Echo Park by Michael Connelly

he tried to give a false name but a DMV thumbprint made him as Waits. Why?”
    “Do you know what a reynard is?
Reynard
spelled
R
6

    AS SOON AS BOSCH dropped Rachel Walling at her car he opened his phone and called his partner. Rider reported that she was finishing up the paperwork on the Matarese case and that they would soon be good to go on it and able to file charges at the DA’s office the following day.
    “Good. Anything else?”
    “I got the box on Fitzpatrick from Evidence Archives and it turned out to be two boxes.”
    “Containing what?”
    “Mostly old pawn records that I can tell were never even looked at. They were sopping wet back then from when the fire was put out. The guys from Riot Crimes put them in plastic tubs and they’ve been moldering in them ever since. And, man, do they stink.”
    Bosch nodded as he computed this. It was a dead end and it didn’t matter. Raynard Waits was about to confess to the killing of Daniel Fitzpatrick anyway. He could tell that Rider was looking at it the same way. An uncoerced confession is a royal flush. It beats everything.
    “Have you heard from Olivas or O’Shea?” Rider asked.
    “Not yet. I was going to call Olivas but wanted to talk to you first. Do you know anybody in city licensing?”
    “No, but if you want me to call over there I can in the morning. They’re closed now. What are you looking for?”
    Bosch checked his watch. He didn’t realize how late it had gotten. He guessed that the omelet at Duffy’s was going to count as breakfast, lunch and dinner.
    “I was thinking we should run Waits’s business and see how long he’s had it, whether there were ever any complaints, that sort of thing. Olivas and his partner should have done it but there is nothing in the files about it.”
    She was silent for a while before speaking.
    “You think that could have been the connection to the High Tower?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe to Marie. She had a nice big picture window in her apartment. It isn’t something I remember coming up back then. But maybe we missed it.”
    “Harry, you never miss a thing, but I’ll get on it right away.”
    “The other thing is the guy’s name. It could be phony.”
    “How so?”
    He told her about contacting Rachel Walling and asking her to look at the files. This was initially met with resounding silence because Bosch had crossed one of those invisible LAPD lines by inviting the FBI into the case without command approval, even if the invitation to Walling was unofficial. But when Bosch told Rider about Reynard the Fox she dropped her silence and became skeptical.
    “You think our window-washing serial killer was schooled in medieval folklore?”
    “I don’t know,” he answered. “Walling says he could have picked it up from a children’s book. Doesn’t matter. There is enough there that I think we’ve got to look at birth certificates, make sure there is someone named Raynard Waits. In the first file, when he was popped for prowling in ’ninety-three, he was booked under the name Robert Saxon—the name he gave—but then they got Raynard Waits when his thumbprint hit the DMV computer.”
    “What are you seeing there, Harry? If they had his thumb on file back then, I’m thinking maybe the name isn’t phony after all.”
    “Maybe. But you know it isn’t impossible to get a DL with a false name on it in this state. What if Saxon actually was his real name but the computer spit out his alias and he just went with it? We’ve seen it happen before.”
    “Then why keep the name after? He had a record under Waits. Why not go back to Saxon or whatever his real name is?”
    “Good questions. I don’t know. But we’ve got to check it out.”
    “Well, we’ve got him no matter what his name is. I’ll Google
Raynard the Fox
right now.”
    “Spell it with an
e.
”
    He waited and could hear her fingers on the computer keyboard.
    “Got it,” she finally said. “There’s a lot of stuff about Reynard the