Echo Park

retired in ’oh-two and it went into Archives. A couple years go by and things don’t work out the way I thought they would in retirement and I come back on the job. That was last year.”
    Bosch didn’t think it was necessary to tell O’Shea that he had copied the Gesto file and taken it with him, along with several other open cases, when he left his badge behind and walked out the door in 2002. Copying the files had been an infraction of department regs, and the fewer people who knew that the better.
    “In the last year I pulled the Gesto file every time I had a little time to work it,” he continued. “But there’s no DNA , no latents. There’s only legwork. I’ve talked to all the principals again—everybody I could find. There’s still the one guy out there who I always felt could be the guy, but I never could make anything out of it. I talked to him twice this year, leaned pretty hard.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Who is it?”
    “His name’s Anthony Garland. He comes from Hancock Park money. You ever heard of Thomas Rex Garland, the oilman?”
    O’Shea nodded.
    “Well, T. Rex, as he is known, is Anthony’s father.”
    “What’s Anthony’s connection to Gesto?”
    “‘Connection’ might be too strong a word. Marie Gesto’s car was found in a single garage attached to a Hollywood apartment building. The apartment it corresponded to was empty. Our sense of things at the time was that it wasn’t just coincidence that the car ended up in there. We thought whoever hid the car there knew the apartment was vacant and that he’d get a decent ride out of hiding it there.”
    “Okay. Anthony Garland knew about the garage or he knew Marie?”
    “He knew about the garage. His former girlfriend had lived in the apartment. She had broken up with him and then moved back to Texas. So he knew the apartment and the garage were empty.”
    “That’s pretty thin. That’s all you had?”
    “Pretty much. We thought it was thin, too, but then we pulled the ex-girlfriend’s DMV mug and it turned out she and Marie looked a lot alike. We started to think that maybe Marie had been some sort of replacement victim. He couldn’t get to his ex-girlfriend because she had left, so he got to Marie instead.”
    “Did you go to Texas?”
    “Twice. We talked to the ex and she told us that the main reason she split with Anthony was because of his temper.”
    “Was he violent with her?”
    “She said no. She said she left before it got to that point.”
    O’Shea leaned forward.
    “So, did Anthony Garland know Marie?” he asked.
    “We don’t know. We are not sure he did. Until his father brought his lawyer into it and he stopped talking to us, he denied ever knowing her.”
    “When was this?—the lawyer, I mean.”
    “Back then, and now. I came at him again a couple times this year. I pressed him and he lawyered up again. Different lawyers this time. They were able to get a restraining order reissued against me. They convinced a judge to order me to stay away from Anthony unless he had a lawyer with him. My guess is that they convinced the judge with money. It’s the way T. Rex Garland gets things done.”
    O’Shea leaned back, nodding thoughtfully.
    “Does this Anthony Garland have any kind of criminal record before or after Gesto?”
    “No, not a criminal record. He hasn’t been a very productive member of society—he lives off his old man’s handouts, as near as I can tell. He runs security for his father and his various enterprises. But there’s never been anything criminal that I could find.”
    “Wouldn’t it stand to reason that someone who had kidnapped and killed a young woman would have other criminal activity on his record? These things usually aren’t aberrations, are they?”
    “If you went with the percentages, yeah. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Plus, there’s the old man’s money. Money smooths a lot of things over, makes a lot of things go away.”
    O’Shea nodded again like he was learning about criminals and crime for the first time. It was a bad act.
    “What was your next move going to be?” he asked.
    Bosch shook his head.
    “I didn’t have one. I sent the file back to Archives and thought that was it. Then a couple weeks ago I went down and pulled it again. I don’t know what I was going to do. Maybe talk to some of Garland’s more recent friends, see if he ever mentioned Marie Gesto or anything about her. All I knew for sure was that I