Echo Park

time in a year. He hesitated and she almost hung up on him.
    “Rachel, it’s Harry Bosch.”
    Now she hesitated before responding.
    “Harry . . .”
    “So what’s ‘Tactical’ mean?”
    “It’s just the squad designation.”
    He understood. She didn’t answer because it was eyes-only stuff and the line was probably on tape somewhere.
    “Why are you calling, Harry?”
    “Because I need a favor. I could use your help, actually.”
    “With what? I’m sort of in the middle of something here.”
    “Then don’t worry about it. I thought maybe you’d . . . well, never mind, Rachel. It’s no big deal. I can handle it.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll let you get back to Tactical, whatever that is. You take care.”
    He closed the phone and tried not to let her voice and the memory it conjured distract him from the task at hand. He looked back across the intersection and realized he was probably in the same position the CRT car had been in when Gonzalez and Fennel spotted Waits’s van. The eucalyptus tree and night shadows had provided them cover.
    Bosch was hungry now, having missed lunch. He decided he would cross over the freeway into Chinatown and grab takeout to bring back to the squad room. He pulled back onto the street and was debating whether to call the office to see if anybody wanted anything from Chinese Friends when his cell rang. He checked the screen but saw the ID was blocked. He answered anyway.
    “It’s me.”
    “Rachel.”
    “I wanted to switch to my cell.”
    There was a pause. Bosch knew he had been right about the phones at Tactical.
    “How have you been, Harry?”
    “I’ve been fine.”
    “So you did like you said you were going to do. You went back to the cops. I read about you last year with that case up in the Valley.”
    “Yeah, my first case back. Everything’s been below the radar since then. Until this thing I’ve got working now.”
    “And that’s why you called me?”
    Bosch noted the tone in her voice. It had been more than eighteen months since they had spoken. And that was at the end of an intense week when they had crossed paths on a case, Bosch working on a private ticket before coming back to the department and Walling working on resuscitating her career with the bureau. The case led Bosch back to the blue fold and Walling to the L.A. field office. Whether Tactical, whatever that was, constituted an improvement over her previous posting in South Dakota was something Bosch didn’t know. What he did know was that before she had fallen from grace and been cast out to the reservation beat in the Dakotas, she had been a profiler in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.
    “I called because I thought maybe you’d be interested in putting some of your old skills to work again,” he said.
    “You mean a profile?”
    “Sort of. Tomorrow I have to go head to head in a room with an admitted serial killer and I don’t know the first thing about what makes him tick. This guy wants to confess to nine murders in a deal to avoid the needle. I have to make sure he’s not playing us. I have to figure out if he’s telling the truth before we turn around and tell all the families—what families we know of—that we’ve got the right guy.”
    He waited a moment for her to react. When she didn’t he pressed on.
    “I’ve got crimes, a couple crime scenes and forensics. I’ve got his apartment inventory and photos. But I don’t have a handle on him. I was calling because I was wondering if I could show you some of this stuff and, you know, maybe get some ideas from you on how to handle him.”
    There was another long silence before she answered.
    “Where are you, Harry?” she finally asked.
    “Right now? Right now I’m heading into Chinatown to pick up some shrimp fried rice. I missed lunch.”
    “I’m downtown. I could meet you. I missed lunch, too.”
    “You know where Chinese Friends is?”
    “Of course. How about a half hour?”
    “I’ll order before you get there.”
    Bosch closed the phone and felt a thrill that he knew came from something other than the idea that Rachel Walling might be able to help him with the Waits case. Their last encounter had ended badly but the sting of it had eroded over time. What was left in his memory was the night they had made love in a Las Vegas motel room and he had believed he had connected with a kindred soul.
    He looked at his watch. He had time to kill even if he was going to order food before