The black echo

Part III
Tuesday,May 22
Eleanor Wish called again Tuesday morning while Harry Bosch was fiddling with his tie in front of the bathroom mirror. She said she wanted to meet at a coffee shop in Westwood before taking him into the bureau. He had already had two cups of coffee but said he'd be there. He hung up, fastened the top button on his white shirt and pulled the tie snugly to his neck. He couldn't remember the last time he had paid such attention to the details of his appearance.
When he got there, she was in one of the booths along the front windows. She had both hands on the water glass in front of her and looked content. There was a plate pushed off to the side that had the paper wrapping from a muffin on it. She gave him a short courtesy smile as he slid in and waved a hand at a waitress.
"Just coffee," Bosch said.
"You already ate?" Wish said when the waitress went away.
"Uh, no. But I'm fine."
"You don't eat much, I can tell."
Said more like a mother than a detective.
"So, who's going to tell me about it? You or Rourke?"
"Me."
The waitress put down a cup of coffee. Bosch could hear four salesmen in the next booth dickering over the table's breakfast bill. He took a small swallow of hot coffee.
"I would like the FBI's request for my help put on paper, signed by the senior special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office." She hesitated a moment, put her glass down and looked directly at him for the first time. Her eyes were so dark they betrayed nothing about her. At their corners, he saw just the beginning of a gentle web of lines in the tan skin.
At the line of her chin there was a small, white crescent scar, very old and almost unnoticeable. He wondered if the scar and the lines bothered her, as he believed they would most women. Her face seemed to him to have a slight sadness cast in it, as if a mystery carried inside had worked its way outside. Perhaps it was fatigue, he thought. Nevertheless, she was an attractive woman. He figured her age for early thirties.
"I think that can be arranged," she said. "Any other demands before we get to work?"
He smiled and shook his head no.
"You know, Bosch, I got your murder book yesterday and read through it last night. For what you had there, and for one day's work, it was very good work, Most other detectives, that body'd still be in the waiting line at the morgue and listed as probable accidental OD."
He said nothing.
"Where should we begin on it today?" she asked.
"I've got some things working that weren't in the book yet. Why don't you tell me about the bank burglary first? I need the background. All I know is what you put out to the papers and on the BOLOs. You bring me up, then I'll take it from there, tell you about Meadows." The waitress came and checked his cup and her glass. Then Eleanor Wish told the story of the bank heist. Bosch thought of questions as she went along, but he tried to note them in his head to ask afterward. He sensed that she marveled at the story, the planning and execution of the caper. Whoever they were, the tunnelers, they had her respect. He found himself almost jealous.
"Beneath the streets of L.A.," she said, "there are more than four hundred miles of storm lines that are wide enough and tall enough to drive a car through. After that, you've got even more tributary lines. Eleven hundred more miles that you could walk or at least crawl through.
"This means anybody can go under and, if they know the way, get close to any building they want to in the city. And it is not that difficult to find the way. The plans for the whole network are public record, on file with the county recorder's office. Anyway, these guys used the drainage system to get to WestLand National."
He had already figured as much but didn't bother to say. She said the FBI believed there were at least three underground men and then at least one on top to act as lookout, provide other necessary functions. The topsider probably communicated with them by radio, except possibly near the end because of the danger that radio waves might set off the explosive detonators.
The underground men made their way through the drainage system on Honda all-terrain vehicles. There was a drive-in entrance to the storm sewer system at a wash in the Los Angeles River basin northeast of downtown. They drove in there, probably under cover of darkness, and following recorder's maps, made their way through the tunnel network to a spot under Wilshire Boulevard in downtown, about 30 feet below and 150 yards west of WestLand National. It was a two-mile trip.
An industrial drill with a twenty-four-inch circle bit, probably diamond-tipped, was attached to a generator on one of the ATVs and used to cut a hole through the six-inch concrete wall of the stormwater tunnel. From there the underground men began to dig.
"The actual break-in to the vault occurred on Labor Day weekend," Wish said. "We think they must have begun the tunnel three or four weeks earlier. They'd only work nights. Go in, dig some and be back out by dawn. The DWP has inspectors that routinely go through the system looking for cracks and other problems. They work days, so the perps probably didn't risk it."
"What about the hole they cut in the side, wouldn't the water and power people have seen that?" asked Bosch, who immediately became annoyed with himself for asking a question before she was done.
"No," she said. "These guys thought of everything. They had a piece of plywood cut in a circle twenty-four inches wide. They coated it with concrete—we found it there after. We think that when they left each morning, they put this in the hole, and then each time they'd caulk around the edges with more concrete. It would look like a pipeline from a storm drain that had been capped off. That's pretty common down there. I've been. You see capped lines all over the place. The twenty-four inches is a standard size. So this would have looked normal. It doesn't get noticed and the perps just come back the next night, go back in and dig a little farther toward the bank."
She said the tunnel was dug primarily with hand tools—shovels, picks, drills powered off the generator on the ATV. The tunnelers probably used flashlights but also candles. Some of them were found still burning in the tunnel after the robbery was discovered. They were propped in small indentations cut in the walls.
"That ring a bell?" Wish asked.
He nodded.
"We figure they made about ten to twenty feet of progress a night," she said. "We found two wheelbarrows in the tunnel, after. They had been cut in half and disassembled to fit through the twenty-four-inch hole and then strapped back together to be used during the digging. It must have been one or two of the perps' jobs to make runs back out of the tunnel and to dump the dirt and debris from the dig into the main drainage line. There is a steady flow of water on the floor of the line, and it would have washed the dirt away, eventually, to the river wash. We figure that on some nights their topside partner opened fire hydrants up on Hill to get more water flowing down there."
"So they had water down there, even in a drought."
"Even in a drought . . ."
Wish said that when the thieves finally dug their way under the bank, they tapped into the bank's own underground electric and telephone lines. With downtown a ghost town on weekends, the bank branch was closed on Saturdays. So on Friday, after business hours, the thieves bypassed the alarms. One of the perps had to be a bell-man. Not Meadows, he was probably the explosives man.
"The funny thing was, they didn't need a bellman," she said. "The vault's sensor alarm had repeatedly been going off all week. These guys, with their digging and their drills, must have been tripping the alarms. Four straight nights the cops are called out along with the manager. Sometimes three times in one night. They don't find anything and begin to think it's the alarm. The sound-and-movement sensor is off balance. So the manager calls the alarm company and they can't get anybody out until after the holiday weekend, you know, Labor Day. So this guy, the manager—"
"Turns the alarm off." Bosch finished for her.
"You got it. He decides he isn't going to get called out each night during the weekend. He's supposed to go down to the Springs to his time-share condo and play golf. He turns the alarms off. Of course, he no longer works for WestLand National."
Under the vault, the bandits used a water-cooled industrial drill, which was bolted upside down to the underside of the vault slab, to bore a two-and-a-half-inch hole through the five feet of concrete and steel. FBI crime scene analysts estimated that took five hours, and only if the drill didn't overheat. Water to cool it came from a tap into an underground water main. They used the bank's water.
"After they got the hole drilled, they packed it with C-4," she said. "Ran the wire down through their tunnel and out into the drainage tunnel. They popped it from there." She said LAPD emergency-response records showed that at 9:14 A.M. on that Saturday, alarms were reported at a bank across the street from WestLand National and a jewelry store a half-block away.
"We figure that was the detonation time," Wish said. "Patrol was sent out, looked around and didn't find anything, decided the alarms were probably triggered by an earthquake tremor and left. Nobody bothered to check WestLand National. Its alarm hadn't made a peep. They didn't know that it had been turned off."
Once into the vault, they didn't leave, she said. They worked right through the three-day weekend, drilling the locks on the deposit boxes, pulling the drawers and emptying them.
"We found empty food cans, potato chip bags, freeze-dried food packets, you know, survival store stuff," Wish said. "It looks like they stayed there, maybe slept in shifts. In the tunnel there was a wide part, it was like a small room. Like a sleeping room, we think. We found the pattern from a sleeping bag impressed on the dirt floor. We also found impressions in the sand left by the stocks of M-16s—they brought automatic weapons with them. They weren't planning on surrendering if things went wrong."
She let him think about that a few moments and then continued. "We estimate they were in the vault sixty hours, maybe a few more. They drilled four hundred and sixty-four of the boxes. Out of seven fifty. If there were three of them, then that's about a hundred and fifty-five boxes each. Subtract about fifteen hours for rest and eating over the three days they were in there, and you've got each man drilling three, four boxes an hour."
They must have had a time limit, she said. Maybe three o'clock or thereabouts Tuesday morning. If they quit drilling by then, it gave them plenty of time to pack up and get out. They took the loot and their tools and backed out. The bank manager, with a fresh Palm Springs tan on his face, discovered the heist when he opened the vault for business Tuesday morning.
"That's it in a nutshell," she said. "Best thing I've seen or heard of since I've been in the job. Only a few mistakes. We've found out a lot about how they did it but not much about who did it. Meadows was as close as we ever got, and now he's dead. That photograph you showed me yesterday. Of the bracelet? You were right, it's the first thing that's ever turned up from one of those boxes that we know of."
"But now it's gone."
Bosch waited for her to say something but she was done.
"How'd they pick the boxes to drill?" he asked.
"It looks random. I have a video at the office I'll show you. But it looks like they said, 'You take that wall, I'll take this one, you take that one,' and so on. Some boxes right next to others that were drilled were left untouched. Why, I don't know. Didn't look like a pattern. Still, we had losses reported in ninety percent of the boxes they drilled. Mostly untraceable stuff. They chose well."
"How did you come up with three of them?"
"We figured it would take at least that many to drill that many boxes. Plus, that's how many ATVs there were."
She smiled and he bit. "Okay, how'd you know about the ATVs?"
"Well, there were tracks in the mud in the drainage line and we identified them from tires. We also found paint, blue paint, on the wall on one of the curves of the drainage line. One of them had slid on the mud and hit the wall. The paint lab in Quantico came up with the model year and make. We hit all the Honda dealers in Southern California until we came up with a purchase of three blue ATVs at a dealership in Tustin, four weeks before Labor Day. Guy paid cash and loaded them on a trailer. Gave a phony name and address.
