The black echo

Part IX
Monday, May 28 Memorial Day Observed
By the time Bosch got to the veterans cemetery in Westwood, it was just after midnight.
He had checked a new car out of the Wilcox fleet garage and then driven by Eleanor Wish's apartment. There were no lights on and he felt like a teenager checking on the girlfriend who dumped him. Even though he was alone he was embarrassed. He didn't know what he would have done if there had been a light. He headed back east toward the cemetery, thinking about Eleanor and how she had betrayed him in love and business, all at the same time.
He started with the supposition that Eleanor had asked Sharkey if he recognized her because it was she who had been in the Jeep that delivered Meadows's body to the reservoir. She had been looking for a sign that the boy realized this and recognized her. But he didn't. Sharkey went on—after Bosch joined the interview—to say he had seen two people who he thought were men. He said the smaller of the two stayed in the Jeep's passenger seat and didn't help with the body at all. It seemed to Bosch that the boy's mistake should have insured his life. But he knew that it had been he who had then doomed Sharkey when he suggested hypnotizing him. Eleanor had passed that on to Rourke, who knew he couldn't risk it.
Next was the question of why. The money was the ultimate answer, but Bosch could not comfortably attribute this motive to Eleanor. There was something more. The others involved—Meadows, Franklin, Delgado and Rourke—all shared the common bond of Vietnam as well as direct knowledge of the two targets, Binh and Tran. How did Eleanor fit into this? Bosch thought about her brother, killed in Vietnam. Was he the connection? He remembered that she had said his name was Michael, but she hadn't mentioned how or when he was killed. Bosch hadn't let her. Now he regretted having stopped her when she apparently wanted to talk about him. She had mentioned the memorial in Washington and how it had changed her. What could she have seen that would do that? What could the wall have told her that she didn't already know?
He drove into the cemetery off Sepulveda Boulevard and up to the great black iron gates that stood closed across the gravel entrance road. Bosch got out and walked up, but they were locked with a chain and padlock. He looked through the black bars and saw a small stone-block house about thirty yards up the gravel road. He saw the pale blue glow of TV light against a curtained window. Bosch went back to the car and flipped the siren. He let it wail until a light came on behind the curtain. The cemetery attendant came out a few moments later and walked toward the gate with a flashlight, while Bosch got his badge case out and held it open through the bars. The man wore dark pants and a light-blue shirt with a tin badge on it.
"You police?" he asked.
Bosch felt like saying no, Amway. Instead, he said, "LAPD. I wonder if you can open 'er up for me."
The attendant put the flashlight on his badge and ID. In the light Bosch could see the white whiskers on the man's face and smell the slight scent of bourbon and sweat.
"What's the problem, officer?"
"Detective. I'm on a homicide investigation, Mr. . . . ?"
"Kester. Homicide? We got plenty dead people here, but these cases are closed, I guess you could say."
"Mr. Kester, I don't have time to go through all the details but what I need to do is take a look at the Vietnam memorial, the replica that is on display here for the holiday weekend."
"What's wrong with your arm, and where's your partner? Don't you guys travel in twos?"
"I was hurt, Mr. Kester. My partner is working on another part of the investigation. You watch too much TV in that little room of yours. That's TV cops stuff."
Bosch said this last part with a smile, but he was already getting tired of the old security guard. Kester turned and looked at the cemetery house and then back at Bosch.
"You seen the TV light, right? I figured that one. Uh, this is federal property and I don't know if I can open it up without—"
"Look, Kester, I know you're civil service and they haven't fired anyone since maybe Truman was president. But if you give me a bad time on this, I'm going to give you a bad time. I'll put a drinking-on-the-job beef in on you Tuesday morning. First thing. Now let's do it. Open it up and I won't bother you. I just need to take a look at the wall."
Bosch rattled the chain. Kester stared dull-eyed at the lock and then fished a ring of keys off his belt and opened the gate.
"Sorry," Bosch said.
"I still don't think this is proper," Kester said angrily. "What's that black stone got to do with a homicide anyway?"
