The black echo

Part VI
Friday, May 25
They were interviewed by the Santa Monica police, the California Highway Patrol, LAPD and the FBI. A DUI unit had been called to give Bosch a sobriety test. He passed. And by 2 A.M. he sat in an interview room at the West Los Angeles bureau, bone-tired and wondering if the Coast Guard or IRS would be next. He and Eleanor had been separated and he hadn't seen her since they had arrived three hours earlier. It bothered him that he could not be with her to protect her from the interrogators. Lieutenant Harvey "Ninety-eight" Pounds came into the room then and told Bosch they were finished for the night. Bosch could tell that Ninety-eight was angry, and it wasn't just because he had been rousted from home.
"What kind of cop doesn't get the make of the car that tries to run him down?" he asked.
Bosch was used to the second-guessing tone to the questions. It had been that way all night.
"Like I told every one of those guys before you, I was a little busy at the time. I was trying to save my ass."
"And this guy you pull over," Pounds cut in. "Jesus, Bosch, you rough him up on the side of the freeway. Every a*shole with a car phone is dialing nine one one reporting kidnap, murder, who knows what else. Couldn't you have tried to get a look at the right side of his car before you pulled him over?"
"It was impossible. All of this is covered in the report we typed up, Lieutenant. I've gone over it, seems like ten times already."
Pounds acted as though he didn't hear. "And he's a lawyer no less."
"So what?" Bosch said, now losing his patience. "We apologized. It was a mistake. The car looked the same. And if he is going to sue anybody it will be the FBI. They've got deeper pockets. So don't worry about it."
"No, he'll sue us both. He's already talking about it, fer crissake. And this is not the time to try to be funny, Bosch."
"It's also not the time to be worried about what we did or didn't do right. None of the suits that have come in here to interview me have seemed to care that somebody might be trying to kill us. They just want to know how far away I was when I fired and whether I endangered bystanders and why I pulled that car over without probable cause. Well, f*ck it, man. Somebody is out to kill my partner and me. Excuse me if I'm not feeling particularly sorry for the lawyer who got his suspenders twisted."
Pounds was ready for that argument.
"Bosch, for all we have evidence of, it could have just been a drunk. And what do you mean 'partner'? You are on a day-to-day loan to this investigation. And after tonight, I think the loan is going to be withdrawn. You've spent five solid days on this case, and from what I understand from Rourke, you've got nothing."
"It was no drunk, Pounds. We were a target. And I don't care what Rourke says we have, I'm going to clear this one. And if you'd quit undermining the effort, believe in your own people for once and maybe get those Internal Affairs a*sholes off me, you might be in line for a piece of the honors when it happens."
Pounds's eyebrows arched like roller coasters.
"Yeah, I know about Lewis said Clarke," Bosch said. "And I know their paper was being copied to you. I guess they didn't tell you about the little talk we had? I caught 'em snoozing outside my house."
It was clear from his expression that Pounds had not heard. Lewis and Clarke were staying low and Bosch would not get jammed up over what he had done to them. He began to wonder where the two IAD detectives had been when he and Eleanor had almost been run down.
Meanwhile, Pounds remained silent for a long time. He was a fish swimming around the bait Bosch had cast, seeming to know there was a hook in it but thinking there might be a way to get the bait without the hook. Finally he told Bosch to give him a rundown on the week's investigation. He was on the hook now. Bosch ran the case down for him, and though Pounds never spoke once during the next twenty minutes Bosch could tell by his roller-coasting eyebrows whenever he heard something that Rourke had neglected to bring up.
When the story was finished, there was no more talk from Pounds of Bosch's being withdrawn from the case. Nevertheless, Bosch felt very tired of the whole thing. He wanted to sleep, but Pounds still had questions.
"If the FBI isn't putting people into the tunnels, should we?" he asked.
Bosch could see he was thinking in terms of being in on the bust, if there was one. If he put LAPD people into the drainage tunnels, the FBI wouldn't be able to crowd the department out when the credit for the bust came. Pounds would receive a slap on the back from the chief if he could defend against such a maneuver.
But Bosch had come to believe that Rourke's reasoning was sound and correct. A tunnel crew would stand a good chance of stumbling into the thieves and maybe getting killed.
"No," Bosch told Pounds. "Let's first see if we can get a fix on Tran and where he keeps his stash. For all we know, it might not even be a bank."
Pounds stood up, having heard enough. He said Bosch was free to go. As the lieutenant headed to the interview room door he said, "Bosch, I don't think you'll have any problems with this incident tonight. It sounds to me like you did what you could. The lawyer got his feathers ruffled but he'll settle down. Or just settle."
Bosch didn't say anything or smile at his meager joke.
"One thing," Pounds continued. "The fact that this happened in front of Agent Wish's home is a bit troubling because it has the appearance of impropriety. Just a hint, no? You were just walking her to the door, weren't you?"
"I don't really care how it appeared, Lieutenant," Bosch answered. "I was off duty."
Pounds looked at Bosch a moment, shook his head as if Bosch had ignored his outstretched hand, and then went through the door of the small room.
Bosch found Eleanor sitting by herself in an interview room next to his. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped on her hands, her elbows up on the scarred wooden table. Her eyes opened as he walked in. She smiled and he immediately felt healed of fatigue, frustration and anger. It was a smile a child gives another when they've gotten away with something on the adults.
"All done?" she said.
"Yeah. You?"
"Been done more than an hour. You are the one they wanted to grill."
"As usual. Rourke has left?"
"Yeah, he split. Said he wants me to check in with him every other hour tomorrow. After what happened tonight, he thinks he hasn't kept a tight enough rein on this."
"Or you."
"Yeah. It looks like there is some of that, too. He wanted to know what we were doing at my place. I told him you were just walking me to my door."
Bosch sat down wearily at the other side of the table and dug a finger into a cigarette pack in search of the last one. He put it in his mouth but didn't light it.
"Besides being titillated or jealous of what we might have been doing, who does Rourke think tried to take us out?" he asked. "A drunk driver, like my people seem to think?"
"He did mention the drunk driver theory. He also asked whether I have a jealous ex-boyfriend. Other than that, there doesn't seem to be a great amount of concern that it might have something to do with our case."
"I hadn't thought of the ex-boyfriend angle. What did you tell him?"
"You're as conniving as he is," she said, flashing her brilliant smile. "I told him it wasn't any of his business."
"Good going. Is it mine?"
"The answer is no." She let him hang over the cliff a few seconds, then added, "That is, no jealous exboyfriends. So, can we leave now and get to where we were"—she looked at her watch—"about four hours ago?"
Bosch was awake in Eleanor Wish's bed long before dawn light crept around the curtain drawn across the sliding glass door. Unable to defeat insomnia, he finally got up and took a shower in the downstairs bathroom. After, he looked through her kitchen cabinets and refrigerator and began to put together a breakfast of coffee, eggs and cinnamon raisin bagels. He couldn't find any bacon.
When he heard the shower upstairs go off, he carried a glass of orange juice up and found her in front of the bathroom mirror. She was naked and braiding her hair, which she'd divided into three thick hanks. He was entranced by her and watched as she expertly maneuvered her hair into a French braid. She then accepted the juice and a long kiss from Bosch. She put on her short robe and they went downstairs to eat.
After, Harry opened the kitchen door and stood just outside it while he smoked a cigarette.
"You know," he said, "I'm just happy nothing happened."
"You mean last night on the street?"
"Yeah. To you. I don't know how I'd've handled it. I know we just met and all, but . . . uh, I care. You know?"
"Me too."
Bosch had taken a shower, but his clothes were as fresh as the ashtray in a used car. After a while he said he had to leave, to go by his house and change. Eleanor said she would go into the bureau and check for fallout from last night's activities and get whatever was on file about Binh. They agreed to meet at Hollywood Station, on Wilcox, because it was closest to Binh's business, and Bosch needed to turn in his damaged car, anyway. She walked him to the door and they kissed as if she were seeing him off to a day at the office at the accounting firm.
When Bosch got to his house, he found no messages on the phone machine and no sign that the place had been entered. He shaved and changed clothes and then headed down the hill through Nichols Canyon and then over to Wilcox. He was at his desk, updating the Investigating Officer's Chronological Report forms, when Eleanor came in at ten. The squad room was full and most of the detectives who were male stopped what they were doing to check her out. She had an uncomfortable smile on her face when she sat down in the steel chair next to the homicide table.
"Anything wrong?"
"I just think I would rather walk through Biscailuz," she said, referring to the sheriff's jail downtown.
"Oh. Yeah, these guys can leer better than most flashers. You want a glass of water?"
"No. I'm fine. Ready?"
"Let's do it."



They took Bosch's new car, which was actually at least three years old and had seventy-seven thousand miles on it. The station fleet manager, a permanent desk assignee since he'd had four fingers blown off by a pipe bomb he stupidly picked up one Halloween, said it was the best he could do. Budget restraints had halted the replacement of cars, though repairing the old ones actually cost the department more. At least, Bosch learned after starting the car, the air conditioner worked reasonably well. There was a light Santa Ana condition kicking up and the forecast was for an unseasonably warm holiday weekend.
Eleanor's research on Binh showed he had an office and business on Vermont near Wilshire. There were more Korean-run shops in the area than Vietnamese, but they coexisted. As near as Wish had been able to find out, Binh controlled a number of businesses that imported cheap clothing and electronic and video merchandise from the Orient and then moved it through Southern California and Mexico. Many of the items turistas thought they were getting on the cheap in Mexico and then bringing back to the States had already been here. It all seemed successful on paper, though it was small-time. Still, it was enough to make Bosch question if Binh even needed the diamonds. Or ever had any.
Binh owned the building his office and discount video equipment store was based in. It was a 1930s auto showroom that had been converted years before Binh had ever seen it. Unreinforced concrete block fronted with wide picture windows and guaranteed to come down in a decent shaker. But for someone who had made it out of Vietnam the way Binh had, earthquakes were probably viewed as a minor inconvenience, not a risk.
After they found an empty parking space across the street from Ben's Electronics, Bosch told Eleanor he wanted her to handle the questioning, at least at first. Bosch said he figured that Binh might be more inclined to talk to the feds than to the locals. They decided on a plan to small-talk him and then ask about Tran. Bosch didn't tell her that he also had a second plan in mind.
"Doesn't exactly look like the kind of place run by a guy with a box full of diamonds in a bank vault," Bosch said as they got out of the car.
"That is had in the bank," she said. "And remember, he couldn't flaunt that stuff. He had to be like every other Joe Immigrant. The appearance of living day to day. The diamonds, if there were any, were the collateral for this place, for his American success story. But it had to look like he made it from scratch."
"Wait a second," Bosch said as they got to the other side of the street. He told Eleanor he had forgotten to ask Jerry Edgar to fill in on a court appearance for him that afternoon. He pointed to a pay phone at a service station next to Binh's building and trotted over. Eleanor stayed behind, looking in the windows of the store.
Bosch called Edgar but didn't say anything about a court appearance.
"Jed, I need a favor. You won't even have to get up."
