. He took the call.

“This is Bosch.”

“Harry, where are you?”

It was Abel Pratt. There was an urgency in his voice.

“Nowhere. Why?”

“Where are you?”

Something told Bosch that Pratt knew exactly where he was.

“I’m in Beachwood Canyon. What’s going on?”

There was a moment of silence before Pratt responded, the urgent tone replaced with one of annoyance.

“What’s going on is that I just got a call from Lieutenant Randolph at OIS. He says there’s a Mustang registered to you sitting in the lot up there. I tell him that’s really strange, because Harry Bosch is on home duty and is supposed to be staying a million miles away from the investigation in Beachwood Canyon.”

Thinking quickly, Bosch came up with what he thought was a way out.

“Look, I’m not investigating anything. I’m looking for something. I lost my challenge coin out here yesterday. I’m just looking for it.”

“What?”

“My RHD chip. It must’ve come out of my pocket when I was sliding down the embankment or something. I got home last night and it wasn’t in my pocket.”

As he spoke Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the coin he was claiming to have lost. It was a heavy metal coin about the size and width of a casino chip. One side showed a gold detective’s badge and the other side showed the caricature of a detective-suit, hat, gun and exaggerated chin-set against an American flag background. It was known as a challenge coin or chip and was a carryover from the practice of elite and specialized military units. Upon acceptance into the unit a soldier is given a challenge coin and is expected to carry it always. At any time or place a fellow unit member can ask to see the coin. This most often takes place in a bar or canteen. If the soldier fails to be carrying the coin, then he picks up the tab. The tradition had been observed for several years in the RHD. Bosch had been given his coin upon returning from retirement.

“Fuck the coin, Harry,” Pratt said angrily. “You can replace it for ten bucks. Stay away from the investigation. Go home and stay home until you hear from me. Am I clear?”

“You’re clear.”

“Besides, what the fuck? If you lost your coin out there the Forensics people would have found it already. They went over that scene with a metal detector looking for cartridges.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, I sort of forgot about that.”

“Yeah, Harry, you forgot? Are you bullshitting with me?”

“No, Top, I’m not. I forgot. I was bored and decided to come look for it. I saw Randolph’s people and decided to keep my head down. I just didn’t think they’d call in my plate.”

“Well, they did. And then I got the call. I don’t like blowback like this, Harry. You know that.”

“I’m going home right now.”

“Good. Stay there.”

Pratt didn’t wait for Bosch’s response. He clicked off and Bosch closed his phone. He flipped the heavy coin into the air, caught it in his palm, badge side up, and pocketed it. He then walked to his car.

24

SOMETHING ABOUT BEING TOLD to go home made Bosch not go home. After leaving Beachwood Canyon he made a stop at St. Joe’s to check in on Kiz Rider. She had changed locations again. She was now out of ICU and on a regular patient floor. She didn’t have a private room but the other bed in the room was empty. They often did that for cops.

Speaking was still difficult for her and the malaise of depression she exhibited that morning had not lifted. Bosch didn’t stay long. He passed on a get-well from Jerry Edgar and then left, finally going home as instructed and hauling in the two cartons and files he had collected earlier from the Open-Unsolved Unit.

He put the cartons on the floor in the dining room and spread the files out on the table. There was a lot and he knew he could probably occupy himself for at least a couple days with what he had taken from the office. He went over to the stereo and turned it on. He knew that he already had the Coltrane-Monk collaboration from Carnegie Hall in the machine. The player was on shuffle and the first song out was called “Evidence.” Bosch took that as a good sign as he went back to the table.

To begin he had to take an inventory of exactly what he had so he could decide how to approach his review of the material. First and foremost was the copy of the investigative record in the current case Raynard Waits was being prosecuted for. This had been turned over by Olivas but not studied closely by Bosch and Rider because their assignments and priorities were the Fitzpatrick and Gesto cases. On the table Bosch also had the Fitzpatrick murder book Rider had pulled out of Archives as well as his secret copy of the Gesto murder book, of which he had already completed a review.

Finally, on the floor were the two plastic cartons containing whatever pawn records had been salvaged after Fitzpatrick’s business was torched and then soaked by fire hoses during the 1992 riots.

There was a small drawer in the side of the dining room table. Bosch figured that it had been designed for silverware but since he used the table more often to work on than to eat on, the drawer contained an assortment of pens and legal pads. He withdrew one of each, deciding that he needed to write down the important aspects of the current investigation. After twenty minutes and three torn-off and crumpled pages, his free-form thoughts had filled less than half a page.

/ arrest

Echo Park

\ escape (Red Line)

Who is Waits? Where is the castle? (destination: Echo Park)

Beachwood Canyon-setup, false confession

Who benefits? Why now?

Bosch studied the notes for a few moments. He knew that the last two questions he had written were actually the starting point. If things had gone according to plan, who would have benefited from Waits’s false confession? Waits, for one, by avoiding a death sentence. But the real winner was the real killer. The case would have been closed, all investigations halted. The real killer would escape justice.

Bosch looked at the two questions again. Who benefits? Why now? He considered them carefully and then reversed their order and considered them again. He came to a single conclusion. His continued investigations of the Marie Gesto case had created a need for something to be done now. He had to believe that he had knocked too hard on someone’s door and that the entire Beachwood Canyon plan had come about because of pressure he was continuing to exert on the case.

This conclusion led to the answer to the other question at the bottom of the sheet. Who benefits? Bosch wrote:

Anthony Garland-Hancock Park

For thirteen years Bosch’s instinct had told him Garland was the one. But beyond his instincts there was no evidence directly connecting Garland to the murder. Bosch had not yet been made privy to the evidence, if any, that was developed during the excavation of the body and the autopsy, but he doubted that after thirteen years there would be anything usable-no DNA or forensics that could tie the killer to the body.

