Echo Park

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch moved toward the back wall, making his way around an obstacle course of upright barrels, rolls of plastic, bales of towels, squeegee blades and other window-washing equipment. There was a strong smell of ammonia and other chemicals. Bosch’s eyes were beginning to water.

  The hinges on the door at the rear wall were visible and Bosch knew it would swing toward him when he opened it.

  “FBI!” Walling yelled from outside. “Coming in!”

  “Clear!” Bosch yelled back.

  He heard her scrabble under the garage door but kept his attention on the door in the back wall. He moved toward it, listening all the time for any sound.

  Taking a position to the side of the door Bosch put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. It was unlocked. He looked back for the first time at Rachel. She was in a combat stance at an angle from the door. She nodded and in one quick move he flung the door open and moved across the threshold.

  The room was dark and windowless and he saw no one. He knew he was a target standing in the light in the doorway and quickly sidestepped into the room. He saw a string from an overhead light and reached out and yanked on it. The string snapped in his hand but the light came on, the hanging bulb jumping and swinging in response. He was in a crowded work and storage room that was about ten feet deep. There was no one in the room.

  “Clear!”

  Rachel entered and they stood there scanning the room. A bench cluttered with old paint cans, household tools and flashlights was on the right. Four old and rusting bikes were stacked against the left wall, along with folding chairs and a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes. The back wall was concrete block. Hung on it was the dusty old flag for the pole up on the front terrace of the house. On the floor in front of it was a stand-up electric fan, its blades caked with dust and crud. It looked like at one time somebody had tried to blow the fetid, damp smell out of the room.

  “Shit!” Bosch said.

  He lowered his gun, turned and walked past Rachel back into the garage. She followed him.

  Bosch shook his head and tried to rub some of the chemical sting out of his eyes. He didn’t understand. Were they too late? Were they following the wrong lead altogether?

  “Check the van,” he said. “See if there is any sign of the girl.”

  Rachel crossed behind him to the van, and Bosch went to the pedestrian door to check for the flaws in his belief that someone had to be in the garage.

  He had to be right. There was a dead bolt on the door, meaning it could only have been locked from the inside. He moved over to the garage doors and stooped down to look at their locking mechanisms. He was right again. Both had padlocks on interior slide locks.

  He tried to puzzle it out. All three doors had been locked from the inside. It meant that either someone was inside the garage or there was an exit point he hadn’t identified yet. But this seemed impossible. The garage was dug directly into the hillside embankment. There was no possibility of a rear exit.

  He was checking the ceiling, wondering if it was possible that there was a passageway up to the house, when Rachel called from inside the van.

  “I’ve got a roll of duct tape,” she said. “I’ve got used strips on the floor with hair.”

  It boosted Bosch’s belief that they had the right place. He stepped over to the open side door of the van. He looked in at Rachel while he pulled out his phone. He noticed the wheelchair lift in the van.

  “I’ll call for backup and Forensics,” he said. “We missed him.”

  He had to turn the phone back on, and while he waited for it to boot up he realized something. The stand-up fan in the back room wasn’t pointed toward the garage doors. If you were going to air the room out, you would point the fan toward the door.

  His phone buzzed in his hand and it distracted him. He looked down at the screen. It told him he had a message waiting. He clicked a button to check the call record and saw that he had just missed a call from Jerry Edgar. He’d get to it later. He punched in a number for Communications and told the dispatcher to connect him with the Raynard Waits Fugitive Task Force. An officer identifying himself as Freeman picked up.

  “This is Detective Harry Bosch. I have—”

  “Harry! Gun!”

  It was Rachel who had yelled. Time slowed down. All in a second Bosch looked at her in the van’s doorway, her eyes focused over his shoulder at the back of the garage. Without thinking, he jumped forward and into her, pulling his arms around her and taking her to the floor of the van in a crushing tackle. Four shots came from behind him followed by the instantaneous sound of bullets striking metal and glass breaking. Bosch rolled off Rachel and came up with his gun in hand. He caught a glimpse of a figure ducking into the rear storage room. He fired six shots through the doorway and raking across the wall to its right.

  “Rachel, okay?”

  “I’m okay. Are you hit?”

  “I don’t think so!”

  “It was him! Waits!”

  They paused and watched the door to the rear room. No one came back through.

  “Did you hit him?” Rachel whispered.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I thought we cleared that room.”

  “I thought we did, too.”

  Bosch stood up, keeping his aim on the doorway. He noticed that the light from within was now off.

  “I dropped my phone,” he said. “Call for backup.”

  He started moving toward the door.

  “Harry, wait. He could—”

  “Call for backup! And remember to tell them I’m in there.”

  He cut to his left and approached the door from an angle that would give him the widest vision of the interior space. But without the overhead light the room was cast in shadows and he could see no movement. He started taking small steps using his right foot first and maintaining a firing position. Behind him he heard Rachel on her phone identifying herself and asking for a transfer to LAPD dispatch.

  Bosch got to the threshold and swung the gun across his body to cover the part of the room he had not had an angle on. He stepped in and sidestepped to the right. There was no movement, no sign of Waits. The room was empty.

