Echo Park

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 send him to the death chamber. He didn’t want to be responsible for opening a door to a possible insanity defense.
    Still, Bosch thought, a psychological study could have been useful for understanding the defendant and his crimes. It should have been done. Whether the subject was cooperative or not, a profile could have been drawn from the crimes themselves as well as from what was known about Waits through his history, appearance, the findings in his apartment and interviews conducted with those he knew and worked for. Such a profile might have also been useful to O’Shea as an edge against a move by the defense to claim insanity.
    Now it was too late. The department had a small psych staff and there would be no way for Bosch to get anything done before the interview with Waits the next day. And farming a request out to the FBI would result in a two-month wait at best.
    Bosch suddenly had an idea about that but decided to grind it over for a little while before acting on anything. He put the questions aside for the moment and got up to refill his coffee mug. He was using a real coffee mug he had brought down from the Open-Unsolved Unit because he preferred it over Styrofoam. His mug had come from a famous writer and television producer named Stephen Cannell who had spent time with the OU Unit while researching a project. Printed on the side of the mug was Cannell’s favorite piece of writing advice. It said
What’s the bad guy up to?
Bosch liked it because he thought it was a good question for a real detective to always be considering as well.
    He came back to the cafeteria table and looked at the last file. It was thin and the oldest of the three. He put aside thoughts of Echo Park and psychological profiles, sat down and opened the file. It involved the reports and investigation related to Waits’s arrest in February 1993 for prowling. It was the only blip on the radar involving Waits until his arrest in the van with the body parts thirteen years later.
    The reports said Waits was arrested in the backyard of a home in the Fairfax District after a neighbor with insomnia happened to look out her window while walking through her dark house. She saw a man looking in the rear windows of the house next door. The woman woke her sleeping husband and he promptly snuck out of the house, jumped the man and held him until police arrived. The man was found in possession of a screwdriver and charged with prowling. He carried no identification and gave the name Robert Saxon to the arresting officers. He said he was only seventeen. But his ruse crumbled and he was identified as Raynard Waits, twenty-one, a short time later when a thumbprint taken during the booking process scored a match in DMV records to a driver’s license issued nine months earlier to Raynard Waits. That license carried the same day and month of birth with one change. It said Raynard Waits was four years older than he had claimed to be as Robert Saxon.
    Once identified, Waits admitted to police during questioning that he had been looking for a home to burglarize. However, it was noted in the report that the window he had been seen looking through corresponded to the bedroom of a fifteen- year-old girl who lived in the house. Still, Waits avoided any sort of sex offender jacket in a plea agreement negotiated by his attorney, Mickey Haller. He was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation, which, according to the reports, he completed with high marks and no violations.
    Bosch realized that the incident was an early warning of what was to come. But the system was too overburdened and inefficient to recognize the danger that was in Waits. He worked the dates and realized that while Waits was successfully completing probation in the eyes of the justice system, he was also graduating from prowler to murderer. Marie Gesto was taken before he cleared his tail.
    “Howzit going?”
    Bosch looked up and quickly took off his glasses so he could focus on distance. Rider had come down to get coffee. She was holding an empty
What’s the bad guy up to?
mug. The writer had given one to everybody in the squad.
    “Almost done,” he said. “How about you?”
    “I’m done with what O’Shea gave us. I called Evidence Archives for the box on Fitzpatrick.”
    “What’s in there?”
    “I don’t know for sure but