Echo Park

was talking about the case or the election.
    He said, “If Waits can help me bring Marie Gesto home to her parents, then I’m on your side.”
    It wasn’t a completely accurate summation of his feelings, but it got him out of the office.

3

    BACK AT OPEN-UNSOLVED they sat in their supervisor’s office and brought him up to date on the day’s developments. Abel Pratt was four weeks away from retirement after twenty-five years on the job. He was attentive to them but not overly so. On the side of his desk was a stack of Fodor’s guidebooks for Caribbean islands. His plan was to pull the pin, leave the city and find an island to live on with his family. It was a common retirement dream among law enforcement officers—to pull back from all the darkness witnessed for so long on the job. The reality, however, was that after about six months on the beach the island got pretty boring.
    A detective three from RHD named David Lambkin was set to be the squad’s top after Pratt split. He was a nationally recognized sex crimes expert chosen for the job because so many of the cold cases they were working in the unit were sexually motivated. Bosch was looking forward to working with him and would have liked to be briefing him instead of Pratt but the timing was off.
    They went with who they had, and one of the positive things about Pratt was that he was going to give them free rein until he was out the door. He just didn’t want any waves, no blowback in his face. He wanted a quiet, uneventful last month on the job.
    Like most cops with twenty-five years in the department, Pratt was a throwback. He was old school. He preferred working on a typewriter over a computer. Rolled halfway up in the IBM Selectric next to his desk was a letter he had been working on when Bosch and Rider stepped in. Bosch had grabbed a quick glance at it while he was sitting down and saw it was a letter to a casino in the Bahamas. Pratt was trying to line up a security gig in paradise, and that about said it all when it came to where his mind was at these days.
    After hearing their briefing, Pratt gave his approval for them to work with O’Shea and only became animated when he issued a warning about Raynard Waits’s attorney, Maury Swann.
    “Let me tell you about Maury,” Pratt said. “Whatever you do when you meet him do not shake his hand.”
    “Why not?” Rider asked.
    “I had a case with him once. This is way back. It was a gangbanger on a one-eighty-seven. Every day when we started court, Maury made a big deal of shaking my hand and then the prosecutor’s. He probably would have shaken the judge’s hand, too, if he’d gotten the chance.”
    “So?”
    “So after his guy was convicted he tried to get a reduced sentence by snitching out the others involved in the murder. One of the things he told me during the debriefing was that he thought I was dirty. He said that during the trial Maury had told him he could buy all of us. Me, the prosecutor, everybody. So the banger had his homegirl get him the cash and Maury explained to him that every time he was shaking our hands he was paying us off. You know, passing the cash palm to palm. He always did those two-handed shakes, too. He was really selling it to his guy while all along he was keeping the cash.”
    “Holy shit!” Rider exclaimed. “Didn’t you guys work up a case on him?”
    Pratt dismissed the idea with a wave.
    “It was after the fact and besides it was a bullshit he-said-he-said case. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere—not with Maury being a member of the bar in good standing and all. But ever since then I heard that Maury likes shaking hands a lot. So when you get in that room with him and Waits, don’t shake his hand.”
    They left Pratt’s office, smiling at the story, and returned to their own workstation. The division of labor had been worked out on their walk back from the courthouse. Bosch would take Waits, and Rider would take Fitzpatrick. They would know the files inside and out by the time they sat across the table from Waits in the interview room the following day.
    Since Rider had less to read in the Fitzpatrick case she also would finish the filing on Matarese. This meant Bosch was cleared to study full-time the world of Raynard Waits. After pulling out the Fitzpatrick file for Rider, he chose to take the accordion folder O’Shea had given them down to the cafeteria. He knew the lunch crowd would be thinning out and he would be able to spread the files