"Maybe everything," Bosch said. He started walking back to his car but then turned around, remembering something he had read about the memorial. "There's a book. It tells where the names are on the wall. You can look them up. Is that up there at the wall?"
Kester had a puzzled look on his face that Bosch could see even in the dark. He said, "Don't know about any book. All I know is that the U.S. Park Service people brought that thing in here, set it up. Took a bulldozer to clear a spot on the hill. They got some guy that stays with it during proper visiting hours. He's the one you'll have to ask about books. And don't ask me where he is. I don't even know his name. You gonna be a while or should I leave it unlocked?"
"Better lock it up. I'll come get you when I'm leaving." He drove the car through the gate after the old man pulled it open, then up to a gravel parking area near the hill. Bosch could see the dark shine of the wall in the gash carved out of the rise. There were no lights and the area was deserted. He took a flashlight off the car seat and headed up the slope.
He first swung the light around to get an idea of the wall's size. It was about sixty feet long, tapering at each end. Then he walked up close enough to read the names. An unexpected feeling came over him. A dread. He did not want to see these names, he realized. There would be too many that he knew. And what was worse was that he might come across names he didn't expect, that belonged to men he didn't know were here. He swept the beam around and saw a wooden lectern, its top canted and ledged to hold a book, like a church Bible stand. But when he walked over, he found nothing on the stand. The park service people must have taken the directory with them for safekeeping. Bosch turned and looked back at the wall, its far end tapering off into darkness. He checked his cigarettes and saw he had nearly a whole pack. He admitted to himself that he had expected it would be this way. He would have to read every name. He knew it before he came. He lit a cigarette and put the beam on the first panel of the wall.
It was four hours before he saw a name he recognized. It wasn't Michael Scarletti. It was Darius Coleman, a boy Bosch bad known from First Infantry. Coleman was the first guy Bosch had known, really known, to get blown away. Everybody had called him Cake. He had a knife-cut tattoo on his forearm that said Cake. And he was killed by friendly fire when a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant called in the wrong chart coordinates for an air strike in the Triangle.
Bosch reached to the wall and ran his fingers along the letters in the dead soldier's name. He had seen people do that on TV and in movies. He pictured Cake with a reefer tucked behind his ear, sitting on his pack and eating chocolate cake out of a can. He was always trading for everybody's cake. The reefer made him crave the chocolate.
Harry moved on to other names after that, stopping only to light cigarettes, until he had none left. In nearly four more hours he had come across three dozen more names belonging to soldiers he had known and knew were dead. There were no surprise names, and so his fear in that regard was unfounded. But despair came from something else. A small picture of a man in uniform was wedged into the thin crack between the false marble panels of the memorial. The man offered his full, proud smile to the world. Now he was a name on the wall. Bosch held the photo in his hand and turned it over. It said: "George, we miss your smile. All our love, Mom and Teri."
Bosch carefully put the photo back into the crack, feeling like an intruder on something very private. He thought about George, a man he never knew, and grew sad for no reason he could explain to himself. After a while, he moved on.
At the end, after 58,132 names, there was one he had not seen. Michael Scarletti. It was what he had expected. Bosch looked up at the sky. It was turning orange in the east and he could feel a slight breeze coming out of the northwest. To the south the Federal Building loomed above the cemetery tree line like a giant dark tombstone. Bosch was lost. He didn't know why he was here or whether what he had found meant a damned thing. Was Michael Scarletti still alive? Had he ever existed? What Eleanor had said about her trip to the memorial had seemed so real and true. How could any of this make sense? The beam of the flashlight was weak and dying. He turned it off.
Bosch napped a couple of hours in his car at the cemetery. When he woke the sun was high in the sky, and for the first time he noticed that the cemetery lawns were awash in flags, each grave marked by a small plastic Old Glory on a wooden stick. He started the car and slowly made his way along the thin cemetery roads, looking for the spot where Meadows would be buried.
It wasn't hard to find. Nestled on the side of one of the roads that wound into the northeast section of the cemetery were four vans with microwave antennas. There was a grouping of other cars as well. The media. Bosch hadn't expected all of the TV cameras and the reporters. But once he saw this crowd he realized that he had forgotten that holidays were slow news days. And the tunnel caper, as it had been dubbed by the media, was still a hot item. The video vampires would need fresh footage for the evening's broadcasts.