Edgar hesitated, as Bosch thought he would.
"What do you need?"
"You aren't supposed to say it like that. You're supposed to say, 'Sure, Harry, what do you need?' "
"Come on, Harry, we both know we're under the glass. We've got to be careful. Tell me what you need. I'll tell you if I can do it."
"All I want you to do is buzz me in ten minutes. I need to get out of a meeting. Just buzz me, and when I call in, just put the phone down for a couple minutes. And if I don't call in, buzz me again in five minutes. That's it."
"That's all you need? Just the buzz?"
"Right. Ten minutes from now."
"Okay, Harry," Edgar said, relief in his voice. "Hey, I heard about your thing last night. That was close. And word around here is that it wasn't no drunk driver. You watch your ass."
"Always. What's going on with Sharkey?"
"Nothing. I ran down his crew like you told me. Two of 'em told me they were with him that night. I think they were rolling faggots. They said they lost sight of him after he got in a car. That was a couple hours before the desk got the call that he was in the tunnel up at the bowl. I figure whoever was in that car did him."
"Description?"
"The car? Not very good. Dark color, American sedan. Something new. That's about it."
"What kind of headlights?"
"Well, I showed 'em the car book and they picked different taillights. One guy's got round, the other says rectangle. But on the headlights. They both said they—"
"Square, side-by-side squares."
"Right. Hey, Harry, you thinking this is the car that came down on you and the FBI woman? Jesus! We ought to get together on this."
"Later. Maybe later. Meantime, buzz me in ten minutes."
"Ten minutes, right."
Bosch hung up and went back to Eleanor, who was looking through the plate-glass window at the ghetto blasters on display. They entered the store, shook off two salesmen, walked around a stack of boxed camcorders on sale for $500 each and told a woman standing at a cash register station in the back that they were there to see Binh. The woman stared blankly at them until Eleanor showed her badge and federal ID card.
"You wait here," the woman said and then disappeared through a door located behind the cash counter. There was a small mirrored window in the door that reminded Bosch of the interview room back at Wilcox. He looked at his watch. He had eight minutes.
?      ?       ?
The man who emerged from the door behind the cash register looked to be about sixty years old. He had white hair. He was short but Bosch could tell he had once been physically powerful for his size. Built wide and low to the ground, he now was softened by an easier life than he had had in his native land. He wore silver-framed glasses with a pink tint and an open-collar shirt and golf slacks. His breast pocket sagged with the weight of almost a dozen pens and a clip-on pocket flashlight. Ngo Van Binh was low key all the way.
"Mr. Binh? My name is Eleanor Wish. I am from the FBI. This is Detective Bosch, LAPD. We'd like to ask you a few questions."
"Yes," he said, the stern expression on his face unchanging.
"It's about the break-in at the bank where you had a safe-deposit box."
"I reported no loss, my deposit box had sentimental occupants only."
Diamonds ranked fairly high up there on the sentimental range, Bosch thought. "Mr. Binh, can we go back to your office and talk privately?" he said instead.
"Yes, but I suffered no loss. You look. It is in the reports."
Eleanor held her hand out, urging Binh to lead the way. They followed him through the door with the mirror window and into a warehouselike storage room. There were hundreds of boxes of electronic appliances on steel shelves going to the ceiling. They passed through into a smaller room that was a repair or assembly shop. There was a woman sitting at a tool bench with a bowl of soup held to her mouth. She did not look up as they passed. There were two doors at the back of the shop, and the procession went through one into Binh's office. It was here that Binh shed his peasant trappings. The office was large and plush, with a desk and two chairs to the right and a dark leather L-shaped couch to the left. The couch was at the edge of an Oriental rug that featured a three-headed dragon poised to strike. The couch faced two walls of shelves filled by books and stereo and video equipment, much finer than what Bosch had seen out front. We should have braced him at his home, Bosch thought. Seen how he lived, not how he worked.
Bosch quickly scanned the room and saw a white telephone on the desk. It would be perfect. It was an antique, the kind where the handset was cradled above a rotary dial. Binh moved toward his desk but Bosch quickly spoke up.
"Mr. Binh? Would it be okay if we sat over here on the couch? We'd like to keep this as informal as possible. We sit at desks all day, to tell you the truth."
Binh shrugged his shoulders as though it made no difference to him, that they were inconveniencing him no matter where they sat. It was a distinctly American gesture, and Bosch believed his seeming difficulty with English was a front used to better insulate him. Binh sat down on one side of the L-shaped couch and Eleanor and Bosch took the other.
"Nice office," Bosch said and looked around. He saw no other phone in the room.
Binh nodded. He offered no tea or coffee, no small talk. He just said, "What do you want, please?"
Bosch looked at Eleanor.
She said, "Mr. Binh, we are just retracing our steps. You reported no financial loss in the vault break-in. We—"
"That is right. No loss."
"That is correct. What did you keep in the box?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Papers and such, no value. I told this to everyone already."
"Yes, we know. We are sorry to bother you again. But the case remains open and we have to go back and see if we missed anything. Could you tell me in specific detail what papers you lost? It might help us, if we make a recovery of property and can identify who it belongs to."
Eleanor took a small notebook and pen out of her purse. Binh looked at his two visitors as if he could not possibly see how his information could help. Bosch said, "You'd be surprised sometimes what little things can—"
His pager tone sounded and Bosch pulled the device off his belt and looked at the number display. He stood up and looked around, as if he was just noticing the room for the first time. He wondered if he was overdoing it.
"Mr. Binh, can I use your phone? It'll be local."
Binh nodded, and Bosch walked to the front of the desk, leaned over and picked up the handset. He made a show of checking the pager number again, then dialed Edgar's number. He remained standing with his back to Eleanor and Binh. He looked up at the wall, as if studying the silk tapestry that hung there. He heard Binh begin to describe to Eleanor the immigration and citizenship papers that had been taken from his safe-deposit box. Bosch put the pager in his coat pocket and came out with the small pocketknife, the T-9 phone bug and the small battery he had disconnected from his own phone.
"This is Bosch, who paged me?" he said into the phone when Edgar picked up. After Edgar put the phone down, he said, "I'll hold a few minutes, but tell him I'm in the middle of an interview. What's so important?"
With his back still to the couch and Binh still talking, Bosch turned slightly to the right and cocked his head as if he were holding the phone to his left ear, where Binh could not see it. Bosch brought the handset down to stomach level, used the knife to pop off the earpiece cover—clearing his throat as be did this—and then pulled out the audio receiver. With one hand he connected the bug to its battery—he had practiced doing it earlier while waiting for the new car in the fleet yard at Wilcox. Then he used his fingers to shove the bug and battery into the barrel of the handset. He put the receiver back in and snapped on the cover, coughing loudly to camouflage any sound.
"Okay," Bosch said into the phone. "Well, tell him I'll call back when I am through here. Thanks, man."
He put the phone back on the desk while returning the knife to his pocket. He went back to the couch, where Eleanor was writing in a notebook. When she was finished she looked at Bosch and Bosch knew without any sign that now the interview would shift into a new direction.
"Mr. Binh," she said. "Are you sure that is all you had in the box?"
"Yes, sure, why do you ask me so much?"
"Mr. Binh, we know who you are and the circumstances of your coming to this country. We know you were a police officer."
"Yes, so? What's it mean?"
"We also know other things—"
"We know," Bosch cut in, "you were very highly paid as a police officer in Saigon, Mr. Binh. We know that for some of your work you were paid in diamonds."
"What does this mean, what he says?" Binh said, looking at Eleanor and gesturing with his hand to Bosch. He was lapsing into the defense of language barrier. He seemed to know less English as the interview went on.
"It means what he says," she answered. "We know about the diamonds you brought here from Vietnam, Captain Binh. We know you kept them in the safe-deposit box. We believe the diamonds were the motivation for the vault break-in."
The news didn't shake him, he may have already considered as much. He did not move. He said, "This not true."
"Mr. Binh, we've got your package," Bosch said. "We know all about you. We know what you were in Saigon, what you did. We know what you took with you when you came here. I don't know what you are into now—it all looks legit, but we don't really care. What we do care about is who ripped off that bank. And they ripped it off because of you. They took the collateral for all this and everything else you've got. Now, I don't think we are telling you something that you probably haven't figured out or thought about on your own. In fact, you might have even thought your old partner Nguyen Tran was behind it because he knew what you had and maybe where it was. Not a bad guess, but we don't think so. In fact, we think he is next on the list."
Not a crack formed on the stone that was Binh's face.
"Mr. Binh, we want to talk to Tran," Bosch said. "Where is he?"
Binh looked down through the coffee table in front of him to the three-headed dragon on the rug beneath it. He put his hands together on his lap, shook his head and said, "Who is this Tran?"
Eleanor glared at Bosch and tried to salvage what rapport she had had with the man before he butted in.
"Captain Binh, we're not interested in taking any action against you. We simply want to stop another vault break-in before it happens. Can you help us, please?"
Binh didn't answer. He looked down at his hands.
"Look, Binh, I don't know what you've got going on this," Bosch said. "You might have people out there trying to find the same people we are, I don't know. But I'm telling you right now, you are out of it. So tell us where Tran is."
"I don't know this man."
"We are your only hope. We have to get to Tran. The people that ripped you off, they are in the tunnels again. Right now. If we don't get to Tran this weekend, there won't be anything left for you or him."
Binh remained a stone, as Bosch expected. Eleanor stood up.
"Think about it, Mr. Binh," she said.
"We're running out of time, and so is your old partner," Bosch said as they headed for the door.
After walking through the showroom door Bosch looked both ways for traffic and ran across Vermont to the car. Eleanor walked it, anger making her strides stiff and jerky. Bosch got in and reached to the floor behind the front seat for the Nagra. He turned it on and set the recording speed at its fastest level. He didn't think the wait would be long. He hoped all the electronic equipment in the store would not skew the reception. Eleanor got in the passenger side and started to complain.
"That was magnificent," she said. "We'll never get anything out of that guy now. He's just going to call up Tran and—what the hell is that?"
"Something I picked up from the shooflies. They dropped a bug in my phone. Oldest trick in the IAD book."
"And you just put it in . . ." She pointed across the street and Bosch nodded.
"Bosch, do you realize what could happen to us, what this means? I'm going back in there and getting—"
She opened the car door but he reached across and pulled it closed.
"You don't want to do that. This is our only way to get to Tran. Binh wasn't going to tell us, no matter how we handled the interview, and deep down behind those angry eyes you know it. So it's this or nothing. Binh warns Tran and we never know where he is, or we use this to maybe find him. Maybe. We'll probably know soon enough"
Eleanor looked straight forward and shook her head.
"Bosch, this could mean our jobs. How could you do this without consulting me?"
"For that reason. It could mean my job. You didn't know."
"I'd never prove it. The whole thing looks like a setup. I keep him occupied while you do your little charade on the phone."
"It was a setup, only you didn't know. Besides, Binh and Tran are not the targets of our investigation. We are not gathering evidence against them, just from them. This will never go in a report. And if he finds the bug, he can't prove I put it there. There was no register number. I looked. The suits weren't stupid enough to make it traceable. We're clear. You're clear. Don't worry."