Garland was a suspect under the “replacement victim” theory. That is, his rage toward the woman who had dropped him led him to kill a woman who reminded him of her. The shrinks would call it a long-shot theory but Bosch now moved it front and center. Do the math, he thought. Garland was the son of Thomas Rex Garland, wealthy oil baron from Hancock Park. O’Shea was in a highly contested election battle, and money was the gasoline that kept a campaign engine running. It was not inconceivable that a quiet approach had been made to T. Rex, a deal struck and a plan enacted. O’Shea gets the money he needs to win the election, Olivas gets the head investigator nod in O’Shea’s office and Waits takes the fall for Gesto while Garland takes a ride on it.

It was said that L.A. was a sunny place for shady people. Bosch knew that better than most. He had no hesitation in believing Olivas had been part of such a scheme. And the thought of O’Shea, a career prosecutor, selling his soul for a shot at the top slot didn’t give him pause for very long either.

“Run, you coward! How’s your bullshit deal looking now?”

He opened his phone and called Keisha Russell at the Times. After several rings he checked his watch and saw it was a few minutes after five. He realized she was probably on deadline and ignoring her calls. He left a message at the prompt, asking her to call back.

Since it was so late in the day Bosch decided he had earned a beer. He went to the kitchen and got an Anchor Steam out of the box. He was happy he had gone high end the last time he bought beer. He took the bottle out on the deck and watched as the heart of rush hour gripped the freeway below. The traffic slowed to a crawl and the incessant sound of car horns of every variety began. It was just far enough away to be less than intrusive. Bosch was glad he was not down there in the fight.

His phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. It was Keisha Russell calling back.

“Sorry, I was going over tomorrow’s story with the copyeditor.”

“I hope you spelled my name right.”

“Actually, you’re not in this one, Harry. Surprise.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What can you do for me?”

“Uh, I was actually going to ask you to do something for me.”

“Of course you were. What could it be?”

“You’re a political reporter now, right? Does that mean you look at campaign contributions?”

“I do. I review every filing by every one of my candidates. Why?”

He walked back inside and muted the stereo.

“This is off the record, Keisha. I’d like to know who has been supporting Rick O’Shea’s campaign.”

“O’Shea? Why?”

“I’ll tell you when I can tell you. I just need the information right now.”

“Why do you always do this to me, Harry?”

It was true. They had danced like this many times in the past. But their history was that Bosch was always true to his word when he said he would tell her when he could tell her. He hadn’t double-crossed her once. And so her protests were banter, a mere prequel to her doing what Bosch wanted her to do. That was part of the dance as well.

“You know why,” he said, playing his part. “Just help me out and there will be something for you when the time is right.”

“Someday I want to decide when the time is right. Hold on.”

She clicked off and was gone for almost a minute. As he waited Bosch stood over the spread of documents on the dining room table. He knew that he was spinning his wheels with this angle on O’Shea and Garland. They could not be touched at the moment. They were guarded by money and the law and the rules of evidence. Bosch knew the correct angle of investigation was to go at Raynard Waits. His job was to find him and break open the case.

“Okay,” Russell said after getting back on the line. “I have the most up-to-date filing. What do you want to know?”

“How up-to-date is up-to-date?”

“This was filed last week. Friday.”

“Who are his main contributors?”

“There’s nobody who is really big, if that is what you mean. He’s mostly running a grassroots campaign. Most of his contributors are fellow lawyers. Almost all of them.”

Bosch thought of the Century City law firm that handled things for the Garland family and had gotten the court orders preventing Bosch from questioning Anthony Garland about Marie Gesto without an attorney present. The head of the firm was Cecil Dobbs.

“Is one of those lawyers Cecil Dobbs?”

“Um… yes, C. C. Dobbs, Century City address. He gave a thousand.”

Bosch remembered the lawyer in his collection of videotaped interviews with Anthony Garland.

“What about Dennis Franks?”

“Franks, yes. A lot of people from that firm contributed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, according to election law, you give your home and work address when you make a contribution. Dobbs and Franks have a Century City work address and, let’s see, nine, ten, eleven other people gave the same address. They each gave a thousand, too. It’s probably all the lawyers in the same firm.”

“So thirteen thousand dollars from there. Is that it?”

“That’s it from there, yes.”

Bosch thought about whether to specifically ask if the name Garland was on the contributors list. He didn’t want her making phone calls or snooping around in his investigation.

“No big corporate contributors?”

“Nothing of major consequence. Why don’t you tell me what you are looking for, Harry? You can trust me.”

He decided to go for it.

“You have to hold on to it until you hear from me. No phone calls, no inquiries. You just sit on this, right?”

“Right, until I hear from you.”

“Garland. Thomas Rex Garland, Anthony Garland, anybody like that on there?”

“Mmmm, no. Isn’t Anthony Garland the kid you were looking at once for Marie Gesto?”

Bosch almost cursed out loud. He was hoping she wouldn’t make the connection. A decade earlier, when she was a hellion on the cop beat, she had come across a search warrant application he had filed in an effort to search Anthony Garland’s home. The application had been rejected for lack of probable cause but the filing was public record, and at the time, Russell, the ever industrious reporter, routinely combed through the search warrants at the courthouse. Bosch had talked her out of writing a story identifying the scion of the local oil family as a suspect in the Gesto murder but here it was a decade later and she remembered the name.

“You can’t do anything with this, Keisha,” he responded.

“What are you doing? Raynard Waits confessed to Gesto. Are you saying that was bullshit?”

“I’m not saying anything. I was simply curious about something, that’s all. Now, you cannot do anything with this. We have a deal. You sit on this until you hear from me.”

“You’re not my boss, Harry. How come you are talking to me like you’re my boss?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t want you running off and going crazy on this. It could hurt what I’ve got going. We have a deal, right? You just said I can trust you.”

It was a long time before she answered.

“Yes, we have a deal. And, yes, you can trust me. But if this is going where I think you are going with it, I want updates and reports. I’m not just going to sit around waiting to hear from you after you get the full package put together. If I don’t hear from you, Harry, I’m going to get nervous. When I get nervous I do some crazy things, make some crazy phone calls.”

Bosch shook his head. He should never have made the call to her.

