Echo Park

you, Bosch!” Garland said. “You better hope you never come for me alone, man. I’ll put you down in the dirt.”
    Franks put a calming hand on Garland’s arm. Bosch was silent for a few moments before responding.
    “You want to threaten me now, Anthony? You think I’m like one of those teenagers you cuff out in the oil fields and dump crude on? You think I’m going to go away with my tail between my legs?”
    Garland’s face pinched together and turned dark. His eyes looked like frozen black marbles.
    Bosch hit the pause button on the VCR remote.
    “There,” he said to Rachel, pointing at the screen with the remote. “That’s what I wanted you to see. Look at his face. Pure, perfect rage. That’s why I thought it was him.”
    Walling didn’t respond. Bosch glanced at her and she looked as though she had seen the face of pure, perfect rage before. She looked to be almost intimidated by it. Bosch wondered if she had seen it in one of the killers she had faced, or in someone else.
    Bosch turned back to the television and hit the fast-forward button again.
    “Now we jump almost ten years, to when I brought him in last April. Franks was gone and a new guy had the case in Dobbs’s office. He dropped the ball and never went back to the judge when the first restraining order expired. So I took another shot at him. He was surprised to see me. I grabbed him when he came out of Kate Mantilini’s at lunch one day. He probably thought I was long gone from his life.”
    He stopped the fast-forward and played the tape. On the screen Garland looked older and wider. His face had spread and he wore his now-thinning hair cropped short. He wore a white shirt with a tie. The taped interviews had followed him from the end of boyhood to well into manhood.
    This time he sat in a different interview room. This one was at Parker Center.
    “If I’m not under arrest, then I should be free to go,” he said. “Am I free to go?”
    “I was hoping you’d answer a few questions first,” Bosch replied.
    “I answered all your questions years ago. This is a vendetta, Bosch. You will not give up. You will not leave me alone. Am I free to go or not?”
    “Where did you hide her body?”
    Garland shook his head.
    “My God, this is unbelievable. When will this end?”
    “It will never end, Garland. Not until I find her and not until I lock you up.”
    “This is fucking crazy!
You’re
crazy, Bosch. What can I say to make you believe me? What can—”
    “You can tell me where she is and then I’ll believe you.”
    “Well, that’s the one thing I can’t tell you, because I don’t—”
    Bosch suddenly killed the TV with the remote. For the first time, he realized how case-blind he had been, going after Garland as relentlessly as a dog chasing a car. He was unaware of the traffic, unaware that right in front of him in the murder book was the clue to the real killer. Watching the tape with Walling had heaped humiliation upon humiliation. He had thought by showing her the tape she would see why he had focused on Garland. She would understand and absolve him of the mistake. But now seeing it through the prism of Waits’s impending confession he couldn’t even absolve himself.
    Rachel leaned toward him and touched his back, her soft fingers tracing down his spine.
    “It happens to all of us,” she said.
    Bosch nodded. Not to me, he thought.
    “I guess when this is all over I’m going to have to find him and apologize,” he said.
    “Fuck him. He’s still an asshole. I wouldn’t bother.”
    Bosch smiled. She was trying to make it easy for him.
    “You think?”
    She pulled back the elastic waistband on his boxers and then snapped them against his back.
    “I think I have at least another hour before I should be thinking about getting home.”
    Bosch turned to look at her and she smiled.

10

    THE NEXT MORNING Bosch and Rider walked from the Hall of Records to the CCB and despite the wait for an elevator still got to the DA’s office twenty minutes early. O’Shea and Olivas were ready for them. Everyone took the same seats as before. Bosch noticed that the posters that had been leaning against the wall were gone. They had probably been put to good use somewhere, maybe sent to the public hall where the candidates’ forum was scheduled for that night.
    As he sat down Bosch saw the Gesto murder book on O’Shea’s desk. He took it without asking and immediately opened it to the chronological record. He combed through