The black echo

Part II
Monday, May 21
Bosch came awake in his watch chair about 4 A.M. He had left the sliding glass door open to the porch, and the Santa Ana winds were billowing the curtains, ghostlike, out across the room. The warm wind and the dream had made him sweat. Then the wind had dried the moisture on his skin like a salty shell. He stepped out onto the porch and leaned against the wood railing, looking down at the lights of the Valley. The searchlights at Universal were long since retired for the night and there was no traffic sound from the freeway down in the pass. In the distance, maybe from Glendale, he heard the whupping sound of a helicopter. He searched and found the red light moving low in the basin. It wasn't circling and there was no searchlight. It wasn't a cop. He thought then that he could smell the slight scent of malathion, sharp and bitter, on the red wind.
He went back inside and closed the sliding glass door. He thought about bed but knew there would be no more sleep this night. It was often this way with Bosch. Sleep would come early in the night but not last. Or it would not come until the arriving sun softly cut the outline of the hills in the morning fog.
He had been to the sleep disorder clinic at the VA in Sepulveda but the shrinks couldn't help him. They told him he was in a cycle. He would have extended periods of deep sleep trances into which torturous dreams invaded. This would be followed by months of insomnia, the mind reacting defensively to the terrors that awaited in sleep. Your mind has repressed the anxiety you feel over your part in the war, the doctor told him. You must assuage these feelings in your waking hours before your sleep time can progress undisturbed. But the doctor didn't understand that what was done was done. There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.
He showered and shaved, afterward studying his face in the mirror and remembering how unkind time had been to Billy Meadows. Bosch's hair was turning to gray but it was full and curly. Other than the circles under his eyes, his face was unlined and handsome. He wiped the remaining shaving cream off and put on his beige summer suit with a light-blue button-down oxford. On a hanger in the closet he found a maroon tie with little gladiator helmets on it that was not unreasonably wrinkled or stained. He pegged it in place with the 187 tie pin, clipped his gun to his belt and then headed out into the predawn dark. He drove into downtown for an omelet, toast and coffee at the Pantry on Figueroa. Open twenty-four hours a day since before the Depression. A sign boasted that the place had not gone one minute in that time without a customer. Bosch looked around from the counter and saw that at the moment he was personally carrying the record on his shoulders. He was alone.
The coffee and cigarettes got Bosch ready for the day. After, he took the freeway back up to Hollywood, passing a frozen sea of cars already fighting to get downtown.
Hollywood Station was on Wilcox just a couple of blocks south of the Boulevard, where most of its business came from. He parked at the curb out front because he was only staying awhile and didn't want to get caught in the back lot traffic jam at the change of watch. As he walked through the small lobby he saw a woman with a blackened eye, who was crying and filling out a report with the desk officer. But down the hall to the left the detective bureau was quiet. The night man must have been out on a call or up in the Bridal Suite, a storage room on the second floor where there were two cots, first come, first served. The detective bureau's hustle and bustle seemed to be frozen in place. No one was there, but the long tables assigned to burglary, auto, juvenile, robbery and homicide were all awash in paperwork and clutter. The detectives came and went. The paper never changed.
Bosch went to the back of the bureau to start a pot of coffee. He glanced through a rear door and down the back hallway where the lockup benches and the jail were located. Halfway down the hall to the holding tank, a young white boy with blond dreadlocks sat handcuffed to a bench. A juvie, maybe seventeen at most, Bosch figured. It was against California law to put them in a holding tank with adults. Which was like saying it might be dangerous for coyotes to be put in a pen with dobermans.
"What you looking at, f*ckhead?" the boy called down the hall to Bosch.
Bosch didn't say anything. He dumped a bag of coffee into a paper filter. A uniform stuck his head out of the watch commander's office farther down the hall.
"I told you," the uniform yelled at the kid. "Once more and I'm going to go up a notch on the cuffs. Half hour and you won't feel your hands. Then how you going to wipe your ass in the john?"
"I guess I'll have to use your f*ckin' face."
The uniform stepped into the hall and headed toward the kid, his hard black shoes making long, mean strides. Bosch shoved the filter bowl into the coffee machine and hit the brewing cycle switch. He walked away from the hallway door and over to the homicide table. He didn't want to see what happened with the kid. He dragged his chair away from his spot at the table and over to one of the community typewriters. The pertinent forms he needed were in slots on a rack on the wall above the machine. He rolled a blank crime scene report into the typewriter. Then he took his notebook out of his pocket and opened to the first page.
Two hours of typing and smoking and drinking bad coffee later, a bluish cloud hung near the ceiling lights over the homicide table and Bosch had completed the myriad forms that accompany a homicide investigation. He got up and made copies on the Xerox in the back hall. He noticed the dreadlock kid was gone. Then he got a new blue binder out of the office supplies closet—after finessing the door with his LAPD ID card—and hooked one set of the typed reports onto the three rings. The other set he hid in an old blue binder he kept in a file drawer and that was labeled with the name of an old unsolved case. When he was done, he reread his work. He liked the order the paperwork gave the case. On many previous cases he had made it a practice to reread the murder book each morning. It helped him draw out theories. The smell of the binder's new plastic reminded him of other cases and invigorated him. He was in the hunt again. The reports he had typed and placed in the murder book were not complete, though. On the Investigating Officer's Chronological Report he had left out several parts of his Sunday afternoon and evening. He neglected to type in the connection he had made between Meadows and the WestLand bank burglary. He also left out the visits to the pawnshop and to see Bremmer at the Times. There were no typed summaries of these interviews either. It was only Monday, day two. He wanted to wait until he had been to the FBI before committing any of that information to the official record. He wanted to know, exactly, what was going on first. It was a precaution he took on every case. He left the bureau before any of the other detectives had arrived for the day.
By nine Bosch had driven to Westwood and was on the seventeenth floor of the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard. The FBI waiting room was austere, the usual plastic-covered couches and scarred coffee table with old copies of the FBI Bulletin fanned across its fake wood-grain veneer. Bosch didn't bother to sit down or read. He stood before the sheer white curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the panorama. The northern exposure offered a view that stretched from the Pacific eastward around the rim of the Santa Monica Mountains to Hollywood. The curtains served as a layer of fog over the smog. He stood with his nose almost touching the soft gauze fabric and looked down, across Wilshire, at the Veterans Administration Cemetery. Its white stones sprouted in the manicured grass like row after row of baby teeth. Near the cemetery's entrance a funeral was in progress, with a full honor guard at attention. But there wasn't much of a crowd of mourners. Farther north, at the top of a rise where there were no tomb-stones, Bosch could see several workers removing sod and using a backhoe to dig up a long slice of the earth. He checked their progress from time to time as he scanned the view, but he could not figure out what they were doing. The clearing was far too long and wide for a grave.
By ten-thirty the soldier's funeral was done but the cemetery workers were still toiling on the hill. And Bosch was still waiting at the curtain. A voice finally hit him from behind.
"All those graves. Such neat rows. I try never to look out the windows here."
He turned. She was tall and lithesome with brown wavy hair about to the shoulder with blond highlights. A nice tan and little makeup. She looked hard-shell and maybe a little weary for so early in the day, the way lady cops and hookers get. She wore a brown business suit and a white blouse with a chocolate-brown western bow. He detected the unsymmetrical curves of her hips beneath the jacket. She was carrying something small on the left side, maybe a Rugar, which was unusual. Bosch had always known female detectives to carry their weapons in their purses.
"That's the veterans cemetery," she said to him.
"I know."
He smiled, but not at that. It was that he had expected Special Agent E. D. Wish to be a man. No reason other than that was who most of the bureau agents assigned to the bank detail were. Women were part of the newer image of the bureau and weren't usually found in the heavy squads. It was a fraternity largely made up of dinosaurs and cast-outs, guys who couldn't or wouldn't cut it in the bureau's hard-charging focus on white-collar, espionage and drug investigations. The days of Melvin Purvis, G-man, were just about over. Bank robbery wasn't flashy anymore. Most bank robbers weren't professional thieves. They were hypes looking for a score that would keep them going for a week. Of course, stealing from a bank was still a federal crime. That was the only reason the bureau still bothered.
"Of course," she said. "You must know that. How can I help you, Detective Bosch? I'm Agent Wish."
They shook hands, but Wish made no movement toward the door she had come through. It had closed and the lock had snapped home. Bosch hesitated a moment and then said, "Well, I've been waiting all morning to see you. It's about the bank squad . . . One of your cases."
"Yes, that's what you told the receptionist. Sorry to have kept you, but we had no appointment and I had another pressing matter. I wish you had called first."
Bosch nodded his understanding, but again there was no movement toward inviting him in. This isn't working right, he thought.
"Do you have any coffee back there?" he said.
"Uh . . . yes, I believe we do. But can we make this quick? I'm really in the middle of something at the moment."
Who isn't, Bosch thought. She used a card key to open the door and then pulled it open and held it for him. Inside, she led him down a corridor where there were plastic signs on the walls next to the doors. The bureau didn't have the same affinity for acronyms as the police department. The signs were numbered—Group 1, Group 2 and so on. As they went along, he tried to place her accent. It had been slightly nasal but not like New York. Philadelphia, he decided, maybe New Jersey. Definitely not Southern California, never mind the tan that went with it.
"Black?" she said.
"Cream and sugar, please."
She turned and entered a room that was furnished as a small kitchen. There was a counter and cabinets, a four-cup coffeemaker, a microwave and a refrigerator. The place reminded Bosch of law offices he had been to to give depositions. Nice, neat, expensive. She handed him a styrofoam cup of black coffee and signaled for him to put in his own cream and sugar. She wasn't having any. If it was an attempt to make him uncomfortable, it worked. Bosch felt like an imposition, not someone who brought good news, a break in a big case. He followed her back into the hallway and they went through the next doorway, which was marked Group 3. It was the bank robbery-kidnap unit. The room was about the size of a convenience store. It was the first federal squad room Bosch had been in, and the comparison to his own office was depressing. The furniture here was newer than anything he had ever seen in any LAPD squad. There was actually carpet on the floor and a typewriter or computer at almost every desk. There were three rows of five desks and all of them but one were empty. A man in a gray suit sat at the first desk in the middle row, holding a phone to his ear. He didn't look up as Bosch and Wish walked in. Except for the background noise of a tactical channel coming from a scanner on a file cabinet in the back, the place could have passed for a real estate office.