"Harry, that is hardly reassur—"
The red light on the Nagra flicked on. Someone was using Binh's phone. Bosch checked to make sure the tape was rolling.
"Eleanor, you make the call," Bosch said, holding the recorder up on the palm of his hand. "Turn it off if you want. Your choice."
She turned and looked at the recorder, then at Bosch. Just then the dialing stopped and it was silent in the car. A phone began to ring at the other end of Binh's call. She turned away. Someone answered the phone. A few words were exchanged in Vietnamese and then more silence.
Then a new voice was on the line and a conversation began, also in Vietnamese. Bosch could tell one of the voices belonged to Binh. The other sounded like a man about Binh's age. It was Binh and Tran, together again. Eleanor shook her head and forced a short laugh.
"Brilliant, Harry, now who do we get to translate? We aren't letting anyone else know about this. We can't risk it."
"I don't want to translate it." He turned the receiver off and rewound the tape. "Get out your little pad and pen."
Bosch adjusted the recorder to its slowest speed and hit the play button. When the dialing started, it was slow enough that Bosch could count the clicks. Bosch called the numbers out to Eleanor, who wrote them down. They had the number Binh had dialed.
The phone number was a 714 area code. Orange County. Bosch switched the receiver on; the telephone conversation between Binh and the unknown man was continuing. He turned it off and picked up the radio microphone. He gave a dispatcher the phone number and asked for the name and address that went with it. It would take a few minutes while someone looked it up in a reverse directory. Meantime, Bosch started the car and headed south toward Interstate 10. He had already connected with the 5 and was heading into Orange County when the dispatcher got back to him.
The phone number belonged to a business called the Tan Phu Pagoda in Westminster. Bosch looked over at Eleanor, who looked away.
"Little Saigon," he said.
Bosch and Wish got to the Tan Phu Pagoda from Binh's business in an hour. The pagoda was a shopping plaza on Bolsa Avenue where no sign was printed in English. The building was off-white stucco with glass fronts on the half-dozen shops that lined the parking lot. Each was a small establishment that sold mostly unneeded junk like electronic equipment or T-shirts. There were competing Vietnamese restaurants on either end. Next to one of the restaurants was a glass door that led to an office or business without a front display window. Though neither Bosch nor Wish could decipher the words on the door, they immediately figured it was the entrance to the shopping center office.
"We need to get in there and confirm that's Tran's place, see if he's there and if there are other exits," Bosch said.
"We don't even know what he looks like," Wish reminded him.
He thought a moment. If Tran wasn't using his real name, it would tip him off to go in asking for him.
"I've got an idea," Wish said. "Find a pay phone. Then I'll go in the office. You dial the number you got off the tape and when I'm in there I'll see if it rings. If I hear a phone we have the right place. I'll also try to scope out Tran and the exits."
"Phones might be ringing in there every ten seconds," Bosch said. "It might be a boiler room or a sweatshop. How will you know it's me?"
She was silent a moment.
"Chances are they don't speak English, or at least not well," she said. "So you ask whoever answers to speak English or get someone who can. When you get someone who understands, say something that will get a reaction I'll be able to see."
"You mean if the phone rings in a place where you will see."
She shrugged, her eyes showing him she was tired of his shooting down every suggestion she made. "Look, it's the only thing we can do. Come on, there's a phone, we don't have a lot of time."
He drove out of the parking lot and a quarter block down to a pay phone out front of a liquor store. Wish walked back to the Tan Phu Pagoda and Bosch watched until she reached the door of the office. He dropped a quarter in the phone and dialed the number he had written on his pad in front of Binh's. The line was busy. He looked back at the office door. Wish was gone from view. He dropped the quarter and dialed again. Busy. He did it in quick succession two more times before he got a ring. He was thinking that he had probably dialed the wrong number, when the call was answered.
"Tan Phu," a male voice said. Young, Asian, probably early twenties, Bosch thought. Not Tran.
"Tan Phu?" Bosch asked.
"Yes, please."
Bosch could not think of what to do. He whistled into the phone. The comeback was a staccato verbal attack of which Bosch could not understand a single word or sound. Then the phone at the other end was slammed down. Bosch walked back to the car and drove back toward the shopping plaza and into the narrow parking lot. He was cruising through it slowly when Wish appeared at the glass door with a man. An Asian. Like Binh, he had gray hair and had the aura; unspoken power, unflexed muscle. He held the door open for Eleanor and nodded to her as she said thanks. He watched her walk off and then disappeared inside again.
"Harry," she said as she got in the car, "what did you say to the guy on the phone?"
"Not a word. So it was that office?"
"Yeah. I think that was our Mr. Tran who held the door for me. Nice guy."
"So what did you do to become such great pals?"
"I told him I was a real estate lady. When I went in I asked to see the boss. Then Mr. Gray Hair came out of a back office. He said his name was Jimmie Bok. I said I represented Japanese investors and asked if he was interested in taking an offer on the shopping center. He said no. He said, in very fine English, 'I buy, I don't sell.' Then he escorted me out. But I think that was Tran. Something about him."
"Yeah, I saw it," Bosch said. Then he picked up the radio and asked dispatch to run the name Jimmie Bok on the NCIC and DMV computers.
Eleanor described the inside of the office. A central reception area, a hallway running behind it with four doors, including one at the rear that looked like an exit, judging by the double lock. No women. At least four men other than Bok. Two of them looked like hired muscle. They stood up from the reception room couch when Bok walked out of the middle door in the hallway.
Bosch drove out of the lot and around the block. He cut up the alley that ran behind the shopping plaza. He stopped when he had driven far enough to see a gold stretch Mercedes parked next to a rear door to the complex. There was a double lock on the door.
"That's got to be his wheels," Wish said.
They decided they would watch the car. Bosch drove on by it to the end of the alley and parked behind a Dumpster. Then he realized it was full of garbage from the restaurant. He backed out and drove out of the alley completely. He parked on the side street so that by looking out the passenger side of the car, they both could see the rear end of the Mercedes. Bosch could also look at Eleanor at the same time.
"So, I guess we wait," she said.
"Guess so. No way of telling whether he'll do anything after Binh's warning: Maybe he did something after Binh got ripped off last year and we're just spinning our wheels."
Bosch got a radio callback from the dispatcher; Jimmie Bok had a clean driving record. He lived in Beverly Hills and he had no criminal record. Nothing else.
"I'm going back to the phone," Eleanor announced. Bosch looked at her. "I have to check in. I'll tell Rourke we're set up on this guy and see if he can't shake someone loose to maybe call some banks and run his name. To see if he is a customer. I'd also like to run him on the property computer. He said, 'I buy, I don't sell.' I'd like to know what he buys."
"Fire a shot if you need me," Bosch said, and she smiled as she opened the door.
"You want something to eat?" she asked. "I'm thinking about getting takeout for lunch from one of those restaurants up front."
"Just coffee," he said. He hadn't eaten Vietnamese food in twenty years. He watched her walk around to the front of the center.
About ten minutes after she was gone, as Bosch watched the Mercedes, he saw a car pass by the other end of the alley. He immediately made it as a police sedan. A white Ford LTD without wheel covers, just the cheap hubcaps that revealed the matching white wheels. It had been too far away for him to see who was in it. He alternately looked at the Mercedes and then at the rearview mirror to see if the LTD was coming around the block. But in five minutes, he never saw it.
Wish was back ten minutes after that. She was carrying a grease-stained brown bag from which she pulled one coffee and two goldfish cartons. Steamed rice and crab boh, she said. He passed on her offer and rolled his window down. He sipped the coffee she handed to him and grimaced.
"Tastes like it was made in Saigon and shipped over," he said. "Did you get Rourke?"
"Yeah. He's going to get somebody to check Bok out and page me if they come up with anything. He wants to know, on a radio patch-through, the minute the Mercedes starts moving."
Two hours passed easily as they small-talked and watched the gold Mercedes. Eventually Bosch announced that he was going to break camp and drive around the block just to change the pace. What he didn't say was that he was bored and his butt was falling asleep and that he wanted to look for the white LTD.
"Do you think maybe we should call to see if he's still there, and then hang up if he gets on?" she said.
"If Binh gave him the warning, a call like that might shake him up, make him think something is going on, make him more cautious."
He drove the car up to the corner and along the front of the shopping plaza. Nothing unusual caught his eye. He went around the block and parked in the same spot again. He had not seen the LTD.
As soon as they were back in position, Wish's pager sounded and she got out to go to the phone again. Bosch concentrated on the gold Mercedes and forgot about the LTD for the time being. But after Eleanor was gone twenty minutes he began to get nervous. It was after 3 P.M. and Bok/Tran had not left as they expected he would. Something didn't seem right. But what? Bosch looked up at the front corner of the shopping center, studying it and waiting for Eleanor to make the turn around the stucco siding. He heard a sound, like a muffled impact. Two or three of them. Shots? He thought of Eleanor, and his heart was pushed by a fist up into his throat. Or had the sound been car doors closing? He looked at the Mercedes but could only see the trunk and taillights. He saw no one around the car. Back at the front corner; no Eleanor. Then back at the Mercedes, and he saw the brake lights go on. Bok was leaving. Bosch started the car and drove up to the corner, his rear tires spitting gravel as he gunned it forward. At the corner he saw Eleanor walking along the sidewalk toward him. He honked the horn and signaled for her to hurry. Eleanor trotted to the car and was just getting in when the Mercedes appeared in Bosch's rearview mirror and turned out of the alley toward them.
"Get down," he said and pulled Eleanor down on the seat.
The Mercedes floated by and turned onto Bolsa. He released his grip on her neck. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded as she came up.
Bosch pointed at the Mercedes, which was heading away. "They were coming by. You would've been made because you went in the office today. What took you so long?"
"They had to track down Rourke. He wasn't in his office."
Harry pulled out and started following the Mercedes from a distance of about two blocks. After a long moment composing herself, Eleanor said, "Is he by himself?"
"I don't know. I didn't see him get in. I was looking up at the corner for you. I think I heard more than one car door close. I'm sure I did."
"But you don't know if Tran was one of them who got in?"
"Right. Don't know. But it's getting late. I figure it's gotta be him."
Bosch realized then that he might have fallen for the oldest ruse in the surveillance book. Bok, or Tran, or whoever he was, could have simply sent one of his minions in the hundred-thousand-dollar car to draw away the tail.
"What do you think, go back?" he said.
Wish didn't answer until he looked over at her. "No," she said. "Go with what we got. Don't second-guess yourself. You're right about the time. A lot of banks close at five before a holiday weekend. He had to get going. He was warned by Binh. I think it's him."
Bosch felt better. The Mercedes turned west and then north again on the Golden State Freeway toward Los Angeles. The traffic crept slowly into downtown, and then the gold car went west on the Santa Monica Freeway, exiting on Robertson at twenty minutes before five. They were heading into Beverly Hills. Wilshire Boulevard was lined with banks from downtown to the ocean. As the Mercedes turned west, Bosch felt they had to be close. Tran would keep his treasure at a bank near his home, he thought. The gamble had been right. He relaxed a bit and finally got around to asking Eleanor what Rourke had said when she called in.