He decided to stay in the car, and watched as the short ceremony at Meadows's gray casket was filmed in quadruplicate. It was presided over by a rumpled minister who probably came from one of the downtown missions. There were no real mourners except for a few professionals from the VFW. A three-man honor guard also stood at attention.
When it was over, the minister pushed the brake pedal with his foot and the casket slowly descended. The cameras came in tight on this. And then, afterward, the news teams broke off in different directions to film stand-up reports at locations around the gravesite. They were spread out in a semicircle. This way, each reporter would look as if he or she had been at the funeral exclusively. Bosch recognized a few as people who had shoved microphones in his face before. Then he noticed that one of the men he had thought was one of the professional mourners was actually Bremmer. The Times reporter walked away from the grave and was heading to one of the cars parked along the access road. Bosch waited until Bremmer was almost next to his car before he rolled down the window and called to him.
"Harry, I thought you were in the hospital or something."
"I thought I'd come by. But I didn't know it was going to be a circus. Don't you people have anything better to do?"
"Hey, I'm not with them. That's a pig f*ck."
"What?"
"TV reporters. That's what they call one of these gang-bangs. So, what are you doing here? I didn't think you'd be out so soon."
"I escaped. Why don't you get in and take a ride." Then indicating the TV reporters with his hand, Bosch said, "They might see me here and charge over and trample us."
Bremmer walked around and got in the car. Bosch took the driveway to the west section of the cemetery. He parked under the shade of a sprawling oak tree, from which they could see the Vietnam memorial. There were several people milling about, mostly men, mostly alone. They all looked at the black stone quietly. A couple of the men wore old fatigue jackets, the sleeves cut off.
"You seen the papers or TV yet on this thing?" Bremmer asked.
"Not yet. But I heard what was put out."
"And?"
"Bullshit. Most of it, at least."
"Can you tell me?"
"Not that it gets back to me."
Bremmer nodded. They had known each other a long time. Bosch did not have to ask for promises and Bremmer did not have to go over the differences between off-the-record statements, background statements and statements not for attribution. They had a trust built on prior credibility, going both ways.
"Three things you should check," Bosch said. "Nobody's asked about Lewis and Clarke. They weren't part of my surveillance. They were working for Irving over at IAD. So once you get that established, put the heat on them to explain what they were doing."
"What were they doing?"
"That you'll have to get somewhere else. I know you have other sources in the department."
Bremmer was writing in a long, thin spiral notebook, the kind that always gave reporters away. He was nodding as he wrote.
"Second, find out about Rourke's funeral. It will probably be out of state somewhere. Someplace far enough away that the media back here won't bother to send anybody. But send somebody anyway. Somebody with a camera. He'll probably be the only one there. Just like today's planting. That should tell you something."
Bremmer looked up from his notebook. "You mean no hero's funeral? You're saying Rourke was part of this thing, or he just f*cked it up? Christ, the bureau—and we, the media—are making the guy out to be John Wayne reincarnated."
"Yeah, well, you gave him life after death. You can take it away, I guess."
Bosch just looked at him a moment, contemplating how much he should tell, what was safe for him to tell. For just a moment he felt so outraged he wanted to tell Bremmer everything he knew, and the hell with what would happen and what Irving had said. But he didn't. Control came back.
"What's the third thing?" Bremmer asked.
"Get the military records of Meadows, Rourke, Franklin and Delgado. That will tie it up for you. They were in Vietnam, same time, same unit. That's where this whole thing starts. When you get that far, call me and I'll try to fill in what you don't have."
Then all at once Bosch grew tired of the charade being orchestrated by his department and the FBI. The thought of the boy, Sharkey, kept coming to mind. Flat on his back, his head cocked at that odd, sickening angle. The blood. They were going to mop that one up like it didn't matter.
"There's a fourth thing," he said. "There was a kid."
