Echo Park (2 page)

“What’s bothering me is that I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

“What kind of bad feeling?”

“The kind that tells me we’re never going to find her. And if we never find her, then we never find him.”

“The killer?”

The elevator jerked to a hard stop, bounced once and came to a rest. Bosch pulled open the doors. At the end of the short tunnel that led to the cul-de-sac and the garages, he saw a woman holding a microphone and a man holding a television camera waiting for them.

“Yeah,” he said. “The killer.”

Part One

THE KILLER

1

T
HE CALL CAME IN
while Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, were sitting at their desks in the Open-Unsolved Unit, finishing the paperwork on the Matarese filing. The day before, they had spent six hours in a room with Victor Matarese discussing the 1996 murder of a prostitute named Charisse Witherspoon. DNA that had been extracted from semen found in the victim’s throat and stored for ten years had been matched to Matarese. It was a cold hit. His DNA profile had been banked by the DOJ in 2002 after a forcible rape conviction. It had taken another four years before Bosch and Rider came along and reopened the Witherspoon case, pulled the DNA and sent it to the state lab on a blind run.

It was a case initially made in the lab. But because Charisse Witherspoon had been an active prostitute the DNA match was not an automatic slam dunk. The DNA could have come from someone who was with her before her killer turned up and hit her repeatedly on the head with a two-by-four.

So the case didn’t come down to the science. It came down to the room and what they could get from Matarese. At 8 a.m. they woke him up at the halfway house where he had been placed upon his parole in the rape case and took him to Parker Center. The first five hours in the interview room were grueling. In the sixth he finally broke and gave it all up, admitting to killing Witherspoon and throwing in three more, all prostitutes he had murdered in South Florida before coming to L.A.

When Bosch heard his name called out for line one, he thought it was going to be Miami calling him back. It wasn’t.

“Bosch,” he said after grabbing the phone.

“Freddy Olivas. Northeast Division Homicide. I’m over in Archives looking for a file and they say you’ve already got it signed out.”

Bosch was silent a moment while his mind dropped out of the Matarese case. Bosch didn’t know Olivas but the name sounded familiar. He just couldn’t place it. As far as signed-out files went, it was his job to review old cases and look for ways to use forensic advances to solve them. At any given time he and Rider could have as many as twenty-five files from Archives.

“I’ve pulled a lot of files from Archives,” Bosch said. “Which one are we talking about?”

“Gesto. Marie Gesto. It’s a ’ninety-three case.”

Bosch didn’t respond right away. He felt his insides tighten. They always did when he thought about Gesto, even thirteen years later. In his mind, he always came up with the image of those clothes folded so neatly on the front seat of her car.

“Yeah, I’ve got the file. What’s happening?”

He noticed Rider look up from her work as she registered the change in his voice. Their desks were in an alcove and pushed up against one another, so Bosch and Rider faced each other while they worked.

“It’s kind of a delicate matter,” Olivas said. “Eyes only. Relates to an ongoing case I’ve got and the prosecutor just wants to review the file. Could I hop on by there and grab it from you?”

“Do you have a suspect, Olivas?”

Olivas didn’t answer at first and Bosch jumped in with another question.

“Who’s the prosecutor?”

Again no answer. Bosch decided not to give in.

“Look, the case is active, Olivas. I’m working it and have a suspect. If you want to talk to me, then we’ll talk. If you’ve got something working, then I am part of it. Otherwise, I’m busy and you can have a nice day. Okay?”

Bosch was about to hang up when Olivas finally spoke. The friendly tone was gone from his voice.

“Tell you what, let me make a phone call, Hotshot. I’ll call you right back.”

He hung up without a good-bye. Bosch looked at Rider.

“Marie Gesto,” he said. “The DA wants the file.”

“That’s your own case. Who was calling?”

“A guy from Northeast. Freddy Olivas. Know him?”

Rider nodded.

“I don’t know him but I’ve heard of him. He’s lead on the Raynard Waits case. You know the one.”

Now Bosch placed the name. The Waits case was high profile. Olivas probably viewed it as his ticket to the show. The LAPD was broken into nineteen geographic divisions, each with a police station and its own detective bureau. Divisional Homicide units worked the less complicated cases and the positions were viewed as stepping-stones to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division squads working out of the police headquarters at Parker Center. That was the show. And one of those squads was the Open-Unsolved Unit. Bosch knew that if Olivas’s interest in the Gesto file was even remotely tied to the Waits case, then he would jealously guard his position from RHD encroachment.