"He confirmed through the Orange County clerk's office that Jimmie Bok is Nguyen Tran. They had a fictitious name filing. He changed his name nine years ago. We should've checked Orange County. I forgot about Little Saigon.
"Also," she said, "if this guy Tran had diamonds, he might have used them all up already. Property recs show he owns two more shopping centers like that one back there. In Monterey Park and Diamond Bar."
Bosch told himself it was still possible. The diamonds could be the collateral for the real estate empire. Just like with Binh. He kept his eyes on the Mercedes, only a block ahead now because rush hour was in full force and he didn't want to get cut off. He watched the black windows of the car move along the rich street, and he told himself it was heading to the diamonds.
"And I saved the best for last," Wish announced then. "Mr. Bok, also known as Mr. Tran, controls his many holdings through a corporation. The title of said corporation, according to the records check by Special Agent Rourke, is none other than Diamond Holdings, Incorporated."
They passed Rodeo Drive and were in the heart of the commercial district. The buildings lining Wilshire took on more stateliness, as if they knew they had more money and class in them. Traffic slowed to a crawl in some areas, and Bosch got as close as two car lengths behind the Mercedes, not wanting to lose the car on a missed light. They were almost to Santa Monica Boulevard and Bosch was beginning to figure they were headed to Century City. Bosch looked at his watch. It was four-fifty. "If this guy is going to a bank in Century City, I don't think he's going to make it."
Just then the Mercedes made a right turn into a parking garage. Bosch slowed to the curb and without saying a word Wish jumped out and walked into the garage. Bosch took the next right and went around the block. Cars were pouring out of office parking lots and garages, cutting in front of him again and again. When he finally got around, Eleanor was standing at the curb at the same spot where she had jumped out. He pulled up and she leaned into the window.
"Park it," she said, and she pointed across the street and down half a block. There was a rounded structure that was built out to the street from the first floor of a high-rise office building. The walls of the semicircle were glass. And inside this huge glass room Bosch saw the polished steel door of a vault. A sign outside the building said Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. He looked at Eleanor and she was smiling.
"Was Tran in the car?" he asked.
"Of course. You don't make mistakes like that."
He smiled back. Then he saw a space open up at a meter just ahead. He drove up and parked.
?      ?       ?
"Since we started thinking there would be a second vault hit, my whole orientation was banks," Eleanor Wish said. "You know, Harry? Maybe a savings and loan. But I drive by this place a couple times a week. At least. I never considered it."
They had walked down Wilshire and were standing across the street from Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. She was actually standing behind him and peeking at the place over his shoulder. Tran, or Bok as he was now known, had seen her earlier, and they couldn't risk his spotting her here. The sidewalk was clogged with office types that were pouring through the revolving glass doors of the buildings, heading to parking garages and trying to get even a five-minute jump on the traffic, on the holiday weekend.
"It fits though," Bosch said. "He comes here, doesn't trust banks, like your friend at State was talking about. So he finds a vault without a bank. Here it is. But even better. As long as you have the money to pay, these places don't need to know who you are. No federal banking regulations because it isn't a bank. You can rent a box and only identify yourself with a letter or a number code."
Beverly Hills Safe & Lock had all the appearances of a bank but was far from it. There were no savings or checking accounts. No loan department, no tellers. What it offered was what it showed in the front window. Its polished steel vault. It was a business that protected valuables, not money. In a town like Beverly Hills, this was a precious commodity. The rich and famous kept their jewels here. Their furs. Their prenuptial agreements.
And it all sat out there in the open. Behind glass. The business was the bottom floor of the fourteen-story J. C. Stock Building, a structure unnotable save for the glass vault room that protruded in a half circle from the first-floor facade. The entrance to Beverly Hills Safe & Lock was on the side of the building at Rincon Street, where Mexicans in short yellow jackets stood ready to valet a client's car.
After Bosch had dropped Eleanor off and gone around the block, she had watched Tran and two bodyguards get out of the gold Mercedes and walk to the safe and lock. If they thought they might be followed, they hadn't shown it. They never looked behind them. One of the bodyguards carried a steel briefcase.
Eleanor said, "I think I made at least one of the bodyguards as carrying. The other's coat was too baggy. Is that, him? Yeah, there he is."
Tran was being escorted by a man in a dark-blue banker's suit into the vault room. A bodyguard trailed behind with the steel briefcase. Bosch saw the heavy man's eyes sweep the sidewalk outside until Tran and Banker's Suit disappeared through the vault's open door. The man with the briefcase waited. Bosch and Wish also waited, and watched. It was about three minutes before Tran came out, followed by the suit, who carried a metal safe-deposit box about the size of a woman's shoe box. The bodyguard took up the rear, and the three men walked out of the glass room, out of sight.
"Nice, personal service," Wish said. "Beverly Hills all the way. He's probably taking it into a private sitting room to make the transfer."
"Think you can get ahold of Rourke and get a crew over here to follow Tran when he leaves?" Bosch asked. "Use a landline. We have to stay off the air in case the people underground have someone up top listening to our frequencies."
"I take it we're staying here with the vault?" she asked, and Bosch nodded. She thought a moment and said, "I'll make the call. He'll be glad to know we found the place. We'll be able to put the tunnel crew down."
She looked about, saw a pay phone next to a bus stop on the next corner and made a move to walk that way. Bosch held her arm.
"I'm going to go inside, see what's up. Remember, they know you, so stay out of sight until they're gone."
"What if they split before reinforcements come?"
"I'm staying with that vault. I don't care about Tran.
You want the keys? You can take the car and tail him."
"No, I'll stay with the vault. With you."
She turned and headed toward the phone. Bosch crossed Wilshire and went in the safe and lock, passing an armed security guard who had been walking toward the door with a key ring in his hand.
"Closing up, sir," said the guard, who had the swagger and gruffness of an ex-cop.
"I'll only be a minute," Bosch said without stopping.
Banker's Suit, who had led Tran into the vault, was one of three young, fair-haired men sitting at antique desks on the plush gray carpet in the reception area. He glanced up from some papers on his desk, sized up Bosch's appearance and said to the younger of the other two, "Mr. Grant, would you like to help this gentleman."
Though his unspoken answer was no, the one called Grant stood up, came around his desk and with the best phony smile in his arsenal approached Bosch.
"Yes, sir?" the man said. "Thinking of opening a vault account with us?"
Bosch was about to ask a question when the man stuck out his hand and said, "James Grant, ask me anything. Though we are running a little short of time. We are closing for the weekend in a few minutes."
Grant drew up his coat sleeve to check his watch to confirm closing time.
"Harvey Pounds," Bosch said, taking his hand. "How did you know I don't already have a vault account?"
"Security, Mr. Pounds. We sell security. I know every vault client on sight. So do Mr. Avery and Mr. Bernard." He turned slightly and nodded at Banker's Suit and the other salesman, who solemnly nodded back.
"Not open weekends?" Bosch asked, trying to sound disappointed.
Grant smiled. "No, sir. We find our clients are the type of people who have well-planned schedules, well-planned lives. They reserve the weekend for pleasures, not errands like these others you see. Scurrying to the banks, the ATMs. Our clients are a measure above that, Mr. Pounds. And so are we. You can appreciate that."
There was a sneer in his voice when he said this. But Grant was right. The place was as slick as a corporate law office, with the same hours and the same self-important front men.
Bosch took an expansive look around. In an alcove to the right where there was a row of eight doors he saw Tran's two bodyguards standing on each side of the third door. Bosch nodded at Grant and smiled.
"Well, I see you have guards all over the place. That's the kind of security I'm looking for, Mr. Grant."
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Pounds, those men are merely waiting for a client who is in one of the private offices. But I assure you our security provision can't be compromised. Are you looking for a vault with us, sir?"
The man had more creepy charm than an evangelist. Bosch disliked him and his attitude.
"Security, Mr. Grant, I am looking for security. I want to lease a vault but I need to be assured of the security, from both outside and inside problems, if you know what I mean."
"Of course, Mr. Pounds, but do you have any idea of the cost of our service, the security we provide?"
"Don't know and don't care, Mr. Grant. See, the money is not the object. The peace of mind is. Agreed? Last week my next-door neighbor, I'm talking about just three doors down from the former president, had a burglary. The alarm was no obstacle to them. They took very valuable things. I don't want to wait for that to happen to me. No place is safe these days."
"Truly a shame, Mr. Pounds," Grant said, an unbridled note of excitement in his voice. "I didn't realize it was getting that way in Bel Air. But I couldn't agree more with your plan of action. Have a seat at my desk and we can talk. Would you like coffee, perhaps some brandy? It is near the cocktail hour, of course. Just one of the little services we provide that a banking institution cannot."
Grant laughed then, silently, with his head nodding up and down. Bosch declined the offer and the salesman sat down, pulling his chair in behind him. "Now, let me tell you the basics of how we work. We are completely non-regulated by any government agency. I think your neighbor would be happy about that."
He winked at Bosch, who said, "Neighbor?"
"The former president, of course." Bosch nodded and Grant proceeded. "We provide a long list of security services, both here and for your home, even an armed security escort if needed. We are the complete security consultant. We—"
"What about the safe-deposit vault?" Bosch cut in. He knew Tran would be coming out of the private office at any moment. He wanted to be in the vault by then.
"Yes, of course, the vault. As you saw, it is on display to the world. The glass circle, as we call it, is perhaps our most brilliant security ploy. Who would attempt to breach it? It is on display twenty-four hours a day. Right on Wilshire Boulevard. Genius?"
Grant's smile was wide with triumph. He nodded slightly in an effort to prompt agreement from his audience.
"What about from underneath?" Bosch asked, and the man's mouth dropped back into a straight line.
"Mr. Pounds, you can't expect me to outline our structural security measures, but rest assured the vault is impregnable. Between you, me and the lamppost, you won't find a bank vault in this town with as much concrete and steel in the floor, in the walls, in the ceiling of that vault. And the electrical? You couldn't—if you excuse the expression—break wind in the circle room without setting off the sound, motion and heat sensors."
"May I see it?"
"The vault?"
"Of course."
"Of course."
Grant adjusted his jacket and ushered Bosch toward the vault. A glass wall and a mantrap separated the semicircular vault room from the rest of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Grant waved his hand at the glass and said, "Double-plated tempered glass. Vibration alarm tape between the sheets of glass to make tampering impossible. You'll find this on the exterior windows as well. Basically, the vault room is sealed in two plys of three-quarter-inch glass."
Using his hand again like a model pointing out prizes on a game show, Grant indicated a boxlike device beside the door to the mantrap. It was about the size of an office water fountain, and a circle of white plastic was inlaid on top. On the circle was the black outline of a hand, its fingers splayed.
"To get in the vault room, your hand must be on file. The bone structure. Let me show you."
