Echo Park

by Michael Connelly

  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.”