The black echo

The black echo - Michael Connelly


Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the following people for their help and support:
Many thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to my editor, Patricia Mulcahy, for all their hard work, enthusiasm and belief in this book.
Also, thanks to the many police officers who over the years have given me an insight into their jobs and lives. I also want to ackowledge Tom Mangold and John Pennycate, whose book The Tunnels of Cu Chi tells the reals story of the tunnel rats of the Vietnam War.
Last, I would like to thank my family and friends for their encouragement and unqualified support. And, most of all, I am indebted to my wife, Linda, whose belief and inspiration never waned.

Part I
Sunday, May 20
The boy couldn't see in the dark, but he didn't need to. Experience and long practice told him it was good. Nice and even. Smooth strokes, moving his whole arm while gently rolling his wrist. Keep the marble moving. No runs. Beautiful.
He heard the hiss of the escaping air and could sense the roll of the marble. They were sensations that were comforting to him. The smell reminded him of the sock in his pocket and he thought about getting high. Maybe after, he decided. He didn't want to stop now, not until he had finished the tag with one uninterrupted stroke.
But then he stopped—when the sound of an engine was heard above the hiss of the spray can. He looked around but saw no light save for the moon's silvery white reflection on the reservoir and the dim bulb above the door of the pump house, which was midway across the dam.
But the sound didn't lie. There was an engine approaching. Sounded like a truck to the boy. And now he thought he could hear the crunching of tires on the gravel access road that skirted the reservoir. Coming closer. Almost three in the morning and someone was coming. Why? The boy stood up and threw the aerosol can over the fence toward the water. He heard it chink down in the brush, short of the mark. He pulled the sock from his pocket and decided just one quick blow to give himself balls. He buried his nose in the sock and drew in heavily on the paint fumes. He rocked back on his heels, and his eyelids fluttered involuntarily. He threw the sock over the fence.
The boy stood his motorbike up and wheeled it across the road, back toward the tall grass and the bottlebrush and pine trees at the base of the hill. It was good cover, he thought, and he'd be able to see what was coming. The sound of the engine was louder now. He was sure it was just a few seconds away, but he didn't see the glow of headlights, This confused him. But it was too late to run.
He put the motorbike down in the tall brown grass and stilled the free-spinning front wheel with his hand. Then he huddled down on the earth and waited for whatever and whoever was coming.
Harry Bosch could hear the helicopter up there, somewhere, above the darkness, circling up in the light. Why didn't it land? Why didn't it bring help? Harry was moving through a smoky, dark tunnel and his batteries were dying. The beam of the flashlight grew weaker every yard he covered. He needed help. He needed to move faster. He needed to reach the end of the tunnel before the light was gone and he was alone in the black. He heard the chopper make one more pass. Why didn't it land? Where was the help he needed? When the drone of the blades fluttered away again, he felt the terror build and he moved faster, crawling on scraped and bloody knees, one hand holding the dim light up, the other pawing the ground to keep his balance. He did not look back, for he knew the enemy was behind him in the black mist. Unseen, but there. And closing in.
When the phone rang in the kitchen, Bosch immediately woke. He counted the rings, wondering if he had missed the first one or two, wondering if he had left the answering machine on.
He hadn't. The call was not picked up and the ringing didn't stop until after the required eight rounds. He absentmindedly wondered where that tradition had come from. Why not six rings? Why not ten? He rubbed his eyes and looked around. He was slumped in the living room chair again, the soft recliner that was the center-piece of his meager furnishings. He thought of it as his watch chair. This was a misnomer, however, because he slept in the chair often, even when he wasn't on call.
Morning light cut through the crack in the curtains and slashed its mark across the bleached pine floor. He watched particles of dust floating lazily in the light near the sliding glass door. The lamp on the table next to him was on, and the TV against the wall, its sound very low, was broadcasting a Sunday-morning Jesus show. On the table next to the chair were the companions of insomnia: playing cards, magazines and paperback mystery novels—these only lightly thumbed and then discarded. There was a crumpled pack of cigarettes on the table and three empty beer bottles—assorted brands that had once been members of six-packs of their own tribe. Bosch was fully dressed, right down to a rumpled tie held to his white shirt by a silver 187 tie tack.
He reached his hand down to his belt and then around back to the area below his kidney. He waited. When the electronic pager sounded he cut the annoying chirp off in a second. He pulled the device off his belt and looked at the number. He wasn't surprised. He pushed himself out of the chair, stretched, and popped the joints of his neck and back. He walked to the kitchen, where the phone was on the counter. He wrote "Sunday, 8:53 A.M." in a notebook he took from his jacket pocket before dialing. After two rings a voice said, "Los Angeles Police Department, Hollywood Division. This is Officer Pelch, how can I help you?"
Bosch said, "Somebody could die in the time it took to get all that out. Let me talk to the watch sergeant."
Bosch found a fresh pack of cigarettes in a kitchen cabinet and got his first smoke of the day going. He rinsed dust out of a glass and filled it with tap water, then took two aspirins out of a plastic bottle that was also in the cabinet. He was swallowing the second when a sergeant named Crowley finally picked up.
"What, did I catch you in church? I rang your house. No answer."
"Crowley, what have you got for me?"
"Well, I know we had you out last night on that TV thing. But you're still catching. You and your partner. All weekend. So, that means you got the DB up at Lake Hollywood. In a pipe up there. It's on the access road to the Mulholland Dam. You know it?"
"I know the place. What else?"
"Patrol's out. ME, SID notified. My people don't know what they got, except a DB. Stiff's about thirty feet into this pipe there. They don't want to go all the way in, mess up a possible crime scene, you know? I had 'em page your partner but he hasn't called in. No answer at his phone either. I thought maybe the two of you was together or something. Then I thought, nah, he ain't your style. And you ain't his."
"I'll get ahold of him. If they didn't go all the way in, how they know it's a DR and not just some guy sleeping it off?"
"Oh, they went in a bit, you know, and reached in with a stick or something and poked around at the guy pretty good. Stiff as a wedding night prick."
"They didn't want to mess up a crime scene but then they go poking around the body with a stick. That's wonderful. These guys get in after they raised the college requirement, or what?"
"Hey, Bosch, we get a call, we've got to check it out. Okay? You want for us to transfer all our body calls directly to the homicide table to check out? You guys'd go nuts inside a week."
Bosch crushed the cigarette butt in the stainless steel sink, and looked out the kitchen window. Looking down the hill he could see one of the tourist trains moving between the huge beige sound studios in Universal City. A side of one of the block-long buildings was painted sky blue with wisps of white clouds; for filming exteriors when the natural L.A. exterior turned brown as wheat.
Bosch said, "How'd we get the call?"
"Anonymous to nine one one. A little after oh four hundred. Dispatcher said it came from a pay phone on the boulevard. Somebody out screwin' around, found the thing in the pipe. Wouldn't give a name. Said there was a stiff in the pipe, that's all. They'll have the tape down at the com center."
Bosch felt himself getting angry. He pulled the bottle of aspirin out of the cabinet and put it in his pocket. While thinking about the 0400 call, he opened the refrigerator and bent in. He saw nothing that interested him. He looked at his watch.
"Crowley, if the report came in at four A.M. why are you just getting to me now, nearly five hours later?"
"Look, Bosch, all we had was an anonymous call. That's it. Dispatcher said it was a kid, no less. I wasn't going to send one of my guys up that pipe in the middle of the night on information like that. Coulda been a prank. Coulda been an ambush. Coulda been anything, fer crissake. I waited till it got light out and things slowed down around here. Sent some of my guys over there at the end of shift. Speaking of end of shifts, I'm outta here. I've been waiting to hear from them and then from you. Anything else?"
Bosch felt like asking if it ever occurred to him that it would be dark in the pipe whether they went poking around at 0400 or 0800, but let it go. What was the use?
"Anything else?" Crowley said again.
Bosch couldn't think of anything, but Crowley filled the empty space.
"It's probly just some hype who croaked himself, Harry. No righteous one eighty-seven case. Happens all the time. Hell, you remember we pulled one out of that same pipe last year. . . . Er, well, that was before you came out to Hollywood. . . . So, see, what I'm saying is some guy, he goes into this same pipe—these transients, they sleep up there all the time—and he's a slammer but he shoots himself with a hot load and that's it. Checks out. 'Cept we didn't find him so fast that time, and with the sun and all beating on the pipe a couple days, he gets cooked in there. Roasted like a tom turkey. But it didn't smell as good."
Crowley laughed at his own joke. Bosch didn't. The watch sergeant continued.
"When we pulled this guy out, the spike was still in his arm. Same thing here. Just a bullshit job, a no-count case. You go out there, you'll be back home by noon, take a nap, maybe go catch the Dodgers. And then next weekend? Somebody else's turn in the barrel. You're off watch. And that's a three-day pass. You got Memorial Day weekend coming next week. So do me a favor. Just go out and see what they've got."
Bosch thought a moment and was about to hang up, then said, "Crowley, what did you mean you didn't find that other one so fast? What makes you think we found this one fast?"
"My guys out there, they say they can't smell a thing off this stiff other than a little piss. It must be fresh."
"Tell your guys I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell them not to f*ck anymore with anything at my scene."
"They—"
Bosch knew Crowley was going to defend his men again but hung up before he had to hear it. He lit another cigarette as he went to the front door to get the Times off the step. He spread the twelve pounds of Sunday paper out on the kitchen counter, wondering how many trees died. He found the real estate supplement and paged through it until he saw a large display ad for Valley Pride Properties. He ran his finger down a list of Open Houses until be found one address and description marked CALL JERRY. He dialed the number.
"Valley Pride Properties, can I help you?"
"Jerry Edgar, please."
A few seconds passed and Bosch heard a couple of transfer clicks before his partner got on the line.
"This is Jerry, may I help you?"
"Jed, we just got another call. Up at the Mulholland Dam. And you aren't wearing your pager."
"Shit," Edgar said, and there was silence. Bosch could almost hear him thinking, I've got three showings today. There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown. "What's the call?"
Bosch told him what little he knew.
"If you want me to take this one solo, I will," Bosch said, "If anything comes up with Ninety-eight, I'll be able to cover it. I'll tell him you're taking the TV thing and I'm doing the stiff in the pipe."
"Yeah, I know you would, but it's okay, I'm on my way. I'm just going to have to find someone to cover for my ass first."
They agreed to meet at the body, and Bosch hung up. He turned the answering machine on, took two packs of cigarettes from the cabinet and put them in his sport coat pocket. He reached into another cabinet and took out the nylon holster that held his gun, a Smith & Wesson 9mm—satin finished, stainless steel and loaded with eight rounds of XTPs. Bosch thought about the ad he had seen once in a police magazine. Extreme Terminal Performance. A bullet that expanded on impact to 1.5 times its width, reaching terminal depth in the body and leaving maximum wound channels. Whoever had written it had been right. Bosch had killed a man a year earlier with one shot from twenty feet. Went in under the right armpit, exited below the left nipple, shattering heart and lungs on its way. XTP. Maximum wound channels. He clipped the holster to his belt on the right side so he could reach across his body and take it with his left hand.
He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth without toothpaste: he was out and had forgotten to go by the store. He dragged a wet comb through his hair and stared at his red-rimmed, forty-year-old eyes for a long moment. Then he studied the gray hairs that were steadily crowding out the brown in his curly hair. Even the mustache was going gray. He had begun seeing flecks of gray in the sink when he shaved. He touched a hand to his chin but decided not to shave. He left his house then without changing even his tie. He knew his client wouldn't mind.
Bosch found a space where there were no pigeon droppings and leaned his elbows on the railing that ran along the top of the Mulholland Dam. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he looked through the cleft of the hills to the city below. The sky was gunpowder gray and the smog was a form-fitted shroud over Hollywood. A few of the far-off towers in downtown poked up through the poison, but the rest of the city was under the blanket. It looked like a ghost town.
There was a slight chemical odor on the warm breeze and after a while he pegged it. Malathion. He'd heard on the radio that the fruit fly helicopters had been up the night before spraying North Hollywood down through the Cahuenga Pass. He thought of his dream and remembered the chopper that did not land.
To his back was the blue-green expanse of the Hollywood reservoir, 60 million gallons of the city's drinking water trapped by the venerable old dam in a canyon between two of the Hollywood Hills. A six-foot band of dried clay ran the length of the shoreline, a reminder that L.A. was in its fourth year of drought. Farther up the reservoir bank was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence that girded the entire shoreline. Bosch had studied this barrier when he first arrived and wondered if the protection was for the people on one side of the fence or the water on the other.
Bosch was wearing a blue jumpsuit over his rumpled suit. His sweat had stained through the underarms and back of both layers of clothing. His hair was damp and his mustache drooped. He had been inside the pipe. He could feel the slight, warm tickle of a Santa Ana wind drying the sweat on the back of his neck. They had come early this year.
Harry was not a big man. He stood a few inches short of six feet and was built lean. The newspapers, when they described him, called him wiry. Beneath the jumpsuit his muscles were like nylon cords, strength concealed by economy of size. The gray that flecked his hair was more partial to the left side. His eyes were brown-black and seldom betrayed emotion or intention.