"What was it?"
"The name? Frederic B. Isley, as in FBI. It would come up again. We once showed the salesman some six-packs that included Meadows's, yours and a few other people's photos but he couldn't make anybody as Isley."
She wiped her mouth on a napkin and dropped it on the table. He could see no lipstick on it.
"Well," she said, "I've had enough water for a week. Meet me back at the bureau and we'll go over what we've got and what you've got on the Meadows thing. Rourke and I think that is the way to go. We've exhausted all leads on the bank job, been banging against the wall. Maybe the Meadows case will bring us the break we need."
Wish picked up the tab, Bosch put down the tip.
They took their separate cars to the Federal Building. Bosch thought about her as he drove and not the case. He wanted to ask her about that little scar on her chin and not how she connected the WestLand tunnelers to Vietnam tunnel rats. He wanted to know what gave the sweet sad look to her face. He followed her car through a neighborhood of student apartments near UCLA and then across Wilshire Boulevard. They met at the elevator in the parking garage of the Federal Building.
"I think this will be best if you basically just deal with me," she said as they rode up alone. "Rourke—You and Rourke did not start off well and—"
"We didn't even start off," Bosch said.
"Well, if you would give him the chance you would see he is a good man. He did what he thought was right for the case."
The elevator doors spread apart on the seventeenth floor, and there was Rourke.
"There you two are," he said. He put his hand out to Bosch, who took it without much conviction. Rourke introduced himself.
"I was just going down for coffee and a roll," he said. "Care to join me?"
"Uh, John, we just came from a coffee shop," Wish said. "We'll meet you back up here."
Bosch and Wish were now outside the elevator and Rourke was inside. The assistant special agent in charge just nodded his head, and the door closed. Bosch and Wish headed into the office.
"He's a lot like you in a way—been through the war and all," she said. "Give him a try. You're not going to help things if you don't thaw out."
He let it go by. They walked down the hall to the Group 3 squad and Wish pointed to a desk behind hers. She said it was empty since the agent who used it had been transferred to Group 2, the porno squad. Bosch put his briefcase on the desk and sat down. He looked around the room. It was much more crowded than the day before. About a half-dozen agents were at desks and three more were in the back standing around a file cabinet where there was a box of doughnuts. He noticed a television and VCR on a rack in the back of the office. It hadn't been there the day before.
"You said something about a video," he said to Wish.
"Oh, yes. I'll get that set up and you can watch while I answer a few phone messages on other things."
She took a videotape out of a drawer in her desk and they walked to the back of the squad. The gang of three quietly moved away with their doughnuts, alarmed by the presence of an outsider. She set the tape up and left him there to watch alone.
The video, obviously shot with a hand-held camera, was a bouncy, unprofessional walk-through of the thieves' trail. It began in what Bosch surmised was the storm sewer, a square tunnel that curved away into a darkness the camera's strobe couldn't reach. Wish had been right, it was large. A truck could have driven down it. A small stream of water moved slowly down the center of the concrete floor. There was mold and algae on the floor and the lower part of the walls, and Bosch could almost smell the dampness. The camera panned down to the grayish-green floor. There were tire tracks in the slime. The next video scene was the entrance to the thieves' tunnel, a cleanly cut hole in the sewer wall. A pair of hands moved into the picture holding the plywood circle Wish said had been used to cover the hole during the day. The hands moved further into the screen, then a head of dark hair. It was Rourke. He was wearing a dark jumpsuit with white letters across the back. FBI. He held the plywood up to the hole. It was a perfect fit.
The video jumped then, and the scene was now from inside the thieves' tunnel. It was eerie for Bosch to watch, and brought back memories of the hand-dug tunnels he had crawled through in Vietnam. This tunnel curved to the right. Surreal lighting flickered from candles set every twenty feet or so in notches dug into the wall. After curving for what he judged was about sixty feet, the tunnel turned sharply to the left. It then followed a straight-away for almost a hundred feet, candles still flickering from the walls. The camera finally came to a dead end where there was a pile of concrete rubble, twisted pieces of steel rebar and plating. The camera panned up to a gaping hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. Light poured down from the vault above. Rourke stood up there in his jumpsuit, looking down at the camera. He dragged a finger across his neck and the picture cut again. This time the camera was inside the vault, a wide-angle shot of the entire room. As in the newspaper photo Bosch had seen, hundreds of safe-deposit box doors stood open. The boxes lay empty in piles on the floor. Two crime scene techs were dusting the doors for fingerprints. Eleanor Wish and another agent were looking up at the steel wall of box doors and writing in notebooks. The camera panned down to the floor and the hole to the tunnel below. Then the tape went black. He rewound it, brought it back and put it on her desk.
"Interesting," he said. "I saw a few things I had seen before. In the tunnels over there. But nothing that would have made me start looking at tunnel rats in particular. What was the lead to Meadows, people like me?"
"First off, there was the C-4," she said. "Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent a team out to go through the concrete and steel from the blast hole. There were trace elements of the explosive. The ATF guys ran some tests and came up with C-4. I'm sure you know it. It was used in Vietnam. Tunnel rats used it especially to implode tunnels. The thing is, you can get much better stuff now, with more compressed impact area, easier handling and detonation. It's even cheaper. Also less dangerous to handle and easier to get ahold of. So we figured—I mean the ATF lab guy figured—the reason C-4 was used was because the user was comfortable with it, had used it before. So right off we thought it would be a Vietnam-era vet.
"Another corollary to Vietnam was the booby traps. We think that before they went up into the vault to start drilling, they wired the tunnel to protect their rear. We sent an ATF dog through as a precaution, you know, to make sure there wasn't any more live C-4 lying around. The animal got a reading—indicated explosives—in two places in the tunnel. The midway point and at the entrance cut in the wall of the storm line. But there was nothing there anymore. The perps took it with them. But we found peg holes in the floor of the tunnel and snippets of steel wire at both spots—like the leftover stuff when you are cutting lengths with a wire cutter."
"Tripwires," Bosch said.
"Right. We're thinking they had the tunnel wired for intruders. If anybody had come in from behind to take them, the tunnel would have gone up. They'd've been buried under Hill Street. At least, the tunnelers took the explosives out with them when they left. Saved us stumbling across them."
"But an explosion like that probably would've killed the tunnelers along with the intruders," Bosch said.
"We know. These guys just weren't taking chances. They were heavily armed, fortified and ready to go down. Succeed or suicide. . . .
"Anyway, we didn't narrow it down specifically to tunnel rats possibly being involved until somebody caught something when we were going over the tire tracks in the main sewer line. The tracks were here and there, no complete trail. So it took us a couple days to track them from the tunnel back to the entrance at the river wash. It wasn't a straight shot. It's a labyrinth down there. You had to know your way. We figured these guys weren't sitting there on their ATVs with a flashlight and a map every night."
"Hansel and Gretel? They left crumbs along the way?"
"Sort of. The walls down there have a lot of paint on them. You know, DWP marks, so they know where they are, what line is going where, dates of inspection and so forth. With all the paint on them, some look like the side of a 7-Eleven in an East L.A. barrio. So we figured the perps marked the way. We walked the trail and looked for reoccurring marks. There was only one. Kind of a peace sign, without the circle. Just three quick slash marks."
He knew the mark. He'd used it himself in tunnels twenty years ago. Three quick slashes on a tunnel wall with a knife. It was the symbol they'd used to mark their way, so they could find the way out again.
Wish said, "One of the cops there that day—this was before LAPD turned the whole thing over to us—one of the robbery guys said he recognized it from Vietnam. He wasn't a tunnel rat. But he told us about them. That's how we connected it. From there, we went to the Department of Defense and the VA and got names. We got Meadows's. We got yours. Others."
"How many others?"
She pushed a six-inch stack of manila files across her desk.
"They're all here. Have a look if you want."
Rourke walked up then.
"Agent Wish has told me about the letter you requested," he said. "I have no problem with it. I roughed out something and we'll try to get Senior Special Agent Whitcomb to sign it sometime today."
When Bosch didn't say anything Rourke went on.
"We may have overreacted yesterday, but I hope I've set everything straight with your lieutenant and your Internal Affairs people." He gave a smile a politician would envy. "And by the way, I wanted to tell you I admire your record. Your military record. Myself, I served three tours. But I never went down into any of those ghastly tunnels. I was over there, though, till the very end. What a shame."
"What was the shame, that it ended?"
Rourke eyed him a long moment, and Bosch saw red spread across his face from the point where his dark eyebrows knitted together. Rourke was a very pale man with a sallow face that gave the impression he was sucking on a sourball. He was a few years older than Bosch. They were the same height but Rourke had more weight on his frame. To the bureau's traditional uniform of blue blazer and light-blue button-down shift, he had added a red power tie.
"Look, detective, you don't have to like me, that's fine," Rourke said. "But, please, work with me on this. We want the same thing."
Bosch gave in for the time being.
"What is it that you want me to do? Tell me exactly. Am I just along for the ride or do you really want my work?"
"Bosch, you are supposedly a top-notch detective. Show us. Just follow your case. Like you said yesterday, you find who killed Meadows and we find who ripped off WestLand. So, yes, we want your best work. Proceed as you normally would but with Special Agent Wish as your partner."
Rourke walked away and out of the squad. Bosch figured he must have his own office somewhere off the quiet hallway. He turned to Wish's desk and picked up the stack of files. He said, "Okay then, let's go."
?      ?       ?
Wish signed out a bureau car and drove while Bosch looked through the stack of military files on his lap. He noticed his own was on top. He glanced at some of the others and recognized only Meadows's name.
"Where to?" Wish asked as she pulled out of the garage and took Veteran Avenue up to Wilshire.
"Hollywood," he said. "Is Rourke always such a stiff?"
She turned east and smiled one of those smiles that made Bosch wonder whether she and Rourke had something going on.
"When he wants," she said. "He's a good administrator, though. He runs the squad well. Always has been the leader type, I guess. I think he said he was in charge of a whole outfit or something when he was with the army. Over there in Saigon."
No way there was anything between them, he thought then. You don't defend your lover by calling him a good administrator. There was nothing there.