When the story about Sharkey was finished, Bosch started the car and drove Bremmer back down the driveway to his own car. The TV reporters had cleared out of the cemetery and a man in a small front loader was pushing dirt into Meadows's grave. Another man leaned on a shovel nearby and watched.
"I'll probably need a job after your story comes out," Bosch said while watching the gravediggers.
"You won't be in it as an attribution. Plus, when I get the military records, they'll speak for themselves. I'll be able to scam the department's public information officers into confirming some of this other stuff, make it look like it came from them. And then near the bottom of the story, I'll say, 'Detective Harry Bosch declined comment.' How's that?"
"I'll probably need a job after your story comes out."
Bremmer just looked at the detective for a long moment.
"Are you going over to the grave?"
"I might. After you leave me alone."
"I'm leaving." He opened the car door and got out, then leaned back in. "Thanks, Harry. This is going to be a good one. Heads are going to bounce."
Bosch looked at the reporter and sadly shook his head. "No they aren't," he said.
Bremmer stared uneasily and Bosch dismissed him with his hand. The reporter closed the door and went to his own car. Bosch had no misconceived notion about Bremmer. The reporter was not guided by any genuine sense of outrage or by his role as a watchdog for the public. All he wanted was a story no other reporter had. Bremmer was thinking of that, and maybe the book that would come after, and the TV movie, and the money and ego-feeding fame. That was what motivated him, not the outrage that had made Bosch tell him the story. Bosch knew this and accepted it. It was the way things worked.
"Heads never bounce," he said to himself.
He watched the gravediggers finish their job. After a while he got out and walked over. There was one small bouquet of flowers next to the flag stuck in the soft orange ground. The flowers were from the VFW. Bosch stared at the scene and didn't know what he should feel. Maybe some kind of sentimental affection or remorse. Meadows was underground for good this time. Bosch didn't feel a thing. After a while he looked up from the grave and toward the Federal Building. He started walking in that direction. He felt like a ghost, coming from the grave for justice. Or maybe just vengeance.
If she was surprised it was Bosch who had pressed the door buzzer, Eleanor Wish didn't show it. Harry had flipped his badge to the guard on the first floor and been waved to the elevator. There was no receptionist working on the holiday, so he had pressed the night bell. It was Eleanor who opened the door. She wore faded jeans and a white blouse. There was no gun on her belt.
"I thought you might come, Harry. Were you at the funeral?"
He nodded but made no move toward the door she held open. She looked at him a long moment, her eyebrows arched in that lovely questioning look she had. "Well, are you going to come in or stand out there all day?"
"I was thinking we would take a walk. Talk alone."
"I have to get my keycard so I can come back in." She made a move to go back in and then stopped. "I doubt you heard this, because they haven't put the word out. But they found the diamonds."
"What?"
"Yes. They traced Rourke to some public storage lockers in Huntington Beach. They found receipts somewhere. They got the court order this morning and just opened them. I've been listening to the scanner. They're saying hundreds of diamonds. They'll have to get an appraiser. We were right, Harry. Diamonds. You were right. They also found all the other stuff—in a second locker. Rourke hadn't gotten rid of it. The boxholders will get their stuff back. There's going to be a press conference, but I doubt they will be saying whose lockers they were."
He just nodded, and she disappeared through the door. Bosch wandered over to the elevators and pushed the button while waiting for her. She had her purse with her when she came out. It made him conscious of not having a gun. And it privately embarrassed him that he momentarily thought that was a concern. They didn't speak on the way down, not until they were out of the building and on the sidewalk, heading toward Wilshire. Bosch had been weighing his words, wondering if the finding of the diamonds meant anything. She seemed to be waiting for him to begin but uncomfortable in the silence.
"I like the blue sling," she finally said. "How do you feel, anyway? I'm surprised they let you out of there so soon."
"I just left. I feel fine." He stopped to put a cigarette in his mouth. He had bought a pack from a machine in the lobby. He lit it with the lighter.
"You know," she said, "this would be a good time to quit those. Make a new start."
He ignored the suggestion and breathed the smoke in deeply.
"Eleanor, tell me about your brother."
"My brother? I told you."
"I know. I want to hear again. About what happened to him and what happened when you visited the wall in Washington. You said it changed things for you. Why did it change things for you?"
