Michael Connelly - EchoPark

He nodded. He wasn’t expecting this.

“Do you still live in that house up on the hill?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m there. Woodrow Wilson.”

“Good. My place is down off Beverly, not too far. I’ll come up to your place. I remember the view.”

Bosch didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure what he had just invited into his life.

“Can I give you something to think about until then?” she asked. “Maybe do some checking?”

“Sure, what?”

“The name. Is that his real name?”

Bosch frowned. He had never considered the name. He assumed it was real. Waits was incarcerated. His fingerprints would have been run through the system to confirm identity.

“I assume so. His fingerprints matched a previous arrest. That previous time he tried to give a false name but a DMV thumbprint made him as Waits. Why?”

“Do you know what a reynard is? Reynard spelled R - e - y instead of R - a - y. ”

Bosch shook his head. This was coming from left field. He hadn’t even been thinking about the name.

“No, what is it?”

“It’s a name for a young male fox. A young female is a vixen and the male is a reynard. I studied European folklore in college-back when I thought I wanted to be a diplomat. In medieval French folklore there is a character that is a fox named Reynard. He is a trickster. There are stories and epics about the scheming fox named Reynard. The character has appeared repeatedly through the centuries in books-children’s books mostly. You can Google it when you get back to the office and I am sure you will get many hits.”

Bosch nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her he didn’t know how to Google. He barely knew how to e-mail his eight-year-old daughter. She tapped a finger on the stack of files.

“A young fox would be a small fox,” she said. “In the description Mr. Waits is small in stature. You take it all in context of the full name and-”

“The little fox waits,” Bosch said. “The young fox waits. The trickster waits.”

“For the vixen. Maybe that’s how he saw it with his victims.”

Bosch nodded. He was impressed.

“We missed that. I can do some checking on the ID as soon as I get back.”

“And hopefully I will have more for you tonight.”

She went back to eating and Bosch went back to watching her.

AS SOON AS BOSCH dropped Rachel Walling at her car he opened his phone and called his partner. Rider reported that she was finishing up the paperwork on the Matarese case and that they would soon be good to go on it and able to file charges at the DA’s office the following day.

“Good. Anything else?”

“I got the box on Fitzpatrick from Evidence Archives and it turned out to be two boxes.”

“Containing what?”

“Mostly old pawn records that I can tell were never even looked at. They were sopping wet back then from when the fire was put out. The guys from Riot Crimes put them in plastic tubs and they’ve been moldering in them ever since. And, man, do they stink.”

Bosch nodded as he computed this. It was a dead end and it didn’t matter. Raynard Waits was about to confess to the killing of Daniel Fitzpatrick anyway. He could tell that Rider was looking at it the same way. An uncoerced confession is a royal flush. It beats everything.

“Have you heard from Olivas or O’Shea?” Rider asked.

“Not yet. I was going to call Olivas but wanted to talk to you first. Do you know anybody in city licensing?”

“No, but if you want me to call over there I can in the morning. They’re closed now. What are you looking for?”

Bosch checked his watch. He didn’t realize how late it had gotten. He guessed that the omelet at Duffy’s was going to count as breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“I was thinking we should run Waits’s business and see how long he’s had it, whether there were ever any complaints, that sort of thing. Olivas and his partner should have done it but there is nothing in the files about it.”

She was silent for a while before speaking.

“You think that could have been the connection to the High Tower?”

“Maybe. Or maybe to Marie. She had a nice big picture window in her apartment. It isn’t something I remember coming up back then. But maybe we missed it.”

“Harry, you never miss a thing, but I’ll get on it right away.”

“The other thing is the guy’s name. It could be phony.”

“How so?”

He told her about contacting Rachel Walling and asking her to look at the files. This was initially met with resounding silence because Bosch had crossed one of those invisible LAPD lines by inviting the FBI into the case without command approval, even if the invitation to Walling was unofficial. But when Bosch told Rider about Reynard the Fox she dropped her silence and became skeptical.

“You think our window-washing serial killer was schooled in medieval folklore?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Walling says he could have picked it up from a children’s book. Doesn’t matter. There is enough there that I think we’ve got to look at birth certificates, make sure there is someone named Raynard Waits. In the first file, when he was popped for prowling in ’ninety-three, he was booked under the name Robert Saxon-the name he gave-but then they got Raynard Waits when his thumbprint hit the DMV computer.”

“What are you seeing there, Harry? If they had his thumb on file back then, I’m thinking maybe the name isn’t phony after all.”

“Maybe. But you know it isn’t impossible to get a DL with a false name on it in this state. What if Saxon actually was his real name but the computer spit out his alias and he just went with it? We’ve seen it happen before.”

“Then why keep the name after? He had a record under Waits. Why not go back to Saxon or whatever his real name is?”

“Good questions. I don’t know. But we’ve got to check it out.”

“Well, we’ve got him no matter what his name is. I’ll Google Raynard the Fox right now.”

“Spell it with an e. ”

He waited and could hear her fingers on the computer keyboard.

“Got it,” she finally said. “There’s a lot of stuff about Reynard the Fox.”

“That’s what Walling said.”

There was silence for a long moment while Rider read. Then she spoke.

“Says here that part of the legend is that Reynard the Fox had a secret castle that nobody could find. He used all kinds of trickery to draw his victims close. Then he would take them back to the castle and eat them.”

That hung out there untouched for a while. Finally Bosch spoke.

“Do you have time to run another AutoTrack and see if you can get anything on Robert Saxon?”

“Sure.”

There was not a lot of conviction in her tone. But Bosch wasn’t going to let her off the hook. He wanted to keep things in motion.

“Read me his DOB off the arrest report,” Rider said.

“I can’t. I don’t have it here.”

“Where is it? I don’t see it on your desk.”

“I gave the files to Agent Walling. I’ll get them back later tonight. You’ll have to go on the computer to pull the arrest report.”

A lengthy silence went by before Rider responded.

“Harry, those are official investigative files. You know you shouldn’t have parted with them. And we’re going to need them tomorrow for the interview.”

“I told you, I’ll have them back tonight.”

“Let’s hope so. But I’ve gotta tell you, partner, you’re doing the cowboy thing again and I don’t like it very much.”

“Kiz, I’m just trying to keep things moving. And I want to be ready for this guy in that room tomorrow. What Walling is giving me will give us an edge.”