Wish took a seat behind the first desk in the first row and gestured for Bosch to take the seat alongside it. This put him directly between Wish and Gray Suit on the phone. Bosch put his coffee down on her desk and began to figure right away that Gray Suit wasn't really on the phone, even though the guy kept saying "Uh huh, uh huh" or "Uh uh" every few moments or so. Wish opened a file drawer in her desk and pulled out a plastic bottle of water, some of which she poured into a paper cup.
"We had a two eleven at a savings and loan in Santa Monica, just about everybody's out on it," she explained as he scanned the almost empty room. "I was coordinating from here. That's why you had to wait out there. Sorry."
"No problem. Get him?"
"What makes you say it was a him?"
Bosch shrugged his shoulders. "Percentages."
"Well, it was two of them. One of each. And yes, we got them. They were in a stolen from Reseda reported yesterday. Female went in and took care of business. Male was the wheel. They took the 10 to the 405, then into LAX, where they left the car in front of a skycap at United. Then they took the escalator to the arrivals level, got on a shuttle bus to the Flyaway station in Van Nuys and then took a cab all the way back down to Venice. To a bank. We had an LAPD copter over them the whole time. They never looked up. When she went into the second bank we thought we were going to see another two eleven so we rushed her while she was waiting in line for a teller. Got him in the parking lot. Turns out she was just going to deposit the take from the first bank. An inter-bank transfer, the hard way. See some dumb people in this business, Detective Bosch. What can I do for you?"
"You can call me Harry."
"As I am doing what for you?"
"Interdepartmental cooperation," he said. "Kinda like you and our helicopter this morning."
?      ?       ?
Bosch drank some of his coffee and said, "Your name is on a BOLO I came across yesterday. Year-old case out of downtown. I'm interested in it. I work homicide out of Hollywood Div—"
"Yes, I know," Agent Wish interrupted.
"—ision."
"The receptionist showed me the card you gave. By the way, do you need it back?" That was a cheap shot. He saw his sad-looking business card on her clean green blotter. It had been in his wallet for months and its corners were curled up at the edges. It was one of the generic cards the department gave detectives who worked out in the bureaus. It had the embossed police badge on it and the Hollywood Division phone number but no name. You could buy yourself an ink pad and order a stamp and sit at your desk at the beginning of each week and stamp out a couple of dozen cards. Or you could just write your name on the line with a pen and not give out too many. Bosch had done the latter. Nothing the department could do could embarrass him anymore.
"No, you can keep it. By the way, you have one?"
In a quick, impatient motion, she opened the top middle drawer of the desk, took a card out of a little tray and put it down on the desk top next to the elbow Bosch had leaned there. He took another sip of coffee while glancing down at it. The E stood for Eleanor.
"So anyway you know who I am and where I come from," he began. "And I know a little bit about you. For instance, you investigated, or are investigating, a bank caper from last year in which the perps came in through the ground. A tunnel job. WestLand National."
He noticed her attention immediately pick up with that, and even thought he sensed Gray Suit's breathing catch. Bosch had a line in the right water.
"Your name is on the bulletins. I am investigating a homicide I believe is related to your case and I want to know . . . basically, I want to know what you've got . . . Can we talk about suspects, possible suspects. . . . I think we might be looking for the same people. I think my guy might have been one of your perps."
Wish was quiet for a moment and played with a pencil she'd picked up off the blotter. She pushed Bosch's card around on the green square with the eraser end. Gray Suit was still acting like he was on the phone. Bosch glanced over at him and their eyes briefly connected. Bosch nodded and Gray Suit looked away. Bosch figured he was looking at the man whose comments had been in the newspaper articles. Special Agent John Rourke.
"You can do better than that, can't you, Detective Bosch?" Wish said. "I mean, you just walk in here and wave the flag of cooperation and you expect me to just open up our files."
She tapped the pencil three times on the desk and shook her head like she was disciplining a child.
"How about a name?" she said. "How about giving me some reason for the connection? We usually handle this kind of request through channels. We have liaisons that evaluate requests from other law enforcement agencies to share files and information. You know that. I think it might be best—"
Bosch pulled the FBI bulletin with the insurance photo of the bracelet out of his pocket. He unfolded it and laid it on the blotter. Then he took the pawnshop Polaroid out of the other pocket and also dropped that on the desk.
"WestLand National," he said, tapping a finger on the bulletin. "The bracelet was pawned six weeks ago in a downtown shop. My guy pawned it. Now he's dead."
She kept her eyes on the Polaroid bracelet and Bosch saw recognition there. The case had stayed that much with her.
"The name is William Meadows. Found him in a pipe yesterday morning, up at the Mulholland Dam."
Gray Suit ended his one-sided conversation. He said, "I appreciate the information. I have to go, we're wrapping up a two eleven. Uh huh. . . . Thank you. . . . You too, good-bye now."
Bosch didn't look at him. He watched Wish. He thought he sensed that she wanted to look over at Gray Suit. Her eyes darted that way but then quickly went back to the photograph. Something wasn't right, and Bosch decided to jump back into the silence.
"Why don't we skip the bullshit, Agent Wish? As far as I can tell, you've never recovered a single stock certificate, a single coin, a single jewel, a single gold-and-jade bracelet. You've got nothing. So screw the liaison stuff. I mean, what is this? My guy pawned the bracelet; he ended up dead. Why? We have parallel investigations here, don't you think? More likely, the same investigation."
Nothing.
"My guy was either given that bracelet by your perps or he stole it from them. Or possibly, he was one of them. So, maybe the bracelet wasn't supposed to turn up yet. Nothing else has. And he goes and breaks the rules and pawns the thing. They whack him, then go to the pawnshop and steal it back. Whatever. The thing is, we are looking for the same people. And I need a direction to start in."
She remained silent still, but Bosch sensed a decision coming. This time he waited her out.
"Tell me about him," she finally said.
He told her. About the anonymous call. About the body. About the apartment that had been searched. About finding the pawn stub hidden behind the photo. And then going to the pawnshop to find the bracelet stolen. He didn't say that he had known Meadows.
"Anything else taken from the pawnshop, or just this bracelet?" she asked when he was done.
"Of course. Yes. But just as a cover for the real thing they wanted. The bracelet. Way I see it, Meadows was killed because whoever killed him wanted the bracelet. He was tortured before he was murdered because they wanted to know where it was. They got what they needed, killed him, then went and got the bracelet. Mind if I smoke?"
"Yes, I do. What could be so important about one bracelet? This bracelet is only a drop in the bucket of what was taken, of what hasn't ever turned up."
Bosch had thought of that and didn't have an answer. He said, "I don't know."
"If he was tortured as you say, why was the pawn ticket there for you to find? And why did they have to break into the pawnshop? You're suggesting that he told them where the bracelet was but didn't give up the ticket?"
Bosch had thought about this, too. He said, "I don't know. Maybe he knew they wouldn't let him live. So he only gave them half of what they needed. He kept something back. It was a clue. He left the pawn stub behind as a clue."
Bosch thought about the scenario. He had first begun to put it together when rereading his notes and the reports he had typed. He decided it was time to play one more card.
"I knew Meadows twenty years ago."
"You knew this victim, Detective Bosch?" Her voice was louder now, accusatory. "Why didn't you say that when you first came in here? Since when does the LAPD allow its detectives to go around investigating the deaths of their friends?"
"I didn't say that. I said I knew him. Twenty years ago. And I didn't ask for the case. It was my turn in the bucket. I got the call out. It was . . ."
He didn't want to say coincidence.
"This is all very interesting," Wish said. "It is also irregular. We—I'm not sure we can help you. I think—"
"Look, when I knew him, it was with the U.S. Army, First Infantry in Vietnam. Okay? We were both there. He was what they called a tunnel rat. Do you know what that means? . . . I was one too."
Wish said nothing. She was looking down at the bracelet again. Bosch had totally forgotten about Gray Suit.
"The Vietnamese had tunnels under their villages," Bosch said. "Some were a century old. The tunnels went from hootch to hootch, village to village, jungle to jungle.
They were under some of our own camps, everywhere. And that was our job, the tunnel soldiers, to go down into those things. There was a whole other war under the ground."
Bosch realized that aside from a shrink and a circle group at the VA in Sepulveda he had never told anyone about the tunnels and what he did.
"And Meadows, he was good at it. As much as you could like going down into that blackness with just a flashlight and a .45, well, he did. Sometimes we'd go down and it would take hours, and sometimes it would take days. And Meadows, well, he was the only one I ever knew over there that wasn't scared of going down there. It was life above ground that scared him."
She didn't say anything. Bosch looked over at Gray Suit, who was writing on a yellow tablet Bosch couldn't read. Bosch heard someone report on the tac channel that he was transporting two prisoners to the Metro lockup.
"So now twenty years later you've got a tunnel caper and I've got a dead tunnel fighter. He was found in a pipe, a tunnel. He had property from your caper." Bosch felt around in his pockets for his cigarettes, then remembered she had said no. "We have to work together on this one. Right now."
He knew by her face it hadn't worked. He emptied his coffee cup, ready for the door. He didn't look at Wish now. He heard Gray Suit pick up the phone again and punch a number out. He stared down at the residue of sugar in the bottom of his cup. He hated sugar in his coffee.
"Detective Bosch," Wish began, "I am sorry you had to wait in the hall so long this morning. I am sorry this fellow soldier you knew, Meadows, is dead. Whether it was twenty years ago or not, I am. I have sympathy for him, and you, and what you may have had to go through. . . . But I am also sorry that I can't help you at the moment. I will have to follow established protocol and talk to my supervisor. I will get back to you. As soon as possible. That is all I can do at the moment."
Bosch dropped the cup into a trash can next to her desk and reached over to pick up the Polaroid and the bulletin page.
"Can we keep the photo here?" Agent Wish asked. "I need to show it to my supervisor."
Bosch kept the Polaroid. He got up and stepped in front of Gray Suit's desk. He held the Polaroid up to the man's face. "He's seen it," he said over his shoulder as he walked out of the office.
Deputy Chief Irvin Irving sat at his desk, brushing his teeth and working the muscles of his jaw into hard rubber balls. He was disturbed. And this clenching and gnashing of teeth was his habit when disturbed or in solitary, contemplative moods. As a result, the musculature of his jaw had become the most pronounced feature of his face. When looked at head-on, Irving's jawline was actually wider than his ears, which were pinned flat against his shaven skull and had a winglike shape to them. The ears and the jaw gave Irving an intimidating if not odd visage. He looked like a flying jaw, as though his powerful molars could crush marbles. And Irving did all he could to promote this image of himself as a fearsome junkyard dog who might sink his teeth into a shoulder or leg and tear out a piece of meat the size of a softball. It was an image that had helped overcome his one impediment as a Los Angeles policeman—his silly name—and could only aid him in his long-planned ascendancy to the chiefs office on the sixth floor. So he indulged the habit, even if it did cost him a new set of $2,000 molar implants every eighteen months.
