Michael Connelly - EchoPark

They small-talked for a while and then he told her what he had been doing since lunch and what he had learned. He could tell by her reserved comments that she was not convinced by his description of the trail he had found in Beachwood Canyon. But when he showed her the timeline he had worked up, she readily agreed with his conclusions about the killer’s changing of ID after the Fitzpatrick murder. She also agreed that, while they didn’t have the killer’s real name, they might have his real birth date.

Bosch looked down at the two plastic cartons on the floor.

“Then I guess it’s worth the shot,” he said.

She leaned to the side so she could see what he was looking at.

“What are those?”

“Pawn slips mostly. All the records salvaged after the fire. Back in ’ninety-two they were all wet. They dropped them in these boxes and forgot about them. Nobody’s ever looked through them all.”

“Is that what we’re doing tonight, Harry?”

He looked up at her and smiled. He nodded.

After they were finished eating they decided that they would take a carton each. Bosch suggested that they take them out onto the back deck because of the musty smell that would come from the cartons once they were opened. Rachel readily agreed. Bosch lugged the cartons out and then got two empty cardboard boxes from the carport. They sat down in deck chairs and began the work.

Taped to the top of the carton Bosch chose was a 3 x 5 card that said MAIN FILE CABINET. Bosch took the top off and used it to try to wave away the fumes that came out. The carton contained mostly pink pawn slips and 3 x 5 cards that had been haphazardly put in the container as if with a shovel. There was nothing ordered or neat about the records.

Water damage was high. Many of the slips had stuck together while wet, and the ink on others was smeared and unreadable. Bosch looked over at Rachel and saw her dealing with the same issues.

“This is bad, Harry,” she said.

“I know. Just do the best you can. It might be our last hope.”

There was no way to begin but simply to dig in. Bosch pulled out a wad of slips, brought them up to his lap and started going through them, attempting to make out the name, address and birth date of each customer who had pawned something through Fitzpatrick. Each time he looked at a slip, he checked the top corner with a red pencil from the dining room table drawer and dropped it into the cardboard box on the other side of his chair.

They were at it a solid half hour, working without conversation, when Bosch heard the phone in the kitchen ring. He thought about letting it go but knew it might be a call from Hong Kong. He got up.

“I didn’t even know you had a landline,” Walling said.

“Not many people do.”

He grabbed the phone on the eighth ring. It wasn’t his daughter. It was Abel Pratt.

“Just checking on you,” he said. “I figure if I get you on the house line and you say you are home, then you’re really home.”

“What, am I under house arrest now?”

“No, Harry, I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

“Look, there will be no blowback from me, okay? But home duty does not mean I have to be at home twenty-four-seven. I checked with the union.”

“I know, I know. But it does mean you do not take part in any job-related investigation.”

“Fine.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m sitting on the back deck with a friend. We’re having a beer and enjoying the night air. Is that okay with you, Top?”

“Anybody I know?”

“I doubt it. She doesn’t like cops.”

Pratt laughed and it seemed that Bosch had finally put him at ease about what he was doing.

“Then, I’ll let you get back to it. Have a good one, Harry.”

“I will if I can stay off the phone. I’ll call in tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“And I’ll be here. Good night.”

He hung up, checked the refrigerator for hidden or lost beers and returned to the deck empty-handed. Rachel was waiting for him with a smile on her face and a water-stained 3 x 5 card in her hand. Attached to it with a paper clip was a pink pawn slip.

“Got it,” she said.

She handed it to him and Bosch stepped back inside the house, where the lighting was better. He read the card first. It was written on with blue ink that was partially smeared by water but still legible.

Unsatisfied Customer-02/12/92

Customer complained that property was sold before 90-day pawn period expired. Shown pawn slip and corrected. Customer complained that 90 days should not have included weekends and holidays. Cursed/slammed door.

DGF

The pink pawn slip attached to the complaint card carried the name Robert Foxworth, the DOB 11/03/71 and an address on Fountain in Hollywood. The item pawned on October 8, 1991, was listed as an “heirloom medallion.” Foxworth had been given eighty dollars for it. There was a fingerprint square at the bottom right corner of the slip. Bosch could see the ridges of a fingerprint but the ink had either worn away or leached out of the paper because of the moisture contained in the storage carton.

“The DOB is a match,” Rachel said. “Plus the name connects on two levels.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he took Robert forward when he used the name Robert Saxon and he took the Fox in Foxworth forward when he used Raynard. Maybe that’s where this whole Raynard thing came from. If his real name is Foxworth, maybe when he was a kid, his parents told him stories about a fox named Reynard.”

“If his real name is Foxworth,” Bosch repeated. “Maybe we just found another alias.”

“Maybe. But at least it’s something you didn’t have before.”

Bosch nodded. He could feel his excitement building. She was right. Finally they had a new angle to pursue. Bosch pulled out his phone.

“I’m going to run the name and see what happens.”

He called central dispatch and asked a service operator to run the name and birth date they had found on the pawn slip. It came back clean and with no record of a current driver’s license. He thanked the operator and hung up.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not even a driver’s license.”

“But that’s good,” Rachel said. “Don’t you see? Robert Foxworth would be about to turn thirty-five right now. If there’s no history or current license, then that is further confirmation that he is no more, that he’s either dead or he became someone else.”

“Raynard Waits.”

She nodded.

“I guess I was hoping for a DL with an Echo Park address,” Bosch said. “I guess that’s too much to ask for.”

“Maybe not. Is there a way in this state to check defunct driver’s licenses? Robert Foxworth, if that’s his real name, probably got a license when he turned sixteen in nineteen eighty-seven. When he switched identities it would have expired.”

Bosch considered this. He knew that the state did not start requiring a thumbprint from licensed drivers until the early nineties. It meant Foxworth could have gotten a driver’s license in the late eighties and there would be no way to connect him to his new identity as Raynard Waits.

“I could check with DMV in the morning. It’s not something I can get through communications dispatch tonight.”

“There is something else you can check tomorrow,” she said. “Remember the quick and dirty profile I did the other night? I said these early crimes weren’t aberrations. He built up to them.”

Bosch understood.

“A juvy jacket.”

She nodded.

“You might find a juvenile record on Robert Foxworth-again, if that’s his real name. It wouldn’t have been accessible through dispatch either.”

She was right. State law kept juvenile records from trailing an offender into adulthood. The name may have come up clean when Bosch called dispatch to run it but that didn’t mean it was squeaky clean. As with the driver’s license information, Bosch would have to wait until morning, when he could get into the juvenile records at the Department of Probation.