The pipe was located above ground and ran for fifty yards alongside the reservoir's access road. It was rusted inside and out, and was empty and unused except by those who sought its interior as a shelter or its exterior as a canvas for spray paint. Bosch had had no clue to its purpose until the reservoir caretaker had volunteered the information. The pipe was a mud break. Heavy rain, the caretaker said, could loosen earth and send mud sliding off the hillsides and into the reservoir. The three-foot-wide pipe, left over from some unknown district project or boondoggle, had been placed in a predicted slide area as the reservoir's first and only defense. The pipe was held in place by half-inch-thick iron rebar that looped over it and was embedded in concrete below.
Bosch had put on the jumpsuit before going into the pipe. The letters LAPD were printed in white across the back. After taking it out of the trunk of his car and stepping into it, he realized it was probably cleaner than the suit he was trying to protect. But he wore it anyway, because he had always worn it. He was a methodical, traditional, superstitious detective.
As he had crawled with flashlight in hand into the damp-smelling, claustrophobic cylinder, he felt his throat tighten and his heartbeat quicken. A familiar emptiness in his gut gripped him. Fear. But he snapped on the light and the darkness receded along with the uneasy feelings, and he set about his work.
Now he stood on the dam and smoked and thought about things. Crowley, the watch sergeant, had been right, the man in the pipe was certainly dead. But he had also been wrong. This would not be an easy one. Harry would not be home in time for an afternoon nap or to listen to the Dodgers on KABC. Things were wrong here. Harry wasn't ten feet inside the pipe before he knew that.
There were no tracks in the pipe. Or rather, there were no tracks that were of use. The bottom of the pipe was dusty with dried orange mud and cluttered with paper bags, empty wine bottles, cotton balls, used syringes, newspaper bedding—the debris of the homeless and addicted. Bosch had studied it all in the beam of the flashlight as he slowly made his way toward the body. And he had found no clear trail left by the dead man, who lay headfirst into the pipe. This was not right. If the dead man had crawled in of his own accord, there would be some indication of this. If he had been dragged in, there would be some sign of that, too. But there was nothing, and this deficiency was only the first of the things that troubled Bosch.
When he reached the body, he found the dead man's shirt—a black, open-collar crew shirt—pulled up over his head with his arms tangled inside. Bosch had seen enough dead people to know that literally nothing was impossible during the last breaths. He had worked a suicide in which a man who had shot himself in the head had then changed pants before dying, apparently because he did not want his body to be discovered soaked in human waste. But the shirt and the arms on the dead man in the pipe did not seem acceptable to Harry. It looked to Bosch as if the body had been dragged into the pipe by someone who had pulled the dead man by the collar.
Bosch had not disturbed the body or pulled the shirt away from the face. He noted that it was a white male. He detected no immediate indication of the fatal injury. After finishing his survey of the body, Bosch carefully moved over the corpse, his face coming within a half foot of it, and then continued through the pipe's remaining forty yards. He found no tracks and nothing else of evidentiary value. In twenty minutes he was back in the sunlight. He then sent a crime scene tech named Donovan in to chart the location of debris in the pipe and video the body in place. Donovan's face had betrayed his surprise at having to go into the pipe on a case he'd already written off as an OD. He had tickets to the Dodgers, Bosch figured.
After leaving the pipe to Donovan, Bosch had lit a cigarette and walked to the dam's railing to look down on the fouled city and brood.
At the railing he could hear the sound of traffic filtering up from the Hollywood Freeway. It almost sounded gentle from such a distance. Like a calm ocean. Down through the cleft of the canyon he saw blue swimming pools and Spanish tile roofs.
A woman in a white tank top and lime-green jogging shorts ran by him on the dam. A compact radio was clipped to her waistband, and a thin yellow wire carried sound to the earphones clamped to her head. She seemed to be in her own world, unaware of the grouping of police ahead of her until she reached the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the end of the dam. It told her to stop in two languages. She jogged in place for a few moments, her long blond hair clinging to sweat on her shoulders, and watched the police, who were mostly watching her. Then she turned and headed back past Bosch. His eyes followed her, and he noticed that when she went by the pump house she deviated her course to avoid something. He walked over and found glass on the pavement. He looked up and saw the broken bulb in the socket above the pump house door. He made a mental note to ask the caretaker if the bulb had been checked lately.
When Bosch returned to his spot at the railing a blur of movement from below drew his attention. He looked down and saw a coyote sniffing among the pine needles and trash that covered the earth below the trees in front of the dam. The animal was small and its coat was scruffy and completely missing some patches of hair. There were only a few of them left in the city's protected areas, left to scavenge among the debris of the human scavengers.
"They're pulling it out now," a voice said from behind.
Bosch turned and saw one of the uniforms that had been assigned to the crime scene. He nodded and followed him off the dam, under the yellow tape, and back to the pipe.
?      ?       ?
A cacophony of grunts and heavy gasps echoed from the mouth of the graffiti-scarred pipe. A shirtless man, with his heavily muscled back scratched and dirty, emerged backward, towing a sheet of heavy black plastic on top of which lay the body. The dead man was still face up with his head and arms mostly obscured in the wrapping of the black shirt. Bosch looked around for Donovan and saw him stowing a video recorder in the back of the blue crime scene van. Harry walked over.
"Now I'm going to need you to go back in. All the debris in there, newspapers, cans, bags, I saw some hypos, cotton, bottles, I need it all bagged."
"You got it," Donovan said. He waited a beat and added, "I'm not saying anything, but, Harry, I mean, you really think this is the real thing? Is it worth busting our balls on?"
"I guess we won't know until after the cut."
He started to walk away but stopped.
"Look, Donnie, I know it's Sunday and, uh, thanks for going back in."
"No problem. It's straight OT for me."
The shirtless man and a coroner's technician were sitting on their haunches, huddled over the body. They both wore white rubber gloves. The technician was Larry Sakai, a guy Bosch had known for years but had never liked. He had a plastic fishing-tackle box open on the ground next to him. He took a scalpel from the box and made a one-inch-long cut into the side of the body, Just above the left hip. No blood came from the slice. From the box he then removed a thermometer and attached it to the end of a curved probe. He stuck it into the incision, expertly though roughly turning it and driving it up into the liver.
The shirtless man grimaced, and Bosch noticed he had a blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of his right eye. It somehow seemed appropriate to Bosch. It was the most sympathy the dead man would get here.
"Time of death is going to be a pisser," Sakai said. He did not look up from his work. "That pipe, you know, with the heat rising, it's going to skew the temperature loss in the liver. Osito took a reading in there and it was eighty-one. Ten minutes later it was eighty-three. We don't have a fixed temp in the body or the pipe."
"So?" Bosch said.
"So I am not giving you anything here. I gotta take it back and do some calculating."
"You mean give it to somebody else who knows how to figure it?" Bosch asked.
"You'll get it when you come in for the autopsy, don't worry, man."
"Speaking of which, who's doing the cutting today?"
Sakai didn't answer. He was busy with the dead man's legs. He grabbed each shoe and manipulated the ankles. He moved his hands up the legs and reached beneath the thighs, lifting each leg and watching as it bent at the knee. He then pressed his hands down on the abdomen as if feeling for contraband. Lastly, he reached inside the shirt and tried to turn the dead man's head. It didn't move. Bosch knew rigor mortis worked its way from the head through the body and then into the extremities.
"This guy's neck is locked but good," Sakai said. "Stomach's getting there. But the extremities still have good movement."
He took a pencil from behind his ear and pressed the eraser end against the skin on the side of the torso. There was purplish blotching on the half of the body closest to the ground, as if the body were half full of red wine. It was post-mortem lividity. When the heart stops pumping, the blood seeks the low ground. When Sakai pressed the pencil against the dark skin, it did not blanch white, a sign the blood had fully clotted. The man had been dead for hours.
"The po-mo lividity is steady," Sakai said. "That and the rig makes me estimate that this dude's been dead maybe six to eight hours. That's going to have to hold you, Bosch, until we can work with the temps."
Sakai didn't look up as he said this. He and the one called Osito began pulling the pockets on the dead man's green fatigue pants inside out. They were empty, as were the large baggy pockets on the thighs. They rolled the body to one side to check the back pockets. As they did this, Bosch leaned down to look closely at the exposed back of the dead man. The skin was purplish with lividity and dirty. But he saw no scratches or marks that allowed him to conclude that the body had been dragged.
"Nothing in the pants, Bosch, no ID," Sakai said, still not looking up.
Then they began to gently pull the black shirt back over the head and onto the torso. The dead man had straggly hair that had more gray in it than the original black. His beard was unkempt and he looked to be about fifty, which made Bosch figure him at about forty. There was something in the breast pocket of the shirt and Sakai fished it out, looked at it a moment and then put it into a plastic bag held open by his partner.
"Bingo," Sakai said and handed the bag up to Bosch. "One set of works. Makes our jobs all a lot easier."
Sakai next peeled the dead man's cracked eyelids all the way open. The eyes were blue with a milky caul over them. Each pupil was constricted to about the size of a pencil lead. They stared vacantly up at Bosch, each pupil a small black void.
Sakai made some notes on a clipboard. He'd made his decision on this one. Then he pulled an ink pad and a print card from the tackle box by his side. He inked the fingers of the left hand and began pressing them on the card. Bosch admired how quickly and expertly he did this. But then Sakai stopped.
"Hey. Check it out."
Sakai gently moved the index finger. It was easily manipulated in any direction. The joint was cleanly broken, but there was no sign of swelling or hemorrhage.
"It looks post to me," Sakai said.
Bosch stooped to look closer. He took the dead man's hand away from Sakai and felt it with both his own, un-gloved hands. He looked at Sakai and then at Osito.
"Bosch, don't start in," Sakai barked. "Don't be looking at him. He knows better. I trained him myself."
Bosch didn't remind Sakai that it was he who had been driving the ME wagon that dumped a body strapped to a wheeled stretcher onto the Ventura Freeway a few months back. During rush hour. The stretcher rolled down the Lankershim Boulevard exit and hit the back end of a car at a gas station. Because of the fiberglass partition in the cab, Sakai didn't know he had lost the body until he arrived at the morgue.
Bosch handed the dead man's hand back to the coroner's tech. Sakai turned to Osito and spoke a question in Spanish. Osito's small brown face became very serious and he shook his head no.
"He didn't even touch the guy's hands in there. So you better wait until the cut before you go saying something you aren't sure about."
Sakai finished transferring the fingerprints and then handed the card to Bosch.
"Bag the hands," Bosch said to him, though he didn't need to. "And the feet."
He stood back up and began waving the card to get the ink to dry. With his other hand he held up the plastic evidence bag Sakai had given him. In it a rubber band held together a hypodermic needle, a small vial that was half filled with what looked like dirty water, a wad of cotton and a pack of matches. It was a shooter's kit and it looked fairly new. The spike was clean, with no sign of corrosion. The cotton, Bosch guessed, had only been used as a strainer once or twice. There were tiny whitish-brown crystals in the fibers. By turning the bag he could look inside each side of the matchbook and see only two matches missing.
Donovan crawled out of the pipe at that moment. He was wearing a miner's helmet equipped with a flashlight. In one hand he carried several plastic bags, each containing a yellowed newspaper, or a food wrapper or a crushed beer can. In the other he carried a clipboard on which he had diagramed where each item had been found in the pipe. Spiderwebs hung off the sides of the helmet. Sweat was running down his face and staining the painter's breathing mask he wore over his mouth and nose. Bosch held up the bag containing the shooter's kit. Donovan stopped in his tracks.
"You find a stove in there?" Bosch asked.
"Shit, he's a hype?" Donovan said. "I knew it. What the f*ck are we doin' all this for?"
Bosch didn't answer. He waited him out.
"Answer is yes, I found a Coke can," Donovan said.
The crime scene tech looked through the plastic bags in his hands and held one up to Bosch. It contained two halves of a Coke can. The can looked reasonably new and had been cut in half with a knife. The bottom half had been inverted and its concave surface used as a pan to cook heroin and water. A stove. Most hypes no longer used spoons. Carrying a spoon was probable cause for arrest. Cans were easy to come by, easy to handle and disposable.
"We need the kit and the stove printed as soon as we can," Bosch said. Donovan nodded and carried his burden of plastic bags toward the police van. Bosch turned his attention back to the ME's men.
"No knife on him, right?" Bosch said.
"Right," Sakai said. "Why?"
"I need a knife. Incomplete scene without a knife."
"So what. Guy's a hype. Hypes steal from hypes. His pals probably took it."
Sakai's gloved hands rolled up the sleeves of the dead man's shirt. This revealed a network of scar tissue on both arms. Old needle marks, craters left by abscesses and infections. In the crook of the left elbow was a fresh spike mark and a large yellow-and-purplish hemorrhage under the skin.
"Bingo," Sakai said. "I'd say this guy took a hot load in the arm and, phssst, that was it. Like I said, you got a hype case, Bosch. You'll have an early day. Go get a Dodger dog."
Bosch crouched down again to look closer.
"That's what everybody keeps telling me," he said.
