Echo Park by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online Page A

Bosch knew that the unknowns were likely to be the seven women Waits was offering to tell authorities about in addition to Marie Gesto and the pawnshop man, but he studied the photos anyway for the face of Marie Gesto.
    She wasn’t there. The faces in the photos belonged to women who had not caused the same sort of stir that Marie Gesto had. Bosch sat back and took off his reading glasses to rest his eyes for a few moments. He remembered one of his early teachers in Homicide. Detective Ray Vaughn had a special sympathy for the ones he called “murder’s nobodies,” the victims who didn’t count. He taught Bosch early on that in society all victims are not created equal, but to the true detective they must be.
    “Every one of them was somebody’s daughter,” Ray Vaughn had told him. “Every one of them counted.”
    Bosch rubbed his eyes. He thought about Waits’s offer to clear up nine murders, including Marie Gesto’s and Daniel Fitzpatrick’s and those of seven women who never caused a blip on anybody’s radar. Something seemed not right about that. Fitzpatrick was an anomaly because he was a male and the killing didn’t appear to be sexually motivated. He had always assumed that Marie Gesto was a sex killing. But she was not a throwaway victim. She had hit the radar big time. Had Waits learned from her? Had he honed his craft after her killing to make sure he never drew such police and media heat again? Bosch thought that maybe the heat he had applied on the Gesto case was what caused Waits to change, to become a more skilled and cunning killer. If that was so, then he would have to deal with that guilt at a later time. For now he had to focus on what was in front of him.
    He put his glasses on again and went back to the files. The evidence against Waits was solid. Nothing like being caught in possession of body parts. A defense attorney’s nightmare; a prosecutor’s dream. The case sailed through a preliminary hearing in four days, and then the DA’s office upped the ante with O’Shea announcing he would go for the death penalty.
    Bosch had a legal pad to the side of the open file so that he could write down questions for O’Shea, Waits or others. It was blank when he came to the end of his review of the investigation and prosecution files. He now wrote the only questions that came to mind.
     
If Waits killed Gesto, why was there no photo of her in his apartment?
     
Waits lived in West Hollywood. What was he doing in Echo Park?
     
    The first question could be easily explained. Bosch knew killers evolved. Waits could have learned from the Gesto killing that he needed reminders of his work. The photos could have started after Gesto.
    The second question was more troubling to him. There was no report in the file that dealt with this question. It was thought simply that Waits had been on his way to get rid of the bodies, possibly to bury them in the parklands that surrounded Dodger Stadium. No further investigation of this was contemplated or called for. But to Bosch it was something to consider. Echo Park would have been at least a half hour away by car from Waits’s apartment in West Hollywood. That was a long time to be driving with body parts in bags. Additionally, Griffith Park, which was larger and had more pockets of isolated and difficult terrain than the area around the stadium, was far closer to the West Hollywood apartment and would have been the better choice for a body dump.
    To Bosch it meant that Waits had a specific destination in mind in Echo Park. This had been missed or dismissed as unimportant in the original investigation.
    He next wrote two words.
     
psych profile?
     
    No psychological study of the defendant had been conducted and Bosch was mildly surprised by this. Perhaps, he thought, it had been a strategic decision by the prosecution. O’Shea might have chosen not to take this route because he didn’t know exactly where it would lead. He wanted to try Waits on the facts and