They were at Wilshire. Bosch pointed across the street and they crossed toward the cemetery. "I left my car over here. I'll drive you back."
"I don't like cemeteries. I told you."
"Who does?"
They walked through the opening in the hedge and the sound of traffic was quieted. Before them was the expanse of green lawn, white stones and American flags.
"My story's the same as a thousand others," she said. "My brother went over there and didn't come back. That's all. And then, you know, going to the memorial, well, it filled me with a lot of different feelings."
"Anger?"
"Yes, there was that."
"Outrage?"
"Yes, I guess. I don't know. It was very personal. What's going on, Harry? What has this got to do with . . . with anything?"
They were on the gravel drive that ran alongside the rows of white stone. Bosch was leading her toward the replica.
"You said your father was career military. Did you get the details of what happened to your brother?"
"He did, but he and my mother never really said anything to me. About details. I mean, they just said he was coming home soon, and I had gotten a letter from him saying he was coming. Then, like the next week, you know, they said he had been killed. He didn't make it home after all. Harry, you are making me feel . . . What do you want? I don't understand this."
"Sure you do, Eleanor."
She stopped and just looked down at the ground. Bosch saw the color in her face change to a lighter shade of pale. And her expression became one of resignation. It was subtle, but it was there. Like the faces of mothers and wives he had seen while making next-of-kin notification. You didn't have to tell them somebody was dead. They opened the door; they knew the score. And now Eleanor's face showed that she knew Bosch had her secret. She lifted her eyes and looked off, away from him. Her gaze settled on the black memorial gleaming in the sun at the top of the rise.
"That's it, isn't it? You brought me here to see that."
"I guess I could ask you to show me where your brother's name is. But we both know it's not on there."
"No . . . it's not."
She was transfixed by the sight of the memorial. Bosch could see in her face that the hard-shell resistance was gone. The secret wanted to come out.
"So, tell me about it," he said.
"I did have a brother, and he died. I never lied to you, Harry. I never actually said he was killed over there. I said he never came back, and he didn't. That is true. But he died here in L.A. On his way home. It was 1973."
She seemed to go off on a memory. Then she came back.
"Amazing. I mean, to make it through that war and then to not make the trip home. It doesn't make sense. He had a two-day layover in L.A. on the way back to D.C. to the hero's welcome we were going to have for him. There was a nice safe job, arranged through Father at the Pentagon. Only they found him in a brothel in Hollywood. The spike was still in his arm. Heroin."
She looked up at Bosch's face and then looked away.
"That's the way it looked, but that wasn't the way it was. It was ruled an OD, but he was murdered. Just like Meadows so many years later. But my brother was written off the way Meadows was supposed to have been written off."
Bosch thought she might be beginning to cry. He needed to keep her on track, telling the story.
"What's going on, Eleanor? What's it got to do with Meadows?"
"Nothing," she said, and looked back along the trail they had walked.
Now she was lying. He knew there was something. He had the dreadful feeling in his gut that the whole thing revolved around her. He thought of the daisies she had sent to his hospital room. The music they had played at her apartment. The way she had found him in the tunnel. Too many coincidences.
"Everything," he said, "it was all part of your plan."
"No, Harry."
"Eleanor, how did you know there are daisies growing on the hill below my house?"
"I saw them when I—"
"You visited me at night. Remember? You couldn't see anything below the porch." He let that sink in a little. "You had been there before, Eleanor. When I was taking care of Sharkey. And then the visit later that night, that wasn't a visit. That was a test. Like the hang-up phone call. That was you. Because it was you who put the bug in my phone. This whole thing was. . . . Why don't you just tell me?"
She nodded without looking at him. He could not take his eyes off her. She composed herself and began.
"Did you ever have one thing that was at your center, was the very seed of your existence? Everybody has one unalterable truth at their core. For me, it was my brother. My brother and his sacrifice. That's how I dealt with his death. By making it and him larger than life. Making him a hero. It was the seed that I protected and nurtured. I built a hard shell around it and watered it with my adoration, and as it grew it became a bigger part of me. It grew into the tree that shaded my life. Then, all of a sudden, one day it was gone. The truth was false. The tree was chopped down, Harry. No more shade. Just the blinding sun."