And Sakai was probably right, he thought. But he didn't want to fold this one away yet. Too many things didn't fit. The missing tracks in the pipe. The shirt pulled over the head. The broken finger. No knife.
"How come all the tracks are old except the one?" he asked, more of himself than Sakai.
"Who knows?" Sakai answered anyway. "Maybe he'd been off it awhile and decided to jump back in. A hype's a hype. There aren't any reasons."
Staring at the tracks on the dead man's arms, Bosch noticed blue ink on the skin just below the sleeve that was bunched up on the left bicep. He couldn't see enough to make out what it said.
"Pull that up," he said and pointed.
Sakai worked the sleeve up to the shoulder, revealing a tattoo of blue and red ink. It was a cartoonish rat standing on hind legs with a rabid, toothy and vulgar grin. In one hand the rat held a pistol, in the other a booze bottle marked XXX. The blue writing above and below the cartoon was smeared by age and the spread of skin. Sakai tried to read it.
"Says 'Force'—no, 'First.' Says 'First Infantry.' This guy was army. The bottom part doesn't make—it's another language. 'Non . . . Gratum . . . Anum . . . Ro—' I can't make that out."
"Rodentum," Bosch said.
Sakai looked at him.
"Dog Latin," Bosch told him. "Not worth a rat's ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam."
"Whatever," Sakai said. He took an appraising look at the body and the pipe. He said, "Well, he ended up in a tunnel, didn't he? Sort of."
Bosch reached his bare hand to the dead man's face and pushed the straggly black and gray hairs off the forehead and away from the vacant eyes. His doing this without gloves made the others stop what they were doing and watch this unusual, if not unsanitary, behavior. Bosch paid no notice. He stared at the face for a long moment, not saying anything, not hearing if anything was said. In the moment that he realized that he knew the face, just as he knew the tattoo, the vision of a young man flashed in his mind. Rawboned and tan, hair buzzed short. Alive, not dead. He stood up and turned quickly away from the body.
Making such a quick, unexpected motion, he banged straight into Jerry Edgar, who had finally arrived and walked up to huddle over the body. They both took a step back, momentarily stunned. Bosch put a hand to his forehead. Edgar, who was much taller, did the same to his chin.
"Shit, Harry," Edgar said. "You all right?"
"Yeah. You?"
Edgar checked his hand for blood.
"Yeah. Sorry about that. What are you jumping up like that for?"
"I don't know."
Edgar looked over Harry's shoulder at the body and then followed his partner away from the pack.
"Sorry, Harry," Edgar said. "I sat there waiting an hour till somebody came out to cover me on my appointments. So tell me, what have we got?"
Edgar was still rubbing his jaw as he spoke.
"Not sure yet," Bosch said. "I want you to get in one of these patrol cars that has an MCT in it. One that works. See if you can get a sheet on a Meadows, Billy, er, make that William. DOB would be about 1950. We need to get an address from DMV."
"That's the stiff?"
Bosch nodded.
"Nothing, no address with his ID?"
"There is no ID. I made him. So check it out on the box. There should be some contact in the last few years. Hype stuff, at least, out of Van Nuys Division."
Edgar sauntered off toward the line of parked black-and-whites to find one with a mobile computer terminal mounted on the dashboard. Because he was a big man, his gait seemed slow, but Bosch knew from experience that Edgar was a hard man to keep pace with. Edgar was impeccably tailored in a brown suit with a thin chalk line. His hair was close cropped and his skin was almost as smooth and as black as an eggplant's. Bosch watched Edgar walk away and couldn't help but wonder if he had timed his arrival to be just late enough to avoid having to wrinkle his ensemble by stepping into a jumpsuit and crawling into the pipe.
Bosch went to the trunk of his car and got out the Polaroid camera. He then went back to the body, straddled it and stooped to take photographs of the face. Three would be enough, he decided, and he placed each card that was ejected from the camera on top of the pipe while the photo developed. He couldn't help but stare at the face, at the changes made by time. He thought of that face and the inebriated grin that creased it on the night that all of the First Infantry rats had come out of the tattoo parlor in Saigon. It had taken the burned-out Americans four hours, but they had all been made blood brothers by putting the same brand on their shoulders. Bosch remembered Meadows's joy in the companionship and fear they all shared.
Harry stepped away from the body while Sakai and Osito unfolded a black, heavy plastic bag with a zipper running up the center. Once the body bag was unfolded and opened, the coroner's men lifted Meadows and placed him inside.
"Looks like Rip Van-f*cking-Winkle," Edgar said as he walked up.
Sakai zipped the bag up and Bosch saw a few of Meadows's curling gray hairs had been caught in the zipper. Meadows wouldn't mind. He had once told Bosch that he was destined for the inside of a body bag. He said everybody was.
Edgar held a small notepad in one hand, a gold Cross pen in the other.
"William Joseph Meadows, 7-21-50. That sound like him, Harry?"
"Yeah, that's him."
"Well, you were right, we have multiple contacts. But not just hype shit. We've got bank robbery, attempted robbery, possession of heroin. We got a loitering right here at the dam a year or so ago. And he did have a couple hype beefs. The one in Van Nuys you were talking about. What was he to you, a CI?"
"No. Get an address?"
"Lives up in the Valley. Sepulveda, up by the brewery. Tough neighborhood to sell a house in. So if he wasn't an informant, how'd you know this guy?"
"I didn't know him—at least recently. I knew him in a different life."
"What does that mean? When did you know the guy?"
"Last time I saw Billy Meadows was twenty years ago, or thereabouts. He was—it was in Saigon."
"Yeah, that'd make it about twenty years." Edgar walked over to the Polaroids and looked down at the three faces of Billy Meadows. "You know him good?"
"Not really. About as well as anybody got to know somebody there. You learned to trust people with your life, then when it's over you realize you didn't really even know most of them. I never saw him once I got back here. Talked to him once on the phone last year, that's all." "How'd you make him?"
"I didn't, at first. Then I saw the tattoo on his arm. That brought the face back. I guess you remember guys like him. I do, at least."
"I guess . . ."
They let the silence sit there awhile. Bosch was trying to decide what to do, but could only wonder about the coincidence of being called to a death scene to find Meadows. Edgar broke the reverie.
"So you want to tell me what you've got that looks hinky here? Donovan over there looks like he's getting ready to shit his pants, all the work you're putting him through."
Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.
"No knife?" his partner said.
"Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove—if the stove was his."
"Could've brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife."
"Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything."
"Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?"
"To a degree. A user and seller."
"Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can't predict what they're going to do, when they're going to get off the shit or on it. They're lost people, Harry."
"He was off it, though—at least I thought he was. He's only got one fresh pop in his arm."
"Harry, you said you hadn't seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?"
"I hadn't seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He'd been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something—it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing—he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would've only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn't do the time this time, couldn't kick alone like that. . . ."
Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.
"And? . . . Come on, Harry, what'd you do?"
"And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He's a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he'd completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that's what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling. . . . I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn't try to look him up."
Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.
"Look, Harry," Edgar said, "that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That's not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?"
"Do you believe in coincidence?" Bosch asked.
"I don't know. I—"
"There are no coincidences."
"Harry, I don't know what you're talking about. But you know what I think? I don't see anything here that's screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can't see what he's doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That's it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could be a hundred dif—"
"Sometimes they don't scream, Jerry. That's the problem here. It's Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don't you see that that's what they are counting on?"
"Who is 'they,' Harry?"
"Whoever did this."
He shut up for a minute. He was convincing no one, and that almost included himself. Playing to Edgar's sense of dedication was wrong. He'd be off the job as soon as he put in twenty. He'd then put a business card–sized ad in the union newsletter—"LAPD retired, will cut commission for brother officers"—and make a quarter million a year selling houses to cops or for cops in the San Fernando Valley or the Santa Clarita Valley or the Antelope Valley or whatever valley the bulldozers aimed at next.
"Why go in the pipe?" Bosch said then. "You said he lived up in the Valley. Sepulveda. Why come down here?"
"Harry, who knows? The guy was a junkie. Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he croaked himself up there and his friends dragged his dead ass down here because they didn't want to be bothered with explaining it."
"That's still a crime."
"Yeah, that's a crime, but let me know when you find a DA that'll file it for you."
"His kit looked clean. New. The other tracks on his arm look old. I don't think he was slamming again. Not regularly. Something isn't right."
"Well, I don't know. . . . You know, AIDS and everything, they're supposed to keep a clean kit."
Bosch looked at his partner as if he didn't know him.
"Harry, listen to me, what I'm telling you is that he may have been your foxhole buddy twenty years ago but he was a junkie this year. You'll never be able to explain every action he took. I don't know about the kit or the tracks, but I do know that this does not look like one we should bust our humps on. This is a nine-to-fiver, weekends and holidays excluded."
Bosch gave up—for the moment.
"I'm going up to Sepulveda," he said. "Are you coming. or are you going back to your open house?"
"I'll do my job, Harry," Edgar said softly. "Just because we don't agree on something doesn't mean I'm not gonna do what I'm paid to do. It's never been that way, never will be. But if you don't like the way I do business, we'll go see Ninety-eight tomorrow morning and see about a switch."
Bosch was immediately sorry for the cheap shot, but didn't say so. He said, "Okay. You go on up there, see if anybody's home. I'll meet you after I sign off on the scene."
Edgar walked over to the pipe and took one of the Polaroid photos of Meadows. He slipped it into his coat pocket, then walked down the access road toward his car without saying another word to Bosch.
After Bosch took off his jumpsuit and folded it away in the trunk of his car, he watched Sakai and Osito slide the body roughly onto a stretcher and then into the back of a blue van. He started over, thinking about what would be the best way to get the autopsy done as a priority, meaning by at least the next day instead of four or five days later. He caught up with the coroner's tech as he was opening the driver's door.
"We're outta here, Bosch."
Bosch put his hand on the door, holding it from opening enough for Sakai to climb in.
"Who's doing the cutting today?"
"On this one? Nobody."
"Come on, Sakai. Who's on?"
"Sally. But he's not going near this one, Bosch."
"Look, I just went through this with my partner. Not you, too, okay?"
"Bosch, you look. You listen. I've been working since six last night and this is the seventh scene I've been to. We got drive-bys, floaters, a sex case. People are dying to meet us, Bosch. There is no rest for the weary, and that means no time for what you think might be a case. Listen to your partner for once. This one is going on the routine schedule. That means we'll get to it by Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I promise Friday at the latest. And tox results is at least a ten-day wait, anyway. You know that. So what's your goddam hurry?"
"Are. Tox results are at least a ten-day wait."
"F*ck off."
"Just tell Sally I need the prelim done today. I'll be by later."
"Christ, Bosch, listen to what I'm telling you. We've got bodies on gurneys stacked in the hall that we already know are one eighty-sevens and need to be cut. Salazar is not going to have time for what looks to me and everybody else around here except you like a hype case. Cut and dried, man. What am I going to say to him that's going to make him do the cut today?"
"Show him the finger. Tell him there were no tracks in the pipe. Think of something. Tell him the DB was a guy who knew needles too well to've OD'd."
Sakai put his head back against the van's side panel and laughed loudly. Then he shook his head as if a child had made a joke.
"And you know what he'll say to me? He'll say that it doesn't matter how long he'd been spiking. They all f*ck up. Bosch, how many sixty-five-year-old junkies do you see around? None of them go the distance. The needle gets them all in the end. Just like this guy in the pipe."
Bosch turned and looked around to make sure none of the uniforms were watching and listening. Then he turned back to Sakai's face.
"Just tell him I'll be by there later," he said quietly. "If he doesn't find anything on the prelim, then fine, you can stick the body at the end of the line in the hall, or you can park it down at the gas station on Lankershim. I won't care then, Larry. But you tell him. It's his decision, not yours."
Bosch dropped his hand from the door and stepped back. Sakai got in the van and slammed the door. He started the engine and looked at Bosch through the window for a long moment before rolling it down.
"Bosch, you're a pain in the ass. Tomorrow morning. It's the best I can do. Today is no way."
"First cut of the day?"
"Just leave us alone today, okay?"
"First cut?"
"Yeah. Yeah. First cut."
"Sure, I'll leave you alone, See you tomorrow, then."
"Not me, man. I'll be sleeping."
Sakai rolled the window back up and the van moved away. Bosch stepped back to let it pass, and when it was gone he was left staring at the pipe. It was really for the first time then that he noticed the graffiti. Not that he hadn't seen that the exterior of the pipe was literally covered with painted messages, but this time he looked at the individual scrawls. Many were old, faded together—a tableau of letters spelling threats either long forgotten or since made good. There were slogans: Abandon LA. There were names: Ozone, Bomber, Stryker, many others. One of the fresher tags caught his eye. It was just three letters, about twelve feet from the end of the pipe— Sha. The three letters had been painted in one fluid motion. The top of the S was jagged and then contoured, giving the impression of a mouth. A gaping maw. There were no teeth but Bosch could sense them. It was as though the work wasn't completed. Still, it was good work, original and clean. He aimed the Polaroid at it and took a photo.
