Echo Park

center. The homes on the east side would have backyards that stretched up into the rugged terrain of the hills. And at the top of those hills would be the far parking lots of the baseball stadium complex.
    He thought about Waits’s window-washing van and wondered again why he had been on this street in this neighborhood. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where he would have customers. It wasn’t the kind of street where a commercial van would be expected at two in the morning, anyway. The two CRT officers had been correct in taking notice.
    Bosch pulled over and put the car in park. He stepped out and looked around and then leaned against the car as he contemplated the questions. He still didn’t get it. Why had Waits chosen this place? After a few moments he opened his cell phone and called his partner.
    “You run that AutoTrack yet?” he asked.
    “Just did. Where are you?”
    “Echo Park. Anything come up near here?”
    “Uh-uh, I was just looking. The farthest east it puts him is the Montecito Apartments on Franklin.”
    Bosch knew that the Montecito wasn’t near Echo Park but it was not far from the High Tower Apartments, where Marie Gesto’s car had been found.
    “When was he at the Montecito?” he asked.
    “After Gesto. He moved in, let’s see, in ’ninety-nine, and out the next year. A one-year stay.”
    “Anything else worth mentioning?”
    “No, Harry. Just the usual. The guy moved house every one or two years. Didn’t like staying put, I guess.”
    “Okay, Kiz. Thanks.”
    “You coming back to the office?”
    “In a little while.”
    He closed the phone and got back in the car. He took Figueroa Lane to Chavez Ravine Place and hit another stop sign. At one time the whole area up here was known only as Chavez Ravine. But that was before the city moved all the people out and bulldozed the bungalows and shacks they had called home. A grand housing project was supposed to rise in the ravine, with playgrounds and schools and shopping plazas that would invite back those who had been displaced. But once they cleared it all out the housing project was scratched from the city’s plans and it was a baseball stadium that went in instead. To Bosch it seemed that as far back as he could remember in L.A., the fix was always in.
    Bosch had been listening lately to the Ry Cooder CD called
Chávez Ravine.
It wasn’t jazz but that was okay. It was its own kind of jazz. He liked the song “It’s Just Work for Me,” a dirge about a bulldozer driver who came to the ravine to knock down the poor people’s shacks and refused to feel guilty about it.

    You got to go where they send you
    When you’re a dozer-drivin’ man . . .

    He took a left on Chavez Ravine and in a few moments he came to Stadium Way and the spot where Waits had first drawn the attention of the CRT patrol as he passed on his way down into Echo Park.
    At the stop sign he surveyed the intersection. Stadium Way was the feeder line to the stadium’s huge parking lots. For Waits to have come into the neighborhood this way, as the arrest report stated, he would have to have come in from downtown, the stadium, or the Pasadena Freeway. This would not have been the way in from his home in West Hollywood. Bosch puzzled with this for a few moments but determined there was not enough information to draw any conclusion. Waits could have driven through Echo Park, making sure he was not followed, and then drawn the CRT tail after turning around to go back.
    He realized that there was much about Waits he didn’t know and it bothered him that he would come face-to-face with the killer the next day. Bosch felt unprepared. He once again considered the idea he’d had earlier, but this time he didn’t hesitate. He opened his phone and called the FBI field office in Westwood.
    “I’m looking for an agent named Rachel Walling,” he told the operator. “I’m not sure what squad she’s with.”
    “Hold one.”
    By “one” she had apparently meant a minute. As he waited he was honked at by a car that had come up from behind. Bosch moved through the intersection, made a U-turn and then pulled off the road into the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Finally near the two-minute mark his call was transferred and picked up and a male voice said, “Tactical.”
    “Agent Walling, please.”
    “Hold one.”
    “Right,” Bosch said after he heard the click.
    But this time the transfer was made quickly and Bosch heard Rachel Walling’s voice for the first