“He didn’t say what he has going?” Rider asked.

“Not yet. But it must be something. He wouldn’t even tell me which prosecutor he’s working with.”

“Ricochet.”

“What?”

She said it slower.

“Rick O’Shea. He’s on the Waits case. I doubt Olivas has anything else going. They just finished the prelim on that and are heading to trial.”

Bosch didn’t say anything as he considered the possibilities. Richard “Ricochet” O’Shea ran the Special Prosecutions Section of the DA’s office. He was a hotshot and he was in the process of getting hotter. Following the announcement in the spring that the sitting district attorney had decided against seeking reelection, O’Shea was one of a handful of prosecutors and outside attorneys who filed as candidates for the job. He had come through the primary with the most votes but not quite a majority. The runoff was shaping up as a tighter race but O’Shea still held the inside track. He had the backing of the outgoing DA, knew the office inside and out, and had an enviable track record as a prosecutor who won big cases—a seemingly rare attribute in the DA’s office in the last decade. His opponent was named Gabriel Williams. He was an outsider who had credentials as a former prosecutor but he had spent the last two decades in private practice, primarily focusing on civil rights cases. He was black, while O’Shea was white. He was running on the promise of watchdogging and reforming the county’s law enforcement practices. While members of the O’Shea camp did their very best to ridicule Williams’s platform and qualifications for the position of top prosecutor, it was clear that his outsider stance and platform of reform were taking hold in the polls. The gap was closing.

Bosch knew what was happening in the Williams-O’Shea campaigns because this year he had been following local elections with an interest he had never exhibited before. In a hotly contested race for a city council seat, he was backing a candidate named Martin Maizel. Maizel was a three-term incumbent who represented a west-side district far from where Bosch lived. He was generally viewed as a consummate politician who made backroom promises and was beholden to big-money interests to the detriment of his own district. Nevertheless, Bosch had contributed generously to his campaign and hoped to see his reelection. His opponent was a former deputy police chief named Irvin R. Irving, and Bosch would do whatever was within his power to see Irving defeated. Like Gabriel Williams, Irving was promising reform and the target of his campaign speeches was always the LAPD. Bosch had clashed numerous times with Irving while he served in the department. He didn’t want to see the man sitting on the city council.

The election stories and wrap-ups that ran almost daily in the
Times
had kept Bosch up to date on other contests as well as the Maizel-Irving contest. He knew all about the fight O’Shea was involved in. The prosecutor was in the process of bolstering his candidacy with high-profile advertisements and prosecutions designed to show the value of his experience. A month earlier he had parlayed the preliminary hearing in the Raynard Waits case into daily headlines and top-of-the-broadcast reports. The accused double murderer had been pulled over in Echo Park on a late-night traffic stop. Officers spied trash bags on the floor of the man’s van with blood leaking from them. A subsequent search found body parts from two women in the bags. If ever there was a safe, slam-bang case for a prosecutor-candidate to use to grab media attention, the Echo Park Bagman case appeared to be it.

The catch was that the headlines were now on hold. Waits was bound over for trial at the end of the preliminary hearing and, since it was a death penalty case, that trial and the attendant renewal of headlines were still months off and well after the election. O’Shea needed something new to grab headlines and keep momentum going. Now Bosch had to wonder what the candidate was up to with the Gesto case.

“Do you think Gesto could be related to Waits?” Rider asked.

“That name never came up in ’ninety-three,” Bosch said. “Neither did Echo Park.”

The phone rang and he quickly picked it up.

“Open-Unsolved. This is Detective Bosch. How can I help you?”

“Olivas. Bring the file over to the sixteenth floor at eleven o’clock. You’ll meet with Richard O’Shea. You’re in, Hotshot.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Wait a minute. What’s this
we
shit? I said
you,
you be there with the file.”

“I have a partner, Olivas. I’ll be with her.”

Bosch hung up without a good-bye. He looked across at Rider.

“We’re in at eleven.”

“What about Matarese?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

He thought about things for a few moments, then got up and went to the locked filing cabinet behind his desk. He pulled the Gesto file and brought it back to his spot. Since returning to the job from retirement the year before, he had checked the file out of Archives three different times. Each time, he read through it, made some calls and visits and talked to a few of the individuals who had come up in the investigation thirteen years before. Rider knew about the case and what it meant to him. She gave him the space to work it when they had nothing else pressing.