Bosch walked to the police van, putting the exposure in his pocket. Donovan was stowing his equipment on shelves and the evidence bags in wooden Napa Valley wine boxes.
"Did you find any burned matches in there?"
"Yeah, one fresh one," Donovan said. "Burned to the end. It was about ten feet in. It's there on the chart."
Bosch picked up a clipboard on which there was a piece of paper with a diagram of the pipe showing the body location and where the other material taken from the pipe had been. Bosch noticed that the match was found about fifteen feet from the body. Donovan then showed him the match, sitting at the bottom of its own plastic evidence bag. "I'll let you know if it matches the book in the guy's kit," he said. "If that's what you're thinking."
Bosch said, "What about the uniforms? What'd they find?"
"It's all there," Donovan said, pointing to a wooden bin in which there were still more plastic evidence bags. These contained debris picked up by patrol officers who had searched the area within a fifty-yard radius of the pipe. Each bag contained a description of the location where the object had been found. Bosch took each bag out and examined its contents. Most of it was junk that would have nothing to do with the body in the pipe. There were newspapers, clothing rags, a high-heeled shoe, a white sock with dried blue paint in it. A sniff rag.
Bosch picked up a bag containing the top to a can of spray paint. The next bag contained the spray paint can. The Krylon label said it was Ocean Blue. Bosch hefted the bag and could tell there was still paint in the can. He carried the bag to the pipe, opened it and, touching the nozzle with a pen, sprayed a line of blue next to the letters Sha . He sprayed too much. The paint ran down the curved side of the pipe and dripped onto the gravel. But Bosch could see the colors matched.
He thought about that for a moment. Why would a graffiti tagger throw half a can of paint away? He looked at the writing on the evidence bag. It had been found near the edge of the reservoir. Someone had attempted to throw the can into the lake but came up short. Again he thought, Why? He squatted next to the pipe and looked closely at the letters. He decided that whatever the message or name was, it wasn't finished. Something had happened that made the tagger stop what he was doing and throw the can, the top and his sniff sock over the fence. Was it the police? Bosch took out his notebook and wrote a reminder to call Crowley after midnight to see if any of his people had cruised the reservoir during the A.M. watch.
But what if it wasn't a cop that made the tagger throw the paint over the fence? What if the tagger had seen the body being delivered to the pipe? Bosch thought about what Crowley had said about an anonymous caller reporting the body. A kid, no less. Was it the tagger who called? Bosch took the can back to the SID truck and handed it to Donovan.
"Print this after the kit and the stove," he said. "I think it might belong to a witness."
"Will do," Donovan said.
?      ?       ?
Bosch drove down out of the hills and took the Barham Boulevard ramp onto the northbound Hollywood Freeway. After coming up through the Cahuenga Pass he went west on the Ventura Freeway and then north again on the San Diego Freeway. It took about twenty minutes to go the ten miles. It was Sunday and traffic was light. He exited on Roscoe and went east a couple of blocks into Meadows's neighborhood on Langdon.
Sepulveda, like most of the suburban communities within Los Angeles, had both good and bad neighborhoods. Bosch wasn't expecting trimmed lawns and curbs lined with Volvos on Meadows's street, and he wasn't disappointed. The apartments were at least a decade past being attractive. There were bars over the windows of the bottom units and graffiti on every garage door. The sharp smell of the brewery on Roscoe wafted into the neighborhood. The place smelled like a 4 A.M. bar.
Meadows had lived in a U-shaped apartment building that had been built in the 1950s, when the smell of hops wasn't yet in the air, gangbangers weren't on the street corner and there was still hope in the neighborhood. There was a pool in the center courtyard but it had long been filled up with sand and dirt. Now the courtyard consisted of a kidney-shaped plot of brown grass surrounded by dirty concrete. Meadows had lived in an upstairs corner apartment. Bosch could hear the steady drone of the freeway as he climbed the stairs and moved along the walkway that fronted the apartments. The door to 7B was unlocked and it opened into a small living room–dining room–kitchen. Edgar was leaning against a counter, writing in his notebook. He said, "Nice place, huh?"
"Yeah," Bosch said and looked around. "Nobody home?"
"Nah. I checked with a neighbor next door and she hadn't seen anybody around since the day before yesterday. Said the guy that lived here told her his name was Fields, not Meadows. Cute, huh? She said he lived all by himself. Been here about a year, kept to himself, mostly.
That's all she knew."
"You show her the picture?"
"Yeah, she made him. Didn't like looking at a picture of a dead guy, though."
Bosch walked into a short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. He said, "You pick the door?"
"Nah—it was unlocked. No shit, I knock a couple times and I'm fixing to get my pouch outta the car and finesse the lock when, for the hell of it, I try the door."
"And it opens."
"It opens."
"You talk to the landlord?"
"Landlady's not around. Supposed to be, but maybe she went out to eat lunch or score some horse. I think everybody I seen around here is a spiker."
Bosch came back into the living room and looked around. There wasn't much. A couch covered with green vinyl was pushed against one wall, a stuffed chair was against the opposite wall with a small color television on the carpet next to it. There was a Formica-topped table with three chairs around it in the dining room. The fourth chair was by itself against the wall. Bosch looked at an old cigarette-scarred coffee table in front of the couch. On it were an overloaded ashtray and a crossword puzzle book. Playing cards were laid out in an unfinished game of solitaire. There was a TV Guide . Bosch had no idea if Meadows smoked but knew that no cigarettes had been found on the body. He made a mental note to check on it later.
Edgar said, "Harry, this place was turned. Not just the door being open and all, but, I mean, there are other things. The whole place has been searched. They did a halfway decent job, but you can tell. It was rushed. Go check out the bed and the closet, you'll see what I mean. I'm gonna give the landlady another try."
Edgar left and Bosch walked back through the living room to the bedroom. Along the way he noted the smell of urine. In the bedroom, he found a queen-sized bed without a backboard pushed against one wall. There was a greasy discoloration on the white wall at about the level where Meadows would have leaned his head while sitting up in bed. Opposite the bed an old six-drawer dresser was against the wall. A cheap rattan night table with a lamp on it stood next to the bed. Nothing else was in the room, not even a mirror.
Bosch studied the bed first. It was unmade; with pillows and sheets in a pile in the center. Bosch noticed that a corner of one of the sheets was folded between the mattress and the box spring, in the midsection of the left side of the bed. The bed would not have been made that way, obviously. Bosch pulled the corner out from under the mattress and let it hang loosely off the side of the bed. He lifted the mattress as if to search underneath it, then lowered it back into place. The corner of the sheet was back between the mattress and the box spring. Edgar was right.
He next opened the six bureau drawers. What clothes there were—underwear, white and dark socks and several T-shirts—were neatly folded and seemed undisturbed. When he closed the bottom left drawer he noticed that it slid unevenly and would not close all the way. He pulled it all the way out of the bureau. Then he pulled another drawer completely out of the dresser. Then the rest. When he had all the drawers out he checked the underside of each to see if something was or had been taped to it. He found nothing. He put them back in but kept changing their order until each one slid easily into place and closed completely. When he was done the drawers were in a different order. The right order. He was satisfied that someone had pulled the drawers out to search beneath and behind them, and had then put them back in the wrong order.
He went into the walk-in closet. He found only a quarter of the available space used. On the floor were two pairs of shoes, a pair of black Reebok running shoes that were dirty with sand and gray dust, and a pair of laced work boots that looked as though they had been recently cleaned and oiled. There was more of the gray dust from the shoes in the carpet. He crouched down and pinched some between his fingers. It seemed like concrete dust. He took a small evidence bag from his pocket and put some of the granules into it. Then he put the bag away and stood up. There were five shirts on hangers, a single white button-down oxford and four long-sleeved black pullovers, like the one Meadows had been wearing. On hangers next to the shirts were two pairs of well-faded jeans and two pairs of black pajamas or karate-style pants. The pockets on all four pairs of pants had been turned inside out. A plastic laundry basket on the floor contained dirty black pants, T-shirts, socks and a pair of boxer shorts.
Bosch walked out of the closet and left the bedroom. He stopped in the hallway bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There was a half-used tube of toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin and a single, empty insulin syringe box. When he closed the cabinet, he looked at himself and saw weariness in his eyes. He smoothed his hair.
Harry walked back to the living room and sat on the couch, in front of the unfinished solitaire hand. Edgar came in.
"Meadows rented the place last July first," he said. "The landlady's back. It was supposed to be a month-to-month lease but he paid for eleven months up front. Four bills a month. That's nearly five grand in cash he put down. Said she didn't ask him for references. She just took the money. He lived—"
"She said he paid for eleven months?" Bosch interrupted. "Was it a deal, pay for eleven, get the twelfth free?"
"Nah, I asked her about that and she said no, it was him. That's just the way he wanted to pay. Said he'd move out June first, this year. That's—what—ten days from now? She said he told her he moved out here on some kind of job, she thinks from Phoenix. Said he was some kind of shift supervisor for the tunnel dig on the subway project downtown. She got the impression that's all his job would take, eleven months, and then he'd go back to Phoenix."
Edgar was looking in his notebook, reviewing his conversation with the landlady.
"That's about it. She ID'd him off the Polaroid, too. She also knew him as Fields. Bill Fields. Said he kept odd hours, like he was on a night shift or something. Said she saw him last week coming home one morning, getting dropped off from a beige or tan Jeep. No license number because she wasn't looking. But she said he was all dirty, that's how she knew he was coming home from work."
They were silent for a few moments, both thinking.
Bosch finally said, "J. Edgar, I have a deal for you."
"You got a deal for me? Okay, let me hear it."
"You go home now or back to your open house or whatever. I'll take this from here. I'll go pull the tape at the com center, go back to the office and start the paper going. I'll see if Sakai made next-of-kin notification; I think, if I remember right, that Meadows was from Louisiana. Anyway, I've got the autopsy skedded for tomorrow at eight. I'll take that, too, on my way in.
"Now, your end is tomorrow you finish up last night's TV thing and take it over to the DA. Shouldn't be any problems with it."
"So you're taking the end that's dipped in shit and letting me skate. The transvestite-offs-transvestite case is as cut and dried as they come. No pun intended."
"Yeah. There's one thing I'd also want. On your way in from the Valley tomorrow, stop by the VA in Sepulveda and see if you can talk them into letting you see Meadows's file. Might have some names that could help. Like I said before, he was supposedly talking to a shrink in the outpatient care unit and in one of those circle jerks. Maybe one of those guys was spiking with him, knows what happened here. It's a long shot, I know. If they give you a hard time, give me a call and I'll work on a search warrant."
"Sounds like a deal. But I'm worried about you, Harry.
I mean, you and I haven't been partners too long, and I know you probably want to work your way back downtown to Robbery-Homicide, but I don't see the percentage in busting your balls on this one. Yeah, this place has been turned over, but that isn't the question. The question is why. And on the face of things, nothing really stirs me. It looks to me like somebody dumped Meadows down at the reservoir after he croaked and searched his place to find his stash. If he had one."
"Probably that's the way it was," Bosch said after a few moments. "But a couple things still bother me. I want to puzzle with it a little more until I'm sure."
"Well, like I said, no problem with me. You're giving me the clean end of the stick."
"I think I'm going to look around a little more. You go ahead, and I'll see you tomorrow when I get back in from the cut."
"Okay, partner."
"And Jed?"
"Yeah?"
"It's got nothing to do with getting downtown again."
Bosch sat alone, thinking, and scanning the room for secrets. His eyes eventually came down on the cards spread out before him on the coffee table. Solitaire. He saw that all four aces were up. He picked up the deck of remaining cards and went through it, peeling off three cards at a time. In the course of going through he came across the two and three of spades and the two of hearts. The game hadn't stalled. It had been interrupted. And never finished.
He became restless. He looked down into the green glass ashtray and saw that all the butts were nonfiltered Camels. Was that Meadows's brand or his killer's? He got up and walked around the room. The faint smell of urine hit him again. He walked back into the bedroom. He opened the drawers of the bureau and stared at their contents once more. Nothing turned in his mind. He went to the window and looked out at the back end of another apartment building across an alley. There was a man with a supermarket cart in the alley. He was poking through a Dumpster with a stick. The cart was half full of aluminum cans. Bosch walked away and sat down on the bed and put his head back against the wall where the headboard should have been and the white paint was a dingy gray. The wall felt cool against his back.
"Tell me something," he whispered to no one.
Something had interrupted the card game and Meadows had died here, he believed. Then he was taken to the pipe. But why? Why not leave him? Bosch leaned his head back to the wall and looked straight across the room. It was at that moment that he noticed a nail in the wall. The nail was about three feet above the bureau and had been painted white along with the wall at some point a long time ago. That was why he hadn't noticed it before. He got up and went to look behind the bureau. In the three-inch space between it and the wall, he saw the edge of a fallen picture frame. With his shoulder, he pushed the heavy bureau away from the wall and picked up the frame. He stepped backward and sat on the edge of the bed studying it. The glass was cracked into an intricate spiderweb that had probably occurred when the frame fell. The damaged glass partially obscured an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and fading to a brownish yellow around the edges. The photo was more than twenty years old. Bosch knew this because between two cracks in the glass he saw his own, young face staring out and smiling.