“I understand, Keisha,” he said. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

He closed the phone, wondering what fresh hell he might have just unleashed on earth and when it would come back to bite him. He trusted Russell but only to the limit he could trust any reporter. He finished his beer and went to the kitchen for another. As soon as he popped the top his phone buzzed.

It was Keisha Russell again.

“Harry, have you ever heard of GO! Industries?”

He had. GO! Industries was the current corporate titling of a company started eighty years earlier as Garland Oil Industries. The company had a logo in which the word GO! had wheels and was slanted forward to look as if it were a speeding car.

“What about it?” he responded.

“Headquartered downtown in the ARCO plaza. I count twelve employees of GO! making one-thousand-dollar contributions to O’Shea. How’s that?”

“That’s fine, Keisha. Thanks for calling back.”

“Did O’Shea take a payoff to put Gesto on Waits? Is that it?”

Bosch groaned into the phone.

“No, Keisha, that’s not what happened and that’s not what I am looking at. If you make any calls in this regard you will compromise what I am doing and could be putting yourself, me, and others in danger. Now would you please drop it until I can tell you exactly what is going on and when you can run with it?”

Once again she hesitated before answering, and it was in that space of silence that Bosch began to wonder if he could still trust her. Maybe her move from police to politics had changed something in her. Maybe, as with most who worked in the realm of politics, her sense of integrity had been sanded down by exposure to the world’s oldest profession: political whoring.

“Okay, Harry, I got it. I was just trying to help. But you remember what I said. I want to hear from you. Soon!”

“You will, Keisha. Good night.”

He closed the phone and tried to shake off his concerns about the reporter. He thought about the information he had gotten from her. Between GO! and the law firm of Cecil Dobbs, O’Shea had received at least twenty-five thousand in campaign contributions from people who could be directly tied to the Garlands. It was spread out and legal, but nevertheless, it was a strong indication that Bosch was on the right track.

He felt a satisfying tug in his guts. He had something to work with now. He just had to find the right angle from which to work it. He went to the table in the dining room and looked at the array of police reports and records spread out in front of him. He picked up the file marked WAITS-BACKGROUND and started to read.

25

F ROM THE STANDPOINT of law enforcement, Raynard Waits was a rarity as a murder suspect. When his van was pulled over in Echo Park, the LAPD in effect had captured a killer the department wasn’t even looking for. In fact, Waits was a killer no department or agency was looking for. There was no file on him in any drawer or computer anywhere. No FBI profile or background briefing existed to refer to. They had a killer and they had to start from scratch with him.

This presented a whole new angle of investigation for Detective Freddy Olivas and his partner, Ted Colbert. The case came to them with a momentum that simply dragged them with it. Everything was about moving forward, toward prosecution. There was little time or inclination to go backwards. Waits was arrested in possession of bags containing the parts of two murdered women. It was a slam dunk, and that precluded the need to know exactly who they had in custody and what had brought him to be in that van on that street at that time.

Consequently, little in the file on the present case helped Bosch. The file contained records of the investigative work related to attempts to identify the victims and drawing the physical evidence together for the impending prosecution.

The background information in the file was simply basic data on Waits either provided by the suspect himself or culled by Olivas and Colbert during routine computer searches. The bottom line was that they knew little about the man they were prosecuting, but what they knew was enough.

Bosch completed his read-through of the file in twenty minutes. When he was finished, once again he had less than a half page of notes on his pad. He had constructed a short timeline that charted the suspect’s arrests, admissions, and use of the names Raynard Waits and Robert Saxon.

4/30/92 -Daniel Fitzpatrick murdered, Hollywood

5/18/92 -Raynard Waits, dob 11/3/71, DL issued, Hollywood

2/01/93 -Robert Saxon, dob 11/3/75-arrested, prowling -IDed as Raynard Waits, dob 11/3/71, through DL thumbprint

9/09/93 -Marie Gesto abducted, Hollywood

5/11/06 -Raynard Waits, dob 11/3/71, arrested 187 Echo Park

Bosch studied the timeline. He found two things worth noting. Waits supposedly didn’t get a driver’s license until he was twenty, and no matter which name he used, he always gave the same month and day of birth. While he once offered 1975 as his year of birth in an attempt to be considered a juvenile, he uniformly gave 1971 at other times. Bosch knew that the latter was a practice often employed by people switching identities. Change the name but keep some of the other details the same to avoid getting confused or forgetting basic information-an obvious giveaway, especially if it’s a cop asking for it.

Bosch knew from the record searches earlier in the week that there was no birth record of Raynard Waits or Robert Saxon with the corresponding 11/03 birth date in Los Angeles County. The conclusion he and Kiz Rider had reached from this was that both names were false. But now Bosch considered that maybe the birth date of 11/03/71 was not false. Maybe Waits, or whoever he was, kept his real date of birth as he changed his name.

Bosch now looked at the close proximity between the date of the Fitzpatrick murder and the date of issue of Waits’s driver’s license. It was less than a month. He added to this the fact that according to the records Waits did not apply for a driver’s license until he was twenty. He thought it was unlikely that a boy growing up in the autotopia of L.A. would wait until he was twenty to get his driver’s license. It was yet one more indication that Raynard Waits was not his name.

Bosch started to feel it. Like a surfer waiting for the right swell before starting to paddle, he felt his wave coming in. He thought that what he was looking at was the birth of a new identity. Eighteen days after he murdered Daniel Fitzpatrick under cover of the riots, the man who killed him walked into a DMV office in Hollywood and applied for a driver’s license. He gave November 3, 1971, as a date of birth and the name Raynard Waits. He would have had to provide a birth certificate, but that would not have been too hard to come up with if he knew the right people. Not in Hollywood. Not in L.A. Getting a phony birth certificate would have been an easy, almost risk-free task.

Bosch believed that the Fitzpatrick murder and the change of ID were connected. It was a cause-and-effect. Something about the murder caused the killer to change his identity. This belied the confession given two days earlier by Raynard Waits. He had characterized the murder of Daniel Fitzpatrick as a thrill kill, an opportunity to indulge a long-held fantasy. He went out of his way to depict Fitzpatrick as a victim chosen at random, chosen simply because he was there.

