Echo Park (3 page)

Further, Mr. Waits suggests that police investigative files in regard to the September 1993 disappearance of Marie Gesto be reviewed as an additional showing of his credibility and good faith. The records will reveal that while the whereabouts of Ms. Gesto were never determined, her car was located by police in a garage at a Hollywood apartment complex known as the High Tower. The car contained Ms. Gesto’s clothing and equestrian equipment plus a grocery bag containing a one-pound package of carrots. Ms. Gesto intended to use the carrots to feed the horses she groomed in exchange for riding time at the Sunset Ranch stables in Beachwood Canyon. Again, this information was never made public.

I would suggest that if an agreement of disposition could be achieved, such an agreement would fall within the exceptions to California’s prohibition against plea bargaining serious felonies inasmuch as, absent Mr. Waits’s cooperation, there are insufficient evidence and material witnesses to prove the People’s case in regard to these nine homicides. Moreover, the People’s forbearance regarding the death penalty is entirely discretionary and does not represent a substantial change in sentence. (California Penal Code §1192.7a.)

Please contact me at your earliest convenience if the foregoing is acceptable.

Sincerely,

Maurice Swann, PA

101 Broadway

Suite 2

Los Angeles, CA 90013

Bosch realized he had read almost the entire letter without taking a breath. He now gulped down some air but it did not displace the cold tightness that was forming in his chest.

“You’re not going to agree to this, are you?” he asked.

O’Shea held his gaze for a moment before responding.

“As a matter of fact, I am negotiating with Swann right now. That was the initial proffer. I’ve improved the State’s take substantially since that arrived.”

“In what way?”

“He’ll have to plead to all the cases. We’ll get eleven murder convictions.”

And you’ll get more headlines in time for the election, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

“But he still walks?” he asked.

“No, Detective, he doesn’t walk. He never sees the light of day again. Have you ever been up to Pelican Bay, the place they send sex offenders? It only sounds like a nice place.”

“But no death penalty. You’re giving him that.”

Olivas smirked as if Bosch didn’t see the light.

“Yes, that is what we are giving,” O’Shea said. “That’s all we’re giving. No death penalty and he goes away forever and a day.”

Bosch shook his head, looked at Rider and then back at O’Shea. He said nothing because he knew it wasn’t his decision to make.

“But before we agree to such a deal,” O’Shea said, “we need to make damn sure he is good for those nine. Waits is no dummy. This could all be a trick to avoid the needle or it could be the real thing. I want to bring you two into this to work with Freddy in finding out which it is. I’ll make the calls and you will be cut loose. That will be the assignment.”

Neither Bosch nor Rider responded. O’Shea pressed on.

“It is obvious he knows things about the two bait cases cited in the letter. Freddy confirmed the Fitzpatrick thing. He was killed during the riots after the Rodney King verdict came in, burned to death behind the roll-down fence in his pawnshop. He was heavily armed at the time and what is not clear is how his killer got close enough to set him on fire. The can of EasyLight was found just like Waits said, standing upright in front of the security fence.

“The mention of the Gesto case we could not confirm because you’ve got the file, Detective Bosch. You’ve already confirmed the part about the garage. Did he get that right about the clothes and the carrots?”

Bosch reluctantly nodded.

“The car was public information,” he said. “The media was all over it. But the bag of carrots was our ace in the hole. Nobody knew about that except me, my partner at the time and the evidence tech who opened the bag. We held it back because that’s where we ended up thinking she crossed his path. The carrots came from a Mayfair Supermarket on Franklin at the bottom of Beachwood Canyon. Turned out it was her routine to stop there before going up to the stables. The day she disappeared she followed the routine. She came out with the carrots and probably her killer as a trailer. We found witnesses who put her in the store. Nothing else after that. Until we found her car.”

O’Shea nodded. He pointed to the letter, which was still on the desk in front of Bosch and Rider.

“Then this is looking good.”

“No, it’s not,” Bosch said. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t make the deal.”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

“Because if he is the one who took Marie Gesto and killed her and he killed those eight other people, maybe even chopped them up like the two they caught him with, then he isn’t someone who should be allowed to live, whether in a prison cell or not. They ought to strap him down, put the juice in him and send him on down the hole to where he belongs.”

O’Shea nodded as if it were a valid consideration.