Bosch turned the frame over and carefully bent back the tin prongs that kept the cardboard backing in place. As he was sliding the yellowed photo out, the glass finally gave way and the pieces dropped to the floor in shatters. He moved his feet away from the glass but didn't get up. He studied the photograph. There were no markings on front or back to tell where or when it had been taken. But he knew it must have been sometime in late 1969 or early 1970, because some of the men in the picture were dead after that.
There were seven of them in the photo. All tunnel rats. All shirtless and proudly displaying their T-shirt tan lines and tattoos, each man's dog tags taped together to keep them from jangling while they crawled through the tunnels. They had to have been in the Echo Sector of Cu Chi District, but Bosch could not tell or remember what village. The soldiers stood in a trench, positioned on both sides of a tunnel entrance no wider than the pipe in which Meadows would later be found dead. Bosch looked at himself and thought that his smile in the photograph was foolish. He was embarrassed by it now, in light of what was still to come after the moment was captured. Then he looked at Meadows in the photo and saw the thin smile and vacant stare. The others had always said Meadows would have a thousand-yard stare in an eight-by-eight room.
Bosch looked down at the glass between his feet and saw a pink piece of paper about the size of a baseball card. He picked it up by its edges and studied it. It was a pawn ticket from a shop downtown. The customer name on it was William Fields. It listed one item pawned: an antique bracelet, gold with jade inlay. The ticket was dated six weeks earlier. Fields had gotten $800 for the bracelet. Bosch slipped it into an evidence envelope from his pocket and stood up.
The trip downtown took an hour because of the traffic heading to Dodger Stadium. Bosch spent the time thinking about the apartment. It had been searched, but Edgar was right. It was a rush job. The pants pockets were the obvious tip. But the bureau drawers should've been put back in correctly, and the photo and the hidden pawn slip should not have been missed. What had been the hurry? He concluded it was because Meadows's body was in the apartment. It had to be moved.
Bosch exited on Broadway and headed south past Times Square to the pawnshop located in the Bradbury Building. Downtown L.A. was as quiet as Forest Lawn on most weekends, and he didn't expect to find the Happy Hocker open. He was curious and just wanted to drive by and take a look at the place before heading to the communications center. But when he drove past the storefront he saw a man outside with an aerosol can painting the word OPEN in black on a sheet of plywood. The board stood in place of the shop's front window. Bosch could see shards of glass on the dirty sidewalk below the plywood. He pulled to the curb. The spray painter was inside by the time he got to the door. He stepped through the beam of an electric eye, which sounded a bell from somewhere above all the musical instruments hanging from the ceiling.
"I'm not open, not Sundays," a man called from the back. He was standing behind a chrome cash register that was atop a glass counter.
"That's not what the sign you just painted says."
"Yes, but that is for tomorrow. People see boards over your windows they think you're out of business. I'm not out of business. I'm open for business, except for weekends. I just have a board out there for a few days. I painted OPEN so people will know, you see? Starting tomorrow."
"Do you own this business?" Bosch said as he pulled his ID case out and flipped open his badge. "This will only take a couple minutes."
"Oh, police. Why din't you say? I been waiting all day for you police."
Bosch looked around, confused, then put it together.
"You mean the window? I'm not here about that."
"What do you mean? The patrol police said to wait for detective police. I waited. I been here since five A.M. this morning."
Bosch looked around the shop. It was filled with the usual array of brass musical instruments, electronic junk, jewelry and collectibles. "Look, Mr.—"
"Obinna. Oscar Obinna pawnshops of Los Angeles and Culver City."
"Mr. Obinna, detectives don't roll on vandalism reports on weekends. I mean, they might not even be doing that during the week anymore."
"What vandalism? This was a breakthrough. Grand robbery."
"You mean a break-in? What was taken?"
Obinna gestured to two glass counter cases that flanked the cash register. The top plate in each case had been smashed into a thousand pieces. Bosch walked up closer and could see small items of jewelry, cheap-looking earrings and rings, nestled among the glass. But he also saw velvet-covered jewelry pedestals, mirrored plates and wood ring pegs where pieces should have been but weren't. He looked around and saw no other damage in the store.
"Mr. Obinna, I can call the duty detective and see if anyone is going to come out today, and if so when they will be here. But that is not what I've come for."
Bosch then pulled out the clear plastic envelope with the pawn ticket in it. He held it up for Obinna to see.
"Can I see this bracelet please?" The moment he said it he felt a bad premonition come over him. The pawnbroker, a small, round man with olive skin and dark hair noodled over a bare cranium, looked at Bosch incredulously, his dark bushy eyebrows knitted together.
"You're not going to take the report on my cases?"
"No sir, I'm investigating a murder. Can you please show me the bracelet pawned on this ticket? Then I will call the detective bureau and find out if anyone is coming today on your break-in. Thank you for your cooperation."
"Aygh! You people! I cooperate. I send my lists each week, even take pictures for your pawn men. Then all I ask for is one detective to investigate a robbery and I get a man who says his job is murder. I been waiting now since five A.M. in the morning."
"Give me your phone. I'll get somebody over."
Obinna took the receiver off a wall phone behind one of the damaged counters and handed it across. Bosch gave him the number to dial. While Bosch talked to the duty detective at Parker Center, the shopkeeper looked up the pawn ticket in a logbook. The duty detective, a woman Bosch knew had not been involved in a field investigation during her entire career with the Robbery-Homicide Division, asked Bosch how he had been, then told him that she had referred the pawnshop break-in to the local station even though she knew there would be no detectives there today. The local station was Central Division. Bosch walked around the counter and dialed the detective bureau there anyway. There was no answer. While the phone rang on unanswered, Bosch began a one-sided conversation.
"Yeah, this is Harry Bosch, Hollywood detectives, I'm just trying to check on the status of the break-in over at the Happy Hocker on Broadway. . . . He is. Do you know when? . . . Uh huh, uh huh. . . . Right, Obinna, O-B-I-N-N-A."
He looked over and Obinna nodded at the correct spelling.
"Yeah, he's here waiting. . . . Right . . . I'll tell him.
Thank you."
He hung up the phone. Obinna looked at him, his bushy eyebrows arched.
"It's been a busy day, Mr. Obinna," Bosch said. "The detectives are out, but they'll get here. Shouldn't be too much longer. I gave the watch officer your name and told him to get 'em over here as soon as possible. Now, can I see the bracelet?"
"No."
Bosch dug a cigarette out of a package he pulled from his coat pocket. He knew what was coming before Obinna spread his arm across one of the damaged display cases.
"Your bracelet, it is gone," the pawnbroker said. "I looked it up here in my record. I see that I had it here in the case because it was a fine piece, very valuable to me. Now it is gone. We are both victims of the robber, yes?"
Obinna smiled, apparently happy to share his woe. Bosch looked into the glitter of sharp glass in the bottom of the case. He nodded and said, "Yes."
"You are a day late, detective. A shame."
"Did you say only these two cases were robbed?"
"Yes. A smash and grab. Quick. Quick."
"What time?"
"Police called me at four-thirty A.M. in the morning.
That is the time of the alarm. I came at once. The alarm, when the window was smashed, the alarm went off. The officers found no one. They stayed until I came. Then I begin to wait for detectives that do not come. I cannot clean up my cases until they get here to investigate this crime."
Bosch was thinking of the time scheme. The body dumped sometime before the anonymous 911 call at 4 A.M. The pawnshop broken into about the same time. A bracelet pawned by the dead man taken. There are no coincidences, he told himself.
"You said something about pictures. Lists and pictures for the pawn detail?"
"Yes, LAPD, that is true. I turn over lists of everything I take in to the pawn detectives. It is the law. I cooperate fully."
Obinna nodded his head and frowned mournfully into the broken display case.
"What about the pictures?" Bosch said.
"Yes, pictures. These pawn detectives, they ask me to take pictures of my best acquisitions. Help them better identify for stolen merchandise. It is not the law, but I say sure, I cooperate fully. I buy the Polaroid kind of camera. I keep pictures if they want to come and look. They never do. It's bullshit."
"You have a picture of this bracelet?"
Obinna's eyebrows arched again as he considered the idea for the first time.
"I think," he said, and then he disappeared through a black curtain in a doorway behind the counter. He came out a few moments later with a shoe box full of Polaroid photos with yellow carbon slips paper-clipped to them. He rustled through the photos, occasionally pulling one out, raising his eyebrows, and then sliding it back into place. Finally, he found what he wanted.
"Here. There it is."
Bosch took the photo and studied it.
"Antique gold with carved jade, very nice," Obinna said. "I remember it, top line. No wonder the shitheel that broke through my window took it. Made in the 1930s, Mexico . . . I gave the man eight hundred dollars. I have not often paid such a price for a piece of jewelry. I remember, very big man, he came here with the ring for the Super Bowl. Nineteen eighty-three. Very nice. I gave him one thousand dollars. He did not come back for it."
He held out his left hand to display the oversized gold ring, which seemed even larger on his small finger.
"The guy who pawned the bracelet, you remember him as well?" Bosch asked.
Obinna looked puzzled. Bosch decided that watching his eyebrows was like watching two caterpillars charging each other. He took one of the Polaroids of Meadows out of his pocket and handed it to the pawnbroker. He studied it closely.
"The man is dead," Obinna said after a moment. The caterpillars seemed to quiver with fear. "The man looks dead."
"I don't need your help for that," Bosch said. "I want to know if he pawned the bracelet."
Obinna handed the photo back. He said, "I think yes."
"He ever come in here and pawn anything else, before or after the bracelet?"
"No. I think I'd remember him. I'll say no."
"I need to take this," Bosch said, holding up the Polaroid of the bracelet. "If you need it back, give me a call."
He put one of his business cards on the cash register. The card was one of the cheap kind, with his name and phone number handwritten on a line. As he walked to the front door, crossing under a row of banjos, Bosch looked at his watch. He turned to Obinna, who was looking through the box of Polaroids again.
"Mr. Obinna, the watch officer, he said to tell you that if the detectives didn't get here in a half hour, you should go home and they will be by in the morning."
Obinna looked at him without saying a word. The caterpillars charged and collided. Bosch looked up and saw himself in the polished brass elbow of a saxophone that hung overhead. A tenor. Then he turned and walked out the door, heading to the com center to pick up the tape.
The watch sergeant in the com center beneath City Hall let Bosch record the 911 call off one of the big reel-to-reels that never stop rolling and recording the cries of the city. The voice of the emergency operator was female and black. The caller was male and white. The caller sounded like a boy.
"Nine one one emergency. What are you reporting?"
"Uh, uh—"
"Can I help you? What are you reporting?"
"Uh, yeah, I'm reporting you have a dead guy in a pipe."
"You said you are reporting a dead body?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"What do you mean a pipe, sir?"
"He is in a pipe up by the dam."
"What dam is that?"
"Uh, you know, where they got the water reservoir and everything, the Hollywood sign."
"Is that the Mulholland Dam, sir? Above Hollywood?"
"Yeah, that's it. You got it. Mulholland. I couldn't remember the name."
"Where is the body?"
"They have a big old pipe up there. You know, the one that people sleep in. The dead guy is in the pipe. He's there."
"Do you know this person?"
"No, man, no way."
"Is he sleeping?"
"Shit, no," The boy laughed nervously. "He's dead."
"How are you sure?"
"I'm sure. I'm just telling you. If you don't want to—"
"What is your name, sir?"
"What is this? What do you need my name for? I just saw it, I didn't do it."
"How am I to know this is a legitimate call?"
"Check the pipe, you'll know. I don't know what else to tell you. What's my name got to do with anything?"
"For our records, sir. Can you give me your name?"
"Uh, no."
"Sir, will you stay there until an officer arrives?"
"No, I'm already gone. I'm not there, man. I'm down—"
"I know, sir. I have a readout here that says you are at a pay phone on Gower near Hollywood Boulevard. Will you wait for the officer?"
"How—? Never mind, I gotta go now. You check it out.
The body is there. A dead guy."
"Sir, we would like to talk—"
The line was disconnected. Bosch put the cassette tape in his pocket and headed out of the com center the way he had come in.
It had been ten months since Harry Bosch had been on the third floor at Parker Center. He had worked in RHD—the Robbery-Homicide Division—for almost ten years, but never came back after his suspension and transfer from the Homicide Special squad to Hollywood detectives. On the day he got the word, his desk was cleared by two goons from Internal Affairs named Lewis and Clarke. They dumped his stuff on the homicide table at Hollywood Station, then left a message on his phone tape at home saying that's where he could find it. Now, ten months later, he was back on the hallowed floor of the department's elite detective squad, and he was glad it was Sunday. There would be no faces he knew. No reason to look away.
Room 321 was empty except for the weekend duty detective, whom Bosch didn't know. Harry pointed to the back of the room and said, "Bosch, Hollywood detectives. I have to use the box."
The duty man, a young guy with a haircut he had kept when he split the Marine Corps, had a gun catalog open on his desk. He looked back at the computers along the back wall as if to make sure they were still there and then back at Bosch.