But nothing came of the effort. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no lead on Gesto’s whereabouts—though to him there still was no doubt that she was dead—and no solid lead to her abductor. Bosch had leaned repeatedly on the one man who came closest to being a suspect and got nowhere. He was able to trace Marie Gesto from her apartment to the supermarket but no further. He had her car in the garage at the High Tower Apartments but he couldn’t get to the person who had parked it there.

Bosch had plenty of unsolved cases in his history. You can’t clear them all and any Homicide man would admit it. But the Gesto case was one that stuck with him. Each time he would work the case for a week or so, hit the wall and then return the file to Archives, thinking he had done all that could be done. But the absolution only lasted a few months and then there he was at the counter filling out the file request form again. He would not give up.

“Bosch,” one of the other detectives called out. “Miami on two.”

Bosch hadn’t even heard the phone ring in the squad room.

“I’ll take it,” Rider said. “Your head’s somewhere else.”

She picked up the phone and once more Bosch opened the Gesto file.

2

B
OSCH AND RIDER WERE
ten minutes late because of the backup of people waiting for elevators. He hated coming to the Criminal Courts Building because of the elevators. The wait and the jostling for position just to get on one of them put a layer of anxiety on him that he could live without.

In reception in the DA’s office on the sixteenth floor they were told to wait for an escort back to O’Shea’s office. After a couple minutes a man stepped through the doorway and pointed to the briefcase Bosch was holding.

“You got it?” he asked.

Bosch didn’t recognize him. He was a dark-complected Latino in a gray suit.

“Olivas?”

“Yeah. You brought the file?”

“I brought the file.”

“Then come on back, Hotshot.”

Olivas headed back toward the door he had come through. Rider made a move to follow but Bosch put his hand on her arm. When Olivas looked back and saw they were not following him, he stopped.

“You coming or not?”

Bosch took a step toward him.

“Olivas, let’s get something clear before we go anywhere. You call me ‘Hotshot’ again and I’m going to shove the file up your ass without taking it out of my briefcase.”

Olivas raised his hands in surrender.

“Whatever you say.”

He held the door and they followed him into the internal hallway. They went down a long corridor and took two rights before coming to O’Shea’s office. It was a large space, particularly by district attorney’s office standards. Most of the time prosecutors shared offices, two or four to a room, and held their meetings in strictly scheduled interview rooms at the end of each hallway. But O’Shea’s office was double-sized with room for a piano-crate desk and a separate seating area. Being the head of Special Prosecutions obviously had its perks. Being the heir apparent to the top job did as well.

O’Shea welcomed them from behind his desk, standing up to shake hands. He was about forty and handsome with jet-black hair. He was short, as Bosch already knew, even though he had never met him before. He had noticed while catching some of the TV coverage of the Waits prelim that most of the reporters who gathered around O’Shea in the hallway outside the courtroom were taller than the man they pointed their microphones at. Personally, Bosch liked short prosecutors. They were always trying to make up for something and usually it was the defendant who ended up paying the price.

Everybody took seats, O’Shea behind his desk, Bosch and Rider in chairs facing him, and Olivas to the right side of the desk in a chair positioned in front of a stack of
RICK O’SHEA ALL THE WAY
posters leaning against the wall.

“Thank you for coming in, Detectives,” O’Shea said. “Let’s start by clearing the air a little bit. Freddy tells me you two got off to a rough start.”

He was looking at Bosch as he spoke.

“I don’t have any problem with Freddy,” Bosch said. “I don’t even know Freddy enough to call him Freddy.”

“I should tell you that any reluctance on his part to fill you in on what we have here came directly from me because of the sensitive nature of what we are doing. So if you are angry, be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry,” Bosch said. “I’m happy. Ask my partner—this is me when I’m happy.”

Rider nodded.

“He’s happy,” she said. “Definitely happy.”

“Okay, then,” O’Shea said. “Everybody’s happy. So let’s get down to business.”

O’Shea reached over and put his hand above a thick accordion file placed on the right side of his desk. It was open and Bosch saw that it contained several individual files with blue tabs on them. Bosch was too far away to read them—especially without putting on the glasses he had recently begun carrying with him.

“Are you familiar with the Raynard Waits prosecution?” O’Shea asked.

