“Wouldn’t it stand to reason that someone who had kidnapped and killed a young woman would have other criminal activity on his record? These things usually aren’t aberrations, are they?”
“If you went with the percentages, yeah. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Plus, there’s the old man’s money. Money smooths a lot of things over, makes a lot of things go away.”
O’Shea nodded again like he was learning about criminals and crime for the first time. It was a bad act.
“What was your next move going to be?” he asked.
Bosch shook his head.
“I didn’t have one. I sent the file back to Archives and thought that was it. Then a couple weeks ago I went down and pulled it again. I don’t know what I was going to do. Maybe talk to some of Garland’s more recent friends, see if he ever mentioned Marie Gesto or anything about her. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to give up.”
O’Shea cleared his throat and Bosch knew he would now get down to the reason they were there.
“Did the name Ray or Raynard Waits ever come up in all these years of investigating Gesto’s disappearance?”
Bosch looked at him for a moment, his stomach twisting.
“No, it didn’t. Should it have come up?”
O’Shea pulled one of the folders out of the accordion file and opened it on the desk. He lifted a document that looked like a letter off the top.
“As I said, we’ve made it public that we’re going for the death penalty on Waits,” he said. “After the prelim I think he realized the writing was on the wall. He’s got an appeal on the probable cause for the traffic stop. But it will go nowhere and he and his lawyer know it. An insanity defense is a nonstarter as well. This guy’s as calculating and organized as any killer I’ve ever prosecuted. So they responded last week with this. Before I show it to you I have to know that you understand that this is a letter from an attorney. It is a proffer. No matter what happens, whether we move forward with this or not, the information contained in this letter is off the record. If we choose to ignore this offer, no investigation can come of the information in this letter. Do you understand that?”