Echo Park by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online

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.