Echo Park

autotopia of L.A. would wait until he was twenty to get his driver’s license. It was yet one more indication that Raynard Waits was not his name.
    Bosch started to feel it. Like a surfer waiting for the right swell before starting to paddle, he felt his wave coming in. He thought that what he was looking at was the birth of a new identity. Eighteen days after he murdered Daniel Fitzpatrick under cover of the riots, the man who killed him walked into a DMV office in Hollywood and applied for a driver’s license. He gave November 3, 1971, as a date of birth and the name Raynard Waits. He would have had to provide a birth certificate, but that would not have been too hard to come up with if he knew the right people. Not in Hollywood. Not in L.A. Getting a phony birth certificate would have been an easy, almost risk-free task.
    Bosch believed that the Fitzpatrick murder and the change of ID were connected. It was a cause-and-effect. Something about the murder caused the killer to change his identity. This belied the confession given two days earlier by Raynard Waits. He had characterized the murder of Daniel Fitzpatrick as a thrill kill, an opportunity to indulge a long-held fantasy. He went out of his way to depict Fitzpatrick as a victim chosen at random, chosen simply because he was there.
    But if that was truly the case and if the killer had no previous connection to the victim, then why did the killer act almost immediately to reinvent himself with a new identity? Within eighteen days the killer procured a false birth certificate and got a new driver’s license. Raynard Waits was born.
    Bosch knew there was a contradiction in what he was considering. If the killing of Fitzpatrick had taken place as Waits had confessed, then there would have been no reason for him to quickly create a new identity. But the facts—the timeline of the murder and the issuance of the driver’s license—contradicted this. The conclusion to Bosch was obvious. There
was
a connection. Fitzpatrick was not a random victim. He could, in fact, be linked in some way to his killer. And that was why his killer changed his name.
    Bosch got up and took his empty bottle to the kitchen. He decided that two beers was enough. He needed to stay sharp and up on the wave. He went back out to the stereo and put in the masterpiece.
Kind of Blue.
It never failed to give him the charge. “All Blues” was the first song out of the shuffle, and it was like being dealt blackjack at a twenty-five-dollar table. It was his favorite and he let it ride.
    Back at the table he opened the Fitzpatrick murder book and started to read. Kiz Rider had handled it earlier but she had simply been engaged in a review to prepare for taking Waits’s confession. She wasn’t looking for the hidden connection Bosch was now seeking.
    The investigation of Fitzpatrick’s death had been carried out by two detectives temporarily assigned to the Riot Crimes Task Force. Their work was cursory at best. Few leads were followed, because there weren’t many to follow in the first place and because of the overriding pall of futility that fell over all the cases associated with the riots. Almost all acts of violence associated with the three days of widespread unrest were random. People robbed, raped and murdered indiscriminately and at will—simply because they could.
    No witnesses to the attack on Fitzpatrick were located. No forensic evidence was found other than the can of lighter fluid—and it had been wiped clean. Most of the shop’s records had been destroyed by fire or water. What was left was put in two cartons and ignored. The case was treated as a dead end from the moment it was born. It was orphaned and archived.
    The murder book was so thin that Bosch finished his front-to-back read-through in less than twenty minutes. He had taken no notes, gotten no ideas, seen no connections. He felt the tide ebbing. His ride on the wave was coming to an end.
    He thought about getting another beer out of the box and attacking the case all over again the next day. Then the front door opened and Rachel Walling walked in, carrying takeout cartons from Chinese Friends. Bosch stacked the reports on the dining room table so there would be room to eat. Rachel brought plates from the kitchen and opened the cartons. Bosch got the last two Anchors out of the refrigerator.
    They small-talked for a while and then he told her what he had been doing since lunch and what he had learned. He could