“Quite a few people. The residents here, of course, and in the last five weeks I’ve shown the place to several interested parties. I usually point out the garage to them. When I go on vacation there’s a tenant here who sort of watches things for me. He showed the apartment, too.”
“The garage is left unlocked?”
“It’s left unlocked. There’s nothing in it to steal. When the new tenant comes in they can choose to put a padlock on it if they want to. I leave it up to them but I always recommend it.”
“Did you keep any kind of records on who you showed the apartment to?”
“Not really. I might have a few call-back numbers but there is no use in keeping anybody’s name unless they rent it. And as you can see, I haven’t.”
Bosch nodded. It was going to be a tough angle to follow. Many people knew the garage was empty, unlocked and available.
“What about the former tenant?” he asked. “What happened to him?”
“It was a woman, actually,” Kay said. “She lived here five years, trying to make it as an actress. She finally gave up and went back home.”
“It’s a tough town. Where was home?”
“I sent her deposit back to Austin, Texas.”
Bosch nodded.
“She live here alone?”
“She had a boyfriend who visited and stayed a lot but I think that ended before she moved out.”
“We’ll need that address in Texas from you.”
Kay nodded.
“The officers, they said the car belonged to a missing girl,” he said.
“A young woman,” Bosch said.
He reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a photograph of Marie Gesto. He showed it to Kay and asked if he recognized her as someone who might have looked at the apartment. He said he didn’t recognize her.
“Not even from TV?” Edgar asked. “She’s been missing ten days and it’s been in the news.”
“I don’t have a TV, Detective,” Kay said.
No television. In this town that qualified him as a freethinker, Bosch thought.
“She was in the newspapers, too,” Edgar tried.
“I read the papers from time to time,” Kay said. “I get them out of the recycle bins downstairs. They’re usually old by the time I see them. But I didn’t see any story about her.”
“She went missing ten days ago,” Bosch said. “That would have been Thursday the ninth. You remember anything from back then? Anything unusual around here?”
Kay shook his head.
“I wasn’t here. I was on vacation in Italy.”
Bosch smiled.
“I love Italy. Where’d you go?”
Kay’s face brightened.
“I went up to Lake Como and then over to a small hill town called Asolo. It’s where Robert Browning lived.”
Bosch nodded like he knew the places and knew who Robert Browning was.
“We’ve got company,” Edgar said.
Bosch followed his partner’s gaze down to the cul-de-sac. A television truck with a satellite dish on top and a big number 9 painted on the side had pulled up to the yellow tape. One of the patrol officers was walking toward it.
Harry looked back at the landlord.
“Mr. Kay, we’ll need to talk more later. If you can, see what numbers or names you can find of people who looked at or called about the apartment. We’ll also need to talk to the person who handled things while you were in Italy and get the name and forwarding address of the former tenant who moved back to Texas.”
“No problem.”
“And we’re going to need to talk to the rest of the tenants to see if anybody saw that car being dropped off in the garage. We will try not to be too intrusive.”
“No problem with any of that. I’ll see what I can dig up on the numbers.”
They left the apartment and walked with Kay back to the elevator. They said good-bye to the manager and went down, the steel cube lurching again before smoothing out on the descent.
“Harry, I didn’t know you love Italy,” Edgar said.
“I’ve never been.”
Edgar nodded, realizing it had been a tactic to draw Kay out, to put more alibi information on record.
“You thinking about him?” he asked.
“Not really. Just covering the bases. Besides, if it was him, why put the car in his place’s own garage? Why call it in?”
“Yeah. But then, maybe he’s smart enough to know we’d think he’d be too smart to do that. See what I mean? Maybe he’s outsmarting us, Harry. Maybe the girl came to look at the place and things went wrong. He hides the body but knows he can’t move that car because he might get pulled over by the cops. So he waits ten days and calls it in like he thinks it might be stolen.”
“Then maybe you should run his Italian alibi down, Watson.”
“Why am I Watson? Why can’t I be Holmes?”