  He looked at the fan and confirmed his mistake. It was pointed toward the flag hanging on the back wall. It had not been used to blow damp air out. The fan had been used to blow air in.

  Bosch took two steps toward the flag. He reached forward, grabbed it by the edge and ripped it down.

  In the wall, three feet off the ground, was a tunnel entrance. About a dozen concrete blocks had been removed to create an opening four feet square and the excavation into the hillside continued from there.

  Bosch crouched to look into the opening from the safety of the right side. The tunnel was deep and dark, but he saw a glimmer of light thirty feet in. He realized that the tunnel made a turn and that there was a source of light around the bend.

  Bosch leaned closer and realized he could hear a sound from the tunnel. It was a low whimpering. It was a terrible sound but it was beautiful just the same. It meant that no matter what horrors she had experienced through the night, the woman Waits had abducted was still alive.

  Bosch reached back over to the workbench and picked up the shiniest flashlight he saw. He turned it on. It was dead. He tried another and got a weak beam of light. It would have to do.

  He flashed the beam into the tunnel and confirmed that the first leg was clear. He took a step toward the tunnel.

  “Harry, wait!”

  He turned and saw Rachel in the doorway.

  “Backup’s on the way!” she whispered.

  Bosch shook his head.

  “She’s in there. She’s alive.”

  He turned back to the tunnel and flashed the light in once more. It was still clear up to the turn. He turned the light off to conserve it. He glanced back at Rachel and then stepped into the darkness.

  29

  BOSCH HESITATED A MOMENT in the mouth of the tunnel to let his eyes adjust. He then st
arted moving. He didn’t have to crawl. The tunnel was large enough for him to move through in a crouch. Flashlight in his right hand and gun up in his left, he kept his eyes on the dim light ahead. The sound of the woman crying grew louder as he moved forward.

  Ten feet into the tunnel the musty smell that he had noticed outside turned into the deeper stench of decay. As rancid as it was, it was not something new to him. Almost forty years before, he had been a tunnel rat with the U.S. Army, taking part in more than a hundred missions in the tunnels of Vietnam. The enemy sometimes buried their dead in the clay walls of their tunnels. That hid them from sight but the odor of decay was impossible to hide. Once it got into your nose it was equally impossible to forget.

  Bosch knew that he was headed toward something horrific, that the missing victims of Raynard Waits were ahead somewhere in the tunnel. This had been the destination on the night Waits was pulled over in his work van. But Bosch couldn’t help but think that maybe it was his own destination as well. He had come many years and many miles but it seemed to him that he had never really left the tunnels behind, that his life had always been a slow movement through darkness and tight spaces on the way to a flickering light. He knew he was then, now, and forever a tunnel rat.

  His thigh muscles burned from the strain of moving in a crouched position. Sweat began to sting his eyes. And as he got closer to the turn in the tunnel Bosch saw the light changing and rechanging and knew that this was caused by the undulation of a flame. Candlelight.

  Five feet from the turn Bosch slowed to a stop and rested on his heels as he listened. Behind him, he thought he could hear sirens. Backup on the way. He tried to concentrate on what could be heard from the tunnel ahead but there was only the intermittent sound of the woman crying.

  He raised himself up and started forward again. Almost immediately the light ahead went out and the whimpering took on a new energy and urgency.

  Bosch froze. He then heard nervous laughter from ahead, followed by the familiar voice of Raynard Waits.

  “Is that you, Detective Bosch? Welcome to my foxhole.”

  There was more laughter and then it stopped. Bosch let ten seconds go by. Waits said nothing else.

  “Waits? Let her go. Send her out to me.”

  “No, Bosch. She’s with me now. Anybody comes in here, I’ll kill her on the spot. I’ll save the last bullet for myself.”

  “Waits, no. Listen. Just let her come out and I will come in. We’ll trade.”

  “No, Bosch. I like the situation the way it is.”

  “Then what are we doing? We need to talk and you need to save yourself. There’s not a lot of time. Send the girl out.”

  A few seconds went by and then the voice came out of the darkness.

  “Save myself from what? For what?”

  Bosch’s muscles were on the verge of cramping. He carefully lowered himself to a seated position against the right side of the tunnel. He was sure that the candlelight had been coming ahead from the left. The tunnel turned to the left. He kept his gun up but was now employing a cross-wrists bracing with the flashlight up and ready as well.

  “There’s no way out,” he said. “Give it up and come out. Your deal is still in play. You don’t have to die. Neither does the girl.”

  “I don’t care about dying, Bosch. That’s why I’m here. Because I don’t fucking care. I just want it to be on my own terms. Not the state’s or anybody else’s. Just mine.”

  Bosch noticed that the woman had gone silent. He wondered what had happened. Had Waits silenced her? Had he just . . . ?

  “Waits, what’s wrong? Is she all right?”

  “She passed out. Too much excitement, I guess.”