"He's in the wrong business for administrating," Bosch said. "Go up to Hollywood Boulevard, the neighborhood south of the Chinese theater."
It would take fifteen minutes to get there. He opened the top file—it was his own—and began looking through the papers. Between a set of psychiatric evaluation reports he found a black-and-white photo, almost like a mug shot, of a young man in uniform, his face unlined by age or experience.
"You looked good in a crew cut," Wish said, interrupting his thoughts. "Reminded me of my brother when I saw that."
Bosch looked at her but didn't say anything. He put the photo down and went back to roaming through the documents in the file, reading snatches of information about a stranger who was himself.
Wish said, "We were able to find nine men with Vietnam tunnel experience living in Southern California. We checked them all out. Meadows was the only one we really moved up to the level of suspect. He was a hype, had the criminal record. He also had a history of working in tunnels even after he came back from the war." She drove in silence for a few minutes while Bosch read. Then she said, "We watched him a whole month. After the burglary."
"What was he doing?"
"Nothing that we could tell. He might have been doing some dealing. We were never sure. He'd go down to Venice to buy balloons of tar about every three days. But it looked like it was for personal consumption. If he was selling, no customers ever came. No other visitors the whole month we watched. Hell, if we could prove he was selling, we would have popped him and then had something decent to scam him with when we talked about the bank job."
She was quiet again for a moment, then in a tone that Bosch thought was meant more to convince herself than him said, "He wasn't selling."
"I believe you," he said.
"You going to tell me what we're looking for in Hollywood?"
"We're looking for a wit. A possible witness. How was Meadows living during the month you watched? I mean, moneywise. How'd he get money to go down to Venice?"
"Near as we could tell, he was on welfare and had a VA disability check. That's it."
"Why did you call it off after a month?"
"We didn't have anything, and we weren't even sure he had anything to do with it. We—"
"Who pulled the plug?"
"Rourke did. He couldn't—"
"The administrator."
"Let me finish. He couldn't justify the cost of continued surveillance without any results. We were going on a hunch, nothing more. You're just looking at it from hindsight. But it had been almost two months since the robbery. There was nothing there that pointed to him. In fact, we were just going through the motions after a while. We thought whoever it really was, they were in Monaco or Argentina. Not scoring balloon hits of tar heroin on Venice beach and living in a tramp apartment in the Valley. At the time, Meadows didn't make sense. Rourke called the watch. But I concurred. I guess now we know we f*cked up. Satisfied?"
Bosch didn't answer. He knew Rourke had been correct in calling the watch. Nowhere is hindsight better than in cop work. He changed the subject.
"Why that bank, did you ever think about that? Why WestLand National? Why not a Wells Fargo or a vault in a Beverly Hills bank? Probably more money in the banks over in the Hills anyway. You said these underground tunnels go all over the place."
"They do. I don't know the answer to that one. Maybe they picked a downtown bank because they wanted a full three days to open the boxes and they knew downtown banks aren't open Saturdays. Maybe only Meadows and his friends know the answer. What are we looking for in this neighborhood? There was nothing in your reports about a possible witness. Witness to what?"
They were in the neighborhood. The street was lined with run-down motels that had looked depressing the day they were finished being built. Bosch pointed out one of these, the Blue Chateau, and told her to park. It was as depressing as all the others on the street. Concrete block, early fifties design. Painted light blue with darker blue trim that was peeling. It was a two-story courtyard building with towels and clothes hanging out of almost every open window. It was a place where the interior would rival the exterior as an eyesore, Bosch knew. Where runaways crowded eight or ten to a room, the strongest getting the bed, the others the floor or the bathtub. There were places like this on many of the blocks near the Boulevard. There always had been and always would be.
As they sat in the fed car looking at the motel Bosch told her about the half-finished paint scrawl he had found on the pipe at the reservoir and the anonymous 911 caller. He told her he believed the voice went with the paint. Edward Niese, AKA Sharkey.
"These kids, the runaways, they form street cliques," Bosch said as he got out of the car. "Not exactly like gangs. It's not a turf thing. It's for protection and business. According to the CRASH files, Sharkey's crew has been hanging out at the Chateau here for the last couple of months."
As Bosch closed the car door, he noticed a car pull to the curb a half-block up the street. He took a quick glance at it but didn't recognize the car. He thought he could see two figures in it, but it was too far away for him to be sure, or to tell if it was Lewis and Clarke. He headed up a flagstone walkway to an entrance hallway below a broken neon sign for the motel office.
In the office Bosch could see an old man sitting behind a glass window with a slide tray at its base. The man was reading the day's green sheet from Santa Anita. He didn't pull his eyes away until Bosch and Wish were at the window.
"Yes, officers, what can I do for you?"
He was a worn-out old man whose eyes had quit caring about anything but the odds on three-year-olds. He knew cops before they flipped their buzzers. And he knew to give them what they wanted without much fuss.
"Kid named Sharkey," Bosch said. "What's the room?"
"Seven, but he's gone. I think. His motorbike usually sets there in the hall when he's around. There's no bike there. He's gone. Most probably."
"Most probably. Anybody else in seven?"
"Sure. Somebody's always around."
"First floor?"
"Yup."
"Back door or window?"
"Both. Sliding door on the back. Very expensive to replace."
The old man reached over to the key rack and took a key off a hook marked 7. He slid it into the tray beneath the window between him and Bosch.
Detective Pierce Lewis found a receipt from an automatic teller machine in his wallet and used it to pick his teeth. His mouth tasted as though there was still a piece of breakfast sausage in there somewhere. He slid the paper card in and out between his teeth until they felt clean. He made a smacking, unsatisfied sound with his mouth.
"What?" Detective Don Clarke said. He knew his partner's behavioral nuances. The teeth picking and lip smacking meant something was bothering him.
"I think he made us, is all," Lewis said after flipping the card out the window into the street. "That little look he threw down the street when they got out of the car. He was very quick, but I think he made us."
"He didn't make us. If he did, he woulda come charging down here to start up a commotion or something. That's how they do it. Make a commotion, file a lawsuit. He'd've had the Police Protective League up our ass by now. I'm telling you, cops are the last to notice a tail."
"Well . . . I guess," Lewis said.
He let it go for the moment. But he stayed worried. He didn't want to mess up this job. He'd had Bosch by the balls once before and the guy skated because Irving, that flying jaw, had pulled Lewis and Clarke back. But not this time, Lewis silently promised himself. This time he goes down.
"You taking notes?" he asked his partner. "What do you think they're doing in that dump?"
"Looking for something."
"You're shitting me. You really think so?"
"Jeez, who put the pencil up your ass today?"
Lewis looked away from the Chateau to Clarke, who had his hands folded on his lap and his seat back at a sixty-degree angle. With his mirrored glasses shielding his eyes, it was impossible to tell if he was awake or not.
"Are you taking notes or what?" Lewis said loudly.
"If you want notes, whyn't you takin' 'em?"
"Because I'm driving. That's always the deal. You don't want to drive, you gotta write and take the pictures. Now, write something down so we have something to show Irving. Otherwise he'll write up a one eighty-one on us and forget about Bosch."
"That's one point eighty-one. Let's not take shortcuts, even in our language."
"F*ck off."
Clarke snickered and took a notebook out of his inside coat pocket and a gold Cross pen from his shirt pocket. When Lewis was satisfied that notes were being taken and looked back at the motel, he saw a teenage boy with blond dreadlocks circle twice in the road on a yellow motorbike. The boy pulled up next to the car Lewis had just watched Bosch and the FBI woman get out of. The boy shaded his eyes and looked through the driver's-side window into the car.
"Now, what's this?" Lewis said.
"Some kid," Clarke said after looking up from his notes. "He's looking for a stereo to snatch. If he makes a move, what are we going to do? Blow the surveillance to save some a*shole's tape deck?"
"We aren't going to do anything. And he's not going to make a move: He sees the Motorola two-way. He knows it's a cop car. He's backing away now."
The boy revved the bike and did another two circles in the street. As the bike circled, he kept his eyes on the front of the motel. He then cruised through the side parking lot and back out onto the street. He stopped behind an old Volkswagen bus that was parked at the curb and shielded him from the motel. He seemed to be watching the entrance to the Chateau through the windows of the beat-up old bus. He did not notice the two IAD men in the car parked a half-block behind him.
"Come on kid, get going," Clarke said. "I don't want to have to call out patrol on you. F*cking delinquent."
"Use the Nikon and get his picture," Lewis said. "You never know. Something might happen and we'll need it. And while you're at it, get the number off the motel sign. We'll have to call later and see what Bosch and the FBI girl were doing."
Lewis could have easily picked the camera up off the seat himself and taken the photos, but that would set a dangerous precedent that could harm the delicate balance of the rules of surveillance. The driver drives. The rider writes—and does all such related work.
Clarke dutifully picked up the camera, which was equipped with a telephoto lens, and took the photos of the boy on the bike.
"Get one with the bike's plate," Lewis said.
"I know what I am doing," Clarke said as he put the camera down.
"Did you get the motel number? We'll have to call."
"I got it. I'm writing it down. See? What's the big deal? Bosch is prolly in there knocking off a piece. A nice federal piece. Maybe when we call we find out they rented a room."
Lewis watched to make sure Clarke wrote down the number on the surveillance log.
"And maybe we don't," Lewis said. "They just met and, anyway, I doubt he'd be so stupid. They've got to be in there looking for somebody. A wit maybe."
"But there was nothing about any witness in the murder book."
"He held it back. That's Bosch. That's how he works."
Clarke didn't say anything. Lewis looked back down the street to the Chateau. He then noticed that the kid was gone. There was no sign of the motorbike.
Bosch waited a minute to give Eleanor Wish time to get behind the Chateau to watch the sliding door on the back of room 7. He bent and held his ear to the door and thought he heard a rustling sound and an occasional word mumbled. There was someone in the room. When it was time, he knocked heavily on the door. He heard the sound of movement—fast steps on carpet—from the other side of the door, but no one answered. He knocked again and waited, then heard a girl's voice.
"Who is it?"
"Police," Bosch said. "We want to talk to Sharkey."
"He's not here."
"Then I guess we want to talk to you."
