Echo Park Page 8

  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 ab
out?”

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry, Harry.”

  “Tell it to the nine victims that followed.”

  He was staring down at the brush beneath the deck.

  “You going to be all right?”

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

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

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

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

  “Okay, Harry.”

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

  “Harry, can I make a suggestion?”

  He knew what was coming.

  “Sure.”

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

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

  “Stay frosty,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He closed the phone and invited Rachel in.

  8

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

  “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

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

  “I can leave if—”

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

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

  Bosch shook his head.

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

  She smiled and shook her head.

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

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

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

  “What are you having?”

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

  “Can you make a vodka tonic?”

  He nodded.

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

  “Tomato juice?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cranberry juice?”

  “Just vodka.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready.”

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

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

  Bosch nodded.

  “The trickster,” he said.

  She nodded and referred to a short stack of documents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What else?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

  He looked up from his notes.

  “Why?”

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

  “What?”

  She composed her thoughts before answering.

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

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

  She read him.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean?”

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

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

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

  “Right after I left you today.”

  She nodded.

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