She was quiet a moment and Bosch studied her. She seemed all at once to be so fragile he wanted to rush her to a chair before she collapsed. She cupped one elbow with her hand and held the other hand to her lips. It dawned on him what she was saying.
"You didn't know, did you?" Bosch said. "Your parents . . . nobody told you the truth."
She nodded. "I grew up thinking he was the hero my mother and father told me he was. They shielded me. They lied. But how could they know that one day a monument would be made and they would put every name on it. . . . Every name but my brother's."
She stopped, but this time he waited her out.
"One day a few years ago I went to the memorial. And I thought there was some kind of mistake. There was a book there, an index of the names, and I looked and he wasn't listed. No Michael Scarletti. I yelled at the parks people. 'How could you just leave someone's name out of the book?' And so I spent the rest of the day reading the names on the wall. All of them. I was going to show them how wrong they were. But . . . he wasn't there, either. I couldn't— Do you know what it's like to spend almost fifteen years of your life believing something, to build your beliefs around one single, shining fact, and have . . . to find that all that time it actually was like cancer growing inside?"
Bosch smeared the tears on her cheeks with his hand. He leaned his face close to hers.
"So what did you do, Eleanor?"
The fist against her lips squeezed tighter, her knuckles as bloodless as a corpse's. Bosch noticed a park bench farther down the walkway and he took her by the shoulder and directed her there.
"This whole thing," he said after they were sitting. "I don't understand, Eleanor. This whole thing. You were the—You wanted some kind of revenge against—"
"Justice. Not revenge, not vengeance."
"Is there a difference?"
She didn't answer.
"Tell me what you did."
"I confronted my parents. And they finally told me about L.A. I went through all my things from him and I found a letter, his last letter. I still had it in my things at my parents' house but I'd forgotten it. It's here."
She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. Bosch could see the rubber grips and the handle of her gun in the purse. She opened her wallet and pulled out a twice-folded piece of lined notebook paper. She delicately unfolded it and held it open for him to read. He didn't touch it.
Ellie,
I'm getting so short here I can practically taste the soft-shell crabs. I should be home in two weeks or so. First I have to stop off in Los Angeles to make some money. Ha Ha! I have a plan (but don't tell the OM). I'm supposed to drop off a "diplomatic" package in L.A. But there might be a way to do something better with it. When I get back, maybe we can go up to the Poconos again before I have to go back to work for the "war machine." I know what you think about what I'm doing but I can't tell the OM no. We'll see how it goes. One thing's for sure, I'm glad to be leaving this place. I've been in the bush for six weeks before getting some R & R here in Saigon. I don't want to go back, so I'm having them treat me for dysentery. (Ask the OM what that is! Ha Ha.) All I had to do was eat some of the restaurant food in this town and got the symptoms. Anyway, that's all for now. I'm safe and I'll be home soon. So get those crab traps out of the shed.
Love,
Michael

She folded the letter carefully and put it away.
"The OM?" Bosch asked.
"The Old Man."
"Right."
Her composure was coming back. Her face was taking on the hard look Bosch had seen the first day he met her. Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest and his arm in the blue sling.
"I'm not wired, Eleanor," he said. "I'm here for myself, I want to know for myself."
"That's not what I was looking at," she said. "I knew you wouldn't be wired. I was thinking of your arm. Harry, if there is anything that you believe about me now, that you can believe, believe me when I say no one was supposed to get hurt.
"No one. . . . Everybody was to lose. But that was all. After that day—at the memorial, I looked and I searched and I found out what happened to my brother. I used Ernst at State, I used the Pentagon, my father, I used whatever I could and I found out about my brother."
She searched his eyes but he tried not to reveal the thoughts behind them.
"And?"