"S'pose to use the one in your own division," he said.
Bosch walked by him. "I don't have the time to go out to Hollywood. I got an autopsy in twenty minutes," he lied.
"You know, I've heard of you, Bosch. Yeah. The TV show and all of that. You used to be on this floor. Used to."
The last line hung in the air like smog and Bosch tried to ignore it. As he went back to the computer terminals, he couldn't help but let his eyes wander over his old desk. He wondered who used it now. It was cluttered, and he noticed the cards on the Rolodex were crisp and unworn at the edges. New. Harry turned around and looked at the duty man, who was still watching him.
"This your desk when you aren't pulling Sundays?"
The kid smiled and nodded his head.
"You deserve it, kid. You're just right for the part. That hair, that stupid grin. You're going to go far."
"Just 'cause you got busted out of here for being a one-man army . . . Ah, f*ck you, Bosch, you has-been."
Bosch pulled a chair on casters away from a desk and pushed it in front of the IBM PC sitting on a table against the rear wall. He hit the switch and in a few moments the amber-colored letters appeared on the screen: "Homicide Information Tracking Management Automated Network."
For a moment Bosch smiled at the department's unceasing need for acronyms. It seemed to him that every unit, task force and computer file had been christened with a name that gave its acronym the sound of eliteness. To the public, acronyms meant action, large numbers of manpower applied to vital problems. There was HITMAN, COBRA, CRASH, BADCATS, DARE. A hundred others. Somewhere in Parker Center there was someone who spent all day making up catchy acronyms, he believed. Computers had acronyms, even ideas had acronyms. If your special unit didn't have an acronym, then you weren't shit in this department.
Once he was in the HITMAN system, a template of case questions appeared on the screen and he filled in the blanks. He then typed in three search keys: "Mulholland Dam," "overdose" and "staged overdose." He then pushed the execute key. Half a minute later, the computer told him that a search of eight thousand homicide cases—about ten years' worth—stored on the computer's hard disk had come up with only six hits. Bosch called them up one by one. The first three were unsolved slayings of young women who were found dead on the dam in the early 1980s. Each was strangled. Bosch glanced quickly at the information and went on. The fourth case was a body found floating in the reservoir five years earlier. Cause of death was not drowning but otherwise unknown. The last two were drug overdoses, the first of which occurred during a picnic at the park above the reservoir. It looked pretty straightforward to Bosch and he went on. The last bit was a DB found in the pipe fourteen months earlier. Cause of death was later determined to be heart stoppage due to an overdose of tar heroin.
"Decedent known to frequent area of the dam and sleep in pipe," the computer readout said. "No further follow-up."
It was the death that Crowley, the Hollywood watch sergeant, had mentioned when he woke Bosch up that morning. Bosch pushed a key and printed out the information on the last death, though he didn't think it figured into his case. He signed off and shut down the computer, then he sat there a moment thinking. Without getting out of the chair he rolled over to another PC. He turned it on and fed his password in. He took the Polaroid out of his pocket, looked at the bracelet and typed in its description for a stolen property records search. This in itself was an art. He had to describe the bracelet the way he believed other cops would, cops who might be typing in descriptions of a whole inventory of jewelry taken in a robbery or burglary. He described the bracelet simply as "antique gold bracelet with carved jade dolphin design." He pressed the search key and in thirty seconds the computer screen said "No hit." He tried it again, typing "gold-and-jade bracelet" and then punching the search key. This time there were 436 hits. Too many. He needed to thin the herd. He typed "gold bracelet with jade fish" and pressed search. Six hits. That was more like it.
The computer said a gold bracelet with carved jade fish had turned up on four crime reports and two departmental bulletins that had been entered into the computer system since its development in 1983. Bosch knew that because of the immense duplication of records in any police department, all six entries could be and probably were from the same case or report of a missing or stolen bracelet. He called the abbreviated crime reports up on the computer screen and found that his suspicion was correct. The reports were generated by a single burglary in September at Sixth and Hill downtown. The victim was a woman named Harriet Beecham, age seventy-one, of Silver Lake. Bosch tried to place the location in his mind but could not think of what building or business was there. There was no summary of the crime on the computer; he would have to go to records and pull a hard copy. But there was a limited description of the gold-and-jade bracelet, and several other pieces of jewelry taken from Beecham. The bracelet Beecham reported lost could or could not have been the one that Meadows had pawned—the description was too vague. There were several supplementary report numbers given on the computer report and Bosch wrote them all down in his notebook. It seemed to him as he did this that Harriet Beecham's loss had generated an unusual amount of paper.
He next called up the information on the two bulletins. Both had come from the FBI, the first issued two weeks after Beecham had been burglarized. It was then reissued three months later when Beecham's jewelry had still not turned up. Bosch wrote down the bulletin number and turned off the computer. He went across the room to the robbery/commercial burglary section. On a steel shelf that ran along the back wall were dozens of black binders that held the bulletins and BOLOs from past years. Bosch took down the one marked September and began looking through it. He quickly realized that the bulletins were not in chronological order and weren't all issued in September. In fact, there was no order. He might have to look through all ten months since Beecham's burglary to find the bulletin he needed. He pulled an armful of the binders off the shelf and sat down at the burglary table. A few moments later he felt the presence of someone across the table from him.
"What do you want?" he said without looking up.
"What do I want?" the duty detective said. "I want to know what the f*ck you are doing, Bosch. This isn't your place anymore. You can't just come in here like you're running the crew. Put that shit back on the shelf, and if you want to look through it come back down here tomorrow and ask, goddammit. And don't give me any bullshit about an autopsy. You've already been here a half hour."
Bosch looked up at him. He put his age at twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, even younger than Bosch had been when he had made it to Robbery-Homicide. Either standards had dropped or RHD wasn't what it was. Bosch knew it was actually both. He looked back down at the bulletin binder.
"I'm talking to you, a*shole!" the detective boomed.
Bosch reached his foot up under the table and kicked the chair that was across from him. The chair shot out from the table and its backrest hit the detective in the crotch. He doubled over and made an oomph sound, grabbing the chair for support. Bosch knew he had his reputation going for him now. Harry Bosch: a loner, a fighter, a killer. C'mon kid, he was saying, do something. But the young detective just stared at Bosch, his anger and humiliation in check. He was a cop who could pull the gun but maybe not the trigger. And once Bosch knew that, he knew the kid would walk away.
The young cop shook his head, waved his hands like he was saying Enough of this, and walked back to the duty desk.
"Go ahead, write me up, kid," Bosch said to his back.
"F*ck you," the kid feebly returned.
Bosch knew he had nothing to worry about. IAD wouldn't even look at an officer-on-officer beef without a corroborating witness or tape recording. One cop's word against another's was something they wouldn't touch in this department. Deep down, they knew a cop's word by itself was worthless. That was why Internal Affairs cops always worked in pairs.
An hour and seven cigarettes later, Bosch found it. A photocopy of another Polaroid of the gold-and-jade bracelet was part of a fifty-page packet of descriptions and photos of property lost in a burglary at WestLand National Bank at Sixth and Hill. Now Bosch was able to place the address in his mind, and he remembered the dark smoked glass of the building. He had never been inside the bank.
A bank heist with jewelry taken, he thought. It didn't make much sense. He studied the list. Almost every item was a piece of jewelry and there was too much there for a walk-in robbery. Harriet Beecham alone was listed as having lost eight antique rings, four bracelets, four earrings. Besides that, these were listed as burglary losses, not robbery losses. He looked through the Be on Lookout package for any kind of crime summary, but didn't find any. Just a bureau contact: Special Agent E. D. Wish.
Then he noticed in a block on the BOLO sheet that there were three dates noted for the date of the crime. A burglary over a three-day span during the first week of September. Labor Day weekend, he realized. Downtown banks are closed three days. It had to have been a safe-deposit caper. A tunnel job? Bosch leaned back and thought about that. Why hadn't he remembered it? A heist like that would have played in the media for days. It would have been talked about in the department even longer. Then he realized he had been in Mexico on Labor Day, and for the next three weeks. The bank heist had occurred while he was serving the one-month suspension for the Dollmaker case. He leaned forward, picked up a phone and dialed.
"Times, Bremmer."
"It's Bosch. Still got you working Sundays, huh?"
"Two to ten, every Sunday, no parole. So, what's up? I haven't talked to you since, uh, your problem with the Dollmaker case. How you liking Hollywood Division?"
"It'll do. For a while, at least." He was speaking low so the duty detective would not overhear.
Bremmer said, "Like that, huh? Well, I heard you caught the stiff up at the dam this morning."
Joel Bremmer had covered the cop shop for the Times longer than most cops had been on the force, including Bosch. There was not much he didn't hear about the department, or couldn't find out with a phone call. A year ago he called Bosch for comment on his twenty-two-day suspension, no pay. Bremmer had heard about it before Bosch. Generally, the police department hated the Times, and the Times was never short in its criticism of the department. But in the middle of that was Bremmer, whom any cop could trust and many, like Bosch, did.
"Yeah, that's my case," Bosch said. "Right now, it's nothing much. But I need a favor. If it works out the way it's looking, then it will be something you'd want to know about."
Bosch knew he didn't have to bait him, but he wanted the reporter to know there might be something later.
"What do you need?" Bremmer said.
"As you know, I was out of town last Labor Day on my extended vacation, courtesy of IAD. So I missed this one. But there was—"
"The tunnel job? You're not going to ask about the tunnel job, are you? Over here in downtown? All the jewelry? Negotiable bonds, stock certificates, maybe drugs?"
Bosch heard the reporter's voice go up a notch in urgency. He had been right, it had been a tunnel and the story had played well. If Bremmer was this interested, then it was a substantial case. Still, Bosch was surprised he had not heard of it after coming back to work in October.
"Yeah, that's the one," he said. "I was gone then, so I missed it. Ever any arrests?"
"No, it's open. FBI's doing it, last I checked."
"I want to look at the clips on it tonight. Is that all right?"
"I'll make copies. When are you coming?"
"I'll head over in a little while."
"I take it this has got something to do with this morning's stiff?"
"It's looking that way. Maybe. I can't talk right now. And I know the feebees have the case. I'll go see them tomorrow. That's why I want to see the clips tonight."
"I'll be here."
After hanging up the phone, Bosch looked down at the FBI photocopy of the bracelet. There was no doubt it was the piece that had been pawned by Meadows and was in Obinna's Polaroid. The bracelet in the FBI photo was in place on a woman's liver-spotted wrist. Three small carved fish swimming on a wave of gold. Bosch guessed it was Harriet Beecham's seventy-one-year-old wrist and the photo had probably been taken for insurance purposes. He looked over at the duty detective, who was still leafing through the gun catalog. He coughed loudly like he had seen Nicholson do in a movie once and at the same time tore the BOLO sheet out of the binder. The kid detective looked over at Bosch and then went back to the guns and bullets.
As he folded the BOLO sheet into his pocket, Bosch's electronic pager went off. He picked up the phone and called Hollywood Station, expecting to be told there was another body waiting for him. It was a watch sergeant named Art Crocket, whom everyone called Davey, who took the call.
"Harry, you still out in the field?" he said.
"I'm at Parker Center. Had to check on a few things."
"Good, then you're already near the morgue. A tech over there name of Sakai called, said he needs to see you."
"See me?"
"He said to tell you that something came up and they're doing your cut today. Right now, matter of fact."
It took Bosch five minutes to get over to County-USC Hospital and fifteen minutes to find a parking spot. The medical examiner's office was located behind one of the medical center buildings that had been condemned after the '87 earthquake. It was a two-story yellow prefab without much architectural style or life. As Bosch was going through the glass doors where the living people entered and into the front lobby, he passed a sheriff's detective he had spent some time with while working the Night Stalker task force in the early eighties.
"Hey, Bernie," Bosch said and smiled.
"Hey, f*ck you, Bosch," Bernie said. "The rest of us catch ones that count, too."
Bosch stopped there a moment to watch the detective walk into the parking lot. Then he went in and to the right, down a government-green corridor, passing through two sets of double doors—the smell getting worse each time. It was the smell of death and industrial-strength disinfectant. Death had the upper hand. Bosch stepped into the yellow-tiled scrub room. Larry Sakai was in there, putting a paper gown over his hospital scrubs. He already had on a paper mask and booties. Bosch took a set of the same out of cardboard boxes on a stainless steel counter and started putting them on.
"What's with Bernie Slaughter?" Bosch asked. "What happened in here to piss him off?"
"You're what happened, Bosch," Sakai said without looking at him. "He got a call out yesterday morning. Some sixteen-year-old shoots his best friend. Up in Lancaster. Looks like accidental but Bernie's waiting on us to check the bullet track and powder stippling. He wants to close it. I told him we'd get to it late today, so he came in. Only we aren't going to get to it at all today. 'Cause Sally's got a bug up his ass about doing yours. Don't ask me why. He just checked the stiff out when I brought it in and said we'd do it today. I told him we'd have to bump somebody, and he said bump Bernie. But I couldn't get him on the line in time to stop him from coming in. So that's why Bernie's pissed. You know he lives all the way down to Diamond Bar. Long ride in for nothing."