But if that was truly the case and if the killer had no previous connection to the victim, then why did the killer act almost immediately to reinvent himself with a new identity? Within eighteen days the killer procured a false birth certificate and got a new driver’s license. Raynard Waits was born.

Bosch knew there was a contradiction in what he was considering. If the killing of Fitzpatrick had taken place as Waits had confessed, then there would have been no reason for him to quickly create a new identity. But the facts-the timeline of the murder and the issuance of the driver’s license-contradicted this. The conclusion to Bosch was obvious. There was a connection. Fitzpatrick was not a random victim. He could, in fact, be linked in some way to his killer. And that was why his killer changed his name.

Bosch got up and took his empty bottle to the kitchen. He decided that two beers was enough. He needed to stay sharp and up on the wave. He went back out to the stereo and put in the masterpiece. Kind of Blue. It never failed to give him the charge. “All Blues” was the first song out of the shuffle, and it was like being dealt blackjack at a twenty-five-dollar table. It was his favorite and he let it ride.

Back at the table he opened the Fitzpatrick murder book and started to read. Kiz Rider had handled it earlier but she had simply been engaged in a review to prepare for taking Waits’s confession. She wasn’t looking for the hidden connection Bosch was now seeking.

The investigation of Fitzpatrick’s death had been carried out by two detectives temporarily assigned to the Riot Crimes Task Force. Their work was cursory at best. Few leads were followed, because there weren’t many to follow in the first place and because of the overriding pall of futility that fell over all the cases associated with the riots. Almost all acts of violence associated with the three days of widespread unrest were random. People robbed, raped and murdered indiscriminately and at will-simply because they could.

No witnesses to the attack on Fitzpatrick were located. No forensic evidence was found other than the can of lighter fluid-and it had been wiped clean. Most of the shop’s records had been destroyed by fire or water. What was left was put in two cartons and ignored. The case was treated as a dead end from the moment it was born. It was orphaned and archived.

The murder book was so thin that Bosch finished his front-to-back read-through in less than twenty minutes. He had taken no notes, gotten no ideas, seen no connections. He felt the tide ebbing. His ride on the wave was coming to an end.

He thought about getting another beer out of the box and attacking the case all over again the next day. Then the front door opened and Rachel Walling walked in, carrying takeout cartons from Chinese Friends. Bosch stacked the reports on the dining room table so there would be room to eat. Rachel brought plates from the kitchen and opened the cartons. Bosch got the last two Anchors out of the refrigerator.

They small-talked for a while and then he told her what he had been doing since lunch and what he had learned. He could tell by her reserved comments that she was not convinced by his description of the trail he had found in Beachwood Canyon. But when he showed her the timeline he had worked up, she readily agreed with his conclusions about the killer’s changing of ID after the Fitzpatrick murder. She also agreed that, while they didn’t have the killer’s real name, they might have his real birth date.

Bosch looked down at the two plastic cartons on the floor.

“Then I guess it’s worth the shot,” he said.

She leaned to the side so she could see what he was looking at.

“What are those?”

“Pawn slips mostly. All the records salvaged after the fire. Back in ’ninety-two they were all wet. They dropped them in these boxes and forgot about them. Nobody’s ever looked through them all.”

“Is that what we’re doing tonight, Harry?”

He looked up at her and smiled. He nodded.

After they were finished eating they decided that they would take a carton each. Bosch suggested that they take them out onto the back deck because of the musty smell that would come from the cartons once they were opened. Rachel readily agreed. Bosch lugged the cartons out and then got two empty cardboard boxes from the carport. They sat down in deck chairs and began the work.

Taped to the top of the carton Bosch chose was a 3 x 5 card that said MAIN FILE CABINET. Bosch took the top off and used it to try to wave away the fumes that came out. The carton contained mostly pink pawn slips and 3 x 5 cards that had been haphazardly put in the container as if with a shovel. There was nothing ordered or neat about the records.

Water damage was high. Many of the slips had stuck together while wet, and the ink on others was smeared and unreadable. Bosch looked over at Rachel and saw her dealing with the same issues.

“This is bad, Harry,” she said.

“I know. Just do the best you can. It might be our last hope.”

There was no way to begin but simply to dig in. Bosch pulled out a wad of slips, brought them up to his lap and started going through them, attempting to make out the name, address and birth date of each customer who had pawned something through Fitzpatrick. Each time he looked at a slip, he checked the top corner with a red pencil from the dining room table drawer and dropped it into the cardboard box on the other side of his chair.

They were at it a solid half hour, working without conversation, when Bosch heard the phone in the kitchen ring. He thought about letting it go but knew it might be a call from Hong Kong. He got up.

“I didn’t even know you had a landline,” Walling said.

“Not many people do.”

He grabbed the phone on the eighth ring. It wasn’t his daughter. It was Abel Pratt.

“Just checking on you,” he said. “I figure if I get you on the house line and you say you are home, then you’re really home.”

“What, am I under house arrest now?”

“No, Harry, I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

“Look, there will be no blowback from me, okay? But home duty does not mean I have to be at home twenty-four-seven. I checked with the union.”

“I know, I know. But it does mean you do not take part in any job-related investigation.”

“Fine.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m sitting on the back deck with a friend. We’re having a beer and enjoying the night air. Is that okay with you, Top?”

“Anybody I know?”

“I doubt it. She doesn’t like cops.”

Pratt laughed and it seemed that Bosch had finally put him at ease about what he was doing.

“Then, I’ll let you get back to it. Have a good one, Harry.”

“I will if I can stay off the phone. I’ll call in tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“And I’ll be here. Good night.”

He hung up, checked the refrigerator for hidden or lost beers and returned to the deck empty-handed. Rachel was waiting for him with a smile on her face and a water-stained 3 x 5 card in her hand. Attached to it with a paper clip was a pink pawn slip.

“Got it,” she said.

She handed it to him and Bosch stepped back inside the house, where the lighting was better. He read the card first. It was written on with blue ink that was partially smeared by water but still legible.

