“You could say I’ve had the case for thirteen years. I caught it back in ’ninety-three, when she went missing.”

“But nothing ever came of it?”

Bosch shook his head.

“We had no body. All we ever found was her car and that was not enough. We never made anybody for it.”

“Not even a suspect?”

“We looked at a lot of people, one in particular. But we couldn’t make the connections and so nobody rose to the level of active suspect. Then I retired in ’oh-two and it went into Archives. A couple years go by and things don’t work out the way I thought they would in retirement and I come back on the job. That was last year.”

Bosch didn’t think it was necessary to tell O’Shea that he had copied the Gesto file and taken it with him, along with several other open cases, when he left his badge behind and walked out the door in 2002. Copying the files had been an infraction of department regs, and the fewer people who knew that the better.

“In the last year I pulled the Gesto file every time I had a little time to work it,” he continued. “But there’s no DNA, no latents. There’s only legwork. I’ve talked to all the principals again-everybody I could find. There’s still the one guy out there who I always felt could be the guy, but I never could make anything out of it. I talked to him twice this year, leaned pretty hard.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“Who is it?”

“His name’s Anthony Garland. He comes from Hancock Park money. You ever heard of Thomas Rex Garland, the oilman?”

O’Shea nodded.

“Well, T. Rex, as he is known, is Anthony’s father.”

“What’s Anthony’s connection to Gesto?”

“‘Connection’ might be too strong a word. Marie Gesto’s car was found in a single garage attached to a Hollywood apartment building. The apartment it corresponded to was empty. Our sense of things at the time was that it wasn’t just coincidence that the car ended up in there. We thought whoever hid the car there knew the apartment was vacant and that he’d get a decent ride out of hiding it there.”