Bosch had the mask, gown and booties on and followed Sakai down the tiled hall to the autopsy suite. "Then maybe he ought to be pissed at Sally, not me," he said.
Sakai didn't answer. They walked to the first table, where Billy Meadows lay on his back, naked, his neck braced against a short cut of two-by-four wood. There were six of the stainless steel tables in the room. Each had gutters running alongside its edges and drain holes in the corners. There was a body on each. Dr. Jesus Salazar was huddled over Meadows's chest with his back to Bosch and Sakai.
"Afternoon, Harry, I've been waiting," Salazar said, still not looking. "Larry, I'm going to need slides on this."
The medical examiner straightened up and turned. In his rubber-gloved hand he held what looked like a square plug of flesh and pink muscle tissue. He placed it in a steel pan, the kind brownies are cooked in, and handed it to Sakai. "Give me verticals, one of the puncture track, then two on either side for comparison."
Sakai took the pan and left the room to go to the lab. Bosch saw that the plug of meat had been cut from Meadows's chest, about an inch above the left nipple.
"What'd you find?" Bosch asked.
"Not sure yet. We'll see. The question is, What did you find, Harry? My field tech told me you were demanding an autopsy on this case today. Why is that?"
"I told him I needed it today because I wanted to get it done tomorrow. I thought that was what we had agreed on, too."
"Yes, he told me so, but I got curious about it. I love a good mystery, Harry. What made you think this was hinky, as you detectives say?"
We don't say it anymore, Bosch thought. Once it's said in the movies and people like Salazar pick it up, it's ancient.
"Just some things didn't fit at the time," Bosch said. "There are more things now. From my end, it looks like a murder. No mystery."
"What things?"
Bosch got out his notebook and started flipping through the pages as he talked. He listed the things he had noticed wrong at the death scene: the broken finger, the lack of distinct tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head.
"He had a hype kit in his pocket and we found a stove in the pipe, but it doesn't look right. Looks like a plant to me. Looks to me like the pop that killed him is in the arm there. Those other scars on his arms are old. He hasn't been using his arms in years."
"You're right about that. Aside from the one recent puncture in the arm, the groin area is the only area where punctures are fresh. The inside thighs. An area usually used by people going to great lengths to hide their addiction. But then again, this could have just been his first time back on the arms. What else you got, Harry?"
"He smoked, I'm pretty sure. There was no pack of cigarettes with the body."
"Couldn't somebody have taken them off the body? Before it was discovered. A scavenger?"
"True. But why take the smokes and not the kit? There's also his apartment. Somebody searched the place."
"Could have been someone who knew him. Someone looking for his stash."
"True again." Bosch flipped through a few more pages in the notebook. "The kit on the body had whitish-brown crystals in the cotton. I've seen enough tar heroin to know it turns the straining cotton dark brown, sometimes black. So it looks like it was some fine stuff, probably overseas, that was put in his arm. That doesn't go with the way he was living. That's uptown stuff."
Salazar thought a moment before saying, "It's all a lot of supposition, Harry."
"The last thing, though, is—and I am just starting to work on this—he was involved in some kind of caper."
Bosch gave him a brief synopsis of what he knew about the bracelet, its theft from the bank vault and then from the pawnshop. Salazar's domain was the forensic detail of the case. But Bosch had always trusted Sally and found that it sometimes helped to bounce other details of a case off him. The two had met in 1974, when Bosch was a patrolman and Sally was a new assistant coroner. Bosch was assigned guard duty and crowd control on East Fifty-fourth in South-Central where a firefight with the Symbionese Liberation Army had left a house burned to the ground and five bodies in the smoking rubble. Sally was assigned to see if there was a sixth—Patty Hearst—somewhere in the char. The two of them spent three days there, and when Sally finally gave up, Bosch had won a bet that she was still alive. Somewhere.
When Bosch was finished with the story about the bracelet, it seemed to have mollified Sally's worries about the death of Billy Meadows not being a mystery. He seemed energized. He turned to a cart on which his cutting tools were piled and rolled it next to the autopsy table. He switched on a sound-activated tape recorder and picked up a scalpel and a pair of regular gardening shears. He said, "Well, let's get to work."
Bosch moved back a few steps to avoid any spatter and leaned against a counter on which there was a tray full of knives and saws and scalpels. He noticed that a sign taped to the side of the tray said: To Be Sharpened.
Salazar looked down at the body of Billy Meadows and began: "The body is that of a well-developed Caucasian male measuring sixty-nine inches in length, weighing one hundred sixty-five pounds and appearing generally consistent with the stated age of forty years. The body is cold and unembalmed with full rigor and posterior dependent fixed lividity."
Bosch watched him start but then noticed the plastic bag containing Meadows's clothes on the counter next to the tool pan. He pulled it over and opened it up. The smell of urine immediately assaulted his nostrils, and he thought for a moment of the living room at Meadows's apartment. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves as Salazar continued to describe the body.
"The left index finger shows a palpable fracture without laceration or petechial contusion or hemorrhage."
Bosch glanced over his shoulder and saw that Salazar was wiggling the broken digit with the blunt end of the scalpel as he spoke to the tape recorder. He concluded his external description of the body by mentioning the skin punctures.
"There are hemorrhagic puncture wounds, hypodermic type, on the upper inside thighs and interior side of the left arm. The arm puncture exudes a bloody fluid and appears to be most recent. No scabbing. There is another puncture, in the upper left chest, which exudes a small amount of bloody fluid and appears to be slightly larger than that caused by hypodermic puncture."
Salazar put his hand over the tape recorder's speaker and said to Bosch, "I'm having Sakai get slides of this chest puncture. It looks very interesting."
Bosch nodded and turned back to the counter and began spreading out Meadows's clothes. Behind him he heard Salazar using the shears to open up the dead man's chest.
The detective pulled each pocket out and looked at the lint. He turned the socks inside out and checked the inside lining of the pants and shirt. Nothing. He took a scalpel out of the To Be Sharpened pan and cut the stitches out of Meadows's leather belt and pulled it apart. Again nothing. Over his shoulder he heard Salazar saying, "The spleen weighs one hundred ninety grams. The capsule is intact and slightly wrinkled, and the parenchyma is pale purple and trabecular."
Bosch had heard it all hundreds of times before. Most of what a pathologist said into his tape recorder meant nothing to the detective who stood by. It was the bottom line the detective waited for: What killed the person on the cold steel table? How? Who?
"The gallbladder is thin walled," Salazar was saying. "It contains a few cc's of greenish bile with no stones."
Bosch shoved the clothes back into the plastic bag and sealed it. Then he dumped the leather work shoes Meadows had been wearing out of a second plastic bag. He noticed reddish-orange dust fall from inside the shoes. Another indication the body had been dragged into the pipe. The heels had scraped on the dried mud at the bottom of the pipe, drawing the dust inside the shoes.
Salazar said, "The bladder mucosa is intact, and there are only two ounces of pale yellow urine. The external genitalia and vagina are unremarkable."
Bosch turned around. Salazar had his hand on the tape recorder speaker. He said, "Coroner's humor. Just wanted to see if you were listening, Harry. You might have to testify to this one day. To back me up."
"I doubt it," Bosch said. "They don't like boring juries to death."
Salazar started the small circular saw that was used to open the skull. It sounded like a dentist's drill. Bosch turned back to the shoes. They were well oiled and cared for. The rubber soles showed only modest wear. Stuck in one of the deep grooves of the tread of the tight shoe was a white stone. Bosch pried it out with the scalpel. It was a small chunk of cement. He thought of the white dust in the rug in Meadows's closet. He wondered if the dust or the chunk from the shoe tread could be matched to the concrete that had guarded the WestLand Bank's vault. But if the shoes were so well cared for, could the chunk have been in the tread for nine months since the vault break-in? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was from his work on the subway project. If he actually had such a job. Bosch slipped the chunk of cement into a small plastic envelope and put it in his pocket with the others he had collected throughout the day.
Salazar said, "Examination of the head and cranial contents reveals no trauma or underlying pathological disease conditions or congenital anomalies. Harry, I'm going to do the finger now."
Bosch put the shoes back in their plastic bag and returned to the autopsy table as Salazar placed an X-ray of Meadows's left hand on a light window on the wall.
"See here, these fragments?" he said as he traced small, sharp white spots on the negative. There were three of them near the fractured joint. "If this was an old break, these would, over time, have moved into the joint. There is no scarring discernible on the X-ray but I am going to take a look."
He went to the body and used a scalpel to make a T-incision in the skin on the top of the finger joint. He then folded the skin back and dug around with the scalpel in the pink meat, saying, "No . . . no . . . nothing. This was post, Harry. You think it could have been one of my people?"
"I don't know," Bosch said. "Doesn't look like it. Sakai said he and his sidekick were careful. I know I didn't do it. How come there's no damage to the skin?"
"That is an interesting point. I don't know. Somehow the finger was broken without the exterior being damaged. I can't answer that one. But it shouldn't have been too hard to do. Just grab the finger and yank down. Provided you have the stomach for it. Like so."
Salazar went around the table. He lifted Meadows's right hand and yanked the finger backward. He couldn't get the leverage needed and couldn't break the joint.
"Harder than I thought," he said. "Perhaps the digit was struck with a blunt object of some kind. One that did not blemish the skin."
When Sakai came in with the slides fifteen minutes later, the autopsy was completed and Salazar was sewing Meadows's chest closed with thick, waxed twine. He then used an overhead hose to spray debris off the body and wet down the hair. Sakai bound the legs together and the arms to the body with rope, to prevent them from moving during the different stages of rigor. Bosch noticed that the rope cut across the tattoo on Meadows's arm, across the rat's neck.
Using his thumb and forefinger, Salazar closed Meadows's eyes.
"Take him to the box," he said to Sakai. Then to Bosch, "Let's take a look at these slides. This seemed odd to me because the hole was bigger than your normal scag spike and its location, in the chest, was unusual.
"The puncture is clearly antemortem, possibly perimortem—there was only slight hemorrhaging. But the wound is not scabbed over. So we're talking shortly before, or even during death. Maybe the cause of death, Harry."
Salazar took the slides to a microscope that was on the counter at the back of the room. He chose one of the slides and put it on the viewing plate. He bent over to look and after half a minute finally said, "Interesting."
He then looked briefly at the other slides. When he was done, he put the first slide back on the viewing plate.
"Okay, basically, I removed a one-inch-square section of the chest where this puncture was located. I went into the chest about one and a half inches deep with the cut. The slide is a vertical dissection of the sample, showing the track of the perforation. Do you follow me?"
Bosch nodded.
"Good. It's kind of like slicing an apple open to expose the track of a worm. The slide traces the path of the perforation and any immediate impact or damage. Take a look."
Bosch bent to the eyepiece of the microscope. The slide showed a straight perforation about one inch deep, through the skin and into the muscle, tapering in width like a spike. The muscle's pink color changed to a dark brownish color around the deepest point of the penetration.
"What does it mean?" he asked.
"It means," said Salazar, "that the puncture was through the skin, through the fascia—that's the fibrous fat layer— and then directly into the pectoral muscle. You notice the deepening color of the muscle around the penetration?"
"Yes, I notice."
"Harry, that's because the muscle is burned there."
Bosch looked away from the microscope to Salazar. He thought he could make out the line of a thin smile beneath the pathologist's breathing mask.
"Burned?"
"A stun gun," the pathologist said. "Look for one that fires its electrode dart deep into the skin tissue. About three to four centimeters deep. Though in this case, it is likely the electrode was manually pressed deeper into the chest."
Bosch thought a moment. A stun gun would be virtually impossible to trace. Sakai came back into the room and leaned on the counter by the door, watching. Salazar collected three glass vials of blood and two containing yellowish liquid from the tool cart. There was also a small steel pan containing a brown lump of material that Bosch recognized from experience in this room as liver.
"Larry, here are the tox samples," Salazar said. Sakai took them and disappeared from the room again.
"You're talking about torture, electric shock," Bosch said.
"I would say it looks so," Salazar said. "Not enough to kill him, the trauma is too small. But possibly enough to get information from him. An electric charge can be very persuasive. I think there is ample history on that. With the electrode positioned in the subject's chest, he could probably feel the juice going right into his heart. He would have been paralyzed. He'd tell them what they wanted and then could only watch while they put a fatal dosage of heroin into his arm."
"Can we prove any of this?"
Salazar looked down at the tile floor and put his finger on his mask, and scratched his lip beneath it. Bosch was dying for a cigarette. He had been in the autopsy room nearly two hours.
"Prove any of it?" Salazar said. "Not medically. Tox tests will be done in a week. For the sake of argument, say they come back heroin overdose. How do we prove that someone else put it in his arm, not himself? Medically, we can't. But we can show that at the time of death or shortly before, there was a traumatic assault on the body in the form of electric shock. He was being tortured. After death there is the unexplained damage to the first digit of the left hand."
He rubbed the finger over his mask again and then concluded, "I could testify that this was a homicide. The totality of the medical evidence indicates death at the hands of others. But, for the moment, there is no cause. We wait for the tox studies to be completed and then we'll put our heads together again."