Unsatisfied Customer-02/12/92

Customer complained that property was sold before 90-day pawn period expired. Shown pawn slip and corrected. Customer complained that 90 days should not have included weekends and holidays. Cursed/slammed door.

DGF

The pink pawn slip attached to the complaint card carried the name Robert Foxworth, the DOB 11/03/71 and an address on Fountain in Hollywood. The item pawned on October 8, 1991, was listed as an “heirloom medallion.” Foxworth had been given eighty dollars for it. There was a fingerprint square at the bottom right corner of the slip. Bosch could see the ridges of a fingerprint but the ink had either worn away or leached out of the paper because of the moisture contained in the storage carton.

“The DOB is a match,” Rachel said. “Plus the name connects on two levels.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he took Robert forward when he used the name Robert Saxon and he took the Fox in Foxworth forward when he used Raynard. Maybe that’s where this whole Raynard thing came from. If his real name is Foxworth, maybe when he was a kid, his parents told him stories about a fox named Reynard.”

“If his real name is Foxworth,” Bosch repeated. “Maybe we just found another alias.”

“Maybe. But at least it’s something you didn’t have before.”

Bosch nodded. He could feel his excitement building. She was right. Finally they had a new angle to pursue. Bosch pulled out his phone.

“I’m going to run the name and see what happens.”

He called central dispatch and asked a service operator to run the name and birth date they had found on the pawn slip. It came back clean and with no record of a current driver’s license. He thanked the operator and hung up.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not even a driver’s license.”

“But that’s good,” Rachel said. “Don’t you see? Robert Foxworth would be about to turn thirty-five right now. If there’s no history or current license, then that is further confirmation that he is no more, that he’s either dead or he became someone else.”

“Raynard Waits.”

She nodded.

“I guess I was hoping for a DL with an Echo Park address,” Bosch said. “I guess that’s too much to ask for.”

“Maybe not. Is there a way in this state to check defunct driver’s licenses? Robert Foxworth, if that’s his real name, probably got a license when he turned sixteen in nineteen eighty-seven. When he switched identities it would have expired.”

Bosch considered this. He knew that the state did not start requiring a thumbprint from licensed drivers until the early nineties. It meant Foxworth could have gotten a driver’s license in the late eighties and there would be no way to connect him to his new identity as Raynard Waits.

“I could check with DMV in the morning. It’s not something I can get through communications dispatch tonight.”

“There is something else you can check tomorrow,” she said. “Remember the quick and dirty profile I did the other night? I said these early crimes weren’t aberrations. He built up to them.”

Bosch understood.

“A juvy jacket.”

She nodded.

“You might find a juvenile record on Robert Foxworth-again, if that’s his real name. It wouldn’t have been accessible through dispatch either.”

She was right. State law kept juvenile records from trailing an offender into adulthood. The name may have come up clean when Bosch called dispatch to run it but that didn’t mean it was squeaky clean. As with the driver’s license information, Bosch would have to wait until morning, when he could get into the juvenile records at the Department of Probation.

But as soon as his hopes were lifted he knocked them down again.

“Wait a minute, that doesn’t work,” he said. “His prints would have drawn a match. When they ran his prints as Raynard Waits, they would have hit the prints taken from Robert Foxworth as a juvenile. His record might not be available but the prints stay in the system.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Two separate systems. Two separate bureaucracies. The crossover doesn’t always work.”

That was true, but it was more wishful thinking than anything else. Bosch now reduced the juvenile angle to a long shot. It was more likely that Robert Foxworth had never been in the juvenile system. Bosch was beginning to think the name was just another false identity in a string of them.

Rachel tried to change the subject.

“What do you think about this heirloom medallion he pawned?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“The fact that he wanted to get it back is interesting. Makes me think maybe it wasn’t stolen. Like maybe it belonged to someone in his family and he needed to get it back.”

“It would explain him cursing and slamming doors, I guess.”

She nodded.

Bosch yawned and all at once he realized how tired he was. He had been running all day just to get to this name and the uncertainties that accompanied it. The case was crowding his brain. Rachel seemed to read him.

“Harry, I say we quit while we’re ahead and have another beer.”

“I don’t know how far ahead we are but I could use another beer,” Bosch said. “There’s only one problem with that.”

“What?”

“No more beer.”

“Harry, you invited a girl over to do your dirty work and help you crack the case and all you give her is one beer? What’s wrong with you? What about wine? You have some wine?”

Bosch shook his head sadly.

“But I’m on my way to the store.”

“That’s good. I’m on my way to the bedroom. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

“Then, I won’t delay.”

“Make mine a red wine, will you?”

“I’m on it.”

Bosch hurried from the house. He had parked earlier at the front curb so that Rachel could use the carport if she came over. As he walked out the front door he noticed a vehicle sitting at the opposite curb two houses down. The vehicle, a silver SUV, caught his eye because it was parked in a red zone. There was no parking allowed along that curb, since it was too close to the next curve in the road. A car could come around the bend and easily collide with any car parked there.

As Bosch looked up the street the SUV suddenly took off without its lights on. It sped north around the bend and disappeared.

Bosch ran to his car, jumped in and headed north after the SUV. He drove as fast as he could safely go. Within two minutes he had followed the curving street around to the four-way stop at Mulholland Drive. There was no sign of the SUV and it could have gone in any of three directions from the stop.

“Shit!”

Bosch sat at the intersection for a long moment, thinking about what he had just seen and what it might mean. He decided that it either meant nothing or it meant someone was watching his house and therefore watching him. But at the moment there was nothing he could do. He let it go. He turned left and drove Mulholland at a safe speed all the way down to Cahuenga. He knew there was a liquor store near Lankershim. He headed there, checking the rearview mirror for a trailer the whole way.

26

HOME DUTY OR NOT, Bosch dressed in a suit the next morning before heading out. He knew it would give him an aura of authority and confidence while dealing with government bureaucrats. And by twenty minutes after nine it had paid off. He had a solid lead. The Department of Motor Vehicles’ archives had produced a driver’s license issued to a Robert Foxworth on November 3, 1987, the day he turned sixteen and was eligible to drive. The license was never renewed in California but there was no DMV record of the holder being deceased. This meant Foxworth had either moved to another state and was licensed there, decided he no longer wanted to drive or changed identities. Bosch was betting on the third option.