He placed his right hand on the black silhouette. The device began to hum and the white plastic inlay was lit from inside the machine. A bar of light swept below the plastic and Grant's hand, as if it were a Xerox machine.
"X-ray," Grant said. "More positive than fingerprints, and the computer can process it in six seconds."
In six seconds the machine emitted a short beep and the electronic lock on the first door of the trap snapped open. "You see, your hand becomes your signature here, Mr. Pounds. No need for names. You give your box a code and you put the bone structure of your hand on file with us. Six seconds of your time is all we need."
Behind him Bosch heard a voice he recognized as belonging to Banker's Suit, the one called Avery. "Ah, Mr. Long, are we finished?"
Bosch glanced around to see Tran emerging from the alcove. Now he was the one who carried the briefcase. And one of the bodyguards carried the safe-deposit box. The other big man looked right at Bosch. Bosch turned back to Grant and said, "Can we go in?"
He followed Grant into the mantrap. The door closed behind them. They were in a glass-and-white-steel room about twice the size of a telephone booth. There was a second door at the end. Behind it stood another uniformed guard.
"This is just a detail we borrowed from the L.A. County Jail," Grant said. "This door in front of us cannot open unless the one behind us is closed and locked. Maury, our armed guard, makes a final visual check and opens the last door. You see, we have the human and electronic touch here, Mr. Pounds." He nodded to Maury, who unlocked and opened the last door of the trap. Bosch and Grant walked out into the vault room. Bosch didn't bother to mention that he had just successfully circumvented the elaborate security obstacles by playing on Grant's greed and pitching a story with a Bel Air address.
"And now into the vault," Grant said, holding his hand out like a congenial host.
The vault was larger than Bosch had envisioned. It was not wide but it extended far back into the J. C. Stock Building. There were safe-deposit boxes along both side walls and in a steel structure running down the center of the vault. The two began walking down the aisle to the left as Grant explained that the center boxes were for larger storage needs. Bosch could see that the doors were much larger than those on the side walls. Some were big enough to walk through. Grant saw Bosch staring at these and smiled.
"Furs," he said. "Minks. We do very good business storing expensive furs, gowns, what have you. The ladies of Beverly Hills keep them here in the off season. Tremendous insurance savings, not to mention the peace of mind."
Bosch tuned out the sales pitch and watched as Tran walked into the vault, trailed by Avery. Tran still had the briefcase, and Bosch noticed a thin band of polished steel on his wrist. He was handcuffed to the briefcase. Bosch's adrenaline kicked in at a higher notch. Avery stepped up to an open box door marked 237 and slid the deposit box in. He closed the door and used a key in one of the two locks on the door. Tran stepped up and put his own key in the other lock and turned it. He then nodded to Avery and both men walked out, Tran never having looked at Bosch.
Once Tran was gone, Bosch announced that he had seen enough of the vault and headed out also. He walked to the double-plated glass and looked out on Wilshire Boulevard and watched Tran, flanked by the two massive guards, making his way to the parking garage where the Mercedes was parked. No one followed them. Bosch looked around but didn't see Eleanor.
"Is something wrong, Mr. Pounds?" Grant said from behind him.
"Yes," Bosch said. He reached into his coat pocket and brought out his badge wallet. He held it up over his shoulder so Grant could see it from behind. "You better get me the manager of this place. And don't call me Mr. Pounds anymore."
Lewis stood at a pay phone in front of a twenty-four-hour diner called Darling's. He was around the corner and about a block from Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. It had been more than a minute since Officer Mary Grosso had answered the call and said she would get Deputy Chief Irving on the line. Lewis was thinking that if the man wanted hourly updates—by landline, no less—then the least he could do was take the damn call promptly. He switched the phone to his other ear and dug in his coat pocket for something to pick his teeth with. His wrist was sore where it chafed against the pocket. But thinking about being handcuffed by Bosch only made him angry, so he tried to concentrate on the investigation. He had no idea what was going on, what Bosch and the FBI woman were up to. But Irving was convinced there was a caper on, and so was Clarke. If so, Lewis promised himself at the pay phone, he would be the one who would squeeze the cuffs on Bosch's wrists.
An old tramp with scary eyes and white hair shuffled up to the pay phone next to tbe one Lewis was at and checked the change slot. It was empty. He reached a finger toward the slot of the phone Lewis was using, but the IAD detective batted it away.
"Anything there, it's mine, pop," Lewis said.
Undeterred, the tramp said, "You got a quarter so I can get something to eat?"
"F*ck off," Lewis said.
"What?" a voice said.
"What?" Lewis said, and then realized the voice had come from the phone. It was Irving. "Oh, not you, sir. I didn't realize you were—uh, I was talking, uh, I'm having a problem here with someone. I—"
"You speak like that with a citizen?"
Lewis reached a hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a dollar bill. He handed it to the white-haired man and shooed him away.
"Detective Lewis, are you there?"
"Yes, Chief. Sorry. I've taken care of the situation now. I wanted to report. There has been an important development."
He hoped this last would draw Irving's attention away from the earlier indiscretion.
Irving said, "Tell me what you have. Do you still have Bosch in sight?"
Lewis exhaled sharply, relieved.
"Yes," he said, "Detective Clarke is continuing surveillance while I make this report."
"All right, then give it to me. It is Friday evening, Detective, I would like to get home at a reasonable hour."
Lewis spent the next fifteen minutes updating Irving on Bosch's tail of the gold Mercedes from Orange County to the Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. He said the tail was terminated at the safe and lock, which appeared to have been the intended destination.
"What are they doing now, Bosch and the bureau woman?"
"They are still in there. It looks like they are interviewing the manager. Something's going on. It was like they didn't know where they were going but once they got to this place, they knew this was it."
"Was what?"
"That's it. I don't know. Whatever it is they are up to. I think the guy they followed made a deposit. There is a vault, a large vault in the front window of the place."
"Yes, I know where you are talking about."
Irving did not speak for a long period, and Lewis, his report completed, knew better than to interrupt. He started daydreaming about cuffing Bosch's hands behind his back and walking him past a battery of television cameras. He heard Irving clear his throat.
"I don't know their plan," the deputy chief said. "But I want you to stay with them. If they don't go home tonight, neither do you. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"If they allowed the Mercedes Benz to go on, then it must be the vault they wanted to find. They will place the vault under surveillance. And you, in turn, will continue to keep them under surveillance."
"Yes, Chief," Lewis said, though he was still lost.
Irving spent the next ten minutes giving his detective instructions and his theory of what was happening with Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Lewis pulled out a pad and pen and took some quick notes. At the end of the one-sided dialogue, Irving entrusted Lewis with his home telephone number and said, "Don't move in without my prior approval. You can call me at the number at any time, day or night. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Lewis said urgently.
Irving hung up without saying another word.
Bosch waited in the reception area without telling Grant or the other salesmen what was going on until Wish arrived. They stood behind their fancy desks with their mouths open. When Eleanor came to the door it was locked. She knocked and held up her badge. The guard let her in and she walked into the reception area.
As the salesman named Avery opened his mouth to say something, Bosch said, "This is FBI Agent Eleanor Wish. She is with me. We are going to step into one of your client offices for a private conversation. Just take a minute. If there is a head man here, we'd like to speak to him as soon as we come out."
Grant, still flustered, just pointed to the second door in the alcove. Bosch went in the third door and Wish followed. He closed the door on all three of the salesmen's eyes and locked it.
"So, what have we got? I don't know what to tell them," he whispered as he looked around the desk and two chairs in the room for a scrap of paper or anything else Tran might have mistakenly left behind. There was nothing. He opened the drawers of the mahogany desk. There were pens and pencils and envelopes and a stack of bond paper. Nothing else. There was a fax machine on a table against the wall opposite the door but it was not turned on.
"We watch and wait," she said, speaking very quickly. "Rourke says he is putting together a tunnel crew. They'll go in and have a look around. They're going to get with DWP first to see exactly what's down there. They should be able to figure what the best spot for a tunnel would be and then they'll go from there. Harry, you really think this is it?"
He nodded. He wanted to smile but didn't. Her excitement was contagious.
"Did he get a tail on Tran in time?" he asked. "By the way, here they know him as Mr. Long."
There was a knocking on the door and someone's voice saying, "Excuse me. Excuse me." Bosch and Wish ignored it.
"Tran, Bok, now Long," Wish said. "I don't know about the tail. Rourke said he was going to try. I gave him the plate and told him where the Mercedes was parked. Guess we'll find out later. He said he'd also send over a crew to work the surveillance with us. We are going to have a surveillance meeting in the garage across the street at eight o'clock. What did they say here?"
"I haven't told them what's going on yet." There was another knock, this one louder. "Well, then, let's go see the head man."
The owner and chief operating officer of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock turned out to be Avery's father, Martin B. Avery III. He was of the same stock as many of his customers and wanted everybody to know it. He had a private office at the rear of the alcove. Behind his desk was a collection of framed photographs attesting to the fact that he was not just another chiseler feeding off the rich. He was one of them. There was Avery III with a couple of presidents, a movie mogul or two, and English royalty. One photo was of Avery and the Prince of Wales in full polo regalia, though Avery appeared too thick around the middle and loose in the jowls to be much of a horseman.
Bosch and Wish summarized the situation for him and he was immediately skeptical. He said his vault was impregnable. They told him to save the sales pitch and asked to see design and operation plans for the vault. Avery III flipped his $60 blotter over, and there was the vault schematic taped to the back. It was clear that Avery III and his blow-cut salesmen were overselling the vault. Starting from its outermost skin and going inward, it was one-inch steel plating followed by a foot of rebarred concrete followed by another inch of steel. The vault was thicker on the bottom and top, where there was another two-foot layer of concrete. As with all vaults, the most impressive thing was the thick steel door, but that was for show. Just like the hand X-ray and the mantrap. Only a show. Bosch knew that if the tunnel bandits were really down below, they would have little trouble coming up for air.
Avery III said that there had been a vault alarm on each of the past two nights, including two alarms on Thursday night. Each time he was called at home by the Beverly Hills police. He in turn called his son, Avery IV, and dispatched him to meet the officers. The officers and the heir then entered the business and reset the alarm after finding nothing amiss.
"We had no idea that there might be someone in the sewers below us," Avery III said. He said it like the word sewers was wholly beneath his usage. "Hard to believe, hard to believe."
Bosch asked more detailed questions about the vault's operation and security devices. Not realizing its significance, Avery III mentioned matter-of-factly that unlike conventional bank vaults his vault had a time-lock override. He had a code he could enter into the computer lock which would purge the time-lock coordinates. He was able to open the vault door anytime.
"We must accede to our client's needs," he explained. "If a Beverly Hills lady should call on a Sunday because she needs her tiara for the charity ball, I want to be able to get that tiara for her. You see, it is the service we sell."
"Do all your clients know about that weekend service?" Wish asked.
"Of course not," Avery III said. "Only a select few. You see, we charge a hefty fee. We must bring in a security guard to do it."
"How long does it take to do the override and swing the door open?" Bosch asked.
"Not long. I tap in the override code on the keypad next to the vault door and it is done in a matter of seconds. You then set the vault unlock code in, then turn the wheel and the door opens under its own weight. Thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, perhaps less."
