Michael Connelly - EchoPark

“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.

BOSCH 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.”