Echo Park (7 page)

8

S
INCE 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 unknown 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.”

“I guess so.”

“I thought . . . never mind what I thought.”

“No, it wasn’t because of seeing you, Rachel. Seeing you was—I mean, is—actually very nice.”

She took up her mug and drank from it, then looked down at her work and seemed to steel herself to move on.

“Well, I don’t see how his calling you back then changes my conclusions,” she said. “Yes, it does seem out of character for him to have made contact under any name. But you have to remember the Gesto case took place in the early stages of his formation. There are a number of aspects involving Gesto that don’t fit with the rest. So for it to be the only case where he made contact would not be all that unusual.”

“Okay.”

She referred to her notes again, continuing to avoid his eyes since he had told her of the mistake.

“So where was I before you brought that up?”

“You said that after the first two killings he chose victims he could pull beneath the surface without notice.”

“Exactly. What I’m saying is that he was getting his satisfaction in the work. He didn’t need anybody else to know he was doing it. He wasn’t getting off on the attention. He wanted no attention. His fulfillment was self-contained. It needed no outside or public component.”

“So then, what bothers you?”

She looked up at him.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. But you look like something about your own profile of the guy bothers you. Something you don’t believe.”

She nodded, acknowledging that he had read her correctly.

“It’s just that his profile doesn’t support someone who would cooperate at this stage of the game, who would tell you about the other crimes. What I see here is someone who would never admit to it. Any of it. He would deny it, or at the very least keep quiet about it, until they put the needle in his arm.”

“All right, so that’s a contradiction. Don’t all of these guys have contradictions? They’re all messed up in some way. No profile is ever a hundred percent, right?”

She nodded.

“That’s true. But it still doesn’t fit and so I guess what I am trying to say is that from his point of view, there is something else. A higher goal, if you will. A plan. This whole confession thing is indicative of manipulation.”

Bosch nodded like what she had said was obvious.

“Of course it is. He’s manipulating O’Shea and the system. He’s using this to avoid the needle.”

“Maybe so, but there may be other motives as well. Be careful.”

She said the last two words sternly, as if she were correcting a subordinate or even a child.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Bosch said.

He decided not to dwell on it.

“What do you think about the dismemberment?” he asked. “What’s it say?”

“I actually spent most of my time studying the autopsies. I have always believed that you learn the most about a killer from his victims. Cause of death in each case was determined to be strangulation. There were no stab wounds on the bodies. There was just the dismemberment. These are two different things. I think the dismemberment was simply part of the cleanup. It was a way for him to easily dispose of the bodies. Again, it shows his skills, planning and organization. The more I read, the more I realized how lucky we were to get him that night.”

She ran a finger down the sheet of notes she had written and then continued.

“I find the bags very intriguing. Three bags for two women. One bag held both heads and all four hands. It was as if he possibly had a separate destination or plan for the bag containing the identifiers; the heads and the hands. Have they been able to determine where he was going when they pulled him over?”

Bosch shrugged.

“Not really. The assumption was that he was going to bury the bags somewhere around the stadium, but that doesn’t really work because they saw him drive off of Stadium Way and into a neighborhood. He was driving away from the stadium and the woods and the places he could bury the bags. There were some open lots down in the neighborhood and access to the hillsides below the stadium, but it seems to me that if he was going to bury them he would not have gone into a neighborhood. He would go deep into the park, where there was less chance of being noticed.”

“Exactly.”

She glanced at some of her other documents.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“Well, this Reynard the Fox thing might have nothing to do with all of this. It may all be coincidence.”

“But in the epic Reynard had a castle that was his secret hideaway.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I didn’t think you had a computer, let alone knew how to research on line.”

“I don’t. My partner did the search. But I gotta tell you, I was over in the neighborhood right before I called you today. I didn’t see any castle.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t take everything so literally,” she said.

“Well, there’s still a big question about the Reynard stuff,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Did you look at the booking sheet in the file? He wouldn’t talk to Olivas and his partner but he did answer the protocol questions at the jail when he was booked. He listed his education level as high school. No higher education. I mean, look, the guy’s a window washer. How would he even know about this medieval fox?”

“I don’t know. But as I said, the character has popped up repeatedly in all cultures. Children’s books, television shows, there are any number of ways the character could have made an impact on this man. And don’t underestimate this man’s intelligence because he washed windows for a living. He owned and operated a business. That is significant in terms of showing some of his capabilities. The fact that he operated as a killer with impunity for so long is another strong indicator of intelligence.”

Bosch wasn’t completely convinced. He fired off another question that would take her in a new direction.

“How do the first two fit in? He went from public spectacle with the riots and then a big media splash with Marie Gesto to, as you say, diving completely beneath the surface.”

“Every serial killer’s MO changes. The simple answer is that he was on a learning curve. I think the first killing—with the male victim—was an opportunity killing. Like a spree killing. He had thought about killing for a long time but wasn’t sure he could do it. He found himself in a situation—the chaos of the riots—where he could test himself. It was an opportunity to see if he could actually kill someone and then get away with it. The sex of the victim was not important. The identity of the victim was not important. At that moment he just wanted to find out if he could do it and almost any victim would do.”