"I don't know where he is."
"Open the door, please."
He heard more noise, like someone banging into furniture. But nobody opened the door. Then he heard a rolling sound, a glass door sliding open. He put the key in the doorknob and opened the door in time to catch a glimpse of a man going through the back doorway and jumping off the porch to the ground. It wasn't Sharkey. He heard Wish's voice outside, ordering the man to stop.
Bosch took a quick inventory of the room. An entrance hall with closet to the left, bathroom to the right, both empty except for some clothes on the closet floor. Two large double beds pushed up against opposite walls, a dresser with a mirror on the wall above it, a yellow-brown carpet worn flat on the pathways around the beds and to the bathroom. The girl, blond-haired, small, maybe seventeen years old, sat on the front edge of one of the beds with a sheet around her. Bosch could see the outline of a nipple pressing out against the dingy, once-white cloth. The room smelled like cheap perfume and sweat.
"Bosch, you all right in there?" Wish called from outside. He could not see her because of a sheet hung like a curtain over the sliding door.
"Okay. You?"
"Okay. What have we got?"
Bosch walked to the sliding door and looked out. Wish stood behind a man who had his arms extended and his hands on the motel's back wall. He was about thirty, with the sallow skin of a man who just did a month in county lockup. His pants were open in the front. His plaid shirt was buttoned incorrectly. And he stared straight down to the ground with the bug-eyed look of a man who had no explanation but needed one badly. Bosch was momentarily struck by the man's apparent decision to button his shirt before his pants.
"He's clean," she said. "Looks a little winded, though."
"Looks like soliciting sex with a minor if you want to spend the time with it. Otherwise kick him loose."
He turned to the girl on the bed.
"No bullshit, how old are you and what did he pay? I'm not here to bust you."
She thought it over a moment. Bosch never took his eyes off hers.
"Almost seventeen," she said in a bored monotone. "He didn't pay me anything. He said he would, but he didn't get to that yet."
"Who's in charge of your crew, Sharkey? Didn't he ever tell you to get the money first?"
"Sharkey ain't always around. And how'd you get his name?"
"Heard it around. Where is he today?"
"I tol' you, I don't know."
The plaid-shirted man came into the room through the front door followed by Wish. His hands were cuffed behind him.
"I am going to book him. I want to. This is sick. She looks—"
"She told me she was eighteen," Plaid Shirt said.
Bosch walked up to him and pulled open his shirt with a finger. There was a blue eagle with its wings spreading across his chest. In its talons it carried a dagger and a Nazi swastika. Beneath that it said One Nation. Bosch knew that meant the Aryan Nation, the white supremacist prison gang. He let the shirt fall back into place.
"Hey, how long you been out?" he asked.
"Hey, come on, man," Plaid Shirt said. "This is bullshit. She pulled me in from the street. And let me at least button my goddam pants. This is bullshit."
"Give me my money, f*cker," the girl said.
She jumped from the bed, the sheet falling to the floor, and lunged naked at the john's pants pockets.
"Get her off me, get her off," he called out as he squirmed to avoid her hands. "See, you see! She should be going, not me."
Bosch moved in and separated the two and pushed the girl back to the bed. He moved behind the man and said to Wish, "Give me your key."
She made no move, so he reached into his own pocket and got out his own cuff key. One size fits all. He unlocked the cuffs and walked Plaid Shirt over to the room's front door. He opened it and pushed him through. In the hallway the man stopped to button his pants, which gave Bosch the opportunity to put his foot on his butt and push. "Get out of here, short eyes," he said as the man stumbled down the hall. "This is your lucky day."
The girl was wrapped in the dirty sheet again when Bosch went back into the room. He looked at Wish and saw anger in her eyes. He knew it wasn't just for the man in the plaid shirt. Bosch looked at the girl and said, "Get your clothes, go into the bathroom and get dressed." When she didn't move, he said, "Now! Let's go!"
After she grabbed up some clothes from the floor next to the bed and walked to the bathroom, letting the sheet fall to the ground, Bosch turned to Wish.
"We've got too much else to do," he began. "You would have spent the rest of the afternoon getting her statement and booking that guy. In fact, it's a state beef, so I would've had to book him. And it's a flopper; can go felony or misdemeanor. And one look at that girl and the DA would have gone misdee if he filed it at all. It wasn't worth it. It's the life down here, Agent Wish."
She looked at him with smoldering eyes, the same eyes he had seen when he had gripped her wrist to keep her from leaving the restaurant.
"Bosch, I had decided it was worth it. Don't ever do that again."
They stood there trying to outstare each other until the girl came out of the bathroom. She wore faded jeans that were split at the knees and a black tank top. No shoes, and Bosch noticed her toenails were painted red. She sat on the bed without saying anything.
"We need to find Sharkey," Bosch said.
"About what? You got a cigarette?"
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out for her. He gave her a match and she lit it herself.
"About what?" she said again.
"About Saturday night," Wish said curtly. "We do not want to arrest him. We do not want to hassle him. We only want to ask him a few questions."
"What about me?" the girl said.
"What about you?" Wish said.
"Are you going to hassle me?"
"You mean are we going to turn you over to Division of Youth Services, don't you?" Bosch looked at Wish to try to gauge a reaction. He got no reading. He said, "No, we won't call DYS if you help us. What's your name? Your real name."
"Bettijane Felker."
"All right, Bettijane, you don't know where Sharkey is? All we want to do is talk to him."
"All I know is that he's working."
"What do you mean? Where?"
"Boytown. He's probably taking care of business with Arson and Mojo."
"Those the other guys in the crew?"
"Right."
"Where in Boytown did they say they were going?"
"They didn't. They just go where the queers are, I guess. You know."
The girl either couldn't be more specific or wouldn't be. Bosch knew it didn't matter. He had the addresses from the shake cards and knew he'd find Sharkey somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard.
"Thank you," he said to the girl and started heading toward the door. He was halfway down the hall before Wish came out of the room, walking after him at a brisk, angry pace. Before she said anything he stopped at a pay phone in the hallway by the office. He took out a small phone book he always carried, looked up the number for DYS and dialed. He was put on hold for two minutes before an operator transferred him to an automated tape line on which he reported the date and time and the location of Bettijane Felker, suspected runaway. He hung up wondering how many days it would be before they got the message and how many days after that it would be before they got to Bettijane.
They were all the way into West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard and she was still hot. Bosch had tried to defend himself but realized there was no chance. So he sat there quietly and listened.
"It's a matter of trust, that's all," Wish said. "I don't care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed."
He stared at the mirror on the passenger's side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis's huge neck and crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn't tell Wish they were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn't said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.
Finally he said, "Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood, of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I'm sorry. I did not think it would help us to waste a day booking some a*shole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty. I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people's jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It's one of the spots I got off the shake cards."
"We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don't be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along for the ride. We are both on it. Don't forget it."
She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking iced tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn't see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.
They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.
Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren't just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie's Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay phone near the old bar's screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer, answered the phone.
"Is Lewis or Clarke there?"
"No, sir, they're not. Can I take a message?"
"No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point with them."
"I believe they are code seven till P.M. watch."
He hung up. They were off duty until four. They were scamming, or Bosch had simply kicked them too hard in the balls this time and now they were going after him on their own time. He got back in the car and told Wish he had checked his office for messages. It was as she merged the car back into traffic that he saw the yellow motorbike leaning on a parking meter about a half block from Barnie's. It was parked in front of a pancake restaurant.
"There," he said and pointed. "Go on by and I'll get the number. If it's his, we'll sit on it."
It was Sharkey's bike. Bosch matched the plate to his notes from the kid's CRASH file. But there was no sign of the boy. Wish drove around the block and parked in the same spot in front of Barnie's that they had been in before.
"So, we wait," she said. "For this kid you think might be a witness."
"Right. It's what I think. But two of us don't need to waste the time. You can leave me here if you want. I'll go in the beanery, order a pitcher of Henry's and a bowl of chili and watch from the window."
"That's all right. I'm staying."
Bosch settled back for a wait. He took out his cigarettes but she nailed him before he got one out of the pack.
"Have you heard of the draft risk assessment?" she asked.
"The what?"
"Secondhand cigarette smoke. It's deadly, Bosch. The EPA came out last month, officially. Said it's a carcinogen. Three thousand people are getting lung cancer a year from passive smoking, they call it. You are killing yourself and me. Please don't."
He put the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. They were quiet as they watched the bike, which was chain-locked to the parking meter. Bosch took a few glances at the sideview mirror but didn't see the IAD car. He glanced over at Wish, too, whenever he thought she wasn't looking. Santa Monica Boulevard steadily got crowded with cars as the apex of rush hour approached. Wish kept her window closed to cut down on the carbon monoxide. It made the car very hot.
"Why do you keep staring at me?" she asked about an hour into the surveillance.
"At you? I didn't know that I was."
"You were. You are. You ever have a female partner before?"
"Nope. But that's not why I would be staring. If I was."
"Why then? If you were."
"I'd be trying to figure you out. You know, why you are here, doing this. I always thought, I mean at least I heard, that the bank squad over at the FBI was for dinosaurs and f*ckups, the agents too old or too dumb to use a computer or trace some white-collar scumbag's assets through a paper trail. Then, here you are. On the heavy squad. You're no dinosaur, and something tells me you're no f*ckup. Something tells me you're a prize, Eleanor."
She was quiet a moment, and Bosch thought he saw the trace of a smile play on her lips. Then it was gone, if it had been there at all.
"I guess that is a backhanded compliment," she said. "If it is, thank you. I have my reasons for choosing where I am with the bureau. And believe me, I do get to choose. As far as the others in the squad, I would not characterize any of them as you do. I think that attitude, which, by the way, seems to be shared by many of your fellow—"
"There's Sharkey," he said.
A boy with blond dreadlocks had come through a side alley between the pancake shop and a mini-mall. An older man stood with him. He wore a T-shirt that said The Gay 90s Are Back! Bosch and Wish stayed in the car and watched. Sharkey and the man exchanged a few words and then Sharkey took something from his pocket and handed it over. The man shuffled through what looked like a stack of playing cards. He took a couple of cards and gave the rest back. He then gave Sharkey a single green bill.