The address on the license was the lead. It listed Foxworth’s residence as the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, 3075 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. In 1987 he had been a juvenile ward of the county. He either had no parents or they had been declared unfit to raise him and he was removed from them. The designation of DCFS as his address meant that he was either housed in one of the department’s youth halls or had been placed in its foster care program. Bosch knew all of this because he, too, had had such a designation on his first driver’s license. He, too, had been a ward of the county.

As Bosch stepped out of the DMV offices on Spring Street he felt a renewed surge of energy. He had broken through what had seemed to be a dead end the night before and had turned it into a solid lead. As he headed to his car his cell phone vibrated and he answered it without breaking stride or looking at the screen, hoping that it would be Rachel and that he’d be able to share the good news.

“Harry, where are you? No one answered the home line.”

It was Abel Pratt. Bosch was getting tired of his constant checking up on him.

“I’m on my way in to visit Kiz. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure, Harry, except you’re supposed to check in with me.”

“Once a day. It’s not even ten o’clock!”

“I want to hear from you every morning.”

“Whatever. Tomorrow’s Saturday, should I call you? What about Sunday?”

“Don’t go overboard. I’m just trying to look out for you, you know.”

“Sure, Top. Whatever you say.”

“You heard the latest, I take it.”

Bosch stopped in his tracks.

“They caught Waits?”

“No, I wish.”

“Then, what?”

“It’s all over the news. Everybody’s worked up about it down here. Some girl got snatched off the street in Hollywood last night. Pulled into a van on Hollywood Boulevard. The division had those new street cameras installed last year and one of the cameras caught part of the abduction. I haven’t seen it but they say it’s Waits. He’s changed his look-shaved his head, I think-but they’re saying it was him. There’s a press conference at eleven and they’re going to show the tape to the world.”

Bosch felt a dull thud pound in his chest. He had been right about Waits not leaving town. He wished now he had been wrong. As he had these thoughts he realized that he still thought of the killer as Raynard Waits. It didn’t matter if he was truly Robert Foxworth, Bosch knew he would always think of him as Waits.

“Did they get a plate off the van?” he asked.

“No, it was covered. All they put out was that it was a plain white Econoline van. Like the other one he used but older. Look, I’ve gotta go. I just wanted to check in. Hopefully, this is the last day. OIS will finish up and you’ll be back in the unit.”

“Yeah, that would be good. But listen, during his confession, Waits said he had a different van in the nineties. Maybe the task force should get somebody to look through old DMV registrations under his name. They might come up with a plate to go with the van.”

“It’s worth a shot. I’ll tell them.”

“Okay.”

“Stay close to home, Harry. And give my regards to Kiz.”

“Right.”

Bosch closed the phone, happy that he’d been able to come up with the Kiz line on the spot like that. But he also knew that he was becoming a good liar with Pratt, and that didn’t make him very happy.

Bosch got into his car and headed toward Wilshire Boulevard. The call from Pratt had increased his sense of urgency. Waits had abducted another woman, but there had been nothing in the files to indicate that he killed his victims immediately. That meant the latest victim might still be alive. Bosch knew that if he could get to Waits he could save her.

The DCFS offices were crowded and loud. He waited at a records counter for fifteen minutes before he got the attention of a clerk. After taking Bosch’s information and typing it into a computer, she told him that there was indeed a juvenile file relating to Robert Foxworth, DOB 11/03/71, but that to see it he would need a court order authorizing his search of the records.

Bosch just smiled. He was too excited by the fact that a file was actually still in existence to be upset by one more frustration. He thanked her and told her he would be back with the court order.

Bosch stepped back out into the sunlight. He knew he was at a crossroads now. Dancing around the truth of where he was during phone calls with Abel Pratt was one thing. But if he was to apply for a search warrant seeking the DCFS records without departmental approval-coming in the form of a supervisor’s okay-then he would be completely going off the reservation. He would be conducting a rogue investigation and committing a firing offense.

He figured he could take what he had into Randolph at OIS or the Fugitive Task Force and let them run with it, or he could go the rogue route and accept the possible consequences. Since coming back from retirement Bosch had felt less constricted by the rules and regulations of the department. He had already walked out the door once and knew that if push came to shove he would be able to do it again. The second time would be easier. He didn’t want it to come to that but he could do it if he had to.

He pulled out his phone and made the one call he knew might save him from making a choice between two bad options. Rachel Walling answered her cell on the second ring.

“So what’s happening over there in Tactical?” he asked.

“Oh, we always have something happening here. How did it go downtown? Did you hear that Waits abducted another woman last night?”

She had a habit of asking more than one question at a time, especially when she was excited. Bosch told her that he had heard about the abduction and then related the tale of his morning’s activities.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I’m thinking about seeing if the FBI might be interested in joining the case.”

“And what about the case would carry it across the federal threshold?”

“You know, corruption of public officials, campaign finance violations, kidnapping, cats and dogs living together-the usual stuff.”

She stayed serious.

“I don’t know, Harry. You open that door and there’s no telling where it will go.”

“But I’ve got an insider. Somebody who will watch out for me and safeguard the case.”

“Wrong. They probably wouldn’t let me anywhere near this. It’s not my group and there’s the conflict of interest.”

“What conflict? We’ve worked together before.”

“I’m just telling you how this will likely be received.”

“Look, I need a search warrant. If I go off the reservation to get one I probably won’t be able to come back on again. I know it will be the last straw with Pratt, that’s for sure. But if I can say that I was brought into a federal investigation, then that would give me a valid explanation. It would give me an out. All I want is to look at Foxworth’s DCFS file. I think it will lead us to whatever’s in Echo Park.”

She was quiet for a long moment before responding.

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m still at DCFS.”

“Go get a doughnut or something. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You sure?”