Irving pulled his tie tight against his throat and ran his hand over his gleaming scalp. He reached to the intercom buzzer. Though he could have easily pushed the speaker button then and barked his command, he waited for his new adjutant's reply first. This was another of his habits.
"Yes, Chief?"
He loved hearing that. He smiled, then leaned forward until his great, wide jaw was inches from the intercom speaker. He was a man who did not trust that technology could do what it was supposed to do. He had to put his mouth to the speaker and shout.
"Mary, get me the jacket on Harry Bosch. It should be in the actives."
He spelled the first and last names for her.
"Right away, Chief."
Irving leaned back, smiled through clenched teeth but then thought he felt something out of alignment. He deftly ran his tongue over his left rear lower molar, searching for a defect in its smooth surface, maybe a slight fissure. Nothing. He opened the desk drawer and took out a small mirror. He opened his mouth and studied the back teeth. He put the mirror back and took out a pale blue Post-it pad and made a note to call for a dental checkup. He closed the drawer and remembered the time he had popped a fortune cookie into his mouth while dining with the city councilman from the Westside. The right rear lower molar had crumbled on the stale cookie. The junkyard dog decided to swallow the dental debris rather than expose the weakness to the councilman, whose confirmation vote he would someday need and expect. During the meal, he had brought to the councilman's attention the fact that his nephew, an LAPD motorman, was a closet homosexual. Irving mentioned that he was doing his best to protect the nephew and prevent his exposure. The department was as homophobic as a Nebraska church, and if the word leaked to the rank and file, Irving explained to the councilman, the officer could forget any hope for advancement. He could also expect brutal harassment from the rest of L.A.'s finest. Irving didn't need to mention the consequences if a scandal broke publicly. Even on the liberal Westside, it wouldn't help a councilman's mayoral ambitions.
Irving was smiling at the memory when Officer Mary Grosso knocked and then walked into the office with a one-inch-thick file in her hand. She placed it on Irving's glass-topped desk. There was nothing else on its gleaming surface, not even a phone.
"You were right, Chief. It was still in the actives files."
The deputy chief in charge of the Internal Affairs Division leaned forward and said, "Yes, I believe I did not have it transferred to archives because I had a feeling we had not seen the last of Detective Bosch. Let me see, that would be Lewis and Clarke, I believe."
He opened the file and read the notations on the inside of the jacket.
"Yes. Mary, will you have Lewis and Clarke come in, please."
"Chief, I saw them in the squad. They were getting ready for a BOR. I'm not sure which case."
"Well, Mary, they will have to cancel the Board of Rights—and please do not talk to me in abbreviations. I am a slow-moving, careful policeman. I do not like shortcuts. I do not like abbreviations. You will learn that. Now, tell Lewis and Clarke I want them to delay the hearing and report to me forthwith."
He flexed his jaw muscles and held them, hard as tennis balls, at their full width. Grosso scurried from the office. Irving relaxed and paged through the file, re-acquainting himself with Harry Bosch. He noted Bosch's military record and his fast advance through the department. From patrol to detectives to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division in eight years. Then the fall: administrative transfer last year from Robbery-Homicide to Hollywood homicide. Should have been fired, Irving lamented as he studied the entries on Bosch's career chronology.
Next, Irving scanned the evaluation report on a psychological given Bosch the year before to determine if he should be allowed to return to duty after killing an unarmed man. The department psychologist wrote:
Through his war and police experiences, most notably including the aforementioned shooting resulting in fatality, the subject has to a high degree become desensitized to violence. He speaks in terms of violence or the aspect of violence being an accepted part of his day-to-day life, for all of his life. Therefore, it is unlikely that what transpired previously will act as a psychological deterrent should he again be placed in circumstances where he must act with deadly force in order to protect himself or others. I believe he will be able to act without delay. He will be able to pull the trigger. In fact, his conversation reveals no ill effects at all from the shooting, unless his sense of satisfaction with the outcome of the incident—the suspect's death—should be deemed inappropriate.

Irving closed the file and tapped it with a manicured nail. He then picked a strand of long brown hair—Officer Mary Grosso's, he presumed—off the glass desk top and dropped it into a wastebasket next to the desk. Harry Bosch was a problem, he thought. A good cop, a good detective—actually, Irving grudgingly admired his homicide work, particularly his affinity for serial slayers. But in the long run, the deputy chief believed, outsiders did not work well inside the system. Harry Bosch was an outsider, always would be. Not part of the LAPD Family. And now the worst had come to Irving's attention. Bosch had not only left the family but appeared to be engaged in activities that would hurt the family, embarrass the family. Irving decided that he would have to move swiftly and surely. He swiveled in his chair and looked out the window at City Hall across Los Angeles Street. Then his gaze dropped, as it always did, to the marble fountain in front of Parker Center, the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty. There was family, he thought. There was honor. He clenched his teeth powerfully, triumphantly. Just then the door opened.
Detectives Pierce Lewis and Don Clarke strode into the office and presented themselves. Neither spoke. They could have been brothers, They shared close-cropped brown hair, the arms-splayed build of weight lifters, conservative gray silk suits. Lewis's had a thin charcoal stripe; Clarke's maroon. Each man was built wide and low to the ground for better handling. Each had a slightly forward tilt to his body, as if he were wading out to sea, crashing through breakers with his face.
"Gentlemen," said lrving, "we have a problem—a priority problem—with an officer who has come across our threshold before. An officer you two worked with some degree of success before."
Lewis and Clarke glanced at each other and Clarke allowed himself a small, quick smile. He couldn't guess who it could be, but he liked going after repeaters. They were so desperate.
"Harry Bosch," Irving said. He waited a moment to let the name sink in, then said, "You need to take a little ride up to Hollywood Division. I want to open a one point eighty-one on him right away. Complainant will be the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
"FBI?" Lewis said. "What did he do with them?"
Irving corrected him for using the abbreviation for the bureau and told them to sit down in the two chairs in front of his desk. He spent the next ten minutes recounting the telephone call he had received minutes earlier from the bureau.
"The bureau says it is too coincidental," he concluded. "I concur. He may be dirty in this, and the bureau wants him off the Meadows case. At the very least, it appears he intervened to help this suspect, his former military comrade, avoid a jail term last year, possibly so he could accomplish this bank burglary. Whether Bosch knew this, or if there was further involvement in the crime, I do not know. But we are going to find out what Detective Bosch is up to."
Irving delayed here to drive home his point with a full jaw flex. Lewis and Clarke knew better than to interrupt. Irving then said, "This opportunity opens the door for the department to do what it was unable to accomplish before with Bosch. Eliminate him. You will report directly to me. Oh, and I want Bosch's supervisor, a Lieutenant Pounds, copied with your daily reports. On the quiet. But you will do more than copy me. I want telephonic reports twice daily, morning and evening."
"We're on our way," Lewis said as he stood up.
"Aim high, gentlemen, but be careful," Irving counseled them. "Detective Harry Bosch is no longer the celebrity he once was. But, nevertheless, do not let him slip away."
Bosch's embarrassment at being unceremoniously dismissed by Agent Wish had turned to anger and frustration as he rode down the elevator. It was like a physical presence in his chest that jumped into his throat as the stainless steel cell descended. He was alone, and when the pager on his belt started to chirp, he let it go on for its allotted fifteen seconds rather than turn it off. He swallowed his anger and embarrassment and formed it into resolve. As he stepped out of the elevator car, he looked down at the phone number on the pager's digital display. An 818 area code—the Valley, but he didn't recognize the number. He stepped to a pod of pay phones in the courtyard in front of the Federal Building and dialed the number. Ninety cents, an electronic voice said. Luckily he had the loose change. He dumped it in and the call was picked up on a half ring by Jerry Edgar.
"Harry," he began without a hello, "I'm still up here at the VA and I'm getting the runaround, man. They don't have any files on Meadows. They say I have to go through D.C. or I gotta get a warrant. I tell them I know there is a file, you know, on account of what you told me. I say, 'Look, if I was to get a search warrant, can you look and make sure you know where this file is?' And so they're lookin' for a while and what they finally come out saying is, yes, they had a file but it's gone. Guess who came and got it with a court order last year?"
"The FBI."
"You know something I don't know?"
"I haven't exactly been sitting on my ass. They say when the bureau took it or why?"
"They weren't told why. FBI agent just came in with the warrant and took it. Checked it out last September and hasn't brought it back since. Didn't give a reason. The F*cking-B-I doesn't have to.'
Bosch was quiet while he thought about this. They knew all along. Wish knew about Meadows and the tunnels and everything else he had just told her. It had all been a show.
"Harry, you there?"
"Yeah, listen, did they show you a copy of the paperwork or know the name of the agent?"
"No, they couldn't find the subpoena receipt and nobody remembered the agent's name, except that she was a woman."
"Take this number where I'm at. Go back to them in records and ask for another file, just see if it's there. My file."
He gave Edgar the pay phone number, his date of birth, social security number and his full name, spelling out his real first name.
"Jesus, that's your first name?" Edgar said. "Harry for short. How'd your momma come up with that one?"
"She had a thing about fifteenth-century painters. It goes with the last name. Go check on the file, then call me back. I'll wait here."
"I can't even pronounce it, man."
"Rhymes with 'anonymous.' "
"Okay, I'll try that. Where you at, anyway?"
"A pay phone. Outside the FBI."
Bosch hung up before his partner could ask any questions. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the phone booth while watching a small group of people walking in a circle on the long green lawn in front of the building. They were holding up homemade signs and placards that protested a proposal to open new oil leases in Santa Monica Bay. He saw signs that said Just Say No to Oil and Isn't the Bay Polluted Enough? and United States of Exxon and so on.
He noticed a couple of TV news crews on the lawn filming the protest. That was the key, he thought. Exposure. As long as the media showed up and put it on the six o'clock news, the protest was a success. A sound-bite success. Bosch noticed that the group's apparent spokesman was being interviewed on camera by a woman he recognized from Channel 4. He also recognized the spokesman but he wasn't sure from where. After a few moments of watching the man's ease during the interview in front of the camera, Bosch placed him. The guy was a TV actor who used to play a drunk on a popular situation comedy that Bosch had seen once or twice. Though the guy still looked like a drunk, the show wasn't on anymore.