Not fast enough, Bosch thought. Tran's box was located near the front of the vault. That's where the bandits would be working. They would see and probably hear the vault door being opened. No element of surprise.
An hour later, Bosch and Wish were back in his car. They had moved to the second level of the parking garage across Wilshire and east a half block from Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. From there they had an open view of the vault room. After they had left Avery III and taken the surveillance position, they had watched as Avery IV and Grant swung the huge stainless steel vault door closed. They turned the wheel and typed on the computer keypad, locking it. Then the lights inside the business went out, all except those in the glass vault room. Those always stayed on to display the very symbol of the security they offered.
"You think they'll come through tonight?" Wish asked.
"Hard to say. Without Meadows, they're down a man. They might be behind schedule."
They had told Avery III to go home and be ready for a call out. The owner had agreed but remained skeptical of the whole scenario Bosch and Wish had spun for him.
"We are going to have to get them from underground," Bosch said, his hands holding the steering wheel as if he were driving. "We'd never get that door open fast enough."
Bosch idly looked to his left, up Wilshire. He saw a white LTD with police wheels parked at the curb a block away. It was parked next to a fire hydrant and there were two figures in it. He still had company.
Bosch and Wish stood next to his car, which was parked on the second level of the garage facing the retainer wall at the south end. The garage had been virtually empty for more than an hour, but the drab concrete enclosure smelled of exhaust fumes and burning brakes. Bosch was sure the brakes smell was from his car. The stop-and-go tail from Little Saigon had taken its toll on the replacement car. From their position they could look across Wilshire and west a half block to the vault showroom of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Farther down Wilshire the sky was pink and the setting sun a deep orange. Evening lights were coming on in the city and traffic was thinning out. Bosch looked east up Wilshire and could see the white LTD parked at the curb, its occupants shadows behind the tinted windshield.
At eight o'clock a procession of three cars, the last a Beverly Hills patrol car, came up the ramp and cut across the empty parking spaces to where Bosch and Wish stood at the wall.
"Well, if our perps have their lookout in any of these high rises and they saw this little parade, you can bet he is pulling them out now," Bosch said.
Rourke and four other men got out of the two unmarked cars. Bosch could tell by the suits that three of them were agents. The fourth man's suit was a little too worn, its pockets baggy like Bosch's. He carried a cardboard tube. Harry figured him for the DWP supe Wish had said was coming. Three Beverly Hills uniforms, one with captain's bars on his collar, got out of the patrol car. The captain was also carrying a rolled tube of paper.
Everybody converged at Bosch's car and used its hood as the meeting table. Rourke made some quick introductions. The three from BHPD were there because the operation was in their jurisdiction. Interdepartmental courtesy, Rourke said. They were also on hand because Beverly Hills Safe & Lock had filed a design plan with the local police department's commercial security division. They would only observe the meeting, Rourke said, and be called on later if their department was needed for backup. Two of the FBI agents, Hanlon and Houck, would work the overnight surveillance with Bosch and Wish. Rourke wanted a view of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock from at least two angles. The third agent was the FBI's SWAT coordinator. And the last man was Ed Gearson, a DWP underground facilities supervisor.
"Okay, let's set the battle plans," Rourke announced at the end of the introductions. He took the cardboard tube from Gearson without asking and slid out a rolled blueprint. "This is a DWP schematic print for this area. It has all the utility lines, the tunnels and culverts. It tells us exactly what is down there."
He unfurled the grayish map with smeared blue lines on it across the hood. The three Beverly Hills cops anchored the other end with their hands. It was getting dark in the garage and the SWAT man, an agent named Heller, held a penlight with a surprisingly wide and bright beam over the drawing. Rourke took a pen out of his shirt pocket, pulled on it until it telescoped into a pointer.
"Okay, we are . . . right . . ." Before he could find the spot Gearson reached his arm into the light and put a finger on the map. Rourke brought his pen point over to the spot. "Yes, right here," he said and gave Gearson a don't-f*ck-with-me look. The DWP man's shoulders seemed to stoop a little more in his threadbare jacket.
Everyone around the car leaned in closer over the hood to study the location. "Beverly Hills Safe & Lock is here," Rourke said. "The actual vault is here. Can we see your blueprint, Captain Orozco?"
Orozco, who was built like an inverted pyramid, broad shoulders over thin hips, unrolled his drawing across the top of the DWP print. It was a copy of the drawing Avery III had shown Bosch and Wish earlier.
"Three thousand square feet of vault space," said Orozco, indicating the vault area with his hand. "Small private boxes along the sides and free-standing closets down the middle. If they are under there, they could come up through the floor anywhere along these two aisles. So we are talking about a range of about sixty feet in which they could come through the floor."
"Now, Captain," Rourke said, "if you pick that up and we look back at the DWP chart, we can place that breakthrough zone right here." With a Day-Glo yellow under-liner he outlined the floor of the vault on the utility map. "Using that as a guide, we can see the subterranean structures that offer the closest proximity. What do you think, Mr. Gearson?"
Gearson leaned over the car hood another few inches and studied the utility map. Bosch also leaned in. He saw thick lines he assumed indicated major east-west drainage lines. The kind the tunnelers would seek. He noticed that they corresponded to major surface streets: Wilshire, Olympic, Pico. Gearson pointed out the Wilshire line, saying it ran thirty feet below ground and was large enough to drive a truck through. With his finger, the DWP man traced the Wilshire line east ten blocks to Robertson, a major north-south stormwater line. From that intersection, he said, it was just a mile south to an open drainage culvert that ran alongside the Santa Monica Freeway. The opening at the culvert was as big as a garage door and blocked only by a gate with a padlock on it.
"I'd say that's where they could've come in," Gearson said. "Like following surface streets. You take the Robertson line up to Wilshire. Take a left and you're practically here by your yellow line. The vault. But I don't think they'd dig a tunnel off the Wilshire line."
"No?" Rourke said. "How so?"
"Too busy is how so," Gearson said, sensing he was the man with the answers as nine faces peered at him from around the car hood. "We got DWP people underground all the time in these main lines. Checking for cracks, blockages, problems of any sort. And Wilshire's the main drag down there, east and west. Just like up top. If somebody knocked a hole in the wall it'd get noticed. See?"
"What if they were able to conceal the hole?"
"You're talking about like they did a year or so ago in that burglary downtown. Yeah, that might work again, maybe somewhere else, but there is a good chance on the Wilshire line that it'd be seen. We look for that sort of thing now. And, like I said, there's a lot of traffic on the Wilshire line."
There was silence as they took time to consider this. The engines of the cars ticked away the heat.
"Then where would they dig, Mr. Gearson, to get into this vault?" Rourke finally said.
"We got all manner of linkups down there. Don't think us guys don't think of this from time to time when we're working down there. You know, the perfect crime and all that. I've hashed stuff like this around, especially when I read about that last one in the papers. I think if you are saying that's the vault they want to get into, then they'd still do just like I said: come up Robertson and then over on the Wilshire line. But then I think they'd move down one of the service tunnels to sort of stay out of sight. The service tunnels are three to five feet wide. They're round. Plenty of room to work and move equipment. They hook up the main artery lines to the street storm drains and the utility systems in the buildings along here."
He put his hand back into the light and traced the smaller lines he was talking about on the DWP map.
"If they did this right," he said, "what they did was get in the gate down by the freeway and drive their equipment and all up to Wilshire and then over to your target area. They unload their stuff, hide it in one of these service tunnels, as we call 'em, and then take their vehicle back out. They hike back in on foot and set to work in the service tunnel. Hell, they could be working in there five, six weeks before we might have occasion to go up that particular line."
Bosch still thought it sounded too simple.
"What about these other storm lines?" he asked, indicating Olympic and Pico on the map. There was a crosshatch pattern of the smaller service tunnels running from these lines north toward the vault. "What about using one of these and coming up behind the vault?"
Gearson scratched his bottom lip with a finger and said, "That's fine. There's that too. But the thing is, these lines aren't going to get you as close to the vault as these Wilshire offshoots. See what I mean? Why would they dig a hundred-yard tunnel when they could dig a hundred-footer here?"
Gearson liked holding court, the idea of knowing more than the silk suits and uniforms around him. Having finished his speech, he rocked back on his heels, a satisfied look on his face. Bosch knew the man was probably correct on every detail.
"What about earth displacement?" Bosch asked him. "These guys are digging a tunnel through dirt and rock, concrete. Where do they get rid of it? How?"
"Bosch, Mr. Gearson is not a detective," Rourke said. "I doubt that he knows every nuance of—"
"Easy," Gearson said. "The floors of the main lines like Wilshire and Robertson are graded three degrees to center. There is always water running down the center, even most days during a drought. It might not be raining up top but water flows, you know. You'd be surprised how much. Either it's runoff from the reservoirs or commercial use or both. Your fire department gets a call, where you think the water goes when they are done puttin' the fire out? So what I am saying is, if they had enough water they could use it to move the displaced earth or whatever you want to call it."
"It's got to be tons." Hanlon spoke for the first time.
"But it's not several tons at once. You said they took days to dig this. You spread it out over days and the runoff could handle it. Now, if they are in one of the service tunnels they'd have to figure a way to get water through there, down to your main line. I'd check your fire hydrants in the area. You got one leaking or had a report of somebody opening one up, that'd be your boys."
One of the uniforms leaned to Orozco's ear and said something. Orozco leaned over the hood and raised his finger above the map. Then he poked it down on a blue line. "We had a hydrant vandalized here two nights ago."
"Somebody opened it up," the uniform who had whispered to the captain said, "and used a bolt cutter to cut the chain that holds the cap. They took the cap with them, and it took the fire department an hour to get out here with a replacement."
"That would be a lot of water," Gearson said. "That would have taken care of some of your earth displacement."
He looked at Bosch and smiled. And Bosch smiled back. He liked when pieces of the puzzle began to fit.
"Before that, let's see, Saturday night it was, we had an arson," Orozco said. "A little boutique in behind the Stock Building off Rincon."
Gearson looked at the spot Orozco pointed to on the blueprint as being the location of the boutique. He put his own finger on the fire hydrant location. "The water from both of those things would have gone into three street catches, here, here and here," he said, moving his hand deftly over the gray paper. "These two drain to this line. The other drains here."
The investigators looked at the two drainage lines. One ran parallel to Wilshire, behind the J. C. Stock Building. The other ran perpendicular to Wilshire, a straight offshoot, and next to the building.
"Either one and we're still looking at, what, a hundred-foot tunnel?" Wish said.
"At least," Gearson said. "If they had a straight shot. They might've hit ground utilities or hard rock and had to divert some. Doubt any tunnel down there could be a straight shot."
The SWAT expert tugged Rourke's cuff and the two walked away from the crowd for a whispered conversation. Bosch looked at Wish and softly said, "They're not going to go in."
"What do you mean?"
"This isn't Vietnam. Nobody has to go down there. If Franklin and Delgado and anybody else are down there in one of these lines, there's no way to go in safely and unannounced. They hold all the advantages. They'd know we're coming."