"And it was like Ernst told us. Toward the end of the war, the three captains, the triad, were taking an active part in the transport of heroin to the States. One conduit was Rourke and his crew at the embassy, the military police. That included Meadows, Delgado and Franklin. They would find short-timers in the bars in Saigon and proposition them: a few thousand dollars to take a sealed diplomatic package through customs. Nothing to it. They could arrange for them to receive temporary courier status, put them on a plane, and somebody would be waiting for the package in L.A. My brother was one of those that accepted. . . . But Michael had a plan. It didn't take a genius to figure out what they were carrying. And so he must have thought he could get over here and make a better deal with somebody else. I don't know how far he thought it out or had it set up. But it didn't matter. They found him and they killed him."
"They?"
"I don't know who. People working for the captains. For Rourke. It was perfect. He was killed in a way that the army, his family, just about everybody, would want to keep quiet. So it was quickly tidied up and that was that."
Bosch sat next to her as she told the rest of the story and did not interrupt until it was done, until it had come out of her like a demon.
She said the first one she found was Rourke. He was, to her astonishment, in the bureau. She called in her markers and transferred from D.C. out to his crew. She had a different last name than her brother had. Rourke didn't know who she was. After that, Meadows, Franklin and Delgado were located easily enough in prisons. They weren't going anywhere.
"Rourke was the key," she said. "I went to work on him. I guess you could say I seduced him with the plan."
Bosch felt something tear loose inside, some final feeling for her.
"I clearly insinuated that I wanted to make a score. I knew he would go for it because he'd been corrupt for years. And he was greedy. One night he told me about the diamonds, how he had helped these two guys out of Saigon with boxes full of diamonds. It was Tran and Binh. From there, it was easy to plan the whole thing. Rourke recruited the other three and pulled some strings, anonymously, to get them early releases into Charlie Company. It was a perfect plan and Rourke actually thought it was his. That's what made it perfect. In the end, I was going to disappear with the treasure. Binh and Tran would be robbed of the fortune they had spent their lives collecting and hoarding, and the other four would taste the biggest score of their lives and have it taken away. It would be the best way of hurting them the most. But no one outside the circle of guilt was to get hurt. . . . Things just happened."
"Meadows took the bracelet," Bosch said.
"Yes. Meadows took the bracelet. I saw it on the pawn lists that got sent over from LAPD. It was routine, but I panicked. Those lists go to every burglary unit in the county. I thought it would get noticed by somebody, Meadows would be pulled in and spill the story. I told Rourke. And he panicked, too. He waited until they were pretty much done with the second tunnel, and then he and the two others confronted Meadows. I wasn't there."
Her eyes were fixed on a point far away. There was no emotion in her voice anymore. It was just a flat line. Bosch didn't have to prompt her. The rest just came out.
"I wasn't there," she said again. "Rourke called me. He told me that, you know, Meadows died without giving up the pawn ticket. He said he'd made it look like an overdose. The bastard actually said that he knew people who had done it before, a long time ago, and gotten away with it. You see? He was talking about my brother. When he said that, I knew I was doing the right thing . . .
"Anyway, he needed my help. They had searched Meadows's place and couldn't find the pawn stub. That meant Delgado and Franklin were going to break into the shop and get the bracelet back. But Rourke wanted my help with Meadows. The body. He didn't know what to do with it."
She said she knew from Meadows's record that he had been busted for loitering at the reservoir. It wasn't difficult for her to convince Rourke it was a good place to leave the body.
"But I also knew that the reservoir was Hollywood Division, that if you didn't get the call you would at least hear about it and probably take an interest after Meadows was ID'd. See, I knew about you and Meadows. And now I knew Rourke was out of control. You were the safety valve, in case I needed to bring the whole thing down. I couldn't let Rourke get away with it again."
She swept her gaze across the stones and absentmindedly raised a hand and dropped it in her lap, a small show of resignation.
"After we put his body in the Jeep and covered it with the blanket, Rourke went back in to make a last sweep of the place. I stayed outside. There was a tire iron in the back. I took it and hit his fingers with it. Meadows's fingers. It was so somebody would see it was murder. I remember the sound so clearly. The bone. So loud I thought Rourke might even have heard. . . ."
"What about Sharkey?" Bosch asked.
"Sharkey," she said wistfully, as if she were trying the name out for the first time.
