Echo Park

enough to keep a couple horses on. He’d lived there nearly twenty years and was sitting on a gold mine in real-estate value. There was only one problem, though. A few weeks earlier Rider had been at her desk and had overheard Pratt on the phone in his office asking questions about child custody and communal property. She told Bosch about the call and they both assumed that Pratt had been talking to a divorce lawyer.
    “You want to make sugar?” Bosch asked.
    “No, man, it’s just what the property was used for at one time. Now you’d probably buy it, fix it up, and make it a bed-and-breakfast or something.”
    Bosch just nodded. Pratt was moving into a world he knew and cared nothing about.
    “Anyway,” Pratt said, sensing he didn’t have an audience, “I’ll see you. And by the way, it’s nice that you got dressed up for the OIS . Most guys on home duty would’ve slogged in here in jeans and a T-shirt, looking more like a suspect than a cop.”
    “Yeah, no problem.”
    Pratt left the office and Bosch waited thirty seconds for him to get the elevator. He then put a stack of files on one of the evidence cartons and carried it all out the door. He was able to take it down and out to his car and get back before Pratt returned from the cafeteria. He then took the second carton and left. No one questioned what he was doing or where he was going with the materials.
    After pulling out of the pay lot Bosch checked his watch and saw that he had less than an hour to kill before he was supposed to meet Rachel for lunch. It wasn’t enough time to drive home, drop the documents and come back—besides, that would be a waste of time and gas. He thought about canceling the lunch so he could go home right away and get going on the review of the records, but he decided against it because he knew Rachel would be a good sounding board and might even have some ideas about what Waits had meant when he yelled during the shooting.
    He could also get to the restaurant early and start his review while waiting at the table for Rachel. But he knew that might cause a problem if a customer or waiter happened to catch a glimpse of some of the photos in the murder books.
    The city’s main library was located in the same block as the restaurant, and he decided he would go there. He could do some file work in one of the private cubicles and then meet Rachel on time at the restaurant.
    After parking in the garage beneath the library he carried the murder books from the Gesto and Fitzpatrick cases with him onto the elevator. Once inside the confines of the sprawling library, he found an open cubicle in a reference room and set to work reviewing the documents he had brought. Since he had begun rereading the Gesto files in Rider’s hospital room, he decided to stick with them and finish his review.
    Moving through the book in the order the documents and reports were filed, he didn’t reach the Investigative Chronology—usually filed at the back of a murder book—until the end. He casually read through the 51 forms, and nothing about the investigative moves made, the subjects interviewed or the calls received hit him as any more important than when they had been originally added to the chrono.
    Then suddenly he was struck by what he had not seen in the chronology. He quickly flipped pages backwards until he came to the 51 for September 29, 1993, and looked for the entry on the call Jerry Edgar had taken from Robert Saxon.
    It wasn’t there.
    Bosch leaned forward to read the document more clearly. This made no sense. In the official murder book the entry was there. Raynard Waits’s alias, Robert Saxon. The entry date was September 29, 1993, and the time of the call was 6:40 p.m. Olivas had found it during his review of the case and the next day in O’Shea’s office Bosch had seen it clear as day. He had studied it, knowing that it was confirmation of an error that allowed Waits another thirteen years of freedom to kill.
    But the entry was not in Bosch’s copy of the murder book.
    What the hell?
    At first Bosch couldn’t put it together. The copy of the chronology in front of him was made four years earlier, when Bosch had decided to retire. He had secretly copied murder books from a handful of open cases that still gnawed at his insides. They were his retirement cases. His plan had been to work them on his own and at his leisure, to solve them before he could finally let the mission go and sit on a beach in Mexico with a fishing