The Harry Bosch Novels

by Michael Connelly

  “I think that can be arranged,” she said. “Any other demands before we get to work?”

  He smiled and shook his head no.

  “You know, Bosch, I got your murder book yesterday and read through it last night. For what you had there, and for one day’s work, it was very good work. Most other detectives, that body’d still be in the waiting line at the morgue and listed as probable accidental OD.”

  He said nothing.

  “Where should we begin on it today?” she asked.

  “I’ve got some things working that weren’t in the book yet. Why don’t you tell me about the bank burglary first? I need the background. All I know is what you put out to the papers and on the BOLOs. You bring me up, then I’ll take it from there, tell you about Meadows.”

  The waitress came and checked his cup and her glass. Then Eleanor Wish told the story of the bank heist. Bosch thought of questions as she went along, but he tried to note them in his head to ask afterward. He sensed that she marveled at the story, the planning and execution of the caper. Whoever they were, the tunnelers, they had her respect. He found himself almost jealous.

  “Beneath the streets of L.A.,” she said, “there are more than four hundred miles of storm lines that are wide enough and tall enough to drive a car through. After that, you’ve got even more tributary lines. Eleven hundred more miles that you could walk or at least crawl through.

  “This means anybody can go under and, if they know the way, get close to any building they want to in the city. And it is not that difficult to find the way. The plans for the whole network are public record, on file with the county recorder’s office. Anyway, these guys used the drainage system to get to WestLand National.”

  He had already figured as much but didn’t bother to say. She said the FBI believed there were at least three underground men and then at least one on top to act as lookout, provide other necessary functions. The topsider probably communicated with them by radio, except possibly near the end because of the danger that radio waves might set off the explosive detonators.

  The underground men made their way through the drainage system on Honda all-terrain vehicles. There was a drive-in entrance to the storm sewer system at a wash in the Los Angeles River basin northeast of downtown. They drove in there, probably under cover of darkness, and following recorder’s maps, made their way through the tunnel network to a spot under Wilshire Boulevard in downtown, about 30 feet below and 150 yards west of WestLand National. It was a two-mile trip.

  An industrial drill with a twenty-four-inch circle bit, probably diamond-tipped, was attached to a generator on one of the ATVs and used to cut a hole through the six-inch concrete wall of the stormwater tunnel. From there the underground men began to dig.

  “The actual break-in to the vault occurred on Labor Day weekend,” Wish said. “We think they must have begun the tunnel three or four weeks earlier. They’d only work nights. Go in, dig some and be back out by dawn. The DWP has inspectors that routinely go through the system looking for cracks and other problems. They work days, so the perps probably didn’t risk it.”

  “What about the hole they cut in the side, wouldn’t the water and power people have seen that?” asked Bosch, who immediately became annoyed with himself for asking a question before she was done.

  “No,” she said. “These guys thought of everything. They had a piece of plywood cut in a circle twenty-four inches wide. They coated it with concrete — we found it there after. We think that when they left each morning, they put this in the hole, and then each time they’d caulk around the edges with more concrete. It would look like a pipeline from a storm drain that had been capped off. That’s pretty common down there. I’ve been. You see capped lines all over the place. The twenty-four inches is a standard size. So this would have looked normal. It doesn’t get noticed and the perps just come back the next night, go back in and dig a little farther toward the bank.”

  She said the tunnel was dug primarily with hand tools — shovels, picks, drills powered off the generator on the ATV. The tunnelers probably used flashlights but also candles. Some of them were found still burning in the tunnel after the robbery was discovered. They were propped in small indentations cut in the walls.

  “That ring a bell?” Wish asked.

  He nodded.

  “We figure they made about ten to twenty feet of progress a night,” she said. “We found two wheelbarrows in the tunnel, after. They had been cut in half and disassembled to fit through the twenty-four-inch hole and then strapped back together to be used during the digging. It must have been one or two of the perps’ jobs to make runs back out of the tunnel and to dump the dirt and debris from the dig into the main drainage line. There is a steady flow of water on the floor of the line, and it would have washed the dirt away, eventually, to the river wash. We figure that on some nights their topside partner opened fire hydrants up on Hill to get more water flowing down there.”

  “So they had water down there, even in a drought.”

  “Even in a drought….”

  Wish said that when the thieves finally dug their way under the bank, they tapped into the bank’s own underground electric and telephone lines. With downtown a ghost town on weekends, the bank branch was closed on Saturdays. So on Friday, after business hours, the thieves bypassed the alarms. One of the perps had to be a bellman. Not Meadows, he was probably the explosives man.