Bosch was on his second cigarette, leaning on the phone booth and beginning to feel the heat of the day, when he looked up at the glass doors of the building and saw Agent Eleanor Wish walking through. She was looking down and digging a hand through her purse and hadn't noticed him. Quickly and without analyzing why, he ducked behind the phones and, using them as a shield, moved around them as she walked by. It was sunglasses she had been looking for in the purse. Now she had them on as she walked past the protestors without even a glance in their direction. She headed up Veteran Avenue to Wilshire Boulevard. Bosch knew the federal garage was under the building. Wish was walking in the opposite direction. She was going somewhere nearby. The phone rang.
"Harry, they have your file, too. The FBI. What's going on?"
Edgar's voice was urgent and confused. He didn't like waves. He didn't like mysteries. He was a straight nine-to-five man.
"I don't know what's going on, they wouldn't tell me," Bosch replied. "You head into the office. We'll talk there. If you get there before me, I want you to make a call over to the subway project. Personnel. See if they had Meadows working there. Try under the name Fields, too. Then just do the paper on the TV stabbing. Like we said. Keep your end of our deal. I'll meet you there."
"Harry, you told me you knew this guy, Meadows. Maybe we should tell Ninety-eight it's a conflict, that we ought to turn the case over to RHD or somebody else on the table."
"We'll talk about it in a little while, Jed. Don't do anything or talk to anybody about it till I get there."
Bosch hung up the phone and walked off toward Wilshire. He could see Wish already had turned east toward Westwood Village. He closed the distance between them, crossed to the other side of the street and followed behind. He was careful not to get too close, so that his reflection would not be in the shop windows she was looking in as she walked. When she reached Westwood Boulevard she turned north and crossed Wilshire, coming to Bosch's side of the street. He ducked into a bank lobby. After a few moments he went back out on the sidewalk and she was gone. He looked both ways and then trotted up to the corner. He saw her a half block up Westwood, going into the village.
Wish slowed in front of some shop windows and came to a stop in front of a sporting goods store. Bosch could see female manikins in the window, dressed in lime-green running shorts and shirts. Last year's fad on sale today. Wish looked at the outfits for a few moments and then headed off, not stopping until she was in the theater district. She turned into Stratton's Bar & Grill.
Bosch, on the other side of the street, passed the restaurant without looking and went up to the next corner. He stood in front of the Bruin, below the old theater's marquee, and looked back. She hadn't come out. He wondered if there was a rear door. He looked at his watch. It was a little early for lunch but maybe she liked to beat the crowd. Maybe she liked to eat alone. He crossed the street to the other corner and stood below the canopy of the Fox Theater. He could see through the front window of Stratton's but didn't see her. He walked through the parking lot next to the restaurant and into the rear alley. He saw a public access door at the back. Had she seen him and used the restaurant to slip away? It had been a long while since he had been on a one-man tail, but he didn't think she had made him. He headed down the alley and went in the back door.
Eleanor Wish was sitting alone in the row of wooden booths along the restaurant's right wall. Like any careful cop she sat facing the front door, so she didn't see Bosch until he slid onto the bench across from her and picked up the menu she had already scanned and dropped on the table.
He said, "Never been here, anything good?"
"What is this?" she said, surprise clearly showing on her face.
"I don't know, I thought you might want some company."
"Did you follow me? You followed me."
"At least I'm being up front about it. You know, you made a mistake back at the office. You played it too cool. I walk in with the only lead you've had in nine months and you want to talk about liaisons and bullshit. Something wasn't right but I couldn't figure out what. Now I know."
"What are you talking about? Never mind, I don't want to know."
She made a move to slide out of the booth, but Bosch reached across the table and firmly put his hand on her wrist. Her skin was warm and moist from the walk over. She stopped and turned and smoked him with brown eyes so angry and hot they could have burned his name on a tombstone.
"Let go," she said, her voice tightly controlled but carrying enough of an edge to suggest she could lose it. He let go.
"Don't leave. Please." She lingered a moment and he worked quickly. He said, "It's all right. I understand the reasons for the whole thing, the cold reception back there, everything. I have to say it actually was good work, what you did. I can't hold it against you."
"Bosch, listen to me, I don't know what you are talking about. I think—"
"I know you already knew about Meadows, the tunnels, the whole thing. You pulled his military files, you pulled mine, you probably pulled files on every rat that made it out of that place alive. There had to have been something in the WestLand job that connected to the tunnels back there."
She looked at him for a long moment and was about to speak, when a waitress approached with a pad and pencil.
"For now, just one coffee, black, and an Evian. Thank you," Bosch said before Wish or the waitress could speak. The waitress walked away, writing on the pad.
"I thought you were a cream-and-sugar cop," Wish said.
"Only when people try to guess what I am."
Her eyes seemed to soften then, but only a bit.
"Detective Bosch, look, I don't know how you know what you think you know, but I am not going to discuss the WestLand case. It is exactly as I said at the bureau. I can't do it. I am sorry. I really am."
Bosch said, "I guess maybe I should resent it, but I don't. It was a logical step in the investigation. I would've done the same. You take anybody who fit the profile—tunnel rat—and sift them through the evidence."
"You're not a suspect, Bosch, okay? So drop it."
"I know I'm not a suspect." He gave a short, forced burst of laughter. "I was serving a suspension down in Mexico and can prove it. But you already know that. So for me, fine, I'll drop it. But I need what you have on Meadows. You pulled his files back in September. You must have done a workup on him. Surveillance, known associates, background. Maybe . . . I bet you even pulled him in and talked to him. I need it all now—today, not in three, four weeks when some liaison puts a stamp on it."
The waitress came back with the coffee and water. Wish pulled her glass close but didn't drink.
"Detective Bosch, you are off the case. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be the one to tell you. But you're off. You go back to your office and you'll find out. We made a call after you left."
He was holding his coffee with two hands, elbows on the table. He carefully put the cup down on the saucer, in case his hands began to shake.
"What did you do?" Bosch asked.
"I'm sorry," Eleanor Wish said. "After you left, Rourke —the guy you shoved the picture in front of?— he called the number on your card and talked to a Lieutenant Pounds. He told him about your visit today and suggested there was a conflict, you investigating a friend's death. He said some other things and—"
"What other things?"
"Look, Bosch, I know about you. I'll admit we pulled your files, we checked you out. Hell, but to do that, all we had to do was read the newspapers back then. You and that Dollmaker thing. So I know what you have been through with the internal people, and this isn't going to help, but it was Rourke's decision. He—"
"What other things did he tell?"
"He told the truth. He said both your name and Meadows's had come up in our investigation. He said you both knew each other. He asked that you be taken off the case.
So all of this doesn't matter."
Bosch looked off, out of the booth.
"I want to hear you answer," he said. "Am I a suspect?"
"No. At least you weren't until you walked in this morning. Now, I don't know. I'm trying to be honest. I mean, you have to look at this from our standpoint. One guy we looked at last year comes in and says he is investigating the murder of another guy we looked very hard at. This first guy says, 'Let me see your files.' "
She didn't have to tell him as much as she had. He knew this and knew she was probably going out on a limb saying anything at all. For all the shit he had just stepped in or been put in, Harry Bosch was beginning to like cold, hard Eleanor Wish.
"If you won't tell me about Meadows, tell me one thing about myself. You said I was looked at and then dropped. How'd you clear me? You go to Mexico?"
"That and other things." She looked at him a moment before going on. "You were cleared early on. At first we got excited. I mean, we look through the files of people with tunnel experience in Vietnam and there sitting on the top was the famous Harry Bosch, detective superstar, a couple books written about his cases. TV movie, a spin-off series. And the guy the newspapers just happened to have been filled with, the guy whose star crashed with a one-month suspension and transfer from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division to . . ." She hesitated.
"The sewer." He finished it for her.
She looked down into her glass and continued.
"So, right away Rourke started figuring that maybe that's how you spent your time, digging this tunnel into the bank. From hero to heel, this was your way to get back at society, something crazy like that. But when we backgrounded you and asked around quietly, we heard you went to Mexico for the month. We sent someone down to Ensenada and checked it out. You were clear. Around then we also had gotten your medical files from the VA up at Sepulveda—oh, that's it, that's who you checked with this morning, isn't it?"
He nodded. She continued.
"Anyway, in the medical there were the psychiatrist's reports . . . I'm sorry. This seems like such an invasion."




"I want to know."
"The therapy for PTS. I mean, you are completely functional. But you have infrequent manifestation of post-traumatic stress in forms of insomnia and other things, claustrophobia. A doctor even wrote once that you wouldn't go into a tunnel like that, never again. Anyway, we put a profile of you through our behavioral sciences lab in Quantico. They discounted you as a suspect, said it was unlikely that you would cross the line for something like financial gain."
She let all of that sink in a few moments.
"Those VA files are old," Bosch said. "The whole story is old. I'm not going to sit here and present a case for why I should be a suspect. But that VA stuff is old. I haven't seen a shrink, VA or otherwise, in five years. And as far as that phobia shit goes, I went into a tunnel to look at Meadows yesterday. What do you think your shrinks in Quantico would write about that?"
He could feel his face turn red with embarrassment. He had said too much. But the more he tried to control and hide it, the more blood rushed into his face. The wide-hipped waitress chose that moment to come back and freshen his coffee.
"Ready to order?" she said.
"No," Wish said without taking her eyes off Bosch. "Not yet."
"Hon, we have a big lunch crowd come in here, and we're going to need the table for people what want to eat. I make my living off the hungry ones. Not the ones too angry to eat."
She walked away with Bosch thinking that waitresses were probably better observers of human behavior than most cops. Wish said, "I am sorry about all of this. You should have let me get up when I first wanted to."
The embarrassment was gone but the anger was still there. He wasn't looking out of the booth anymore. He was looking right at her.
"You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don't know me. Tell me what you know."
"I don't know you. I know about you," she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. "You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another."
She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. "Hieronymus Bosch. . . . The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you've seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider's job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it."
She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn't.
"It only took one mistake," she said. "You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn't matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn't enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer."
Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn't say anything, and there was a long period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.
"When you get back to the office," he finally began, "you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on."
"I can't do it. He won't do it."
"Yes, he'll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it."