  He laughed and then was silent. Bosch decided that he needed to keep Waits talking. If he was engaged by Bosch he would be distracted from the woman and what was assuredly being planned outside the tunnel.

  “I know who you are,” he said quietly.

  Waits didn’t take the bait. Bosch tried again.

  “Robert Foxworth. Son of Rosemary Foxworth. Raised by the county. Foster homes, youth halls. You lived here with the Saxons. For a time you lived at the McLaren Youth Hall out in El Monte. So did I, Robert.”

  Bosch was met with a long silence. But then the voice came quietly out of the darkness.

  “I’m not Robert Foxworth anymore.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hated that place. McLaren. I hated them all.”

  “They closed it down a couple years ago. After some kid died in there.”

  “Fuck them and fuck that place. How did you find Robert Foxworth?”

  Bosch felt a rhythm building in the conversation. He understood the cue Waits was giving by speaking of Robert Foxworth as someone other than himself. He was Raynard Waits now.

  “It wasn’t that hard,” Bosch answered. “We figured it out through the Fitzpatrick case. We found the pawn slip in the records and matched birth dates. What was the heirloom medallion that had been pawned?”

  There was a long silence before an answer.

  “It was Rosemary’s. It was all he had from her. He had to pawn it and when he went back to get it, that pig Fitzpatrick had already sold it.”

  Bosch nodded. He had Waits answering questions but there wasn’t a lot of time. He decided to jump to the present.

  “Raynard. Tell me about the setup. Tell me about Olivas and O’Shea.”

  There was only silence. Bosch tried again.

  “They used you. O’Shea used you and he’s going to just walk away from it. Is that what you want? You die here in this hole and he just walks away?”

  Bosch put the flashlight down so he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He then had to feel around on the floor of the tunnel to find it again.

  “I can’t give you O’Shea or Olivas,” Waits said in the darkness.

  Bosch didn’t get it. Was he wrong? He doubled back in his head and started at the beginning.

  “Did you kill Marie Gesto?”

  There was a long silence.

  “No, I didn’t,” Waits finally said.

  “Then how was this set up? How could you know where—”

  “Think about it, Bosch. They’re not stupid. They would not directly communicate with me.”

  Bosch nodded. He understood.

  “Maury Swann,” he said. “He brokered the deal. Tell me about it.”

  “What’s to tell? It was a setup, man. He said the whole thing was to make you a believer. He said you were bothering the wrong people and had to be convinced.”

  “What people?”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “This is Maury Swann saying this?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t get to him either. This is communication between a lawyer and his client. You can’t touch it. It’s privileged. Besides, it would be my word against his. That won’t go anywhere and you know it.”

  Bosch did know it. Maury Swann was a tough lawyer and a respected member of the bar. He was also a media darling. There was no way to go after him with just the words of a criminal client—and a serial killer at that. It had been a masterstroke by O’Shea and Olivas to use him as the go-between.

  “I don’t care,” Bosch said. “I want to know how it all went down. Tell me.”

  A long silence went by before Waits responded.

  “Swann went to them with the idea of making a deal. My clearing the books in exchange for my life. He did this without my knowledge. If he had asked me I would have said, don’t bother. I’d rather take the needle than forty years in a cell. You understand that, Bosch. You’re an eye-for-an-eye guy. I like that about you, believe it or not.”

  He ended it there and Bosch had to prompt him again.

  “So then what happened?”

  “One night in the jail, I was taken to the attorney room and there was Maury. He told me there was a deal on the table. But he said it would only work if I threw in a freebie. Admit to one I didn’t do. He told me t
hat there would be a field trip and I would have to lead a certain detective to the body. This detective had to be convinced, and leading him to the body would be the only way to do it. That detective was you, Bosch.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “When he said there would be a field trip, I said yes. That was the only reason. It meant daylight. I saw a chance at daylight.”

  “And you were led to believe that this offer, this deal—that it came directly from Olivas and O’Shea?”

  “Who else would it come from?”

  “Did Maury Swann ever use their names in connection with the deal?”

  “He said this is what they wanted me to do. He said it came directly from them. They would not make a deal if I didn’t throw in the freebie. I had to throw in Gesto and take you to her or there was no fucking deal. You get it?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  He felt his face getting hot with anger. He tried to channel it, put it aside so that it was ready to be used, but not at this moment.

  “How did you get the details you gave me during the confession?”

  “Swann. He got them from them. He said they had the records from the original investigation.”

  “And he told you how to find the body up there in the woods?”

  “Swann told me there were markers in the woods. He showed me pictures and told me how to lead everybody there. It was easy. The night before my confession I studied up on everything.”

  Bosch was silent as he thought about how easily he had been led down the path. He had wanted something so badly and for so long that it had made him blind.

  “And what were you supposed to get out of all of this, Raynard?”

  “You mean, what was in it for me from their point of view? My life, man. They were offering me my life. Take it or leave it. But the truth is, I didn’t care about that. I told you, man, when Maury said there’d be a field trip, I knew that I might have a chance to get away . . . and to visit my . . . my foxhole one last time. That was enough for me. I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care if I died trying, either.”