"What's he doing?" Wish asked.
"Buying baby pictures."
"What?"
"A pedophile."
The older man headed off down the sidewalk and Sharkey walked to his motorbike. He hunched over the chain and lock.
"Okay," Bosch said, and they got out of the car.
?      ?       ?
That would be enough for today, Sharkey thought. Time to kick. He lit a cigarette and bent over the seat of his motorbike to work the combination on the Master lock. His dreads flopped down past his eyes and he could smell some of the coconut stuff he had put in his hair the night before at the Jaguar guy's house. That was after Arson had broken the guy's nose and the blood got everywhere. He stood up and was about to wrap the chain around his waist when he saw them coming. Cops. They were too close. Too late to run. Trying to act like he hadn't yet seen them, he quickly made a mental list of everything in his pockets. The credit cards were gone, already sold. The money could have come from anywhere, some of it did. He was cool. The only thing they'd have would be the queer guy's identification if they had a lineup. Sharkey was surprised the guy had made a report. No one ever had before.
Sharkey smiled at the two approaching cops, and the man held up a tape recorder. A tape recorder? What was this? The man hit the play button and after a few seconds Sharkey recognized his own voice. Then he recognized where it had come from. This wasn't about the Jaguar guy. This was about the pipe.
Sharkey said, "So?"
"So," said the man, "we want you to tell us about it."
"Man, I didn't have anything to do with it. You ain't going to put that—Hey! You're the guy from the police station. Yeah, I saw you there the next night. Well, you ain't going to get me to say I did that shit up there."
"Take it down a notch, Sharkey," the man said. "We know you didn't do it. We just want to know what you saw, is all. Lock your bike up again. We'll bring you back."
The man gave his name and the woman's. Bosch and Wish. He said she was FBI, which really confused things. The boy hesitated, then stooped and locked the bike again.
Bosch said, "We just want to take a ride over to Wilcox to ask you some questions, maybe draw a picture."
"Of what?" Sharkey asked.
Bosch didn't answer; he just gestured with his hand to come along and then pointed up the block at a gray Caprice. It was the car Sharkey had seen in front of the Chateau. As they walked, Bosch kept his hand on Sharkey's shoulder. Sharkey wasn't as tall as Bosch yet, but they shared the same wiry build. The boy wore a tie-dyed shirt of purple and yellow shades. Black sunglasses hung around his neck on orange string. The boy put them on as they approached the Caprice.
"Okay, Sharkey," Bosch said at the car. "You know the procedure. We've got to search you before you go in the car. That way we won't have to cuff you for the ride. Put everything on the hood."
"Man, you said I was no suspect," Sharkey protested. "I don't have to do this."
"I told you, procedure. You get it all back. Except the pictures. We can't do that."
Sharkey looked first at Bosch and then Wish, then he started putting his hands in the pockets of his frayed jeans.
"Yeah, we know about the pictures," Bosch said.
The boy put $46.55 on the hood along with a pack of cigarettes and book of matches, a small penknife on a key chain and a deck of Polaroid photos. They were photos of Sharkey and the other guys in the crew. In each, the model was naked and in various stages of sexual arousal. As Bosch shuffled through them, Wish looked over his shoulder and then quickly looked away. She picked up the pack of cigarettes and looked through it, finding a single joint among the Kools.
"I guess we have to keep that, too," Bosch said.
They drove to the police station on Wilcox because it was rush hour and it would have taken them an hour to get to the Federal Building in Westwood. It was after six by the time they got into the detective bureau, and the place was deserted, everybody having gone home. Bosch took Sharkey into one of the eight-by-eight interview rooms. There was a small, cigarette-scarred table and three chairs in the room. A handmade sign on one wall said No Sniveling! He sat Sharkey down in the Slider—a wooden chair with its seat heavily waxed and a quarter-inch of wood cut off the bottom of the front two legs. The incline was not enough to notice, but enough that the people who sat in the chair could not get comfortable. They would lean back like most hard cases and slowly slide off the front. The only thing they could do was lean forward, right into the face of their interrogator. Bosch told the boy not to move, then stepped outside to plan a strategy with Wish, shutting the door. She opened the door after he closed it.
She said, "It's illegal to leave a juvenile in a closed room unattended."
Bosch closed the door again.
"He isn't complaining," he said. "We've got to talk. What's your feel for him? You want him, or you want me to take it?"
"I don't know," she said.
That settled it. That was a no. An initial interview with a witness, a reluctant witness at that, required a skillful blend of scamming, cajoling, demanding. If she didn't know, she didn't go.
"You're supposed to be the expert interrogator," she said in what seemed to Bosch to be a mocking voice. "According to your file. I don't know if that's using brains or brawn. But I'd like to see how it's done."
He nodded, ignoring the jab. He reached into his pocket for the boy's cigarettes and matches.
"Go in and give him these. I want to go check my desk for messages and set up a tape." When he saw the look on her face as she eyed the cigarettes, he added, "First rule of interrogation: make the subject think he is comfortable. Give 'im the cigarettes. Hold your breath if you don't like it."
He started to walk away but she said, "Bosch, what was he doing with those pictures?"
So that was what was bothering her, he thought. "Look. Five years ago a kid like him would have gone with that man and done who knows what. Nowadays, he sells him a picture instead. There are so many killers—diseases and otherwise—these kids are getting smart. It's safer to sell your Polaroids than to sell your flesh."
She opened the door to the interview room and went in.
Bosch crossed the squad room and checked the chrome spike on his desk for messages. His lawyer had finally called back. So had Bremmer over at the Times, though he had left a pseudonym they had both agreed on earlier.
Bosch didn't want anybody snooping around his desk to know the press had called.
Bosch left the messages on the spike, took out his ID card and went to the supply closet and slipped the lock. He opened a new ninety-minute cassette and popped it into the recorder on the bottom shelf of the closet. He turned on the machine and made sure the backup cassette was turning. He set it on record and watched to make sure both tapes were rolling. Then he went back down the hallway to the front desk and told a fat Explorer Scout who was sitting there to order a pizza to be delivered to the station.
He gave the kid a ten and told him to bring it to the interview room with three Cokes when it came.
"What do you want on it?" the kid asked.
"What do you like?"
"Sausage and pepperoni. Hate anchovies."
"Make it anchovies."
Bosch walked back to the detective bureau. Wish and Sharkey were silent when he walked back into the small interview room, and he had the feeling they had not been talking much. Wish had no feel for the boy. She sat to Sharkey's right. Bosch took the seat on his left. The only window was a small square of mirrored glass in the door. People could look in but not out. Bosch decided to be up front with the boy from the start. He was a kid, but he was probably wiser than most of the men who had sat on the Slider before him. If he sensed deceit, he would start answering questions in one-syllable words.
"Sharkey, we are going to tape this because it might help us later to go over it," Bosch said. "Like I said, you are not a suspect, so you don't have to worry about what you say, unless of course you're going to say you did it."
"See what I mean?" the boy protested. "I knew you'd get around to saying that and putting on the tape. Shit, I been in one of these rooms before, you know."
"That's why we aren't bullshitting you. So let's say it once for the record. I'm Harry Bosch, LAPD, this is Eleanor Wish, FBI, and you are Edward Niese, AKA Sharkey. I want to start by—"
"What's this shit? Was that the president what got dragged in that pipe? What's the FBI doing here?"
"Sharkey!" Bosch said loudly. "Cool it. It's just an exchange program. Like when you used to go to school and the kids would come from France or someplace. Think like she's from France. She's just kinda watching and learning from the pros." He smiled and winked at Wish. Sharkey looked over at her and smiled a little, too. "First question, Sharkey, let's get it out of the way so we can get to the good stuff. Did you do the guy up at the dam?"
"F*ck no. I see—"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Wish broke in. She looked at Bosch. "Can we go outside a moment?"
Bosch got up and walked out. She followed, and this time she closed the interview room door.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"What are you doing? Are you going to read that kid his rights, or do you want to taint this interview from the start?"
"What are you talking about? He didn't do it. He isn't a suspect. I'm just asking him questions because I'm trying to establish an interrogation pattern."
"We don't know he isn't the killer. I think we should give him his rights."
"We read him his rights and he is going to think we think he's a suspect, not a witness. We do that and we might as well go in there and talk to the walls. He won't remember a thing."
She walked back into the interview room without another word. Bosch followed and picked up where he had left off, without saying anything about anybody's rights.
"You do the guy in the pipe, Sharkey?"
"No way, man. I seen him, that's all. He was already dead."
The boy looked to his right at Wish as he said this. Then he pulled himself up in his chair.
"Okay, Sharkey," Bosch said, "By the way, how old are you, where you from, tell me a couple of things like that."
"Almost eighteen, man, then I'm free," the boy said, looking at Bosch. "My mom lives up in Chatsworth, but I try not to live with—man, you already got all of this in one of your little notebooks."
"You a faggot, Sharkey?"
"No way, man," the boy said, staring hard at Bosch. "I sell them pictures, big f*cking deal. I ain't one of 'em."
"You do more'n sell pictures to them? You roll a few when you get the chance? Bust 'em up, take their money. Who's going to file a complaint? Right?"
Now Sharkey looked back over to Wish and raised an open hand. "I don't do that shit. I thought we're talking about the dead guy."
"We are, Sharkey," Bosch said. "I just want to figure out who we're dealing with here, is all. Take it from the top. Tell us the story. I got pizza coming and there's more cigarettes. We got the time."
"It won't take any time. I din't see anything, except the body in there. I hope there's no anchovies."
He said this looking at Wish while pulling himself up in the chair. He had established a pattern in which he would look at Bosch when he was telling the truth, at Wish when he was shading it or outright lying. Scammers always play to the women, Bosch thought.
"Sharkey," Bosch said, "if you want we can take you up to Sylmar and have 'em hold you overnight. We can start again in the morning, maybe when you're memory's a little—"
"I'm worried about my bike back there, might get stole."
"Forget the bike," Bosch said, leaning into the boy's personal space. "We aren't spoiling you, Sharkey, you haven't told us anything yet. Start the story, then we'll worry about the bike."
"Okay, okay. I'll tell you everything."