“What about all of those open cases?” he countered. “Look, I don’t like the idea of this guy living out his life in a private room at Pelican Bay any more than you do. But we have a responsibility to clear those cases and provide answers to the families of those people. Also, you have to remember, we have announced that we are
seeking
the death penalty. That doesn’t mean it’s automatic. We have to go to trial and win and
then
we have to do it all over again to get the jury to recommend death. I’m sure you know that there are any number of things that could go wrong. It only takes one juror to hang a case. And it only takes one to stop the death penalty. It only takes one soft judge to ignore the jury’s recommendation, anyway.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He knew how the system worked, how it could be manipulated and how nothing was a sure thing. Still, it bothered him. He also knew that a life sentence didn’t always mean a life sentence. Every year people like Charlie Manson and Sirhan Sirhan got their shot. Nothing lasts forever, not even a life sentence.

“Plus, there is the cost factor,” O’Shea continued. “Waits doesn’t have money but Maury Swann took the case for publicity value. If we take this to trial he will be ready for battle. Maury’s a damn good lawyer. We can expect experts to cancel out our experts, scientific analysis to cancel out our analysis—the trial will last months and cost the county a fortune. I know you don’t want to hear that money is a consideration here but that is the reality. I have the budget management office already on my back about this one. This proffer could be the safest and best way to make sure this man harms no one else in the future.”

“The best way?” Bosch asked. “Not the right way, if you ask me.”

O’Shea picked up a pen and drummed it lightly on his desk before responding.

“Detective Bosch, why did you sign out the Gesto file so many times?”

Bosch felt Rider turn and look at him. She had asked him the same thing on more than one occasion.

“I told you,” he said. “I pulled it because it had been my case. It bothered me that we never made anybody for it.”

“In other words, it has haunted you.”

Bosch nodded hesitantly.

“Did she have family?”

Bosch nodded again.

“She had parents up in Bakersfield. They had a lot of dreams for her.”

“Think about them. And think about the families of the others. We can’t tell them that Waits was the one unless we know for sure. My guess is that they will want to know and that they are willing to trade that knowledge for his life. It’s better that he plead guilty to all of them than that we get him for only two.”

Bosch said nothing. He had registered his objection. He now knew it was time to go to work. Rider was on the same vibe.

“What is the time frame on this?” she asked.

“I want to move quickly,” O’Shea said. “If this is legit, I want to clean it up and get it done.”

“Gotta get it in before the election, right?” Bosch asked.

He then immediately regretted it. O’Shea’s lips formed a tight line. Blood seemed to collect beneath the skin around his eyes.

“Detective,” he said. “I will give you that. I’m running for election and clearing eleven murders with convictions would be helpful to my cause. But do not suggest the election is my only motivation here. Every night that those parents who carried dreams for their daughter go to bed not knowing where she is or what happened to her is a night of terrible pain as far as I am concerned. Even after thirteen years. So I want to move quickly and assuredly and you can keep your speculations about anything else to yourself.”

“Fine,” Bosch said. “When do we talk to this guy?”

O’Shea looked at Olivas and then back at Bosch.

“Well, I think we should have an exchange of files first. You should come up to speed on Waits and I’d like Freddy to familiarize himself with the Gesto file. Once that is done we’ll set something up with Maury Swann. What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s fine,” Bosch said. “Swann will be there during the interview?”

O’Shea nodded.

“Maury’s riding this one all the way. He’ll milk every angle, probably end up with a book and a movie deal before this thing’s over. Maybe even a guest anchor slot on Court TV.”

“Yeah, well,” Bosch said, “at least then he’d be out of the courtroom.”

“Never thought of it that way,” O’Shea said. “Did you bring the Gesto records?”

Bosch opened his briefcase on his lap and took out the investigation file, which was contained in a three-inch-thick binder generally known as a murder book. He handed it to O’Shea, who turned and gave it to Olivas.

“And I will give you this in return,” O’Shea said.

He slid the file back into the accordion folder and handed it all across the desk.

“Happy reading,” he said. “Are you sure about tomorrow?”

Bosch looked at Rider to see if she had an objection. They had another day before they needed to walk the Matarese filing to the DA. But the work was mostly finished and he knew Rider could handle the rest. When Rider said nothing Bosch looked back at O’Shea.

“We’ll be ready,” he said.

“Then I will call Maury and set it up.”

“Where is Waits?”

“Right here in the building,” O’Shea said. “We’ve got him in high-power on keep-away status.”

“Good,” Rider said.

“What about the other seven?” Bosch asked.

“What about them?”

“Are there no files?”

“The proffer, as well as Maury Swann, indicates that these were women who were never found and possibly never reported missing in the first place,” O’Shea said. “Waits is willing to lead us to them but there is no prep work we can do for them.”