“No, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

She hung up the phone. Bosch closed his and looked around. Instead of a doughnut he went over to a newspaper box and got the morning edition of the Times. He took a seat on the planter that ran along the front length of the DCFS building and looked through the paper for stories on the Raynard Waits and Beachwood Canyon investigations.

There was no story on the abduction on Hollywood Boulevard because that had occurred during the night and long after the paper’s deadline. The coverage of the Waits story had moved off the front page to the state and local section but it was still extensive. There were three stories in all. The most prominent report was on the so-far-unsuccessful nationwide search for the escaped serial killer. Most of the information had already been rendered obsolete by the events of the night. There was no nationwide search anymore. Waits was still here in the city.

This story jumped inside the section and was framed by two sidebars. One was an update on the investigation that filled in some of the details of what had happened during the shoot-out and escape, and the other story was a political update. This latter story was written by Keisha Russell and Bosch quickly scanned it to see if anything they had discussed about Rick O’Shea’s campaign financing had gotten into the paper. Luckily there was nothing, and he felt his trust in her rising.

Bosch finished reading the stories and there was still no sign of Rachel. He moved into other sections of the paper, studying the box scores of sporting events he cared nothing about and reading reviews of movies he would never see. When there was nothing left for him to read he put the paper aside and started pacing in front of the building. He became anxious, worried that he’d lose the edge the morning’s discoveries had given him.

He got out his phone to call her but decided instead to call St. Joseph’s Hospital and check on Kiz Rider’s condition. He was transferred to the third-floor nursing station and was then put on hold. While he was waiting to be connected he saw Rachel finally pull up in a federal cruiser. He closed the phone, crossed the sidewalk and met her as she was getting out.

“What’s the plan?” he said by way of greeting.

“What, no ‘how are you doing’ or ‘thanks for coming’?”

“Thanks for coming. What’s the plan?”

They started walking into the building.

“The plan is the federal plan. I go in and draw down on the man in charge the full force and weight of the government of this great country. I raise the specter of terrorism and he gives us the file.”

Bosch stopped.

“You call that a plan?”

“It’s worked pretty well for us for more than fifty years.”

She didn’t stop. He now had to hurry to catch up.

“How do you know it’s a man in charge?”

“Because it always is. Which way?”

He pointed straight ahead in the main hallway. Rachel didn’t break stride.

“I didn’t wait around for forty minutes for this, Rachel.”

“You have a better idea?”

“I had a better idea. A federal search warrant, remember?”

“That was a nonstarter, Bosch. I told you, I open that door and you get trampled. This is better. In and out. If I get you the file, I get you the file. Doesn’t matter how.”

She was two paces in front of him now, moving with federal momentum. Bosch secretly started to believe. She moved through the double doors beneath the sign that said RECORDS with an authority and command presence that could not be questioned.

The clerk Bosch had dealt with was at the counter speaking with another citizen. Walling stepped right up and didn’t wait for an invitation to speak. She drew her credentials from her suit jacket pocket in one smooth move.

“FBI. I need to see your office manager in regard to a matter of urgency.”

The clerk looked at her with an unimpressed face.

“I will be with you as soon as I fin-”

“You’re with me now, honey. Go get your boss or I’ll go get him. This is life-or-death urgent.”

The woman made a face that seemed to indicate she had never encountered such rudeness before. Without a word to the citizen in front of her or anyone else she stepped away from the counter and walked to a door behind a row of cubicles.

They waited less than a minute. The clerk stepped back out through the door, followed by a man wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt and a maroon tie. He came directly to Rachel Walling.

“I’m Mr. Osborne. How can I help you?”

“We need to step into your office, sir. This is a highly confidential matter.”

“Over this way, please.”

He pointed to a swing door at the far end of the counter. Bosch and Walling walked down to it and its lock was buzzed open. They followed Osborne back through the rear door to his office. Rachel let him get a look at her credentials once he was seated behind a desk festooned with dusty Dodgers memorabilia. There was a wrapped sandwich from Subway front and center on his desk.

“What’s this all-”

“Mr. Osborne, I work for the Tactical Intelligence Unit here in Los Angeles. I’m sure you understand what that means. And this is Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD. We’re working a joint investigation of high importance and urgency. We’ve learned from your clerk that there exists a file pertaining to an individual named Robert Foxworth, date of birth eleven/three/’seventy-one. It is vitally important that we be allowed to review that file immediately.”

Osborne nodded, but what he said didn’t go with a nod.

“I understand. But here at DCFS we work under very precise laws. State laws that protect the children. The records of our juvenile wards are not open to the public without court order. My hands are-”

“Sir, Robert Foxworth is no longer a juvenile. He is thirty-four years old. The file might contain information that will lead us to the containment of a very grave threat to this city. It will undoubtedly save lives.”

“I know, but you have to understand that we are not-”

“I do understand. I understand perfectly that if we don’t see that file now, we could be talking about a loss of human life. You don’t want that on your conscience, Mr. Osborne, and neither do we. That’s why we are on the same team. I’ll make a deal with you, sir. We will review the file right here in your office with you watching. In the meantime, I will get on the phone and instruct a member of my team at Tactical to draw up a search warrant. I will see to it that it is signed by a judge and furnished to you before the end of business today.”

“Well… I’d have to call it up from Archives.”

“Are the archives here in the building?”

“Yes, down below.”

“Then, please call Archives and get that file up here. We don’t have a lot of time, sir.”

“Just wait here. I will handle it personally.”

“Thank you, Mr. Osborne.”

The man left the office and Walling and Bosch sat down in chairs in front of his desk. Rachel smiled.

“Now let’s hope he doesn’t change his mind,” she said.

“You’re good,” he responded. “I tell my daughter that she could talk a zebra out of its stripes. I think you could talk a tiger out of its.”

“If I get this, you owe me another lunch at Water Grill.”

“Fine. Just no sashimi.”

They waited for Osborne’s return for nearly fifteen minutes. When he came back to the office he was carrying a file folder that was nearly an inch thick. He presented it to Walling, who took the file as she was standing up. Bosch took the cue and stood as well.