  “The funny thing was, they didn’t need a bellman,” she said. “The vault’s sensor alarm had repeatedly been going off all week. These guys, with their digging and their drills, must have been tripping the alarms. Four straight nights the cops are called out along with the manager. Sometimes three times in one night. They don’t find anything and begin to think it’s the alarm. The sound-and-movement sensor is off balance. So the manager calls the alarm company and they can’t get anybody out until after the holiday weekend, you know, Labor Day. So this guy, the manager —”

  “Turns the alarm off.” Bosch finished for her.

  “You got it. He decides he isn’t going to get called out each night during the weekend. He’s supposed to go down to the Springs to his time-share condo and play golf. He turns the alarms off. Of course, he no longer works for WestLand National.”

  Under the vault, the bandits used a water-cooled industrial drill, which was bolted upside down to the underside of the vault slab, to bore a two-and-a-half-inch hole through the five feet of concrete and steel. FBI crime scene analysts estimated that took five hours, and only if the drill didn’t overheat. Water to cool it came from a tap into an underground water main. They used the bank’s water.

  “After they got the hole drilled, they packed it with C-4,” she said. “Ran the wire down through their tunnel and out into the drainage tunnel. They popped it from there.”

  She said LAPD emergency-response records showed that at 9:14 A.M. on that Saturday, alarms were reported at a bank across the street from West-Land National and a jewelry store a half-block away.

  “We figure that was the detonation time,” Wish said. “Patrol was sent out, looked around and didn’t find anything, decided the alarms were probably triggered by an earthquake tremor and left. Nobody bothered to check West-Land National. Its alarm hadn’t made a peep. They didn’t know that it had been turned off.”

  Once into the vault, they didn’t leave, she said. They worked right through the three-day weekend, drilling the locks on the deposit boxes, pulling the drawers and emptying them.

  “We found empty food cans, potato chip bags, freeze-dried food packets, you know, survival store stuff,” Wish said. “It looks like they stayed there, maybe slept in shifts. In the tunnel there was a wide part, it was like a small room. Like a sleeping room, we think. We found the pattern from a sleeping bag impressed on the dirt floor. We also found impressions in the sand left by the stocks of M-16s — they brought automatic weapons with them. They weren’t planning on surrendering if things went wrong.”

  She let him thi
nk about that a few moments and then continued. “We estimate they were in the vault sixty hours, maybe a few more. They drilled four hundred and sixty-four of the boxes. Out of seven fifty. If there were three of them, then that’s about a hundred and fifty-five boxes each. Subtract about fifteen hours for rest and eating over the three days they were in there, and you’ve got each man drilling three, four boxes an hour.”

  They must have had a time limit, she said. Maybe three o’clock or thereabouts Tuesday morning. If they quit drilling by then, it gave them plenty of time to pack up and get out. They took the loot and their tools and backed out. The bank manager, with a fresh Palm Springs tan on his face, discovered the heist when he opened the vault for business Tuesday morning.

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” she said. “Best thing I’ve seen or heard of since I’ve been in the job. Only a few mistakes. We’ve found out a lot about how they did it but not much about who did it. Meadows was as close as we ever got, and now he’s dead. That photograph you showed me yesterday. Of the bracelet? You were right, it’s the first thing that’s ever turned up from one of those boxes that we know of.”

  “But now it’s gone.”

  Bosch waited for her to say something but she was done.

  “How’d they pick the boxes to drill?” he asked.

  “It looks random. I have a video at the office I’ll show you. But it looks like they said, ‘You take that wall, I’ll take this one, you take that one,’ and so on. Some boxes right next to others that were drilled were left untouched. Why, I don’t know. Didn’t look like a pattern. Still, we had losses reported in ninety percent of the boxes they drilled. Mostly untraceable stuff. They chose well.”

  “How did you come up with three of them?”

  “We figured it would take at least that many to drill that many boxes. Plus, that’s how many ATVs there were.”

  She smiled and he bit. “Okay, how’d you know about the ATVs?”

  “Well, there were tracks in the mud in the drainage line and we identified them from tires. We also found paint, blue paint, on the wall on one of the curves of the drainage line. One of them had slid on the mud and hit the wall. The paint lab in Quantico came up with the model year and make. We hit all the Honda dealers in Southern California until we came up with a purchase of three blue ATVs at a dealership in Tustin, four weeks before Labor Day. Guy paid cash and loaded them on a trailer. Gave a phony name and address.”

  “What was it?”

  “The name? Frederic B. Isley, as in FBI. It would come up again. We once showed the salesman some six-packs that included Meadows’s, yours and a few other people’s photos but he couldn’t make anybody as Isley.”