Bosch nodded.

“Any other questions?” O’Shea asked, signaling that the meeting was over.

“We’ll let you know,” Bosch said.

“I know I am repeating myself but I feel I need to,” O’Shea said. “This investigation is all off the record. That file is a proffer that is part of a plea negotiation. Nothing in that file or anything that he tells you can ever be used to make a case against him. If this falls apart, then you will not be able to use the information to pursue him. Is that clearly understood?”

Bosch didn’t answer.

“It’s clear,” Rider said.

“There is one exception that I have negotiated. If he lies, if you catch him at any time in a lie or if any piece of information he gives you during this process proves to be knowingly false, all bets are off and we can go after him for all of it. He has been made quite aware of this, too.”

Bosch nodded. He stood up. Rider did, too.

“Do you need me to call someone to free you two up?” O’Shea asked. “I can flex a muscle if needed.”

Rider shook her head.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Harry was already working the Gesto case. The seven women might be unknown victims but there’s got to be a file in Archives on the man in the pawnshop. It all cuts Open-Unsolved in. We can handle our supervisor.”

“Okay, then. As soon as I have the interview set up I will call. Meantime, all of my numbers are in the file. Freddy’s, too.”

Bosch nodded to O’Shea and threw a glance at Olivas before turning to the door.

“Detectives?” O’Shea said.

Bosch and Rider turned back to him. He was standing now. He wanted to shake their hands.

“I am hoping you are on my side on this,” O’Shea said.

Bosch shook his hand, unsure whether O’Shea was talking about the case or the election.

He said, “If Waits can help me bring Marie Gesto home to her parents, then I’m on your side.”

It wasn’t a completely accurate summation of his feelings, but it got him out of the office.

3

B
ACK AT OPEN-UNSOLVED
they sat in their supervisor’s office and brought him up to date on the day’s developments. Abel Pratt was four weeks away from retirement after twenty-five years on the job. He was attentive to them but not overly so. On the side of his desk was a stack of Fodor’s guidebooks for Caribbean islands. His plan was to pull the pin, leave the city and find an island to live on with his family. It was a common retirement dream among law enforcement officers—to pull back from all the darkness witnessed for so long on the job. The reality, however, was that after about six months on the beach the island got pretty boring.

A detective three from RHD named David Lambkin was set to be the squad’s top after Pratt split. He was a nationally recognized sex crimes expert chosen for the job because so many of the cold cases they were working in the unit were sexually motivated. Bosch was looking forward to working with him and would have liked to be briefing him instead of Pratt but the timing was off.

They went with who they had, and one of the positive things about Pratt was that he was going to give them free rein until he was out the door. He just didn’t want any waves, no blowback in his face. He wanted a quiet, uneventful last month on the job.

Like most cops with twenty-five years in the department, Pratt was a throwback. He was old school. He preferred working on a typewriter over a computer. Rolled halfway up in the IBM Selectric next to his desk was a letter he had been working on when Bosch and Rider stepped in. Bosch had grabbed a quick glance at it while he was sitting down and saw it was a letter to a casino in the Bahamas. Pratt was trying to line up a security gig in paradise, and that about said it all when it came to where his mind was at these days.

After hearing their briefing, Pratt gave his approval for them to work with O’Shea and only became animated when he issued a warning about Raynard Waits’s attorney, Maury Swann.

“Let me tell you about Maury,” Pratt said. “Whatever you do when you meet him do not shake his hand.”

“Why not?” Rider asked.

“I had a case with him once. This is way back. It was a gangbanger on a one-eighty-seven. Every day when we started court, Maury made a big deal of shaking my hand and then the prosecutor’s. He probably would have shaken the judge’s hand, too, if he’d gotten the chance.”

“So?”

“So after his guy was convicted he tried to get a reduced sentence by snitching out the others involved in the murder. One of the things he told me during the debriefing was that he thought I was dirty. He said that during the trial Maury had told him he could buy all of us. Me, the prosecutor, everybody. So the banger had his homegirl get him the cash and Maury explained to him that every time he was shaking our hands he was paying us off. You know, passing the cash palm to palm. He always did those two-handed shakes, too. He was really selling it to his guy while all along he was keeping the cash.”

“Holy shit!” Rider exclaimed. “Didn’t you guys work up a case on him?”

Pratt dismissed the idea with a wave.

“It was after the fact and besides it was a bullshit he-said-he-said case. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere—not with Maury being a member of the bar in good standing and all. But ever since then I heard that Maury likes shaking hands a lot. So when you get in that room with him and Waits, don’t shake his hand.”

