The Reversal

sometimes starting out, these people pick from their own peer group. They learn how to kill and then they start to define their targets according to their paraphilias. A paraphilia is—”
    “I know what it is,” McPherson said. “You did all of this work yourself? Or did this Rachel help you?”
    “No, she just worked up the profile. I had some help from my partner pulling all of this together. But it was tough because not all the records are complete, especially on cases that never got above runaway status, and a lot was cleared out. Most of the runaway files from back then are gone.”
    “They didn’t digitize?” McPherson asked.
    Bosch shook his head.
    “Not in L.A. County. They prioritized when they switched over to computerized records and went back and captured records for major crimes. No runaway cases unless there was the possibility of abduction involved. Riverside County was different. Fewer cases out there so they archived everything digitally. Anyway, for that time period in these two counties, we came up with twenty-nine cases over the six-year period we’re looking at. Again, these were unresolved cases. In each the girl disappeared and never came home. We pulled what records we could find and most didn’t fit because of witness statements or other issues. But I couldn’t rule out these eight.”
    Bosch turned to the board and looked at the photos of eight smiling girls. All of them long gone over time.
    “I’m not saying that Jessup had anything to do with any of these girls dropping off the face of the earth, but he could have. As Maggie already noticed, they all have a resemblance to one another and to Melissa Landy. And by the way, the resemblance extends to body type as well. They’re all within ten pounds and two inches of one another and our victim.”
    Bosch turned back to his audience and saw McPherson and Haller transfixed by the photographs.
    “Beneath each photo I’ve put the particulars,” he said. “Physical descriptors, date and location of disappearance, the basic stuff.”
    “Did Jessup know any of them?” Haller asked. “Is he connected in any way to any of them?”
    That was the bottom line, Bosch knew.
    “Nothing really solid—I mean, not that I’ve found so far,” he said. “The best connection that we have is this girl.”
    He turned and pointed to the first photo on the left.
    “The first girl. Valerie Schlicter. She disappeared in nineteen eighty-one from the same neighborhood in Riverside that Jessup grew up in. He would’ve been nineteen and she was seventeen. They both went to Riverside High but because he dropped out early, it doesn’t look like they were there at the same time. Anyway, she was counted as a runaway because there were problems in her home. It was a single-parent home. She lived with her mother and a brother and then one day about a month after graduating from high school, she split. The investigation never rose above a missing persons case, largely because of her age. She turned eighteen a month after she disappeared. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it an investigation. They more or less waited to see if she’d come home. She didn’t.”
    “Nothing else?”
    Bosch turned back and looked at Haller.
    “So far that’s it.”
    “Then discovery is not an issue. There’s nothing here. There’s no connection between Jessup and any of these girls. The closest one you have is this Riverside girl and she was five years older than Melissa Landy. This whole thing seems like a stretch.”
    Bosch thought he detected a note of relief in Haller’s voice.
    “Well,” he said, “there’s still another part to all of this.”
    He stepped over to the case boxes at the end of the table and picked up a file. He walked it down and put it in front of McPherson.
    “As you know, we’ve had Jessup under surveillance since he was released.”
    McPherson opened the file and saw the stack of 8 × 10 surveillance shots of Jessup.
    “With Jessup they’ve learned that there is no routine schedule, so they stick with him twenty-four/seven. And what they’re documenting is that he has two remarkably different lives. The public one, which is carried in the media as his so-called journey to freedom. Everything from smiling for the cameras and eating hamburgers to surfing Venice Beach to the talk-show circuit.”
    “Yes, we’re well aware,” Haller said. “And most of it orchestrated by his attorney.”
    “And then there’s the private side,”