Bosch and Rider nodded.

“It would have been kind of hard to miss,” Bosch said.

O’Shea nodded and offered a slight smile.

“Yes, we have pushed it out in front of the cameras. The guy’s a butcher. A very evil man. We’ve said from the start that we are going for the death penalty on it.”

“From what I’ve heard and seen, he’s a poster boy for it,” Rider said encouragingly.

O’Shea nodded somberly.

“That’s one reason why you are here. Before I explain what we have going, let me ask you to tell me about your investigation of the Marie Gesto case. Freddy said you’ve had the file out of Archives three times in the past year. Is there something active?”

Bosch cleared his throat after deciding to give first and then receive.

“You could say I’ve had the case for thirteen years. I caught it back in ’ninety-three, when she went missing.”

“But nothing ever came of it?”

Bosch shook his head.

“We had no body. All we ever found was her car and that was not enough. We never made anybody for it.”

“Not even a suspect?”

“We looked at a lot of people, one in particular. But we couldn’t make the connections and so nobody rose to the level of active suspect. Then I retired in ’oh-two and it went into Archives. A couple years go by and things don’t work out the way I thought they would in retirement and I come back on the job. That was last year.”

Bosch didn’t think it was necessary to tell O’Shea that he had copied the Gesto file and taken it with him, along with several other open cases, when he left his badge behind and walked out the door in 2002. Copying the files had been an infraction of department regs, and the fewer people who knew that the better.

“In the last year I pulled the Gesto file every time I had a little time to work it,” he continued. “But there’s no DNA, no latents. There’s only legwork. I’ve talked to all the principals again—everybody I could find. There’s still the one guy out there who I always felt could be the guy, but I never could make anything out of it. I talked to him twice this year, leaned pretty hard.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“Who is it?”

“His name’s Anthony Garland. He comes from Hancock Park money. You ever heard of Thomas Rex Garland, the oilman?”

O’Shea nodded.

“Well, T. Rex, as he is known, is Anthony’s father.”

“What’s Anthony’s connection to Gesto?”

“‘Connection’ might be too strong a word. Marie Gesto’s car was found in a single garage attached to a Hollywood apartment building. The apartment it corresponded to was empty. Our sense of things at the time was that it wasn’t just coincidence that the car ended up in there. We thought whoever hid the car there knew the apartment was vacant and that he’d get a decent ride out of hiding it there.”

“Okay. Anthony Garland knew about the garage or he knew Marie?”

“He knew about the garage. His former girlfriend had lived in the apartment. She had broken up with him and then moved back to Texas. So he knew the apartment and the garage were empty.”

“That’s pretty thin. That’s all you had?”

“Pretty much. We thought it was thin, too, but then we pulled the ex-girlfriend’s DMV mug and it turned out she and Marie looked a lot alike. We started to think that maybe Marie had been some sort of replacement victim. He couldn’t get to his ex-girlfriend because she had left, so he got to Marie instead.”

“Did you go to Texas?”

“Twice. We talked to the ex and she told us that the main reason she split with Anthony was because of his temper.”

“Was he violent with her?”

“She said no. She said she left before it got to that point.”

O’Shea leaned forward.

“So, did Anthony Garland know Marie?” he asked.

“We don’t know. We are not sure he did. Until his father brought his lawyer into it and he stopped talking to us, he denied ever knowing her.”

“When was this?—the lawyer, I mean.”

“Back then, and now. I came at him again a couple times this year. I pressed him and he lawyered up again. Different lawyers this time. They were able to get a restraining order reissued against me. They convinced a judge to order me to stay away from Anthony unless he had a lawyer with him. My guess is that they convinced the judge with money. It’s the way T. Rex Garland gets things done.”

O’Shea leaned back, nodding thoughtfully.

“Does this Anthony Garland have any kind of criminal record before or after Gesto?”

“No, not a criminal record. He hasn’t been a very productive member of society—he lives off his old man’s handouts, as near as I can tell. He runs security for his father and his various enterprises. But there’s never been anything criminal that I could find.”

“Wouldn’t it stand to reason that someone who had kidnapped and killed a young woman would have other criminal activity on his record? These things usually aren’t aberrations, are they?”

“If you went with the percentages, yeah. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Plus, there’s the old man’s money. Money smooths a lot of things over, makes a lot of things go away.”