They left Pratt’s office, smiling at the story, and returned to their own workstation. The division of labor had been worked out on their walk back from the courthouse. Bosch would take Waits, and Rider would take Fitzpatrick. They would know the files inside and out by the time they sat across the table from Waits in the interview room the following day.

Since Rider had less to read in the Fitzpatrick case she also would finish the filing on Matarese. This meant Bosch was cleared to study full-time the world of Raynard Waits. After pulling out the Fitzpatrick file for Rider, he chose to take the accordion folder O’Shea had given them down to the cafeteria. He knew the lunch crowd would be thinning out and he would be able to spread the files out and work without the distractions of the constantly ringing phones and chatter of the Open-Unsolved squad room. He had to use a napkin to clean a table in the corner but then quickly settled into his review of the materials.

There were three files on Waits. They included the LAPD murder book compiled by Olivas and Ted Colbert, his partner in the Northeast Division Homicide squad, a file on a prior arrest and the prosecution file compiled by O’Shea.

Bosch decided to read the murder book first. He quickly became acquainted with Raynard Waits and the details of his arrest. The suspect was thirty-four years old and lived in a ground-floor apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood. He wasn’t a large man, standing five foot six and weighing 142 pounds. He was the owner-operator of a one-man business—a residential window-cleaning company called ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners. According to the police reports, he came to the attention of two patrol officers, a boot named Arnolfo Gonzalez and his training officer, Ted Fennel, at 1:50 a.m. on the night of May 11. The officers were assigned to a Crime Response Team which was watching a hillside neighborhood in Echo Park because of a recent rash of home burglaries that had been occurring on the nights of Dodgers home games. Though in uniform, Gonzalez and Fennel were in an unmarked cruiser near the intersection of Stadium Way and Chavez Ravine Place. Bosch knew the location. It was at the remote edge of the Dodger Stadium complex and above the Echo Park neighborhood that the CRT teams were watching. He also knew that they were following a standard CRT strategy: to stay out on the perimeter of the target neighborhood and follow in any vehicle or persons who looked suspicious or out of place.

According to the report filed by Gonzalez and Fennel, they grew suspicious as to why a van marked on the sides with signs that said ClearView Residential Glass Cleaners was out and about at two in the morning. They followed at a distance and Gonzalez used night-vision binoculars to get the van’s plate number. He then entered it into the car’s mobile digital terminal—the officers choosing to use the onboard computer rather than the radio in case the burglar working the neighborhood was equipped with a police radio scanner. The computer kicked back a flag. The plate was registered to a Ford Mustang with an address out in Claremont. Believing that the license plate on the van was stolen and that they now had probable cause to stop it, Fennel accelerated, put on the UC car’s grille lights and stopped the van on Figueroa Terrace near the intersection of Beaudry Avenue.

“The driver of the vehicle appeared agitated and leaned out of the van’s window to talk to Officer Gonzalez, an effort to block the officer from conducting a visual survey of the interior of the vehicle,” the arrest summary read. “Officer Fennel approached the vehicle’s passenger side and beamed his flashlight into the van. Without entering the vehicle, Officer Fennel was able to notice what appeared to be several black plastic trash bags on the floorboard in front of the front passenger seat of the vehicle. A substance appearing to be blood could be seen leaking from the cinched mouth of one of the bags and onto the floor of the van.”

According to the report, “The driver was asked if that was blood leaking from one of the bags and he stated that he had cut himself earlier in the day when a large plate glass window he was cleaning shattered. He stated that he had used several glass-cleaning rags to clean up the blood. When asked to show where he was cut the driver smiled and then suddenly made a move to restart the vehicle’s ignition. Officer Gonzalez reached through the window to restrain him. After a short struggle the driver was removed from the vehicle and placed on the ground and handcuffed. He was then moved to the backseat of the unmarked car. Officer Fennel opened the vehicle and inspected the bags. At this time Officer Fennel found the first bag he opened contained human body parts. Investigative units were immediately summoned to the scene.”

The driver’s license of the man taken out of the van identified him as Raynard Waits. He was booked into the holding tank at Northeast Division while an investigation of his van and the plastic trash bags carried on through the night on Figueroa Terrace. Only after Detectives Olivas and Colbert, the on-call team that night, took over the investigation and retraced some of the steps taken by Gonzalez and Fennel was it learned that the rookie officer had typed the wrong license plate number into the MDT, typing an
F
for an
E
and getting the plate registration for the Mustang out in Claremont.