The boy reached for his cigarettes on the table and Bosch pulled back and got out one of his own. The leaning in and out of his face was a technique Bosch had learned while spending what seemed like ten thousand hours in these little rooms. Lean in, invade that foot and a half that is all theirs, their own space. Lean back when you get what you want. It's subliminal. Most of what goes on in a police interrogation has nothing to do with what is said. It is interpretation, nuance. And sometimes what isn't said. He lit Sharkey's cigarette first. Wish leaned back in her chair as they exhaled the blue smoke.
"You wanna smoke, Agent Wish?" Bosch said.
She shook her head no.
Bosch looked at Sharkey and a knowing look passed between them. It said, You and me, sport. The boy smiled. Bosch nodded for him to start his story and he did. And it was a story.
"I go up there to crash sometimes," Sharkey said. "You know? When I don't find anybody to help me out with some motel money or nothing. Sometimes the room at my crew's motel is too crowded. I gotta get out. So I go up there, sleep in the pipe. It stays warm most the night. Not bad. So anyway, it was one of those nights. So I went up there—"
"What time was this?" Wish asked.
Bosch gave her a look that said, Cool it, ask the questions after the story is out. The kid had been going pretty good.
"Musta been pretty late," Sharkey answered. "Three, maybe four o'clock. I don't have a watch. And so I went up there. And I went in the pipe and I saw the guy that was dead. Just laying there. I climbed out and split. I wasn't going to stay in there with a dead guy. When I got down the hill I called you guys, nine one one."
He looked back from Wish to Bosch.
"That's it," he said. "Can I get a ride back to my bike?"
No one answered, so Sharkey lit another cigarette and pulled himself up in the chair.
"That's a nice story, Edward, but we need the whole thing," Bosch said. "We also need it right."
"Whaddaya mean?"
"I mean it sounds like it was made up by a moron, is what I mean. How'd you see the body in there?"
"I had a flashlight," he explained to Wish.
"No you didn't. You had matches, we found one." Bosch leaned forward until his face was only a foot from the boy's. "Sharkey, how do you think we knew it was you that called? You think the operator just recognized your voice? 'Oh, that's old Sharkey. He's a good kid, calling us about the body.' Think, Sharkey. You signed your name— or at least half of it on the pipe up there. We got your prints off a half a can of paint. And we know you only crawled halfway in the pipe. That's when you got scared and got out. You left tracks."
Sharkey stared forward, his eyes slightly lifted toward the mirrored window on the door.
"You knew the body was there before you went in. You saw somebody drag it into the pipe, Sharkey. Look at me now and tell me the real story."
"Look, I didn't see nobody's face. It was too dark, man," the boy said to Bosch. Eleanor let out a breath. Bosch felt like telling her that if she thought the boy was a waste of time she could leave.
"I was hiding," Sharkey said. " 'Cause, see, at first I thought they were after me or something. I had nothin' to do with this. Why you dragging me down, man?"
"We got a man dead, Edward. We've got to find out why. We don't care about faces. That's fine. Tell us what you did see, and then you're no longer in it."
"That'll be it?"
"That'll be it."
Bosch leaned back then and lit his second cigarette.
"Well, yeah, I was up there and I wasn't too tired yet so I was doing my paint thing and I heard a car coming. Like holy shit. And what was weird was that I heard it before I saw it. 'Cause the guy has no lights on. So, man, I hauled ass and hid in the bushes on the hill right by there, you know, right by the pipe, right by where I hide my bike, you know, while I'm sleeping."
The boy was becoming more animated, using his hands and nodding his head and looking mostly at Bosch now.
"Shit, I thought those guys were coming for me, like somebody had called the cops on account of me being up there spraying a scrip or something. So like I hid. In fact, when they got there a guy gets out and says to the other guy he smells paint. But it turns out they didn't even see me. They just stopped by the pipe 'cause of the body. And only it wasn't a car, either. It was a Jeep."
"You get a license plate number?" Wish said.
"Let him tell it," Bosch said without looking at her.
"No, I didn't get a f*ckin' plate. Shit, their lights were off and it was too dark. So anyway, there was three of them, if you count the dead guy. One guy gets out, he was the driver, and he pulls the dead guy right out of the back, from underneath a blanket or something. Opened a little back door those Jeeps got and drug the guy onto the ground. It was total horror, man. I could tell it was real, you know, a real dead body, just kinda by the way it fell on the ground. Like a dead guy. It made a noise like a body. Not like on TV. But what you'd expect, like, 'Oh no, that's a body he drug out of there,' or something. Then he drug it into the pipe. The other guy wouldn't help him. He stayed in the Jeep. So the first dude, he did it by hisself."
Sharkey took a deep drag on his cigarette and then killed it in the tin ashtray, which was already full of ash and old butts. He exhaled through his nose and looked at Bosch, who just nodded for him to continue. The boy pulled himself up in the seat.
"Um, I stayed there and the guy came out of the pipe after a minute. No longer than that. He looked around when he came out but didn't see me. He went over to a bush near where I was hiding and tore off a branch. Then he went back inside the pipe for a while. And I could hear him in there sweeping or something with the branch. Then he came out and they left. Oh, and uh, he started to back up and the reverse light went on, you know. He took it out of gear like real quick. Then I heard him say something about they couldn't go backward 'cause of the light. They might get seen. So then they went forward, you know, without lights. They drove down the road and across the dam and around the other side of the lake. When they went by that little house on the dam they bashed the light bulb. I saw it go out. I stayed hidden till I couldn't hear the engine anymore. Then I come out."
Sharkey stopped the story for a beat and Wish said, "I'm sorry, can we open the door, get some of this smoke out of here?"
Bosch reached over and pulled the door open without getting up or trying to hide his annoyance. "Go on, Sharkey," was all he said.
"So when they were gone I went over to the pipe and yelled in to the guy. You know, 'Hey, in there' and 'Are you all right,' stuff like that. But nobody answered. So I leaned my bike down on the ground so the light would go in there and I crawled in a little bit. I also lighted a match like you say. And I could see him in there and he looked dead and all. I was going to check but it was too creepy. I got out. I went down the hill and I called the cops. That's all I did, and that's the whole thing."
Bosch figured the boy was going to rob the body but got scared halfway in. That was okay though. The boy could keep that as his secret. Then he thought of the branch taken from the bush and used by the man Sharkey had seen to obliterate the tracks and drag marks in the pipe. He wondered why the uniform cops hadn't come across either the discarded branch or the broken bush during the crime scene search. But he didn't dwell on it long, because he knew the answer. Sloppiness. Laziness. It wasn't the first time things had been missed and wouldn't be the last.
"We're going to go check on that pizza," Bosch said, and he stood up. "We'll only be a couple of minutes."
Outside the interview room Bosch checked his anger and said, "My fault. We should have talked more about how we wanted to do it before we heard his story. I like to hear what they have to say first, then ask questions. It was my fault."
"No problem," Wish said curtly. "He doesn't seem that valuable anyway."
"Maybe." He thought a moment. "I was thinking of going back in and talking a little more to him, maybe bring an Identikit in. And if he doesn't get any better at remembering things we could hypnotize him."
Bosch had no way of knowing what her reaction to the last suggestion would be. He offered it in an offhand manner, half hoping it would slip by unnoticed. California courts had ruled that hypnotizing a witness taints that witness's later court testimony. If they hypnotized Sharkey, he could never be a witness in any court case that could arise from the Meadows investigation.
Wish frowned.
"I know," Bosch. said. "We'd lose him in court. But we might never get to court with what he's given us now. You just said yourself he's not that valuable."
"I just don't know whether we should close the door on his usefulness now. So early in the investigation."
Bosch walked over to the interview room door and looked through the one-way glass at the boy. He was smoking another cigarette. He put it down on the ashtray and stood up. He looked at the door window, but Bosch knew he couldn't see out. The boy quickly and quietly switched his chair with the one Wish had been using. Bosch smiled and said, "He's a smart kid. There might be more there that we won't get unless we put him under. I think it's worth the chance."
"I didn't know you were one of LAPD's hypnotists. I must have missed that in your file."
"I'm sure there's a lot you missed," Bosch replied. After a few moments, he said, "I guess I'm one of the last around. After the Supreme Court shot it down the department quit training people. There was only one class of us. I was one of the youngest. Most of the others have retired."
"Anyway," she said, "I don't think we should do it yet. Let's talk to him some more, maybe wait a couple days before we waste him as a witness."
"Fine. But in a couple days who knows where a kid like Sharkey will be?"
"Oh, you're resourceful. You found him this time. You can do it again."
"You want to take a shot in there?"
"No, you're doing okay. As long as I can jump in now, whenever I think of something."
She smiled and he smiled and they went back into the interview room, which smelled of smoke and sweat. Bosch left the door open again to air it out. Wish didn't have to ask.
"No food?" Sharkey said.
"Still on the way," Bosch said.
Bosch and Wish took Sharkey through his story two more times, picking up small details along the way. They did it as a team. Partners, exchanging knowing looks, surreptitious nods, even smiles. A few times Bosch noticed Wish slipping in her chair and thought he saw a smile play on Sharkey's boyish face. When the pizza came he protested the anchovies but still ate three-quarters of the pie and downed two of the Cokes. Bosch and Wish passed.
Sharkey told them the Jeep that Meadows's body came in was dirty white or beige. He said there was a seal on the side door but he could not describe it. Perhaps this was so it would look like a DWP vehicle, Bosch thought. Maybe it was a DWP vehicle. Now he definitely wanted to hypnotize the boy, but he decided not to bring it up again. He'd wait for Wish to come around, to see that it had to be done.
Sharkey said the one who stayed behind in the Jeep as the body was dragged into the pipe didn't say a word the whole time the boy watched. This person was smaller than the driver. Sharkey described seeing only a slightly built form, a whisper of a silhouette against what little light there was from the moon above the reservoir perimeter's thick stand of pine.
"What did this other guy do?" Wish asked.
"Just watched, I guess. Like a lookout. He didn't even do the driving. I guess he was in charge or something."