Bosch wrote a paraphrase of what Salazar had just said into his notebook. He would have to type it into his own reports.
"Of course," Salazar said, "proving any of this beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is another matter. I would guess that, Harry, you have to find that bracelet and find out why it was worth torturing and killing a man for."
Bosch closed his notebook and started to pull off the paper gown.
The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.
The sun hung like a ball of copper in the driver's-side window. He had the car radio tuned to a jazz station and Coltrane was playing "Soul Eyes." On the seat next to him was a file containing the newspaper clippings from Bremmer. The file was weighted down by a six-pack of Henry's. Bosch got off at Barham and then took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills above Studio City. His home was a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage. It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its midpoint. It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled. But the view was the trade-off. From the back porch Bosch could look northeast across Burbank and Glendale. He could see the purple-hued mountains past Pasadena and Altadena. Sometimes he could see the smoky loom-up and orange blaze of brush fires in the hills. At night the sound of the freeway below softened and the searchlights at Universal City swept the sky. Looking out on the Valley never failed to give Bosch a sense of power which he could not explain to himself. But he did know that it was one reason—the main reason—he bought the place and would never want to leave it.
Bosch had bought it eight years earlier, before the real estate boom got seriously endemic, with a down payment of $50,000. That left a mortgage of $1,400 a month, which he could easily afford because the only things he spent money on were food, booze and jazz.
The down payment money had come from a studio that gave it to him for the rights to use his name in a TV mini-series based on a string of murders of beauty shop owners in Los Angeles. Bosch and his partner during the investigation were portrayed by two midlevel TV actors.
His partner took his fifty grand and his pension and moved to Ensenada. Bosch put his down on a house he wasn't sure could survive the next earthquake but that made him feel as though he were prince of the city.
Despite Bosch's resolve never to move, Jerry Edgar, his current partner and part-time real estate man, told him the house was now worth three times what he had paid for it. Whenever the subject of real estate came up, which was often, Edgar counseled Bosch to sell and trade up. Edgar wanted the listing. Bosch just wanted to stay where he was.
It was dark by the time he reached the hill house. He drank the first beer standing on the back porch, looking out at the blanket of lights below. He had a second bottle while sitting in his watch chair, the file closed on his lap. He hadn't eaten all day and the beer hit him quickly. He felt lethargic and yet jumpy, his body telling him it needed food. He got up and went to the kitchen and made a pressed turkey sandwich that he brought back to the chair with another beer.
When he was finished eating be brushed the sandwich crumbs off the file and opened it up. There had been four Times stories on the WestLand bank caper. He read them in the order of publication. The first was just a brief that had run on page 3 of the Metro section. The information had apparently been gathered on the Tuesday the break-in was discovered. At the time, the LAPD and the FBI weren't that interested in talking to the press or letting the public know what had happened.
AUTHORITIES PROBE BANK BREAK-IN

An undisclosed amount of property was stolen from the WestLand National Bank in downtown during the three-day holiday weekend, authorities said Tuesday.
The burglary, being investigated by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, was discovered when managers of the bank located at the corner of Hill Street and Sixth Avenue arrived Tuesday and found the safe-deposit vault had been looted, FBI Special Agent John Rourke said.
Rourke said an estimate on the loss of property had not been made. But sources close to the investigation said more than $1 million worth of jewels and other valuables stored in the vault by customers of the bank was taken.
Rourke also declined to say how the burglars entered the vault but did say that the alarm system was not working properly. He declined to elaborate.
A spokesman for WestLand declined Tuesday to discuss the burglary. Authorities said there were no arrests or suspects.
Bosch wrote the name John Rourke in his notebook and went on to the next newspaper story, which was much longer. It had been published the day after the first and had been bannered across the top of the front page of the Metro section. It had a two-deck headline and was accompanied by a photograph of a man and woman standing in the safe-deposit vault looking down at a manhole-sized opening in the floor. Behind them was a pile of deposit boxes. Most of the small doors on the back wall were open. Bremmer's byline was on the story.
AT LEAST $2 MILLION TAKEN IN BANK
TUNNEL JOB; BANDITS HAD HOLIDAY
WEEKEND TO DIG INTO VAULT

The article expanded on the first story, filling in the detail that the perpetrators had tunneled into the bank, digging an approximately 150-yard line from a city storm main that ran under Hill Street. The story said an explosive device had been used to make the final break through the floor of the vault. According to the FBI, the burglars probably were in the vault through most of the holiday weekend, drilling open the individual safe-deposit boxes. The entry tunnel from the stormwater main to the vault was believed to have been dug during seven to eight weeks before the heist.
Bosch made a note to ask the FBI how the tunnel had been dug. If heavy equipment was used, most banks' alarms, which measured sound as well as earth vibrations, would have picked up the ground movement and sounded. Also, he wondered, why hadn't the explosive device set off alarms?
He looked then at the third article, published the day after the second. This one wasn't written by Bremmer, though it still had been played on the front of Metro. It was a feature on the dozens of people lining up at the bank to see if their safe-deposit boxes were among those pried open and emptied. The FBI was escorting them into the vault and then taking their statements. Bosch scanned the story but saw the same thing over and over again: people angry or upset or both because they had lost items that they had placed in the vault because they believed it was safer than their homes. Near the bottom of the story Harriet Beecham was mentioned. She had been interviewed as she came out of the bank, and she told the reporter she had lost a lifetime's collection of valuables bought while traveling the world with her late husband, Harry. The story said Beecham was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
"I lost the rings he bought me in France, a bracelet of gold and jade from Mexico," Beecham said. "Whoever they were that did this, they took my memories."
Very melodramatic. Bosch wondered if the last quote had been made up by the reporter.
The fourth story in the file had been published a week later. By Bremmer, it was short and had been buried in the back of Metro, behind where they stuffed the Valley news. Bremmer reported that the WestLand investigation was being handled exclusively by the FBI. The LAPD provided initial backup, but as leads dried up, the case was left in the bureau's hands. Special Agent Rourke was quoted again in this story. He said agents were still on the case full-time but no progress had been made or suspects identified. None of the property taken from the vault, he said, had turned up.
Bosch closed the file. The case was too big for the bureau to slough off like a bank stickup. He wondered if Rourke had been telling the truth about the lack of suspects. He wondered if Meadows's name had ever come up. Two decades earlier Meadows had fought and sometimes lived in the tunnels beneath the villages of South Vietnam. Like all the tunnel fighters, he knew demolition work. But that was for bringing a tunnel down. Implosion. Could he have learned how to blow through the concrete-and-steel floor of a bank vault? Then Bosch realized that Meadows would not necessarily have needed to know how. He was sure the WestLand job had taken more than one person.
He got up and got another beer from the refrigerator. But before going back to the watch chair he detoured into the bedroom, where he pulled an old scrapbook out of the bottom drawer of the bureau. Back in the chair he drank down half the beer, then opened the book. There were bunches of photographs loose between the pages. He had meant to mount them but had never gotten around to it. He rarely even opened the book. The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked. He picked up each snapshot and examined it, at some point realizing that he had never mounted them on the pages because he liked the idea of holding each picture in his hands, feeling it.
The photographs were all taken in Vietnam. Like the picture found in Meadows's apartment, these were mostly in black and white. It was cheaper back then, getting black-and-white film developed in Saigon. Bosch was in some of the shots, but most were photos that he had taken with an old Leica his foster father had given him before he left. It was a peace gesture from the old man. He hadn't wanted Harry to go, and they had fought about it. So the camera was given. And accepted. But Bosch was not one to tell stories when he returned, and the snapshots were left spread through the pages of the scrapbook, never to be mounted, rarely to be looked at.
If there was a recurring theme of the photographs it was the smiling faces and the tunnels. In almost every shot, there were soldiers standing in defiant poses at the mouth of a hole they had probably just been in and conquered. To the outsider, the photos would appear strange, maybe fascinating. But to Bosch they were scary, like newspaper photos he had seen of people trapped in wrecked cars, waiting to be cut out by the firemen. The photos were of the smiling faces of young men who had dropped down into hell and come back to smile into the camera. Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there. But, still, they went.
Bosch turned a cracked page of the album and found Billy Meadows staring up at him. The photo had undoubtedly been taken a few minutes after the one Bosch had found at Meadows's apartment. The same group of soldiers. The same trench and tunnel. Echo Sector, Cu Chi District. But Bosch wasn't in this portrait because he had left the frame to snap the photo. His Leica had caught Meadows's vacant stare and stoned smile—his pale skin looked waxy but taut. He had captured the real Meadows, Bosch thought. He put the photo back in the page and turned to the next one. This one was of himself, no one else in the frame. He clearly remembered setting the camera down on a wooden table in a hootch and setting the timer. Then he moved into the frame. The camera had snapped as he was shirtless, the tattoo on his deeply tanned shoulder catching the falling sun through the window. Behind him, but out of focus, was the dark entrance to a tunnel lying uncovered on the straw floor of the hootch. The tunnel was blurred, forbidding darkness, like the ghastly mouth in Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.
It was a tunnel in the village they called Timbuk2, Bosch knew as he stared at the photo. His last tunnel. He was not smiling in the picture. His eyes were set in dark sockets. And neither was he smiling as he looked at it now. He held the photo in two hands, absentmindedly rubbing his thumbs up and down the borders. He stared at the photograph until fatigue and alcohol pulled him down into sleepy thought. Almost dreamlike. He remembered that last tunnel and he remembered Billy Meadows.
Three of them went in. Two of them came out.
The tunnel had been discovered during a routine sweep at a small village in E Sector. The village had no name on the recon maps, so the soldiers called it Timbuk2. The tunnels were turning up everywhere, so there weren't enough rats to go around. When the tunnel mouth was found under a rice basket in a hootch, the top sergeant didn't want to have to wait for a dust-off to land with fresh rats. He wanted to press on, but he knew he had to check the tunnel out. So the top made a decision like so many others in the war. He sent three of his own men in. Three virgins, scared as shit, maybe six weeks in country among them. The top told them not to go far, just set charges and come out. Do it fast, and cover each other's ass. The three green soldiers dutifully went down into the hole. Except a half-hour later, only two came out.
The two who made it out said that the three of them had separated. The tunnel branched into several directions and they split up. They were telling the top this when there was a rumble, and a huge cough of noise and smoke and dust belched from the tunnel mouth. The C-4 charges had detonated. The company loot came in then and said they wouldn't leave the zone without the missing man. The whole company waited a day for the smoke and dust to settle in the tunnel and then two tunnel rats were dropped during a dust-off—Harry Bosch and Billy Meadows. He didn't care if the missing soldier was dead, the lieutenant told them. Get him out. He wasn't going to leave one of his boys in that hole. "Go get 'im and bring 'im out here so we can get 'im a decent burial," the lieutenant said.
Meadows said, "We wouldn't leave any of our own in there, either."
Bosch and Meadows went down the hole then and found that the main entry led to a junction room where baskets of rice were stored and three other passageways began. Two of these had collapsed in the C-4 explosions. The third was still open. It was the one the missing soldier had taken. And that was the way they went.
They crawled through the darkness, Meadows in front, using their lights sparingly, until they reached a dead end. Meadows poked around the tunnel's dirt floor until he found the concealed door. He pried it open and they dropped down into another level of the labyrinth. Without saying a word, Meadows pointed one way and crawled off. Bosch knew he would go the other way. Each would be alone now, unless the VC were waiting ahead. Bosch's way was a winding passage that was as warm as a steam bath. The tunnel smelled damp and faintly like a latrine. He smelled the missing soldier before he saw him. He was dead, his body putrifying but sitting in the middle of the tunnel with his legs straight out and spread, the toes of his boots pointed upward. His body was propped against a stake planted in the floor of the tunnel. A piece of wire that cut an inch into his neck was wrapped around the stake and held him in place. Afraid of a booby trap, Bosch didn't touch him. He played the beam of his flashlight over the neck wound and followed the trail of dried blood down the front of the body. The dead man wore a green T-shirt with his name stenciled in white on the front. Al Crofton, it said beneath the blood. There were flies mired in the crusted blood on his chest, and for a moment Bosch wondered how they found their way so far down. He dipped the light to the dead soldier's crotch and saw that it, too, was black with dried blood. The pants were torn open and Crofton looked as though he had been mauled by a wild animal. Sweat began to sting Bosch's eyes and his breathing became louder, more hurried than he wanted it to be. He was immediately aware of this but was also aware that he could do nothing to stop it. Crofton's left hand was palm up on the ground next to his thigh. Bosch put the light on it and saw the bloody set of testicles. He stifled the urge to vomit but could not prevent himself from hyperventilating.
He cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to slow his gasping for air. It didn't work. He was losing it. He was panicking. He was twenty years old and he was scared. The walls of the tunnel were closing tighter on him. He rolled away from the body and dropped the light, its beam still focused on Crofton. Bosch kicked at the clay walls of the tunnel and curled into a fetal position. The sweat in his eyes was replaced by tears. At first they came silently, but soon his sobs racked his entire body and his noise seemed to echo in all directions in the darkness, right to where Charlie sat and waited. Right to hell.