In law enforcement terms it was a “good faith error,” meaning the probable cause to have stopped the van should still hold because the officers had been acting in good faith when an honest mistake was committed. Bosch assumed that this was the point of the appeal Rick O’Shea had mentioned earlier.

Bosch put aside the murder investigation file and opened the prosecution file. He quickly looked through the documents until he found a copy of the appeal. He scanned it quickly and found what he had expected. Waits was claiming that typing in the wrong plate number was a custom and practice within the LAPD and often employed when officers on specialty squads wanted to pull over and search a vehicle without legitimate probable cause to do so. Though a Superior Court judge found that Gonzalez and Fennel had acted on good faith and upheld the legality of the search, Waits was appealing that decision to the District Court of Appeal.

Bosch went back to the investigative file. No matter the question of the legality of the traffic stop, the investigation of Raynard Waits had moved rapidly. The morning after the arrest Olivas and Colbert obtained a search warrant for the apartment on Sweetzer where Waits lived alone. A four-hour search and Forensics examination of the apartment produced several samples of human hair and blood taken from the bathroom’s sink and tub traps, as well as a hidden space beneath the floor containing several pieces of women’s jewelry and multiple Polaroid photos of nude young women who appeared to be sleeping, unconscious or dead. In a utility room was an upright freezer which was empty, except for the two samples of pubic hair found by an SID tech.

Meantime, the three plastic bags found in the van had been transported to the coroner’s office and opened. They were found to contain the body parts of two young women, each of whom had been strangled and dismembered after death in the same way. Of note was the fact that the parts from one of the bodies showed indications of having been thawed after being frozen.

Though no cutting tools were found in Waits’s apartment or van, it was clear from the evidence gathered that while Officers Gonzalez and Fennel were looking for a burglar, they had stumbled onto what appeared to be a serial killer at work. The belief was that Waits had already discarded or hidden his tools and was in the process of disposing of the bodies of the two victims when he drew the attention of the CRT officers. The indications were that there might be other victims as well. The reports in the file detailed the efforts made in the next several weeks to identify the two bodies as well as the other women in the Polaroids found in the apartment. Waits of course offered no help in this regard, engaging the services of Maury Swann on the morning of his capture and choosing to remain silent as the law enforcement processes continued and Swann mounted an attack on the probable cause of the traffic stop.

Only one of the two known victims was identified. Fingerprints taken from one of the dismembered women drew a hit on the FBI’s latent database. She was identified as a seventeen-year-old runaway from Davenport, Iowa. Lindsey Mathers had left home two months before being found in Waits’s van and had not been heard from during that time by her parents. With photos supplied by her mother, detectives were able to piece together her trail in Los Angeles. She was recognized by youth counselors at several Hollywood shelters. She had been using a variety of names to avoid being identified and possibly sent home. There were indications she was involved in drug use and street prostitution. Needle marks found on her body during the autopsy were believed to have been the result of a long and ongoing practice of injecting drugs. A blood screen taken during the autopsy found heroin and PCP in her bloodstream.

The shelter counselors who helped identify Lindsey Mathers were also shown the Polaroid photographs found in Waits’s apartment and were able to provide a variety of different names for at least three of the women. Their stories were similar to Mathers’s journey. They were runaways possibly engaged in prostitution as a means of earning money for drugs.

It was clear to Bosch from the gathered evidence and information that Waits was a predator who targeted young women who would not be immediately missed, fringe dwellers who were unaccounted for by society in the first place and therefore not missed when they disappeared.

The Polaroids from the hidden space in Waits’s apartment were in the file, encased in plastic sheets, four to a page. There were eight pages with multiple shots of each woman. An accompanying analysis report stated that the photo collection contained shots of nine different women—the two women whose remains were found in Waits’s van and seven unknowns. Bosch knew that the unknowns were likely to be the seven women Waits was offering to tell authorities about in addition to Marie Gesto and the pawnshop man, but he studied the photos anyway for the face of Marie Gesto.

She wasn’t there. The faces in the photos belonged to women who had not caused the same sort of stir that Marie Gesto had. Bosch sat back and took off his reading glasses to rest his eyes for a few moments. He remembered one of his early teachers in Homicide. Detective Ray Vaughn had a special sympathy for the ones he called “murder’s nobodies,” the victims who didn’t count. He taught Bosch early on that in society all victims are not created equal, but to the true detective they must be.

“Every one of them was somebody’s daughter,” Ray Vaughn had told him. “Every one of them counted.”