O’Shea nodded again like he was learning about criminals and crime for the first time. It was a bad act.

“What was your next move going to be?” he asked.

Bosch shook his head.

“I didn’t have one. I sent the file back to Archives and thought that was it. Then a couple weeks ago I went down and pulled it again. I don’t know what I was going to do. Maybe talk to some of Garland’s more recent friends, see if he ever mentioned Marie Gesto or anything about her. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to give up.”

O’Shea cleared his throat and Bosch knew he would now get down to the reason they were there.

“Did the name Ray or Raynard Waits ever come up in all these years of investigating Gesto’s disappearance?”

Bosch looked at him for a moment, his stomach twisting.

“No, it didn’t. Should it have come up?”

O’Shea pulled one of the folders out of the accordion file and opened it on the desk. He lifted a document that looked like a letter off the top.

“As I said, we’ve made it public that we’re going for the death penalty on Waits,” he said. “After the prelim I think he realized the writing was on the wall. He’s got an appeal on the probable cause for the traffic stop. But it will go nowhere and he and his lawyer know it. An insanity defense is a nonstarter as well. This guy’s as calculating and organized as any killer I’ve ever prosecuted. So they responded last week with this. Before I show it to you I have to know that you understand that this is a letter from an attorney. It is a proffer. No matter what happens, whether we move forward with this or not, the information contained in this letter is off the record. If we choose to ignore this offer, no investigation can come of the information in this letter. Do you understand that?”

Rider nodded. Bosch didn’t.

“Detective Bosch?” O’Shea prompted.

“Maybe I shouldn’t see it, then,” Bosch said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

“You were the one who wouldn’t give Freddy the file. If the case means that much to you, then I think you should be here.”

Bosch finally nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

O’Shea slid the paper across the desk and Bosch and Rider leaned forward to read it together. Bosch first unfolded his glasses and put them on.

Sept. 12, 2006

Richard O’Shea, Assistant District Attorney
Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office
Office 16-11
210 West Temple Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012-3210

Re:
California v. Raynard Waits

Dear Mr. O’Shea:

This letter is intended to open discussions regarding a disposition in the above-referenced case. All statements made herein and hereafter in connection with these discussions are made with the understanding that they are inadmissible under California Evidence Code §1153, California Penal Code §1192.4 and
People v. Tanner,
45 Cal. App.3d 345, 350, 119 Cal. Rptr. 407 (1975).

I suggest to you that Mr. Waits would be willing, on terms and conditions outlined below, to share with you and investigators of your choice information regarding nine homicides, excluding the two in the above-referenced case, and to plead guilty to the charges in the above-referenced case, in exchange for the People’s agreement not to seek the death penalty on the instant homicide charges or to file charges in regard to the homicides about which he would provide information.

Furthermore, in return for the cooperation and information Mr. Waits would provide, you must agree that any and all statements by Mr. Waits and any information derived therefrom will not be used against him in any criminal case; no information provided pursuant to this agreement may be divulged to any other state or federal law enforcement agencies unless and until those agencies, through their representatives, agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this agreement; no statements made or other information provided by Mr. Waits during any “off-the-record” proffer or discussion may be used against him in the prosecution’s case-in-chief; nor may you make derivative use of or pursue any investigative leads suggested by any statements made or information provided by the defendant.

In the event the above-referenced case goes to trial, if Mr. Waits offers testimony materially different from any statements made or other information provided during any proffers or discussion, then you may, of course, impeach him concerning such prior inconsistent statements or information.

I suggest that the families of eight young women and one male victim will attain some form of closure with the knowledge of what transpired in regard to their loved ones and, in eight of these instances, be able to conduct proper religious ceremonies and burials after Mr. Waits leads your investigators to the places where these victims now rest. Additionally, these families will find, perhaps, some comfort in knowing that Mr. Waits is serving a prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Mr. Waits offers to provide information in regard to nine known and unknown homicides between 1992 and 2003. As an initial offer of credibility and good faith, he suggests that investigators review the investigation into the death of Daniel Fitzpatrick, 63, who was burned to death in his Hollywood Boulevard pawnshop on April 30, 1992. Investigative files will reveal that Mr. Fitzpatrick was armed and standing behind the roll-down security fence at the front of his store when he was set afire by an assailant using lighter fluid and a butane lighter. The can of EasyLight lighter fluid was left behind, standing upright in front of the security fence. This information was never made public.