The boy got a better look at the driver but not enough to describe a face, or to make a drawing with the facial templates in the Identikit that Bosch had brought into the interview room. The driver had dark hair and was white. Sharkey couldn't, or wouldn't, be any more exact in his description. He had worn matching dark shirt and pants, maybe overalls. Sharkey said that he also wore some kind of equipment belt or carpenter's apron. Its dark tool pockets hung empty at the hips and flapped like an apron at his waist. This was curious to Bosch, and he asked Sharkey several questions, coming at it from different angles but getting no better description.
After an hour they were finished. They left Sharkey in the smoky room while they conferred outside again. Wish said, "All we have to do now is find a Jeep with a blanket in the back. Do a microanalysis and match hairs. Only must be a couple million white or beige Jeeps in the state. You want me to put out a BOLO, or you want to handle it?"
"Look. Two hours ago we had nothing. Now we've got a lot. If you want, let me hypnotize the kid. Who knows, we might get a license plate, a better description of the driver, maybe he'll remember a name spoken or be able to describe the seal on the door."
Bosch held his hands out palms up. His offer was out, but she had already turned it down. And she did again.
"Not yet, Bosch. Let me talk to Rourke. Maybe tomorrow. I don't want to rush into that and possibly have it come back on us as a mistake. Okay?"
He nodded and dropped his hands.
"So what now?" she said.
"Well, the kid's eaten. Why don't we get him squared away and then you and I get something to eat? There's a place—"
"I can't," she said.
"—on Overland I know."
"I already have plans for tonight. I'm sorry. Maybe we can make it another night."
"Sure." He walked over to the interview room door and looked through the glass. Anything to avoid showing his face to her. He felt foolish for trying to move so quickly with her. He said, "If you have to get going, go ahead. I'll get him in a shelter or something for the night. We don't both have to waste our time with it."
"You sure?"
"Yeah. I'll take care of him. I'll get a patrol unit to take us. We'll get his bike on the way. I'll have 'em drop me by my car."
"That's nice. I mean about you getting his bike and taking care of him."
"Well, we made a deal with him, remember?"
"I remember. But you care about him. I watched how you handled him. You see some of yourself there?"
He turned away from the glass to look at her.
"No, not especially," he said. "He's just another wit that has to be interviewed. You think he's a little bastard now, wait another year, wait till he's nineteen or twenty, if he makes it. He'll be a monster then. Preying on people. This isn't the last time he'll be sitting in that room. He'll be in and out of there his whole life till he kills somebody or they kill him. It's Darwin's rules; survival of the fittest, and he's fit to survive. So no, I don't care about him. I'm putting him in a shelter because I want to know where he is in case we need him again. That's all."
"Nice speech, but I don't think so. I know a little bit about you, Bosch. You care, all right. The way you got him dinner and asked him—"
"Look, I don't care how many times you read my file. You think that means you know about me? I told you, that's bullshit."
He had come up close to her, until his face was only a foot from hers. But she looked away from him, down at her notebook, as if what she had written there might have something to do with what he was saying.
"Look," he said, "we can work this together, maybe even find out who killed Meadows if we get a few more breaks like the one with the kid today. But we won't really be partners and we won't really know each other. So maybe we shouldn't act like we do. Don't tell me about your little brother with a crew cut and how he looks the way I did, because you don't know how I was. A bunch of papers and pictures in a file don't say anything about me."
She closed the notebook and put it in her purse. Then she finally looked up at him. There was a knocking from inside the interview room. Sharkey was looking at himself in the mirrored window of the door. But they both ignored him and Wish just drilled Bosch with her eyes.
"You always get this way when a woman turns you down for dinner?" she asked calmly.
"That's got nothing to do with it and you know it."
"Sure. I know it." She started to walk away, then said, "Let's say nine A.M., we meet at the bureau again?"
He didn't answer and then she did walk away, toward the squad room door. Sharkey pounded on his door again, and Bosch looked over and saw the boy picking the acne on his face in the door's mirror. Wish turned once more before she was out of the room.
"I wasn't talking about my little brother," she said. "He was my big brother, actually. And I was talking about a long time ago. About the way he looked when I was a little girl and he was going away for a while, to Vietnam."
Bosch didn't look at her. He couldn't. He realized what was coming.
"I remember how he looked then," she said, "because it was the last time I saw him. It sticks with you. He was one of the ones that didn't come back."
She walked out.
Harry ate the last slice of pizza. It was cold and he hated anchovies and he felt he deserved it that way. Same for the Coke, which was warm. Afterward, he sat at the homicide table and made calls until he found an empty bed, rather, an empty space, in one of the no-questions-asked shelters near the Boulevard. At Home Street Home they didn't try to send runaways back to where they came from. They knew in most cases home was a worse nightmare than the streets. They just gave the children a safe place to sleep and then tried to send them off to any place but Hollywood.
He checked out an unmarked car and drove Sharkey to his motorbike. It would not fit in the trunk, so Bosch made a deal with the boy. Sharkey would ride the bike to the shelter and Bosch would follow. When the boy got there and got checked in, Bosch would give him back his money and wallet and cigarettes. But not the Polaroids and the joint. Those went into the trash. Sharkey didn't like it but he did it. Bosch told him to hang around the shelter a couple of days, though he knew the boy would probably split first thing in the morning.
"I found you once. If I need to, I can do it again," he said as the boy locked his bike up outside the home.
"I know, I know," Sharkey said.
It was an idle threat. Bosch knew that he had found Sharkey when the boy didn't know he was being looked for. It would be a different story if he wanted to hide. Bosch gave the boy one of his cheap business cards and told him to give a call if he thought of anything that would help.
"That would help you or me?" Sharkey asked.
Bosch didn't answer. He got back in the car and drove back to the station on Wilcox, watching the mirror for signs of a tail. He didn't see any. After checking the car in he went to his desk and picked up the FBI files. He went to the watch office, where the night lieutenant called one of his patrol units in to give Bosch a lift to the Federal Building. The patrol officer was a young cop with a quarter-inch hairdo. Asian. Bosch had heard around the station that he was called Gung Ho. They rode in silence the whole twenty ninutes to the Federal Building.
Harry got home by nine. The red light on his phone machine was blinking but there was no message, just the sound of someone hanging up. He turned on the radio for the Dodgers game, but then he turned it off, tired of hearing people talk. He put CDs by Sonny Rollins, Frank Morlan, and Branford Marsalis into the stereo and listened to the saxophone instead. He spread the files out on the table in the dining room and turned the cap on a bottle of beer. Alcohol and jazz, he thought as he swallowed. Sleeping with your clothes on. You're a cliché cop, Bosch. An open book. And no different from the dozen other fools who must hit on her every day. Just stick to the business in front of you. And don't hope for anything else. He opened the file on Meadows, carefully reading every page, whereas before, in the car with Wish, he had only skimmed.
Meadows was an enigma to Bosch. A pillhead, a heroin user, but a soldier who had re-upped to stay in Vietnam. Even after they took him out of the tunnels, he stayed. In 1970, after two years in the tunnels, he was assigned to a military police unit attached to the American embassy in Saigon. Never saw enemy action again but stayed right up to the end. After the treaty and pullout of 1973, he got a discharge and stayed on again, this time as one of the civilian advisers attached to the embassy. Everybody was going home, but not Meadows. He didn't leave until April 30, 1975, the day of the fall of Saigon. He was on a helicopter and then a plane ferrying refugees out of the country, on their way to the United States. That was his last government assignment: security on the massive refugee transport to the Philippines and then to the States.
According to the records, Meadows stayed in Southern California after coming back. But his skills were limited to military police, tunnel killer, and drug dealer. There was an LAPD application in the file that was marked rejected. He failed the drug test. Next in the file was a National Criminal Intelligence Computer sheet that showed Meadows's record. His first arrest, for possession of heroin, was in 1978. Probation. The next year, he was popped again, this time for possession with intent to sell. He pleaded it out to simple possession and got eighteen months at Wayside Honor Rancho. He did ten of them. The next two years were marked by frequent arrests on marks beefs— fresh needle tracks being a misdemeanor good for sixty days in county lockup. It looked like Meadows was riding the revolving door at county until 1981, when he went away for some substantial time. It was for attempted robbery, a federal beef. The NCIC printout didn't say if it was bank robbery, but Bosch figured it had to be to bring the feds in.
The sheet said Meadows was sentenced to four years at Lompoc and served two.
He wasn't out but a few months before he was picked up for a bank robbery. They must have had him cold. He pleaded guilty and took five years back to Lompoc. He would have been out in three but two years into the sentence he was busted in an escape attempt. He got five more years and was transferred to Terminal Island.
Meadows was paroled from TI in 1988. All those years in stir, Bosch thought. He never knew, never heard from him. What would he have done if he had heard? He thought about that for a moment. It probably changed Meadows more than the war. He was paroled to a halfway house for Vietnam vets. The place was called Charlie Company and was on a farm north of Ventura, about forty miles from Los Angeles. He stayed there nearly a year.
After that there were no further contacts, according to Meadows's sheet. The marks beef that had prompted Meadows to call Bosch a year earlier had never been processed. It wasn't on the sheet. No other known contact with police upon his release from prison.
There was another sheet in the package. This one was handwritten and Bosch guessed it was Wish's clean, legible hand. It was a work and home history. Gathered from records searches of Social Security and DMV records, the entries ran vertically down the left side of the paper. But there were gaps. Time periods unaccounted for. Meadows had worked for the Southern California Water District when he first came back from Vietnam. He was a pipeline inspector. He lost the job after four months for excessive tardiness and sick-outs. From there he must have tried his hand at dealing heroin, because the next lawful employment was not listed until after he got out of Wayside in 1979. He went to work for DWP as an underground inspector—storm drainage division. Lost the job six months later for the same reasons as with the water district. There were a few other sporadic employments. After he left Charlie Company he caught on with a gold mining company in the Santa Clarita Valley for a few months. Nothing else.
There were almost a dozen home addresses listed. Most of them were apartments in Hollywood. There was a house in San Pedro, prior to the 1979 bust. If he was dealing at the time, he was probably getting it at the port in Long Beach, Bosch thought. The San Pedro address would have been convenient.