"After the interview, I told Rourke that Sharkey didn't see our faces at the dam. He even thought I was a man, sitting in the Jeep. But I made a mistake. I mentioned how we discussed hypnotizing him. Even though I stopped you and trusted that you wouldn't do it without me, Rourke didn't trust you. So he did what he did with Sharkey. After we were called out there and I saw him I . . ."
She didn't finish but Bosch wanted to know everything.
"You what?"
"Later, I confronted Rourke and told him I was bringing the whole thing down because he was out of control, killing innocent people. He told me there was no way to stop it. Franklin and Delgado were in the tunnel and out of reach. They turned the radios off when they brought the C-4 in. It's too unstable. He said there was no stopping it without more spilled blood. Then the next night you and I were almost run down. That was Rourke, I'm sure."
She said that the two of them played an unspoken game of mutual distrust and suspicion after that. The burglary of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock continued as planned, and Rourke steered Bosch and everybody else away from going underground to stop it. He had to let Franklin and Delgado go through with it, even though there were no diamonds left in Tran's box. Rourke could not risk going underground to warn them, either.
Eleanor finally ended the game when she followed Bosch down into the tunnel and killed Rourke, his eyes staring at her as he slid down into the black water.
"And that's the whole story," she said quietly.
"My car is over this way," Bosch said as he stood up from the bench. "I'll take you back now."
They found his car on the driveway, and Bosch noticed her eyes linger on the fresh soil on Meadows's grave before she got in. He wondered if she had watched from the Federal Building as the casket was put in the ground. As he drove toward the exit, Harry said, "Why couldn't you let it go? What happened to your brother was another time, another place. Why didn't you let it go?"
"You don't know how many times I've asked that and how many times I didn't know the answer. I still don't."
They were at the light at Wilshire and Bosch was wondering what he was going to do. And once again she read him, she sensed his indecision.
"Are you going to take me in now, Harry? You might have a hard time proving your case. Everybody's dead. It could look like you were part of it, too, You going to risk that?"
He didn't say anything. The light changed and he drove down to the Federal Building, pulling to the curb near the garden of flags.
She said, "If it means anything to you at all, what happened between you and me, it wasn't part of any plan. I know you won't ever know if that's the truth, but I wanted to say—"
"Don't," he said. "Don't say a thing about it."
A few uneasy moments of silence passed between them.
"You're just letting me go here?"
"I think it would be best for you, Eleanor, if you turned yourself in. Go get a lawyer and then come in. Tell them you didn't have anything to do with the murders. Tell them the story about your brother. They are reasonable people and they'll want to keep it low profile, avoid the scandal. The U.S. attorney will probably let you plead to something short of murder. The bureau will go along."
"And what if I don't turn myself in? You will tell them?"
"No. Like you said, I'm too much a part of it. They'd never go with what I'd tell them."
He thought a long moment. He didn't want to say what he was going to say next unless he was sure he meant it. And could, and would, do it.
"No, I won't tell them. . . . But if I don't hear in a few days that you went in, I will tell Binh. And I'll tell Tran. I won't need to prove it to them. I'll just tell them the story with enough facts that they'll know it is true. Then, you know what they'll do? They'll act like they don't know what the hell I'm talking about and they'll tell me to get out. And then they'll come after you, Eleanor, looking for the same kind of justice you got for your brother."
"You would do that, Harry?"
"I said I would. I'll give you two days to go in. Then I tell them the story."
She looked at him, and the pained expression on her face asked why.
Harry said, "Somebody has to answer for Sharkey."
She turned away, put her hand on the door handle and looked out the car window at the flags flapping in the Santa Ana breeze. She didn't look back at him when she said, "So, I guess I was wrong about you."
"If you mean the Dollmaker case, the answer is yes, you were wrong about me."
She looked back at him with a wan smile as she opened the door. She quickly leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She said, "Good-bye, Harry Bosch."
Then she was out of the car, standing in the wind and looking in at him. She hesitated and then closed the door. As Harry drove away he glanced once in the mirror and saw her still at the curb. She stood there looking down like someone who had dropped something in the gutter. After that, he didn't look back.