Echo Park

pink pawn slip attached to the complaint card carried the name Robert Foxworth, the DOB 11/03/71 and an address on Fountain in Hollywood. The item pawned on October 8, 1991, was listed as an “heirloom medallion.” Foxworth had been given eighty dollars for it. There was a fingerprint square at the bottom right corner of the slip. Bosch could see the ridges of a fingerprint but the ink had either worn away or leached out of the paper because of the moisture contained in the storage carton.
    “The DOB is a match,” Rachel said. “Plus the name connects on two levels.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, he took Robert forward when he used the name Robert Saxon and he took the Fox in Foxworth forward when he used Raynard. Maybe that’s where this whole Raynard thing came from. If his real name is Foxworth, maybe when he was a kid, his parents told him stories about a fox named Reynard.”
    “If his real name is Foxworth,” Bosch repeated. “Maybe we just found another alias.”
    “Maybe. But at least it’s something you didn’t have before.”
    Bosch nodded. He could feel his excitement building. She was right. Finally they had a new angle to pursue. Bosch pulled out his phone.
    “I’m going to run the name and see what happens.”
    He called central dispatch and asked a service operator to run the name and birth date they had found on the pawn slip. It came back clean and with no record of a current driver’s license. He thanked the operator and hung up.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Not even a driver’s license.”
    “But that’s good,” Rachel said. “Don’t you see? Robert Foxworth would be about to turn thirty-five right now. If there’s no history or current license, then that is further confirmation that he is no more, that he’s either dead or he became someone else.”
    “Raynard Waits.”
    She nodded.
    “I guess I was hoping for a DL with an Echo Park address,” Bosch said. “I guess that’s too much to ask for.”
    “Maybe not. Is there a way in this state to check defunct driver’s licenses? Robert Foxworth, if that’s his real name, probably got a license when he turned sixteen in nineteen eighty-seven. When he switched identities it would have expired.”
    Bosch considered this. He knew that the state did not start requiring a thumbprint from licensed drivers until the early nineties. It meant Foxworth could have gotten a driver’s license in the late eighties and there would be no way to connect him to his new identity as Raynard Waits.
    “I could check with DMV in the morning. It’s not something I can get through communications dispatch tonight.”
    “There is something else you can check tomorrow,” she said. “Remember the quick and dirty profile I did the other night? I said these early crimes weren’t aberrations. He built up to them.”
    Bosch understood.
    “A juvy jacket.”
    She nodded.
    “You might find a juvenile record on Robert Foxworth—again, if that’s his real name. It wouldn’t have been accessible through dispatch either.”
    She was right. State law kept juvenile records from trailing an offender into adulthood. The name may have come up clean when Bosch called dispatch to run it but that didn’t mean it was squeaky clean. As with the driver’s license information, Bosch would have to wait until morning, when he could get into the juvenile records at the Department of Probation.
    But as soon as his hopes were lifted he knocked them down again.
    “Wait a minute, that doesn’t work,” he said. “His prints would have drawn a match. When they ran his prints as Raynard Waits, they would have hit the prints taken from Robert Foxworth as a juvenile. His record might not be available but the prints stay in the system.”
    “Maybe, maybe not. Two separate systems. Two separate bureaucracies. The crossover doesn’t always work.”
    That was true, but it was more wishful thinking than anything else. Bosch now reduced the juvenile angle to a long shot. It was more likely that Robert Foxworth had never been in the juvenile system. Bosch was beginning to think the name was just another false identity in a string of them.
    Rachel tried to change the subject.
    “What do you think about this heirloom medallion he pawned?” she asked.
    “I have no idea.”
    “The fact that he wanted to get it back is interesting. Makes me think maybe it wasn’t stolen. Like maybe it belonged to someone in his family and he needed to get it back.”
    “It would