"Or what? What can you do? I mean, let's be honest. With your record, you'll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn't do it himself."
"Doesn't matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he'll be reading a story in the Times about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau's nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it'll make waves all the way to D.C. It'll be embarrassing and it'll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You'll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away."
She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. "It's not my call. I'll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I'd call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that's what I'll tell him to do."
"It's no bluff. You've checked me out, you know I'll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it's no bluff. I'll have nothing to lose by doing it. He'll have nothing to lose by bringing me in."
He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.
"You've got my file. You know where you can reach me."
"Yes, we do," she said, and then, "Hey, Bosch?"
He stopped and looked back at her.
"The street whore, was she telling the truth? About the pillow?"
"Don't they all?"
Bosch parked in the lot behind the station on Wilcox and smoked right up until he reached the rear door. He killed the butt on the ground and went in, leaving behind the odor of vomit that wafted from the mesh windows at the rear of the station holding tank. Jerry Edgar was pacing in the back hall waiting for him.
"Harry, we've got a forthwith from Ninety-eight."
"Yeah, what about?"
"I don't know, but he's been coming out of the glass box every ten minutes looking for you. You got your beeper and the Motorola turned off. And I saw a couple of the IAD silks up from downtown go in there with him a while ago."
Bosch nodded without saying anything comforting to his partner.
"What's going on?" Edgar blurted. "If we've got a story, let's get it straight before we go in there. You've had experience with this shit, not me."
"I'm not sure what's going on. I think they're kicking us off the case. Me, at least." He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.
"Harry, they don't bring IAD in to do that. Something's on, and, man, I hope whatever you did, you didn't f*ck me up, too."
Edgar immediately looked embarrassed.
"Sorry, Harry, I didn't mean it that way."
"Relax. Let's go see what the man wants."
Bosch headed toward the detective squad room. Edgar said he'd cut through the watch office and then come in from the front hall so it wouldn't look like they had collaborated on a story. When Bosch got to his desk, the first thing he noticed was that the blue murder book on the Meadows case was gone. But he also noticed that whoever had taken it had missed the cassette tape with the 911 call on it. Bosch picked up the cassette and put it in his coat pocket just as Ninety-eight's voice boomed out of the glass office at the head of the squad room. He yelled just one word: "Bosch!" The other detectives in the squad room looked around. Bosch got up and slowly walked toward the glass box, as the office of Lieutenant Harvey "Ninety-eight" Pounds was called. Through the windows he could see the backs of two suits sitting in there with Pounds. Bosch recognized them as the two IAD detectives who had handled the Dollmaker case. Lewis and Clarke.
Edgar came into the squad through the front hallway just as Bosch passed and they walked into the glass box together. Pounds sat dull-eyed behind his desk. The men from Internal Affairs did not move.
"First thing, no smoking, Bosch, you got that?" Pounds said. "In fact, the whole squad stunk like an ashtray this morning. I'm not even going to ask if it was you."
Department and city policy outlawed smoking in all community-shared offices such as squad rooms. It was okay to smoke in a private office if it was your office or if the office's occupant allowed visitors to smoke. Pounds was a reformed smoker and militant about it. Most of the thirty-two detectives he commanded smoked like junkies. When Ninety-eight wasn't around, many of them would go into his office for a quick fix, rather than have to go out to the parking lot, where they'd miss phone calls and where the smell of piss and puke migrated from the rear windows of the drunk tank. Pounds had taken to locking his office door, even on quick trips up the hall to the station commander's office, but anybody with a letter opener could pop the door in three seconds. The lieutenant was constantly returning and finding his office space fouled by smoke. He had two fans in the ten-by-ten room and a can of Glade on the desk. Since the frequency of the fouling had increased with the reassignment of Bosch from Parker Center to Hollywood detectives, Ninety-eight Pounds was convinced Bosch was the major offender. And he was right, but he had never caught Bosch in the act.
"Is that what this is about?" Bosch asked. "Smoking in the office?"
"Just sit down," Pounds snapped.
Bosch held his hands up to show there were no cigarettes between his fingers. Then he turned to the two men from Internal Affairs.
"Well, Jed, it looks like we might be off on a Lewis and Clarke expedition here. I haven't seen the great explorers on the move since they sent me on a no-expense-paid vacation to Mexico. Did some of their finest work on that one. Headlines, sound bites, the whole thing. The stars of Internal Affairs."
The two IAD cops' faces immediately reddened with anger.
"This time, you might do yourself a favor and keep your smart mouth shut," Clarke said. "You're in serious trouble, Bosch. You get it?"
"Yeah, I get it. Thanks for the tip. I got one for you, too. Go back to the leisure suit you used to wear before you became Irving's bendover. You know, the yellow thing that matched your teeth. The polyester does more for you than the silk. In fact, one of the guys out there in the bullpen mentioned that the ass end of that suit is getting shiny, all the work you do riding a desk."
"All right, all right," Pounds cut in. "Bosch, Edgar, sit down and shut up for a minute. This—"
"Lieutenant, I didn't say one thing," Edgar began. "I—"
"Shut up! Everybody! Shut up a minute," Pounds barked. "Jesus Christ! Edgar, for the record, these two are from Internal Affairs, if you didn't already know, Detectives Lewis and Clarke. What this is—"
"I want a lawyer," Bosch said.
"Me too, I guess," added Edgar.
"Oh, bullshit," Pounds said. "We are going to talk about this and get some things straight, and we aren't bringing any Police Protective League bullshit into it. If you want a lawyer, you get one later. Right now you are going to sit here, the both of you, and answer some questions. If not, Edgar, you are going to be bounced out of that eight-hundred-dollar suit and back into uniform, and Bosch, shit, Bosch, you'll probably go down for the count this time."
For a few moments there was silence in the small room, even though the tension among the five men threatened to shatter the windows. Pounds looked out at the squad room and saw about a dozen detectives acting as if they were working but who were actually trying to pick up whatever they could through the glass. Some had been attempting to read the lieutenant's lips. He got up and lowered a set of venetian blinds over the windows. He rarely did this. It was a signal to the squad that this was big. Even Edgar showed his concern, audibly exhaling. Pounds sat back down. He tapped a long fingernail on the blue plastic binder that lay closed on his desk.
"Okay, now let's get down to it," he began. "You two guys are off the Meadows case. That's number one. No questions, you're done. Now, from the top, you are going to tell us anything and everything."
At that, Lewis snapped open a briefcase and pulled out a cassette tape recorder. He turned it on and put it on Pounds's spotless desk.
Bosch had been partnered with Edgar only eight months. He didn't know him well enough to know how he would take this kind of bullying, or how far he could hold out against these bastards. But he did know him well enough to know he liked him and didn't want him to get jammed up. His only sin in this whole thing was that he had wanted Sunday afternoon off to sell houses.
"This is bullshit," Bosch said, pointing to the recorder.
"Turn that off," Pounds said to Lewis, pointing to the recorder, which was actually closer to him than to Lewis. The Internal Affairs detective stood up and picked up the recorder; He turned it off, hit the rewind button and replaced it on the desk.
After Lewis sat back down Pounds said, "Jesus Christ, Bosch, the FBI calls me today and tells me they've got you as a possible suspect in a goddam bank heist. They say this Meadows was a suspect in the same job, and by virtue of that you should now be considered a suspect in the Meadows kill. You think we aren't going to ask questions about that?"
Edgar was exhaling louder now. He was hearing this for the first time.
"Keep the tape off and we'll talk," Bosch said. Pounds contemplated that for a moment and said, "For now, no tape. Tell us."
"First off, Edgar doesn't know shit about this. We made a deal yesterday. I take the Meadows case and he goes home. He does the wrap-up on Spivey, the TV stabbed the night before. This FBI stuff, the bank job, he doesn't know for shit. Let him go."
Pounds seemed to make a point of not looking at Lewis or Clarke or Edgar. He'd make this decision on his own. It produced a slight glimmer of respect in Bosch, like a candle set out in the eye of a hurricane of incompetence. Pounds opened his desk drawer and pulled out an old wooden ruler. He fiddled with it with both hands. He finally looked at Edgar.
"That right, what Bosch says?"
Edgar nodded.
"You know it makes him look bad, like he was trying to keep the case for himself, conceal the connections from you?"
"He told me he knew Meadows. He was up front all the way. It was a Sunday. We weren't going to get anybody to come out and take it off us on account of him knowing the guy twenty years ago. Besides, most of the people who end up dead in Hollywood the police have known one way or the other. This stuff about the bank and all, he must've found out after I left. I'm finding it all out sitting here."
"Okay," Pounds said. "You got any of the paper on this one?"
Edgar shook his head.
"Okay, finish up what you've got on the—what did you call it?—Spivey, yeah, the Spivey case. I'm assigning you a new partner. I don't know who, but I'll let you know. Okay, go on, that's all."
Edgar let out one more audible breath and stood up.
Harvey "Ninety-eight" Pounds let things settle in the room for a few moments after Edgar left. Bosch wanted a cigarette badly, even to just hold one unlit in his mouth. But he wouldn't show them such a weakness.
"Okay, Bosch," Pounds said. "Anything you want to tell us about all this?"
"Yeah. It's bullshit."
Clarke smirked. Bosch paid no mind. But Pounds gave the IAD detective a withering look that further increased his stock of respect with Bosch.
"The FBI told me today I was no suspect," Bosch said. "They looked at me nine months ago because they looked at anybody around here who'd worked the tunnels in Vietnam. They found some connection to the tunnels back there. Simple as that. It was good work, they had to check out everybody, So they looked at me and went on. Hell, I was in Mexico—thanks to these two goons— when the bank thing went down. The FBI just—"
"Supposedly," Clarke said.
"Shove it, Clarke. You're just angling for a way to take your own vacation down there, at taxpayers' expense, checking it out. You can check with the bureau and save the money."
Bosch then turned back to Pounds and adjusted his chair so his back was to the IAD detectives. He spoke in a low voice to make it clear he was talking to Pounds, not them. "The bureau wants me off it because, one, I threw a curve at 'em when I showed up there today to ask about the bank caper. I mean, I was a name from the past, and they panicked and called you. And two, they want me off the case because they probably f*cked it up when they let Meadows skate last year. They blew their one chance at him and don't want an outside department to come in and see that or to break the thing they couldn't break for nine months."
"No, Bosch, that's what's bullshit," Pounds said. "This morning I received a formal request from the assistant special agent in charge who runs their bank squad, a guy named—"
"Rourke."
