Echo Park

going to ride over there.”
    “And what? You think you’ll find where he was going to bury those bags? You turning psychic on me now, Harry?”
    “Not yet. I just want to see if I can get a feel for Waits before we actually talk to the guy.”
    Saying the name made Bosch grimace and shake his head.
    “What?” Rider asked.
    “You know what we’re doing here? We’re helping to keep this guy alive. A guy who cuts women up and keeps them in the freezer until he runs out of room and has to take them out like trash. That’s our job, find the way to let him live.”
    Rider frowned.
    “I know how you feel, Harry, but I have to tell you, I kind of come down on O’Shea’s side on this. I think it’s better that all the families know and we clear all the cases. It’s like with my sister. We wanted to know.”
    When Rider was a teenager her older sister was murdered in a drive-by shooting. The case was cleared and three bangers went away for it. It was the main reason she became a cop.
    “It’s probably like you with your mother, too,” she added.
    Bosch looked up at her. His mother had been murdered when he was a boy. More than three decades later he solved the crime himself because he wanted to know.
    “You’re right,” he said. “But it just doesn’t sit right with me at the moment, that’s all.”
    “Why don’t you take that ride and clear your head a little bit. I’ll call you if anything comes up on the AutoTrack.”
    “I guess I will.”
    He started closing the files and putting them away.

4

    IN THE SHADOWS OF downtown’s spires and under the glow of lights from Dodger Stadium, Echo Park was one of L.A.’s oldest and ever-changing neighborhoods. Over the decades it had been the destination of the city’s immigrant underclass—the Italians coming first and then the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Cubans, Ukrainians and all of the others. By day a walk down the main drag of Sunset Boulevard might require skills in five or more languages to read all of the storefronts. By night it was the only place in the city where the air could be split by the sound of gang gunfire, the cheers for a home-run ball, and the baying of the hillside coyotes—all in the same hour.
    These days Echo Park was also a favored destination of another class of newcomer—the young and hip. The cool. Artists, musicians and writers were moving in. Cafés and vintage clothing shops were squeezing in next to the bodegas and
mariscos
stands. A wave of gentrification was washing across the flats and up the hillsides below the baseball stadium. It meant the character of the place was changing. It meant real-estate prices were going up, pushing out the working class and the gangs.
    Bosch had lived for a short time in Echo Park when he was a boy. And many years back, there had been a police bar on Sunset called the Short Stop. But cops were no longer welcome there. The place offered valet parking and catered to the Hollywood crowd—two things sure to keep the off-duty officer away. For Bosch the neighborhood of Echo Park had dropped off the radar. To him it wasn’t a destination. It was a drive-through neighborhood, a shortcut on his way to the Medical Examiner’s Office for work or to a Dodgers game for fun.
    From downtown he took a quick jog on the 101 Freeway north to Echo Park Road and then took that north again toward the hillside neighborhood where Raynard Waits had been arrested. As he passed Echo Lake he saw the statue known as the
Lady of the Lake
watching over the water lilies, her hands palms up like the victim of a holdup. As a boy he had lived for almost a year with his mother in the Sir Palmer Apartments across from the lake, but it had been a bad time for her and him and the memory was all but erased. He vaguely remembered that statue but almost nothing else.
    At Sunset he turned right and took it down to Beaudry. From there he drove up the hillside to Figueroa Terrace. He pulled to the curb near the intersection where Waits had been pulled over. A few old bungalow homes built in the thirties and forties were still there, but for the most part the houses were postwar concrete-block construction. They were modest with gated yards and barred windows. The cars in the driveways were not new or flashy. It was a working-class neighborhood that Bosch knew would be largely Latino and Asian now. From the back of the homes on the west side there would be nice views of the downtown towers with the DWP Building front and