She studied his face but didn't say anything.
"It would be the wrong move," Bosch said. "We know they're armed and probably have trips set up. We know they're killers."
Rourke came back to the gathering around the car hood and asked Gearson to wait in one of the bureau cars while he finished up with the investigators. The DWP man walked to the car with his head down, disappointed he was no longer part of the plan.
"We're not going in after them," Rourke said after Gearson shut the car door. "Too dangerous. They have weapons, explosives. We have no element of surprise. It adds up to heavy casualties for us. . . . So, we trap them. We let things take their course and then we will be there waiting, safely, when they come out. Then we'll have surprise on our side.
"Tonight SWAT will make a recon run through the Wilshire line—we'll get some DWP uniforms from Gearson—and look for their entry point. Then we'll set up and wait in whatever's the best location. Whatever's safest from our standpoint."
There was a beat of silence, punctuated by a horn from the street, before Orozco protested.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." He waited until every face was on his. Except Rourke's. He didn't look at Orozco at all.
"We can't be talking about sitting out here with our thumbs up our asses and letting these people blast their way into that vault," Orozco said. "To let them go in and pry open a couple hundred boxes and then just back out. My obligation is to protect the property of the citizens of Beverly Hills, who probably happen to constitute ninety percent of that business's customers. I'm not going along with this."
Rourke collapsed his pen pointer, put it in the inside pocket of his coat and then spoke. He still did not look at Orozco.
"Orozco, your exception can be noted for the record, but we're not asking you to go along with this," Rourke said. Bosch noticed that along with failing to address Orozco by his rank, Rourke had dropped all pretense of courtesy.
"This is a federal operation," Rourke continued. "You are here as a professional courtesy. Besides, if my thinking is correct, they will open one deposit box only. When they find it empty they will cancel the operation and leave the vault."
Orozco was lost. His face showed it. Bosch could see be obviously had not been given many details of the investigation. He felt sorry for him, hung out to dry by Rourke.
"There are things we can't discuss at this point," Rourke said. "But we believe their target is only one box. We have reason to believe it is now empty. When the perps break into the vault and open that particular box and find it is empty, we believe they will back out in a hurry. Our job now is to be ready for that."
Bosch wondered about Rourke's supposition. Would the thieves back out? Or would they think they had the wrong box and keep drilling, looking for Tran's diamonds? Or would they loot the other boxes in hope of stealing property valuable enough to make the tunnel caper worth it? Bosch didn't know. He certainly wasn't as sure as Rourke, but then he knew the FBI agent might just be posturing to get Orozco out of the way.
"What if they don't back out?" Bosch asked. "What if they keep drilling?"
"Then we all have a long weekend ahead of us," Rourke said, "because we are going to wait them out."
"Either way, you're going to put that place out of business," Orozco said, pointing in the direction of the Stock Building. "Once it is known that somebody blew a hole through the vault they've got sitting out there in the big window, there will be no public confidence. Nobody will put their property in there."
Rourke just stared at him. The captain's plea was falling on deaf ears.
"If you can catch them after they break in, why not before?" Orozco said. "Why don't we open up that place, run a siren, make some noise, even sit a patrol car out front? Do something to let 'em know we are here and we know about them. That'll scare 'em out before they break in. We catch them, we save the business. We don't, we still save the business and we get them another day."
"Captain," Rourke said, the false congeniality back, "if you let them know we are here, you take away our one advantage—surprise—and invite a firefight in the tunnels and perhaps up on the street in which they will not care who is hurt, who is killed. That's including themselves and perhaps innocent bystanders. Then, how do we explain to the public and even ourselves that we did it this way because we wanted to try to save a business?"
Rourke waited a beat to let his words sink in, then said, "You see, Captain, I am not going to hedge on safety on this operation. I can't. These men that are down there, they don't scare. They kill. Two people that we know about, including a witness. And that's only this week. No way are we going to let them get away. No f*cking way."
Orozco leaned across the hood and rolled his blueprint up. As he snapped a rubber band around it, he said, "Gentlemen, don't f*ck up. If you do, my department and I will not hold back our criticism or the details of what was discussed at this meeting. Good night."
He turned and walked back to the patrol car. The two uniforms followed without being told to. Everybody else just watched. When the patrol car drove down the ramp, Rourke said, "Well, you heard the man. We can't f*ck this up. Anybody else want to suggest something?"
"What about putting people in the vault now and waiting for them to come up?" Bosch said. He hadn't really considered it but threw it out as it came to him.
"No," the SWAT man said. "You put people in the vault and they are in a corner. No options. No way out. I wouldn't even ask my men for volunteers."
"They could be injured by the blast," Rourke added. "No telling where or when the perps will come up."
Bosch nodded. They were right.
"Can we open the vault and go in, once we know they have come up?" one of the agents said. Bosch couldn't remember now whether he was Hanlon or Houck.
"Yes, there's a way to take the door off the time lock," Wish said. "We'd need to get Avery, the owner, back out here."
"From what Avery said, it looks like that would take too long," Bosch said. "Too slow. Avery can take it off time lock and open it, but it's a two-ton door that swings open on its own weight. At best, it would take a half minute to get it open. Maybe less, but they'd still have the drop on us, the people inside. Same risk as coming at them through the tunnels."
"What about a flash bang?" one of the agents said. "We open the vault door just a bit and throw in a flash grenade. Then we go in and take them."
Rourke and the SWAT man shook their heads in unison.
"For two reasons," the SWAT man said. "If they wire the tunnel as we assume they will, the flash could detonate the charges. We could see Wilshire Boulevard out there drop thirty feet, and we don't want that. Think of the paperwork."
When no one smiled, he continued. "Secondly, that's a glass room we are talking about. Our position in there would be very vulnerable. If they have a lookout, we're dead. We think they go with radio silence when they've got the explosives out. But what if they don't and this lookout lets them know we're out there. They might be ready to toss something out at us while we're tossing something in."
Rourke added his own thoughts. "Never mind the lookout. We put a SWAT team in that glass room and they can watch it on TV. We'll have every station in L.A. with a camera out on the sidewalk and traffic backed up to Santa Monica. It'd be a circus. So forget that. SWAT will get with Gearson, do the recon and get the exits down by the freeway covered. We wait for them underneath and we take 'em on our terms. That's it."
The SWAT man nodded and Rourke continued. "Starting tonight we'll have twenty-four-hour surveillance topside on the vault. I want Wish, Bosch, on the vault side of the building. Hanlon, Houck, on Rincon Street so you can see the door. If it looks or sounds like it is going down, I want to be alerted and I will alert SWAT to stand by. Use landlines if possible. We don't know if they are monitoring our freeks. You people on the surveillance will have to work out a code to use on the radio. Everybody got that?"
"What if there is an alarm?" Bosch asked. "There have been three so far this week."
Rourke thought a moment and said, "Handle it routinely. Meet the callout manager, Avery or whoever, at the door and reset the alarm and send him on his way. I'll get back to Orozco and tell him to send his patrols on the alarms but we'll handle things."
"Avery will get the callouts," Wish said. "He already knows what we think is going to happen here. What if he wants to open the vault, take a look around?"
"Don't let him. It's that simple. It's his vault but his life would be endangered. We can prevent it."
Rourke looked around at the faces. There were no more questions.
"Then that's it. I want people in position in ninety minutes. That gives you all-nighters time to eat, piss and get coffee. Wish, give me status reports, landline, at midnight and oh six hundred. Got it?"
"Got it."
Rourke and the SWAT man got in the car where Gearson was waiting and drove down the ramp. Bosch, Wish, Hanlon, and Houck then worked out a radio code to use. They decided to switch the streets in the surveillance area with the names of streets downtown. The idea was if anyone was listening to the simplex 5 public safety frequency, they would think they were hearing reports on a surveillance at Broadway and First Street in downtown instead of Wilshire and Rincon in Beverly Hills. They also decided to refer to the vault room as a pawnshop while on the radio. That done, the two sets of investigators split up and agreed to check in at the start of the surveillance. As Hanlon and Houck's car headed toward the ramp, Bosch, alone with Wish for the first time since the plans were set, asked what she thought.
"I don't know. I don't like the idea of letting them go into the vault and then run around loose down there after.
I wonder if the SWAT team can really cover everything." "I guess we'll find out."
A car came up the ramp and drove toward them. The lights blinded Bosch, and for a moment he thought of the car that had come at them the night before. But then the car swerved and came to a stop. It was Hanlon and Houck. The passenger window was rolled down and Houck held a thick manila envelope out the window.
"Mail call, Harry," the agent said. "Forgot we were supposed to give this to you. Somebody from your office dropped it by the bureau today, said you were waiting for it but hadn't been by Wilcox to get it."
Bosch took the envelope and held it out away from his body. Houck noticed the discomfort on his face.
"The guy's name was Edgar, a black guy, said you used to be partners," Houck said. "Said it had been sitting in your mailbox two days and he thought it might be important. Said he was showing somebody a house out in Westwood and decided to drop it by while he was in the area. That sound legit to you?"
Bosch nodded and the two agents drove away again. The heavy envelope was sealed but the return address was the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He tore off the end of the envelope and looked inside. There was a thick file of papers.
"What is it?" Wish asked.
"It's Meadows's package. I forgot I ordered it. Did it Monday, before I knew you guys were on the case. Anyway, I've already seen this stuff."
He tossed the envelope through the open window of the car onto the backseat.
"Hungry?" she asked him.
"I want some coffee at least."
"I know a place."
Bosch was sipping steaming black coffee from a plastic cup he had taken from the restaurant, an Italian place on Pico behind Century City. He was in the car, back in place on the second floor of the parking garage across Wilshire from the vault. Wish opened the door and got in after making her midnight check-in call to Rourke.
"They found the Jeep."
"Where?"
"Rourke says SWAT did the reconnaissance ride through the Wilshire storm sewer but found no sign of intruders or a tunnel entry. Looks like Gearson was right. They're tucked in one of the smaller tributary lines. Anyway, the SWAT guys then went down to the drainage wash by the freeway to set the trap. They were deploying at three exit positions from the tunnels when they came across the Jeep. Rourke said there's a car pool parking lot down by the freeway. There's a beige Jeep parked with a covered trailer attached. It's theirs. The three blue ATVs are in the trailer."
"Is he getting a warrant?"
"Yeah, he's got somebody trying to find a judge now. So they'll have it. But they aren't going to go near it until they take down the operation. In case their plan is for someone to come out and get the ATVs. Or somebody already outside is going to show up and drive 'em in.
Bosch nodded and sipped. It was the smart way to go. He remembered he had a cigarette going in the ashtray and tossed it out the open window.
As if guessing what he would be thinking, she said, "Rourke said that from what they could see there was no blanket in the back of the Jeep. But if it's the Jeep Meadows's body was carried to the reservoir in, there still should be fiber evidence."
"What about the seal that Sharkey saw on the door?"
"Rourke said there was no seal. But there could have been one and they just took it off when they were leaving the Jeep out there."