"You know him. Well, he asked that—"
"I be removed from the Meadows case forthwith. He says I knew Meadows, who just happened to be the prime suspect in the bank job. He ends up dead and I'm on the case. Coincidence? Rourke thinks not. I'm not sure myself."
"That's what he said. So that's where we start. Tell us about Meadows, how you knew him, when you knew him, don't leave one thing out."
Bosch spent the next hour telling Pounds about Meadows, the tunnels, the time Meadows called after almost twenty years and how Bosch got him into VA Outreach in Sepulveda without ever seeing him. Just phone calls. At no time did Bosch address the IAD detectives or acknowledge that they were even in the room.
"I didn't make it a secret that I knew him," he said at the end. "I told Edgar. I walked right in and told the FBI. You think I would have done that if I was the one who did Meadows? Not even Lewis and Clarke are that dumb."
"Well, then, Jesus Christ, Bosch, why didn't you tell me?" Pounds boomed. "Why isn't it in the reports in this book? Why do I have to hear it from the FBI? Why does Internal Affairs have to hear it from the FBI?"
So Pounds hadn't made the call to IAD. Rourke had. Bosch wondered if Eleanor Wish had known that and had lied, or if Rourke called out the goons on his own. He hardly knew the woman—he didn't know the woman— but he found himself hoping she hadn't lied to him.
"I only started the reports this morning," Bosch said. "I was going to bring them up to date after seeing the FBI. Obviously, I didn't get the chance."
"Well, I'm saving you the time," Pounds said. "It's been turned over to the FBI."
"What has? The FBI has no jurisdiction over this. This is a murder case."
"Rourke said they believe the slaying is directly related to their ongoing investigation of the bank job. They will include this in their investigation. We will assign our own case officer through an interdepartmental liaison. If and when the time comes to charge someone in the murder, the appointed officer will take it to the DA for state charges."
"Christ, Pounds, there is something going on. Don't you see that?"
Pounds put the ruler back in the drawer and closed it.
"Yes, something is going on. But I don't see it your way," he said. "That's it, Bosch. That's an order. You are off. These two men want to talk to you and you are on a desk till Internal Affairs is finished with its investigation."
He was quiet a moment before beginning again in a solemn tone. A man unhappy with what be had to say.
"You know, you were sent out here to me last year and I could have put you anywhere. I could have put you on the goddam burglary table, handling fifty reports a week, just buried you in paper. But I didn't. I recognized your skills and put you on homicide, what I thought you wanted. They told me last year that you're good but you don't stay in the lines. Now I see they were right. How this will hurt me, I don't know. But I'm not worrying about what's best for you anymore. Now, you can either talk to these guys or not. I don't really care. But that's it. We're done, you and me. If somehow you ride this one out, you better see about getting a transfer, because you won't be on my homicide table anymore."
Pounds picked up the blue binder off his desk and stood up. As he headed out of the office he said, "I have to get somebody to take this over to the bureau. You men can have the office as long as you need it."
He closed the door and was gone. Bosch thought about it and decided he really couldn't fault Pounds for what he had said, or done. He took out a cigarette and lit it.
"Hey, no smoking, you heard the man," Lewis said.
"F*ck off," Bosch said.
"Bosch, you're dead," Clarke said. "We're going to toast your ass right this time. You aren't the hero you once were. No PR problems this time. Nobody's going to give a shit about what happens to you."
Then he stood up and turned the tape recorder back on. He recited the date, the names of the three men present and the Internal Affairs case number assigned to the investigation. Bosch realized the number was about seven hundred higher than the case number from the internal investigation nine months earlier that sent him to Hollywood. Nine months, and seven hundred other cops have been through the bullshit wringer, he thought. One day there will be no one left to do what it says on the side of every patrol car, to serve and protect.
"Detective Bosch"—Lewis took over then in a modulated, calm tone—"we would like to ask you questions regarding the investigation of the death of William Meadows. Will you tell us of any past association with or knowledge you had of the decedent."
"I refuse to answer any questions without an attorney present," Bosch said. "I cite my right to representation under California's Policeman's Bill of Rights."
"Detective Bosch, the department administration does not recognize that aspect of the Policeman's Bill of Rights. You are commanded to answer these questions, and if you do not you will be subject to suspension and possible dismissal. You—"
"Can you loosen these handcuffs, please?" Bosch said.
"What?" Lewis cried out, losing his calm, confident tone.
Clarke stood up and went to the tape recorder and bent over it.
"Detective Bosch is not handcuffed and there are two witnesses here who can attest to that fact," he said.
"Just the two that cuffed me," Bosch said. "And beat me. This is a direct violation of my civil rights. I request that a union rep and my attorney be present before we continue."
Clarke rewound the tape and turned the recorder off. His face was almost purple with anger as he carried it back to his partner's briefcase. It was a few moments before words came to either one of them.
Clarke said, "It's going to be a pleasure to do you, Bosch. We'll have the suspension papers on the chief's desk by the end of the day. You'll be assigned to a desk at Internal Affairs where we can keep an eye on you. We'll start with CUBO and work our way up from there, maybe even to murder. Either way, you're done in the department. You're over."
Bosch stood up and so did the two IAD detectives. Bosch took a last drag on his cigarette, dropped it on the floor in front of Clarke and stepped on it, grinding it into the polished linoleum. He knew they would clean it up rather than let Pounds know they had not controlled the interview or the interviewee. He stepped between them then, exhaled the smoke and walked out of the room without saying a word. Outside, he heard Clarke's barely controlled voice call out.
"You stay away from the case, Bosch!"
?      ?       ?
Avoiding the eyes that followed him, Bosch walked through the squad room and dropped into his seat at the homicide table. He looked across at Edgar, who was seated at his own space.
"You did good," Bosch said. "You should come out all right."
"What about you?"
"I'm off the case and those two a*sholes are going to put paper in on me. I've got the afternoon and that's about it before I get the ROD."
"God damn."
The deputy chief in charge of IAD had to sign off on all Relieved of Duty orders and temporary suspensions. Stiffer penalties had to be recommended to a police commission subcommittee for approval. Lewis and Clarke would go for a temporary ROD, for conduct unbecoming an officer, or CUBO, as it was known. Then they'd work on something stiffer to take to the commission. If the deputy chief signed an ROD on Bosch, he would have to be notified according to union regs. That meant in person or in a tape-recorded phone conversation. Once notification was made, Bosch could be assigned to a desk at IAD in Parker Center or to his home until the conclusion of the investigation. But as they had just promised, Lewis and Clarke would go for assignment to IAD. That way they could put him on display like a trophy.
"You need anything from me on Spivey?" he asked Edgar.
"No. I'm set. I'm gonna start typing it up if I can get a machine."
"Did you happen to check like I asked on Meadows's job on the subway project?"
"Harry, you . . ." Edgar must have thought better of saying what he wanted to say. "Yeah, I checked it out. For what it's worth, they said they haven't had anyone named Meadows on the job. There is a Fields, but he's black and he was at work today. And Meadows probably wasn't working under any other name because they aren't running a midnight shift. The project is ahead of schedule, if you can believe that shit." Edgar then called out, "I got dibs on the Selectric."
"No way," called back an autos detective named Minkly. "I'm on deck with that one."
Edgar started looking around for another candidate. Late in the day, the typewriters in the office were like gold. There were a dozen machines for thirty-two detectives: that was if you included the manual jobs and the electrics with nervous tics like moving borders or jumpy space bars.
"Okay then," Edgar called out. "I got dibs after you, Mink." Then Edgar lowered his voice and turned to Bosch. "Who you think he'll put me with?"
"Pounds? I don't know." It was like guessing who your wife would marry after you punched the time clock for the last time. Bosch wasn't all that interested in speculating who would be partnered with Edgar. He said, "Listen, I have to do some things."
"Sure, Harry. You need any help, anything from me?" Bosch shook his head and picked up the phone. He called his lawyer and left a message. It usually took three messages before the guy would call back, and Bosch made a note to call again. Then he turned his Rolodex, got a number and called the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He asked for a law enforcement clerk and got a woman named Jessie St. John. He put in a priority request for copies of all of Billy Meadows's military records. Three days, St. John said. He hung up thinking that he would never see the records. They'd come but he wouldn't be in this office, at this table, on this case. Next he called Donovan at SID and learned there had been no latent prints on the needle kit found in Meadows's shirt pocket and only smears on the can of spray paint. The light-brown crystals found in the straining cotton in the kit came back as 55 percent pure heroin, Asian blend. Bosch knew that most heroin dealt on the street and shot into the vein was about 15 percent pure. Most of it was tar heroin made by Mexicans. Somebody had given Meadows a very hot shot. In Harry's mind, that made the tox tests he was waiting for a formality. Meadows had been murdered.
Nothing else from the crime scene was of much use, except Donovan mentioned that the freshly burned match found in the pipe was not torn from the matchbook in Meadows's kit. Bosch gave Donovan the address of Meadows's apartment and asked him to send a team out to process it. He said to check the matches in an ashtray on the coffee table against the book in the kit. Then he hung up, wondering if Donovan would send somebody before word spread that Bosch was off the case or suspended.
The last call he made was to the coroner's office. Sakai said he had made next-of-kin notification. Meadows's mother was still alive and was reached in New Iberia, Louisiana. She had no money to send for him or bury him. She hadn't seen him in eighteen years. Billy Meadows would not be going home. L.A. County would have to bury him.
"What about the VA?" Bosch asked. "He was a veteran."
"Right. I'll check it out," Sakai said and hung up.
Bosch got up and took a small portable tape recorder from one of his drawers in the file cabinets. The bank of files ran along the wall behind the homicide table. He slipped the recorder into his coat pocket with the 911 tape and walked out of the squad room through the rear hallway. He went past the lockup benches and the jail, down to the CRASH office. The tiny office was more crowded than the detective bureau. Desks and files for five men and a woman were crammed into a room no bigger than a second bedroom in a Venice apartment. Down one wall of the room was a row of four-drawer file cabinets. On the opposite wall was the computer and teletype. In between were three sets of two desks pushed side by side. The back wall had the usual map of the city with black lines detailing the eighteen police divisions. Above the map were the Top 10: color eight-by-tens of the ten top a*sholes of the moment in Hollywood Division. Bosch noticed one was a morgue shot. The kid was dead but still made the list. Now that's an a*shole, he thought. And above the photos, black plastic letters spelled out Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
Only Thelia King was in, sitting in front of the computer. That was what Bosch wanted. Also known as The King, which she hated, and Elvis, which she didn't mind, Thelia King was the CRASH computer jockey. If you wanted to trace a gang lineage or were just looking for a juvie floating somewhere around Hollywood, Elvis was the one to see. But Bosch was surprised she was alone. He looked at his watch. Just after two, too early for the gang troops to be on the street.
