Echo Park
Chapter One
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 ... read full excerpt from Echo Park ebook