Bosch also saw that he had lived in the Sepulveda apartment since leaving Charlie Company. There was nothing else in the file about the halfway house or what Meadows did there. Bosch found the name of Meadows's parole officer on the copies of his six-month evaluation reports.
Daryl Slater, worked out of Van Nuys. Bosch wrote it down in the notebook. He also wrote down the address of Charlie Company. He then spread the arrests sheet, the work and home history, and the parole reports out in front of him. On a new piece of paper he began to write out a chronology beginning with Meadows being sent to federal prison in 1981.
When he was done, many of the gaps were closed. Meadows served a total of six and a half years in the federal pen. He was paroled in early 1988, when he was sponsored by the Charlie Company program. He spent ten months in the program before moving to the apartment in Sepulveda. Parole reports showed he secured a job as a drill operator in the gold mine in the Santa Clarita Valley. He completed parole in February 1989 and he quit his job a day after his PO signed him off. No known employment since, according to the Social Security Administration. IRS said Meadows hadn't filed a return since 1988.
Bosch went into the kitchen and got a beer out and made a ham and cheese sandwich. He stood by the sink eating and drinking and trying to organize things about the case in his head. He believed that Meadows had been scheming from the time he walked out of TI, or at least Charlie Company. He'd had a plan. He worked legitimate jobs until he cleared parole, and then he quit and the plan was set into action. Bosch felt sure of it. And he felt that it was therefore likely that, at either the prison or the halfway house, Meadows had hooked up with the men who had burglarized the bank with him. And then killed him.
The doorbell rang. Bosch checked his watch and saw it was eleven o'clock. He walked to the door and looked through the peephole and saw Eleanor Wish staring at him. He stepped back, glanced at the mirror in the entrance hall and saw a man with dark, tired eyes looking back at him. He smoothed his hair and opened the door.
"Hello," she said. "Truce?"
"Truce. How'd you know where I—never mind. Come in."
She was wearing the same suit as earlier, hadn't been home yet. He saw her notice the files and paperwork on the card table.
"Working late," he said. "Just looking over some things in the file on Meadows."
"Good. Um, I happened to be out this way and I just wanted, I just came by to say that we . . . Well, it's been a rough week so far. For both of us. Maybe tomorrow we can start this partnership over."
"Yes," he said. "And, listen, I'm sorry for what I said earlier . . . and I'm sorry about your brother. You were trying to say something nice and I. . . . Can you stay a few minutes, have a beer?"
He went to the kitchen and got two fresh bottles. He handed her one and led her through the sliding door to the porch. It was cool out, but there was a warm wind occasionally blowing up the side of the dark canyon. Eleanor Wish looked out at the lights of the Valley. The spotlights from Universal City swept the sky in a repetitive pattern.
"This is very nice," she said. "I've never been in one of these. They're called cantilevers?"
"Yes."
"Must be scary during an earthquake."
"It's scary when the garbage truck drives by."
"So how'd you end up in a place like this?"
"Some people, the ones down there with the spotlights, gave me a bunch of money once to use my name and my so-called technical advice for a TV show. So I didn't have anything else to do with it. When I was growing up in the Valley I always wondered what it would be like to live in one of these things. So I bought it. It used to belong to a movie writer. This is where he worked. It's pretty small, only one bedroom. But that's all I'll ever need, I guess."
She leaned on the railing and looked down the slope into the arroyo. In the dark there was only the dim outline of the live oak grove below. He also leaned over, and absentmindedly peeled bits of the gold foil label off his beer bottle and dropped them. The gold glinted in the darkness as it fluttered down out of sight.
"I have questions," he said. "I want to go up to Ventura."
"Can we talk about it tomorrow? I didn't come up to go over the files. I've been reading those files for almost a year now."
He nodded and stayed quiet, deciding to let her get to whatever it was that brought her. After some time she said, "You must be very angry about what we did to you, the investigation, us checking you out. Then what happened yesterday. I'm sorry."
She took a small sip from her bottle and Bosch realized he had never asked if she wanted a glass. He let her words hang out there in the dark for a few long moments.
"No," he finally said. "I'm not angry. The truth is, I don't really know what I am."
She turned and looked at him. "We thought you'd drop it when Rourke made trouble for you with your lieutenant. Sure, you knew Meadows, but that was a long time ago. That's what I don't get. It's not just another case for you. But why? There must be something more. Back in Vietnam? Why's it mean so much to you?"
"I guess I have reasons. Reasons that have nothing to do with the case."
"I believe you. But whether I believe you is not the point. I'm trying to know what's going on. I need to know."
"How's your beer?"
"It's fine. Tell me something, Detective Bosch."
He looked down and watched a little piece of the printed foil disappear in the black.
"I don't know," he said. "Actually I do know and I don't. I guess it goes back to the tunnels. Shared experience. It's nothing like he saved my life or I saved his. Not that easy. But I feel something is owed. No matter what he did or what kind of f*ckup he became after. Maybe if I had done more than make a few calls for him last year. I don't know."
"Don't be silly," she said. "When he called you last year he was well into this caper. He was using you then. It's like he's using you now, even though he's dead."
He'd run out of label to peel. He turned around and leaned his back on the railing. He fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand, put it in his mouth but didn't light it.
"Meadows," he said and shook his head at the memory of the man. "Meadows was something else. . . . Back then, we were all just a bunch of kids, afraid of the dark. And those tunnels were so damn dark. But Meadows, he wasn't afraid. He'd volunteer and volunteer and volunteer. Out of the blue and into the black. That's what he said going on a tunnel mission was. We called it the black echo. It was like going to hell. You're down there and you could smell your own fear. It was like you were dead when you were down there."
They had gradually turned so that they were facing each other. He searched her face and saw what he thought was sympathy. He didn't know if that's what he wanted. He was long past that. But he didn't know what he wanted.
"So all of us scared little kids, we made a promise.
Every time anybody went down into one of the tunnels we made a promise. The promise was that no matter what happened down there, nobody would be left behind. Didn't matter if you died down there, you wouldn't be left behind. Because they did things to you, you know. Like our own psych-ops. And it worked. Nobody wanted to be left behind, dead or alive. I read once in a book that it doesn't matter if you're lying beneath a marble tombstone on a hill or at the bottom of an oil sump, when you're dead you're dead.
"But whoever wrote that wasn't over there. When you're alive but you're that close to dying, you think about those things. And then it does matter. . . . And so we made the promise."
Bosch knew he hadn't explained a thing. He told her he was going to get another beer. She said she was fine. When he came back out she smiled at him and said nothing.
"Let me tell you a story about Meadows," he said. "See, the way they worked it was, they'd assign a couple, maybe three of us tunnel rats to go out with a company. So when they'd come across a tunnel, we'd zip on down, check it out, mine it, whatever."
He took a long pull on the fresh beer.
"And so once, this would have been in 1970, Meadows and me were tagging at the back of a patrol. We were in a VC stronghold and, man, it was just riddled with tunnels. Anyway, we were about three miles from a village called Nhuan Luc when we lost a point man. He got—I'm sorry, you probably don't want to hear this. With your brother and all."
"I do want to hear. Please."
"So this point got shot by a sniper who was in a spider hole. That was what they called the little entrances to a tunnel network. So somebody took out the sniper and then me and Meadows had to go down the hole to check it out. We went down, and right away we had to split up. This was a big network. I followed one line one way and he went the other. We had said we'd go for fifteen minutes, set charges with a twenty-minute delay, then head back, setting more along the way. . . . I remember I found a hospital down there. Four empty grass mats, a cabinet of supplies, all just sitting in the middle of this tunnel. I remember I thought, Jesus Christ, what's going to be around the bend, a drive-in movie or something? I mean these people had dug themselves in. . . . Anyway, there was a little altar, and there was incense burning. Still burning. I knew then that they were still in there somewhere, the VC, and it scared me. I set a charge and hid it behind the altar, and then I started back as fast as I could. I set two more charges along the way, timing everything so it would all go off at once. So I get back to the drop-in point, you know, the original spider hole, and no Meadows. I waited a few minutes and it's getting close. You don't want to be down there when the C-4 goes. Some of those tunnels are a hundred years old. There was nothing I could do, so I climbed out. He wasn't up top either."
He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn't prod him.
"A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents, and other spider holes all around the jungle.
"And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn't find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn't wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise."
Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.
"Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren't in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn't want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags."
He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.
"So that's my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn't stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear."
She shook her head. He nodded his.
Bosch said, "I wish I had found him that time I went back in to look. I let him down."
They both stood for a while looking down at the kitchen floor. Bosch poured the rest of his beer down the sink.
"One question about Meadows's sheet and then no more business," he said. "He got jammed up at Lompoc on an escape attempt. Then sent to TI. You know anything about that?"
"Yes. And it was a tunnel. He was a trusty and he worked in the laundry. The gas dryers had underground vents going out of the building. He dug beneath one of them. No more than an hour a day. They said he had probably been at it at least six months before it was discovered, when the sprinklers they use in the summer on the rec field softened the ground and there was a cave-in."
He nodded his head. He figured it had been a tunnel.
"The two others that were in on it," she said. "A drug dealer and a bank robber. They're still inside. There's no connection to this."
He nodded again.
"I think I should go now," she said. "We have a lot to do tomorrow."
"Yeah. I have a lot more questions."
"I'll try to answer them if I can."
She passed closely by him in the small space between the refrigerator and counter and moved out into the hallway. He could smell her hair as she went by. An apple scent, he thought. He noticed that she was looking at the print hanging on the wall opposite the mirror in the hallway. It was in three separate framed sections and was a print of a fifteenth-century painting called The Garden of Delights. The painter was a Dutchman.
"Hieronymus Bosch," she said as she studied the nightmarish landscape of the painting. "When I saw that was your full name I wondered if—"
"No relation," he said. "My mother, she just liked his stuff. I guess 'cause of the last name. She sent that print to me once. Said in the note that it reminded her of L.A. All the crazy people. My foster parents . . . they didn't like it, but I kept it for a lot of years. Had it hanging there as long as I've had this place."
"But you like to be called Harry."
"Yeah, I like Harry."
"Good night, Harry. Thanks for the beer."
"Good night, Eleanor. . . . Thanks for the company."