"Where's everybody at?"
"Hey, Bosch," she said, looking away from the screen. "Funerals. We got two different gangs, and I mean warring tribes, planting homeboys in the same cemetery today up in the Valley. They got all hands up there to make sure things stay cool."
"And so why aren't you out there with the boys?"
"Just got back from court. So, before you tell me why you are here, Harry, why don't you tell me what happened in Ninety-eight Pounds's office today?"
Bosch smiled. Word traveled faster through a police station than it did on the street. He gave her an abbreviated account of his time in the barrel and the expected battle with IAD.
"Bosch, you take things too seriously," she said. "Why don't you get yourself an outside gig? Something to keep yourself sane, moving in the flow. Like your partner. Too bad that sucker's married. He's making three times selling houses on the side what we make bustin' heads full-time. I need a gig like that."
Bosch nodded. But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer, he thought but didn't say. Sometimes he believed that he took things just right and everybody else didn't take them seriously enough. That was the problem. Everybody had an outside gig.
"What do you need?" she said. "I better do it now before they put your paper through. After that, you'll be a leper 'round here."
"Stay where you are," he said, and then he pulled over a chair and told her what he needed from the computer.
The CRASH computer had a program called GRIT, an acronym within an acronym, this one for Gang-Related Information Tracking. The program files contained the vitals on the 55,000 identified gang members and juvenile offenders in the city. The computer also tied in with the gang computer at the sheriff's department, which had about 30,000 of its own gangbangers on file. One part of the GRIT program was the moniker file. This stored references to offenders by their street names and could match them with real names, DOBs, addresses, and so on. All monikers that came to police attention through arrests or shake cards—field interrogation reports—were fed into the computer program. It was said the GRIT file had more than 90,000 monikers in it. You just needed to know which keys to push. And Elvis did.
Bosch gave her the three letters he had. "I don't know if that's the whole thing or a partial," he said. "I think it's a partial."
She typed in the commands to open the GRIT files, put in the letters S-H-A and hit the prompt key. It took about thirteen seconds. A frown creased Thelia King's ebony face. "Three hundred forty-three hits," she announced. "You might be hidin' out here a while, Hon."
He told her to eliminate the blacks and Latinos. The 911 tape sounded white to him. She pressed more keys, then the computer screen's amber letters recomposed the list.
"That's better, nineteen hits," King said.
There was no moniker that was just the three letters, Sha. There were five Shadows, four Shahs, two Sharkeys, two Sharkies and one each of Shark, Shabby, Shallow, Shank, Shabot and Shame. Bosch thought quickly about the graffito he had seen on the pipe up at the dam. The jagged S, almost like a gaping mouth. The mouth of a shark?
"Pull up the variations on Shark," he said.
King hit a couple of keys and the top third of the screen filled with new amber letters. Shark was a Valley boy. Limited contact with police; he had gotten probation and graffiti clean-up after he was caught tagging bus benches along Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. He was fifteen. It wasn't likely he would have been up at the dam at three o'clock on a Sunday morning, Bosch guessed. King pulled the first Sharkie up on the screen. He was currently in a Malibu fire camp for juvenile offenders. The second Sharkie was dead, killed in a gang war between the KGB—Kids Gone Bad—and the Vineland Boyz in 1989. His name had not yet been purged from the computer records.
When King called up the first Sharkey the screen filled with information and a blinking word at the bottom said "More." "Here's a regular troublemaker," she said. The computer report described Edward Niese, a male white, seventeen years of age, known to ride a yellow motorbike, tag number JVN138, and who had no known gang affiliation but used Sharkey as a graffiti tag. A frequent runaway from his mother's home in Chatsworth. Two screens of police contacts with Sharkey followed. Bosch could tell by the location of each arrest or questioning that this Sharkey was partial to Hollywood and West Hollywood when he ran away. He scanned to the bottom of the second screen, where he saw a loitering arrest three months earlier at the Hollywood reservoir.
"This is him," he said. "Forget the last kid. Hard copy?"
She pushed keys to print the computer file and then pointed to the wall of file cabinets. He went over and opened the N drawer. He found a file on Edward Niese and pulled it. Inside was a color booking photo. Sharkey was blond and seemed small in the picture. He had the look of hurt and defiance that was as common as acne on teenagers' faces these days. But Bosch was struck by a familiarity about the face. He couldn't place it. He turned the photo over. It was dated two years earlier. King handed him the computer printout and he sat down at one of the empty desks to study it and the contents of the file.
The most serious offenses the boy who called himself Sharkey had committed—and been caught at—were shoplifting, vandalism, loitering and possession of marijuana and speed. He had been held once—twenty days— at Sylmar Juvenile Hall after one of the drug arrests but later released on home probation. All the other times he was popped he was immediately released to his mother. He was a chronic runaway from home and a throwaway from the system.
There was not much more in the file than was on the computer. A little elaboration on the arrests was all. Bosch shuffled through the papers until he found the report on the loitering charge. It went to pretrial intervention and was dismissed when Sharkey agreed to go home to his mother and stay there. That apparently didn't last long. There was a report that the mother had reported him missing to his probation officer two weeks later. According to these records, he had not been picked up yet.
Bosch read the investigating officer's summary on the loitering arrest. It said:
I/O interviewed Donald Smiley, a caretaker at the Mulholland Dam, who said at 7 A.M. this date he went into the pipe situated alongside the reservoir access road to clear it of debris. Smiley found the boy asleep on a bed made of newspapers. The boy was dirty and incoherent when roused. Subject appeared to be under the influence of narcotics. Police were called and I/O responded. The arrestee stated to I/O that he had been sleeping there regularly because his mother did not want him at home. I/O determined the subject was a reported runaway and took him into custody this date, suspicion of loitering.

Sharkey was a creature of habit, Bosch thought. He was arrested at the dam two months ago, but had gone back there to sleep Sunday morning. He looked through the rest of the papers in the file for indications of other habits that would help Bosch find him. From a three-by-five shake card, Bosch learned that Sharkey had been stopped and questioned but not arrested on Santa Monica Boulevard near West Hollywood in January. Sharkey was lacing up new Reeboks and the officer, believing he might have just lifted them, asked Sharkey to produce a receipt. He did and that would have been that. But when the boy pulled the receipt out of a leather pouch on his motorbike, the officer noticed a plastic bag in there and asked to see that as well. The bag contained ten photographs of Sharkey. He was naked in each and stood in different poses, fondling himself in some, his penis erect in others. The officer took the photos and destroyed them, but noted on the shake card that he would alert the sheriff's station in West Hollywood that Sharkey was hustling photos to homosexuals on Santa Monica Boulevard.
That was it. Bosch closed the file but kept the photo of Sharkey. He thanked Thelia King and left the small office. He was walking through the station's rear hallway, past the lockup benches, when he placed the familiarity in the photo. The hair was longer now and in dreadlocks, the defiance crowding out the hurt in the face, but Sharkey had been the kid who was cuffed to the juvie bench early that morning. Bosch felt sure of it. Thelia had missed it on the computer search because the arrest had not yet been logged in. Bosch cut into the watch commander's office, told the lieutenant what he was looking for and was led to a box labeled A.M. Watch. Bosch looked through the reports stacked in the box until he found the paperwork on Edward Niese.
Sharkey had been picked up at 4 A.M. loitering near a newsstand on Vine. A patrol officer thought he was hustling. After he grabbed him he ran a computer check and learned he was a runaway. Bosch checked the day's arrest sheet and learned the kid had been held until 9 A.M., when his probation officer came and got him. Bosch called the PO at Sylmar Juvenile Hall but learned that Sharkey had already been arraigned before a juvenile court referee and was released to the custody of his mother.
"And that's his biggest problem," the PO said. "He'll be gone by tonight, back on the street. I guarantee it. And I told the ref that, but he wasn't going to book the kid into the monkey house just 'cause he was caught loitering and his mother happens to be a telephone whore."
"A what?" Bosch asked.
"It should be in the file. Yeah, while Sharkey's on the street, dear old mom is at home telling guys on the phone how she's gonna piss in their mouths and put rubber bands on their dicks. Advertises in skin mags. She gets forty bucks for fifteen minutes. Takes MasterCard, Visa, puts 'em on hold while she checks on another line to make sure the number is valid and they got credit. Anyway, she's been doing it, near as I can tell, five years now. Edward's formative years were listening to this shit. I mean, no wonder the kid's a scammer and runner. What do you expect?"
"How long ago did he leave with her?"
" 'Bout noon. You want to catch him there, you better go. You got the address?"
"Yeah."
"And Bosch, one thing: Don't be expecting no whore when you get there. His mom, she doesn't look like the part she plays on the phone, if you know what I mean. Her voice might do the job but her looks would scare a blind man."
Bosch thanked him for the warning and hung up. He took the 101 out to the Valley and then the 405 north to the 118 and west. He got off in Chatsworth and drove into the rocky bluffs at the top corner of the Valley. There was a condominium community built on what he knew was once a movie ranch. It had been one of the places Charlie Manson and his crew used to hide out. Parts of one member of that crew's body were supposedly still missing and buried around there someplace. It was near dusk when Bosch got there. People were off work and getting home. A lot of traffic on the development's thin roads. A lot of closing doors. A lot of calls to Sharkey's mother. Bosch was too late.
"I have no time to talk to more police," Veronica Niese said when she answered the door and looked at the badge. "As soon as I get him home he is out the door again. I don't know where he goes. You tell me. That's your job. I have three calls waiting, one long distance. I gotta go."
She was in her late forties, fat and wrinkled. She obviously wore a wig and the dilation of her eyes did not match. She had the dirty-socks smell of a speed addict. Her callers were better off with their fantasies, with just a voice with which to construct a body and face.
"Mrs. Niese, I'm not looking for your son for something he did. I need to talk to him because of something he saw. He could possibly be in danger."
"Oh, bullshit. I've heard that line before."