“We’ll get this back to you as soon as possible,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Osborne.”

“Wait a minute! You said you were going to look at it here.”

Rachel was heading toward the office door, gathering that momentum again.

“There’s no longer time, Mr. Osborne. We have to move. You’ll have the file back by tomorrow morning.”

She was already through the door. Bosch followed, closing it behind him on Osborne’s final words.

“What about the court ord-”

As they passed behind the clerk, Walling asked her to buzz them out. Rachel kept a two-pace lead on Bosch as they headed out into the hallway. He liked walking behind her and admiring how she handled herself. Command presence in spades.

“Is there a Starbucks around here where we could sit and look at this thing? I’d like to look before heading back.”

“There’s always a Starbucks around.”

Out on the sidewalk they walked east until they came to a tiny luncheonette that had a small inside counter with stools. It beat looking for a Starbucks, so they went in. While Bosch ordered two coffees from the man behind the counter Rachel opened the file.

By the time the coffees were put down on the counter and paid for she had a one-page lead on him. They sat side by side and she passed each page to him after she was finished with her review of it. They worked silently and neither one drank their coffee. Buying the coffee had merely bought them the work space at the counter.

The first document in the file was a copy of Foxworth’s birth certificate. He was born at Queen of Angels Hospital. The mother was listed as Rosemary Foxworth, DOB 6/21/54, Philadelphia, Pa., and the father was listed as unknown. The mother’s address was an apartment on Orchid Avenue in Hollywood. Bosch placed the address in the middle of what was now called the Kodak Center, part of the Hollywood renovation and rebirth plan. It was all glitz and glass and red carpets now, but back in 1971 it would have been a neighborhood patrolled by streetwalkers and hypes.

The birth certificate also listed the doctor who delivered the child and a hospital social worker involved in the case.

Bosch did the math. Rosemary Foxworth was seventeen years old when she gave birth to her son. No father listed or in attendance. No father known. The listing of a social worker meant the county was picking up the tab on the delivery, and the home address did not bode well for a happy start for baby Robert.

All of this led to a picture developing like a Polaroid in Bosch’s mind. He guessed that Rosemary Foxworth had been a runaway from Philadelphia, that she hit Hollywood and shared a flop apartment with others like her. She probably worked the nearby streets as a prostitute. She probably used drugs. She gave birth to the boy and then the county eventually stepped in and took him away.

As Rachel passed him more documents, the sad story was borne out. Robert Foxworth was removed from his mother’s custody at age two and taken into the DCFS system. For the next sixteen years of his life he was in and out of foster homes and youth halls. Bosch noted that among the facilities where he had spent time was the McLaren Youth Hall in El Monte, a place where Bosch himself had spent a number of years as a child.

The file was replete with psychiatric evaluations conducted annually or upon Foxworth’s frequent returns from foster care homes. In total the file charted the journey of a broken life. Sad, yes. Unique, no. It was the story of a child taken from his one parent and then equally mistreated by the institution that had taken him. Foxworth floated from place to place. He had no real home or family. He probably never knew what it was like to be wanted or loved.

Reading through the pages brought up memories in Bosch. Two decades before Foxworth’s journey through the system Bosch had charted his own path. He had survived with his own set of scars, but the damage was nothing compared with the extent of Foxworth’s injuries.

The next document Rachel handed him was a copy of a death certificate for Rosemary Foxworth. She died March 5, 1986, of complications stemming from drug use and hepatitis C. She had died in the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center. Robert Foxworth would have been fourteen.

“Here we go, here we go,” Rachel suddenly said.

“What?”

“His longest stay in any foster home was in Echo Park. And the people he stayed with? Harlan and Janet Saxon.”

“What’s the address?”

“Seven-ten Figueroa Lane. He was there from ’eighty-three to ’eighty-seven. Almost four years total. He must have liked them and I guess they liked him back.”

Bosch leaned over to look at the document in front of her.

“He was on Figueroa Terrace, only a couple blocks from there, when he got pulled over with the bodies,” he said. “If they had followed him for just one more minute they would’ve had the place!”

“If that’s where he was going.”

“It’s got to be where he was going.”

She handed him the page and moved on to the next. But Bosch stood up and walked away from the counter. He had read enough for the time being. He had been looking for the connection to Echo Park and now he knew he had it. He was ready to put the book work aside. He was ready to make a move.

“Harry, these shrink reports from when he was a teenager-he was talking about some sick shit here.”

“Like what?”

“A lot of anger toward women. Young promiscuous women. Prostitutes, drug users. You know what the psychology is here? You know what I think he ended up doing?”

“No and no. What?”

“He was killing his mother over and over again. All those missing women and girls they’ve hung on him? The one last night? To him they were like his mother. And he wanted to kill her for abandoning him. And maybe kill them before they did the same thing-brought a child into the world.”

Bosch nodded.

“That’s a nice shake-and-bake shrink job. If we had the time, you could probably find his Rosebud memory, too. But she didn’t abandon him. They took him away from her.”

She shook her head.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Abandonment through lifestyle. The state had no choice but to step in and take him away from her. Drugs, prostitution, the whole thing. By being an unfit mother she abandoned him to this deeply flawed institution where he was trapped until he was old enough to walk away on his own. In his brain chart, that constituted abandonment.”

Bosch nodded slowly. He guessed that she was right but the whole situation made him uncomfortable. It felt too personal to Bosch, too close to his own path. Except for a turn here or there, Bosch and Foxworth had made similar journeys. Foxworth was doomed to kill his own mother over and over again. A police shrink had once told Bosch that he was doomed to solve his own mother’s murder over and over again.

“What is it?”

Bosch looked at her. He had not yet told Rachel his own sordid history. He didn’t want her profiling skills turned on him.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Bosch.”

He shrugged. Walling closed the file on the counter and finally raised her coffee cup to sip from it.

“So what now?” she asked.

Bosch looked at her for a long moment before answering.

“Echo Park,” he said.

“What about backup?”

“I’m going to check it out first, then call backup.”

She nodded.

“I’m going with you.”