Echo Park (6 page)

6

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

“Good. Anything else?”

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

“Containing what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was silent for a while before speaking.

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

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

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

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

“How so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Spell it with an
e.
”

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

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

“That’s what Walling said.”

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

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

“I can’t. I don’t have it here.”

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

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

A lengthy silence went by before Rider responded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You got it.”

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

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

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

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

Bosch ignored his excuse.

“Where?”

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

“You’re at the DA’s now?”

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

Bosch let that float out there without a response.

“Anything else?” Olivas asked.

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

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

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

“Ten o’clock, then?” Bosch asked.

“Ten.”

“Anything else I should know, Olivas?”

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

“I have no idea, Olivas. What?”

“Your fifty-ones from Gesto.”

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

“What about them?” Bosch asked.

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

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

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

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

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

It took him a long moment to find his voice.

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

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

“I know. I saw it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Olivas?” Bosch said.

“What, Bosch?”

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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

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

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

“Harry? Where are you?”

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

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

“No.”

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

“Nope.”

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

“Gesto.”

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

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

Edgar waited a moment before replying.

“That’s it? That’s the entry?”

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

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

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

“He’s the guy . . . I think.”

“You’ve got the killer, Harry?”

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

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

“Gettin’ there.”

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

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

“No, I haven’t called them.”

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

Bosch waited a moment.

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

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

“How many came after?”

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

“Jesus,” Edgar whispered.

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

“So you don’t remember the call?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whatever, Jerry.”

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

Bosch now wanted to get off the line.

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

“Not this time, partner. Not now.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Harry, did you hear?”

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

“Harry, what are you talking about?”

Bosch paused. He was confused.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m home, Kiz. I’m entitled.”

“What did you think I was calling about?”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Tell it to the nine victims that followed.”

He was staring down at the brush beneath the deck.

“You going to be all right?”

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

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

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

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

“Okay, Harry.”

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

“Harry, can I make a suggestion?”

He knew what was coming.

“Sure.”

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

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

“Stay frosty,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He closed the phone and invited Rachel in.