She closed the door and he just stood there. After a few moments he could hear her on the phone, and he thought it was a French accent but couldn't be sure. He could only make out a few of the sentences but they made him blush. He thought about Sharkey and realized he wasn't really a runaway, because there was nothing here to run away from. He left the doorstep and went back to the car. That would be it for the day. And he was out of time. Lewis and Clarke must have paper out on him by now. He'd be assigned to a desk at IAD by morning. He drove back to the station and signed out. Everyone was already gone and there were no messages on his desk, not even from his lawyer. On the way home he stopped by the Lucky and bought four bottles of beer, a couple from Mexico, a lager from England called Old Nick and a Henry's.
He expected to find a message from Lewis and Clarke on his phone tape when he got home. He wasn't wrong, but the message was not what he expected.
"I know you're there, so listen," said a voice Bosch recognized as Clarke's. "They can change their mind but they can't change ours. We'll see you around."
There were no other messages. He played Clarke's message over three times. Something had gone wrong for them. They must have been called off. Could his lame threat to the FBI to go to the media have worked? Even as he thought the question, he doubted the answer was yes.
So then, what happened? He sat down in the watch chair and began drinking the beers, the Mexicans first, and looking through the war scrapbook he had forgotten to put away. When he had opened it Sunday night he had opened a dark memory. He now found himself entranced by it, the distance of time having faded the threat as well as the photos. Sometime after dark the phone rang and Harry picked it up before the tape machine.
"Well," said Lieutenant Harvey Pounds, "the FBI now thinks they might have been too harsh. They've reassessed and want you back in. You are to aid their investigation in any way they request. That comes down from administration, Parker Center."
Pounds's voice betrayed his astonishment at the reversal.
"What about IAD?" Bosch asked.
"Nothing filed on you. Like I said, the FBI is backing away, so is IAD. For now."
"So I am back in."
"You're back in. Not my choice. Just so you know, they went over me, because I told them to blow it out their collective asses. Something about this stinks, but I guess that will have to wait for later. For now, you are on detached assignment. You are working with them until further notice."
"What about Edgar?"
"Don't worry about Edgar. He's not your concern anymore."
"Pounds, you act like you did me a favor putting me on the homicide table when they kicked me out from Parker Center. I did you the favor, man. So if you're looking for apologies from me, you aren't getting any."
"Bosch, I'm not looking for anything from you. You f*cked yourself. Only problem with that is that you may have f*cked me in the process. If it was up to me, you wouldn't be near this case. You'd be checking pawnshop lists."
"But it isn't up to you, is it?"
He hung up before Pounds could reply. He stood there thinking for a few moments and his hand was still on the phone when it rang again.
"Rough day, right?" Eleanor Wish said.
"I thought it was somebody else."
"Well, I guess you've heard."
"I heard."
"You'll be working with me."
"How come you called off the dogs?"
"Simple, we want to keep the investigation out of the papers."
"There's more to it."
She didn't say anything but she didn't hang up. Finally, he thought of something to say.
"Tomorrow, what do I do?"
"Come see me in the morning. We'll go from there."
Bosch hung up. He thought about her, and about how he didn't know what was going on. He didn't like it, but he couldn't walk away now. He went into the kitchen and took the bottle of Old Nick from the refrigerator.
Lewis stood with his back to the passing traffic, using his wide body to block the sound from intruding into the pay phone.
"He starts with the FBI—er, the bureau, tomorrow morning," Lewis said. "What do you want us to do?"
Irving didn't answer at first. Lewis envisioned him on the other end of the line, jaw worked into a clench. Popeye face, Lewis thought and smirked. Clarke walked over from the car then and whispered, "What's so funny? What did he say?"
Lewis batted him away and made a don't-bother-me face at his partner.
"Who was that?" Irving asked.
"It was Clarke, sir. He's just anxious to know our assignment."
"Did Lieutenant Pounds talk to the subject?"
"Yes sir," Lewis said, wondering if Irving was taping the call. "The lieutenant said the, uh, subject has been told he is to work with the F—the bureau. They are consolidating the murder and the bank investigations. He is working with Special Agent Eleanor Wish."
"What's his scam . . . ?" Irving said, though no reply was expected, or offered by Lewis. There was silence on the phone line for a while because Lewis knew better than to interrupt Irving's thoughts. He saw Clarke approaching the phone booth again and he waved him away and shook his head as if he were dealing with an impetuous child. The doorless phone booth was at the bottom of Woodrow Wilson Drive, next to the Barham Boulevard crossing over the Hollywood Freeway. Lewis heard the sound of a semi thunder by on the freeway and felt warm air blow into the booth. He looked up at the lights of the houses on the hillside and tried to pinpoint which one came from Bosch's stilt house. It was impossible to tell. The hill looked like a giant, fat Christmas tree with too many lights.
"He must have some kind of leverage on them," Irving finally said. "He's muscled his way into it. I'll tell you what your assignment is. You two stay on him. Not so he knows. But stay with him. He is up to something. Find out what. And build your one point eighty-one case along the way. The Federal Bureau of Investigation may have withdrawn its complaint, but we will not back off."
"What about Pounds, you still want him copied?"
"That is Lieutenant Pounds, Detective Lewis. And yes, copy him your daily surveillance log. That will be enough for him."
Irving hung up without another word.
"Very good, sir," Lewis said to the dead phone. He didn't want Clarke to know he had been slighted. "We'll stay with it. Thank you, sir. Good night."
Then he, too, hung up, privately embarrassed that his commander had not deemed it necessary to say good night to him. Clarke quickly walked up.
"So?"
"So we pick him up again tomorrow morning. Bring your piss bottle."
"That's it? Just surveillance?"
"At this time."
"Shit. I want to search that f*cker's house. Break some stuff. He's probably got the shit from that heist sitting up there."
"If he was involved, I doubt he would be so stupid. We sit back, for now. If he's dirty on this, we'll see."
"Oh, he's dirty. Don't worry."
"We'll see."
Sharkey sat on the concrete block wall that fronted a parking lot on Santa Monica Boulevard. He closely watched the lighted front of the 7-Eleven across the Street, checking out who was coming and who was going. Mostly tourist trade and couples. No singles yet. None that fit the bill. The boy called Arson sauntered over and said, "This ain't going nowhere, budro."
Arson's hair was red and waxed into spiky flames. He wore black jeans and a dirty black T-shirt. He was smoking a Salem. He wasn't stoned but he was hungry. Sharkey looked at him and then past him to where the third boy, the one known as Mojo, sat on the ground near the bikes. Mojo was shorter and wider, with his black hair slicked back in a knob behind his head. Acne scars marked his face forever as sullen.
"Give it a few more minutes," Sharkey said.
"I want to eat, man," Arson said.
"Well, what do you think I'm trying to do? We all want to eat."
"Maybe we could see how Bettijane's doing," Mojo said. "She'll have made enough for us to eat."
Sharkey looked over at him and said, "You two go ahead. I'm staying till I score. I'm gonna eat."
As he said this he watched a maroon Jaguar XJ6 pull into the convenience store's lot.
"How about the guy in the pipe?" Arson asked. "You think they found him yet? We could go up there and check him out, see if there is any bread. I don't know why you didn't have the balls to do it last night, Shark."
"Hey, you go up there by yourself and check it out if you want," Sharkey said. "See who has balls then."
He hadn't told them that he had called 911 about the body. That would be harder for them to forgive than his fear of going into the pipe. A lone man got out of the Jaguar. He looked like late thirties, brush cut, baggy white slacks and shirt, sweater draped around his shoulders. Sharkey saw no one waiting in the car.
"Hey, check out the Jag," he said. The other two looked over at the store. "This is it. I'm going."
"We'll be here," Arson said.
Sharkey got off the wall and trotted across the boulevard. He watched the Jag's owner through the windows of the store. He had an ice cream in his hand and was looking at the magazine rack. His eyes were constantly on the prowl as he looked at the other men in the store. Sharkey was encouraged as he saw the man head toward the counter to pay for the ice cream. He squatted against the front of the store, the grille of the Jag four feet away.
When the man came out, Sharkey waited for their eyes to lock and the man to smile before he spoke up.
"Hey, mister?" he said as he got up. "I was wondering if you could do me a favor?"
The man looked around the parking lot before answering.
"Sure. What do you need?"
"Well, I was wondering if you might go in and get me a beer. I'll give you the money and all. I just want a beer. To relax, you know?"
The man hesitated. "I don't know . . . that would be illegal, wouldn't it? You're not twenty-one. I could get in trouble."
"Well," Sharkey said with a smile, "do you have any beer at home? Then you wouldn't have to be buying it. Just giving somebody a beer ain't no crime."
"Well . . ."
"I wouldn't stay long. We could probably relax each other a little bit, you know?"
The man took another look around the parking lot. No one was watching. Sharkey thought he had him now.
"Okay," he said. "I can take you back here later if you want."
"Sure. That'd be cool."
They drove east on Santa Monica to Flores and then south a couple of blocks to a townhouse development. Sharkey never turned around or tried to look in the mirrors. They would be back there. He knew it. There was a security gate on the outside of the property which the man had a key for and pulled closed behind them. Then they went into his townhouse.
"My name is Jack," the man said. "What can I get you?"
"I'm Phil. Do you have any food? I'm kind of hungry, too." Sharkey looked around for the security intercom, and the button that would unlatch the gate. The apartment was mostly light-colored furniture on an off-white deep pile carpet. "Nice place."
"Thanks. Let me see what I have. If you want to wash your clothes, we can get that done, too, while you are here. I don't do this very often, you know. But when I can help someone I try."
Sharkey followed him into the kitchen. The security console was on the wall next to the phone. When Jack opened the refrigerator and bent down to look in, Sharkey pushed the button that opened the gate outside. Jack didn't notice.
"I have tuna fish. And I can make a salad. How long have you been on the street? I'm not going to call you Phil. If you don't want to tell me your real name, that's fine."
"Um, tuna fish would be good. Not too long."
"Are you clean?"
"Yeah, sure. I'm okay."
"We'll take precautions."
It was time. Sharkey stepped backward into the hall. Jack looked up from the refrigerator, a plastic bowl in his hand, his mouth slightly ajar. Sharkey thought there was a look of recognition in his face, like he knew what was about to happen. Sharkey twisted the dead bolt and opened the door. Arson and Mojo walked in.
"Hey, what is this?" Jack said, though there was no confidence in his voice. He rushed into the hall and Arson, who was the biggest of all four of them, hit him with a fist on the bridge of his nose. There was a sound like a pencil breaking, and the plastic bowl of tuna fish clumped to the ground. Then there was a lot of blood on the off-white carpet.