“Because Watson is the one who talks too much. But if you want, I’ll start calling you ‘Homes.’ Maybe that would be better.”
“What’s bothering you, Harry?”
Bosch thought of the clothing neatly folded on the front seat of the Honda. He felt that pressure on his insides again. Like his body was wrapped in wire being tightened from behind.
“What’s bothering me is that I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”
“What kind of bad feeling?”
“The kind that tells me we’re never going to find her. And if we never find her, then we never find him.”
“The killer?”
The elevator jerked to a hard stop, bounced once and came to a rest. Bosch pulled open the doors. At the end of the short tunnel that led to the cul-de-sac and the garages, he saw a woman holding a microphone and a man holding a television camera waiting for them.
“Yeah,” he said. “The killer.”
Part One THE KILLER
1
THE CALL CAME IN while Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, were sitting at their desks in the Open-Unsolved Unit, finishing the paperwork on the Matarese filing. The day before, they had spent six hours in a room with Victor Matarese discussing the 1996 murder of a prostitute named Charisse Witherspoon. DNA that had been extracted from semen found in the victim’s throat and stored for ten years had been matched to Matarese. It was a cold hit. His DNA profile had been banked by the DOJ in 2002 after a forcible rape conviction. It had taken another four years before Bosch and Rider came along and reopened the Witherspoon case, pulled the DNA and sent it to the state lab on a blind run.
It was a case initially made in the lab. But because Charisse Witherspoon had been an active prostitute the DNA match was not an automatic slam dunk. The DNA could have come from someone who was with her before her killer turned up and hit her repeatedly on the head with a two-by-four.
So the case didn’t come down to the science. It came down to the room and what they could get from Matarese. At 8 a.m. they woke him up at the halfway house where he had been placed upon his parole in the rape case and took him to Parker Center. The first five hours in the interview room were grueling. In the sixth he finally broke and gave it all up, admitting to killing Witherspoon and throwing in three more, all prostitutes he had murdered in South Florida before coming to L.A.
When Bosch heard his name called out for line one, he thought it was going to be Miami calling him back. It wasn’t.
“Bosch,” he said after grabbing the phone.
“Freddy Olivas. Northeast Division Homicide. I’m over in Archives looking for a file and they say you’ve already got it signed out.”
Bosch was silent a moment while his mind dropped out of the Matarese case. Bosch didn’t know Olivas but the name sounded familiar. He just couldn’t place it. As far as signed-out files went, it was his job to review old cases and look for ways to use forensic advances to solve them. At any given time he and Rider could have as many as twenty-five files from Archives.
“I’ve pulled a lot of files from Archives,” Bosch said. “Which one are we talking about?”
“Gesto. Marie Gesto. It’s a ’ninety-three case.”
Bosch didn’t respond right away. He felt his insides tighten. They always did when he thought about Gesto, even thirteen years later. In his mind, he always came up with the image of those clothes folded so neatly on the front seat of her car.
“Yeah, I’ve got the file. What’s happening?”
He noticed Rider look up from her work as she registered the change in his voice. Their desks were in an alcove and pushed up against one another, so Bosch and Rider faced each other while they worked.
“It’s kind of a delicate matter,” Olivas said. “Eyes only. Relates to an ongoing case I’ve got and the prosecutor just wants to review the file. Could I hop on by there and grab it from you?”
“Do you have a suspect, Olivas?”
Olivas didn’t answer at first and Bosch jumped in with another question.
“Who’s the prosecutor?”
Again no answer. Bosch decided not to give in.
“Look, the case is active, Olivas. I’m working it and have a suspect. If you want to talk to me, then we’ll talk. If you’ve got something working, then I am part of it. Otherwise, I’m busy and you can have a nice day. Okay?”
Bosch was about to hang up when Olivas finally spoke. The friendly tone was gone from his voice.
“Tell you what, let me make a phone call, Hotshot. I’ll call you right back.”
He hung up without a good-bye. Bosch looked at Rider.
“Marie Gesto,” he said. “The DA wants the file.”
“That’s your own case. Who was calling?”