"Yeah," Bosch said. After a few moments of thought, he said, "Does it bother you how everything is just coming together so well?"
"Should it?"
Bosch shrugged his shoulders. He looked up Wilshire. The curb in front of the fireplug was empty. Since they had come back from dinner Bosch hadn't seen the white LTD, which he'd been sure was an IAD car. He didn't know if Lewis and Clarke were around or had called it a night.
"Harry, good detective work pays off with cases that come together," Eleanor told him. "I mean, we aren't out of the dark on this by a long shot. But I think we finally have a measure of control. Damned sight better than we were three days ago. So why the worry when a few things finally start coming together?"
"Three days ago Sharkey was still alive."
"Well, while you're taking the blame for that, why don't you add everybody else who has ever made a choice and gotten themselves killed. You can't change those things, Harry. And you're not supposed to be a martyr."
"What do you mean, choice? Sharkey didn't make any choice."
"Yes, he did. When he chose the streets, he knew he might die on the streets."
"You don't believe that. He was a kid."
"I believe that shit happens. I believe that the best you can do in this job is come out even. Some people win and some lose. Hopefully, half the time it is the good guys who win. That's us, Harry."
Bosch drank his cup dry and they sat in silence for a while after that. They had a clear view of the vault sitting at the center of the glass room like a throne. Out there in the open, polished and shiny under the bright ceiling lights, it said "Take me" to the world, he thought. And somebody would. We're going to let them.
Wish picked up the radio handset, keyed the transmit button twice and said, "Broadway One to First, do you guys copy?"
"We copy, Broadway. Anything?" It was Houck's voice on the comeback. There was a lot of static, as the radio waves ricochetted off the tall buildings in the area.
"Only checking. What's your position?"
"We are due south of the front door of the pawnshop. A clear view of nothing going on."
"We're east. Can see the—" She clicked off the mike and looked at Bosch. "We forgot a code for the vault. Got any ideas?"
Bosch shook his head no, but then said, "Saxophone. I've seen saxophones hanging in pawnshop windows. Musical instruments, lots of them."
She clicked the mike open again. "Sorry, First Street, had technical difficulty. We are east of the pawnshop, have the piano in the window in sight. No activity inside."
"Stay awake."
"That's a K. Broadway out."
Bosch smiled and shook his head.
"What?" she said. "What?"
"I've seen lots of musical instruments in pawnshops, but I don't know about a piano. Who is going to take a piano to a pawnshop? You'd need a truck. We've blown our cover now." He picked up the radio mike, but without clicking the transmit button, and said, "Uh, First Street, check that. It's not a piano in the window. That's an accordion. Our mistake."
She slugged him on the shoulder and told him to never mind the piano. They settled into an easy silence. Surveillance jobs were the bane of most detectives' existence. But in his fifteen years on the job Bosch had never minded a single stakeout. In fact, many times he enjoyed them when he was with good company. He defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company. Bosch thought about the case and watched the traffic pass by the vault. He recapped the events as they had occurred, in order, from start to present. Revisiting scenes, listening to the dialogue over again. He found that often this reaccounting helped him make the next choice or step. What he mulled over now, poking at it like a loose tooth with his tongue, was the hit-and-run. The car that had come at them the night before. Why? What did they know at that point that made them so dangerous? It seemed to be a foolish move to kill a cop and a federal agent. Why was it undertaken? His mind then drifted to the night they had spent together after all the questions were asked by all the supervisors. Eleanor was spooked. More so than he. As he had held her in her bed, he felt as though be were calming a frightened animal. Holding and caressing her as she breathed into his neck. They had not made love. Just held each other. It had somehow seemed more intimate.
"Are you thinking about last night?" she asked then.
"How did you know?"
"A guess. Any ideas?"
"Well, I think it was nice. I think we—"
"I'm talking about who tried to kill us last night."
"Oh. No, no ideas. I was thinking about the after."
"Oh. . . . You know, I didn't thank you, Harry, for being with me like that, not expecting anything."
"I should thank you."
"You're sweet."
They drifted into their own thoughts again. Leaning against the door with his head against the side window, Bosch rarely took his eyes off the vault. Traffic on Wilshire was light but steady. People heading to or from the clubs over on Santa Monica Boulevard or around Rodeo Drive.
There was probably a premiere at nearby Academy Hall. It seemed to Bosch that every limousine in L.A. was working Wilshire this night. Stretch cars of all makes and colors cruised by, one by one. They moved so smoothly they seemed to float. They were beautiful, and intriguing with their black windows. Like exotic women in sunglasses. A car built just for this city, Bosch thought.
"Has Meadows been buried?"
The question surprised him. He wondered what tumble of thought led to it. "No," he answered. "Monday, over at the veterans cemetery."
"A Memorial Day funeral, sounds kind of fitting. So his life of crime did not disqualify him from being placed in such sacred ground?"
"No. He did his time over there in Vietnam. They've saved a space for him. There's probably one there for me, too. Why did you ask?"
"I don't know. Just thinking is all. Will you go?"
"If I'm not sitting here watching this vault."
"That will be nice of you. I know he meant something to you. At one point in your life."
He let it drop, but then she said, "Harry, tell me about the black echo. What you said the other day. What did you mean?"
For the first time he looked away from the vault and at Eleanor. Her face was in darkness, but headlights from a passing car lit the interior of the car for a moment and he could see her eyes on his. He looked back at the vault.
"There isn't anything really to tell. It's just what we called one of the intangibles."
"Intangibles?"
"There was no name for it, so we made up a name. It was the darkness, the damp emptiness you'd feel when you were down there alone in those tunnels. It was like you were in a place where you felt dead and buried in the dark. But you were alive. And you were scared. Your own breath kind of echoed in the darkness, loud enough to give you away. Or so you thought. I don't know. It's hard to explain. Just . . . the black echo."
She let some time slide between them before she said, "I think your going to the funeral is nice."
"Is something wrong?"
"What do you mean?"
"What I said. The way you're talking. You haven't seemed right since last night. Like something—I don't know, forget it."
"I don't know, either, Harry. You know, after the adrenaline wore off, I guess I kind of just got scared. Made me start thinking about things."
Bosch nodded his head but didn't say anything. His mind drifted and he remembered a time in the Triangle when a company that had taken heavy casualties from sniper fire stumbled onto the entrance to a tunnel complex. Bosch, Meadows and a couple of other rats named Jarvis and Hanrahan were dropped at a nearby LZ and escorted to the hole. The first thing they did was drop a Couple of LZ flares, a blue one and a red one, into the hole and blow the smoke in with a Mighty Mite fan, to find the other entrances in the jungle. Pretty soon ribbons of smoke started curling out of the ground at a couple dozen spots for two hundred yards in all directions. The smoke was coming up through the spider holes the snipers used as firing positions or to move in and out of the tunnels. There were so many of them, the jungle was turning purple from the smoke. Meadows was stoned. He popped a cassette into the portable tape player he always carried and started blasting Hendrix's "Purple Haze" into the tunnel. It was one of Bosch's most vivid memories, aside from his dreams, of the war.
He never liked rock and roll after that. The jolting energy of the music reminded him too much of the war.
"Did you ever go see the memorial?" Eleanor asked.
She didn't have to say which one. There was only the one, in Washington. But then he remembered the long black replica he had watched them installing at the cemetery by the Federal Building.
"No," he said after a while. "I've never seen it."
After the air in the jungle cleared and the Hendrix tape was done, the four of them had gone into the tunnel while the rest of the company sat on backpacks and chowed and waited. An hour later, only Bosch and Meadows had come back. Meadows carried with him three NVA scalps. He held them up for the troops above ground and yelled, "You're looking at the baddest blood brother in the black echo." And so came the name. Later, they found Jarvis and Hanrahan in the tunnels. They had fallen into punji traps. They were dead.
Eleanor said, "I visited it when I was living in D.C. I couldn't make myself go to the dedication in eighty-two. But a lot of years later I finally got the courage. I wanted to see my brother's name. I thought maybe it would help me sort things out, you know, about what happened with him."
"And did it?"
"No. Made it worse. It made me angry. It left me with this need for justice, if that makes sense. I wanted justice for my brother."
The silence filled the car again and Bosch poured more coffee into his cup. He was beginning to feel the onset of caffeine jitters but couldn't stop. He was addicted. He watched a couple of drunks who were stumbling down the street stop in front of the window before the vault. One of the men threw his hands up as if trying to gain a measure of the vault's huge door. After a while they moved on. He thought of the rage Eleanor must have felt because of her brother. The helplessness. He thought of his own rage. He knew the same feelings, maybe not to the same degree but from a different perspective. Anybody who was touched by the war knew some part of those feelings. He had never worked it out completely and wasn't sure he wanted to. The anger and sadness gave him something that was better than complete emptiness. Is that what Meadows felt? He wondered. The emptiness. Is that what bounced him from job to job and needle to needle until he was finally and fatally used up on this last mission? Bosch decided that he would go to Meadows's funeral, that he owed him that much.
"You know what you were telling me the other day about that guy, the Dollmaker killer?" Eleanor asked.
"What about it?"
"IAD, they tried to make a case that you executed him?"
"Yes, I told you. They tried. But it wasn't there. All they got me on was suspension for procedure violations."
"Well, I just wanted to say that even if they were right, they were wrong. That would have been justice in my book. You knew what would happen with a guy like that. Look at the Night Stalker. He'll never get the gas. Or it'll take twenty years."
Bosch felt uncomfortable. He had only thought of his motives and actions in the Dollmaker case when alone. He never spoke aloud about it. He didn't know where she was going with this.
She said, "I know if it was true you could never admit it, but I think you either consciously or subconsciously made a decision. You went for justice for all those women, his victims. Maybe even for your mother."
Shocked, Bosch turned to her and was about to ask how she knew about his mother and how she had come to think of her relation to the Dollmaker. Then he remembered the files again. It was probably in there somewhere. When he had applied to the department, he had to say on the forms if he or any close relatives had ever been the victim of a crime. He had been orphaned at eleven, he wrote, when his mother was found strangled in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard. He didn't need to write what she did for a living. The location and crime said enough.
When he recovered his cool, Bosch asked Eleanor what her point was.
"No point," she said. "I just . . . respect that. If it were me, I would have liked to have done the same thing, I think. I hope I would have been brave enough."
He looked over at her, the darkness shielding both their faces. It was late now and no car lights drifted by to show them to each other.
"You go ahead and take the first shift sleeping," he said. "I drank too much coffee."
She didn't answer. He offered to get out a blanket he had put in the trunk, but she declined.
"Did you ever hear what J. Edgar Hoover said about justice?" she asked.
"He probably said a lot, but I don't recall any of it offhand."
"He said that justice is incidental to law and order. I think he was right."
She said nothing else and after a while he could hear her breathing turn deeper and longer. When the rare car drove by he would look over at her face as the light washed across it. She slept like a child, with her head leaning against her hands. Bosch cracked the window and lit a cigarette. He smoked and wondered if he could or would fall in love with her, and she with him. He was thrilled and disquieted by the thought, all at the same time.