  She wiped her mouth on a napkin and dropped it on the table. He could see no lipstick on it.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve had enough water for a week. Meet me back at the bureau and we’ll go over what we’ve got and what you’ve got on the Meadows thing. Rourke and I think that is the way to go. We’ve exhausted all leads on the bank job, been banging against the wall. Maybe the Meadows case will bring us the break we need.”

  Wish picked up the tab, Bosch put down the tip.

  • • •

  They took their separate cars to the Federal Building. Bosch thought about her as he drove and not the case. He wanted to ask her about that little scar on her chin and not how she connected the WestLand tunnelers to Vietnam tunnel rats. He wanted to know what gave the sweet sad look to her face. He followed her car through a neighborhood of student apartments near UCLA and then across Wilshire Boulevard. They met at the elevator in the parking garage of the Federal Building.

  “I think this will be best if you basically just deal with me,” she said as they rode up alone. “Rourke — You and Rourke did not start off well and —”

  “We didn’t even start off,” Bosch said.

  “Well, if you would give him the chance you would see he is a good man. He did what he thought was right for the case.”

  The elevator doors spread apart on the seventeenth floor, and there was Rourke.

  “There you two are,” he said. He put his hand out to Bosch, who took it without much conviction. Rourke introduced himself.

  “I was just going down for coffee and a roll,” he said. “Care to join me?”

  “Uh, John, we just came from a coffee shop,” Wish said. “We’ll meet you back up here.”

  Bosch and Wish were now outside the elevator and Rourke was inside. The assistant special agent in charge just nodded his head, and the door closed. Bosch and Wish headed into the office.

  “He’s a lot like you in a way — been through the war and all,” she said. “Give him a try. You’re not going to help things if you don’t thaw out.”

  He let it go by. They walked down the hall to the Group 3 squad and Wish pointed to a desk behind hers. She said it was empty since the agent who used it had been transferred to Group 2, the porno squad. Bosch put his briefcase on the desk and sat down. He looked around the room. It was much more crowded than the day before. About a half-dozen agents were at desks and three more were in the back standing around a file cabinet where there was a box of donuts. He noticed a television and VCR on a rack in the back of the office. It hadn’t been there the day before.

  “You said something about a video,” he said to Wish.

  “Oh, yes. I’ll get that set up and you can watch while I answer a few phone messages on other things.”

  She took a videotape out of a drawer in her desk and they walked to the back of the squad. The gang of three quietly moved away with their donuts, alarmed by the presence of an outsider. She set the tape up and left him there to watch alone.

  The video, obviously shot with a hand-held camera, was a bouncy, unprofessional walk-through of the thieves’ trail. It began in what Bosch surmised was the storm sewer, a square tunnel that curved away into a darkness the camera’s strobe couldn’t reach. Wish had been right, it was large. A truck could have driven down it. A small stream of water moved slowly down the center of the concrete floor. There was mold and algae on the floor and the lower part of the walls, and Bosch could almost smell the dampness. The camera panned down to the grayish-green floor. There were tire tracks in the slime. The next video scene was the entrance to the thieves’ tunnel, a cleanly cut hole in the sewer wall. A pair of hands moved into the picture holding the plywood circle Wish said had been used to cover the hole during the day. The hands moved further into the screen, then a head of dark hair. It was Rourke. He was wearing a dark jumpsuit with white letters across the back. FBI. He held the plywood up to the hole. It was a perfect fit.

  The video jumped then, and the scene was now from inside the thieves’ tunnel. It was eerie for Bosch to watch, and brought back memories of the hand-dug tunnels he had crawled through in Vietnam. This tunnel curved to the right. Surreal lighting flickered from candles set every twenty feet or so in notches dug into the wall. After curving for what he judged was about sixty feet, the tunnel turned sharply to the left. It then followed a straightaway for almost a hundred feet, candles still flickering from the walls. The camera finally came to a dead end where there was a pile of concrete rubble, twisted pieces of steel rebar and plating. The camera panned up to a gaping hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. Light poured down from the vault above. Rourke stood up there in his jumpsuit, looking down at the camera. He dragged a finger across his neck and the picture cut again. This time the camera was inside the vault, a wide-angle shot of the entire room. As in the newspaper photo Bosch had seen, hundreds of safe-deposit box doors stood open. The boxes lay empty in piles on the floor. Two crime scene techs were dusting the doors for fingerprints. Eleanor Wish and another agent were looking up at the steel wall of box doors and writing in notebooks. The camera panned down to the floor and the hole to the tunnel below. Then the tape went black. He rewound it, brought it back and put it on her desk.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I saw a few things I had seen before. In the tunnels over th
ere. But nothing that would have made me start looking at tunnel rats in particular. What was the lead to Meadows, people like me?”

  “First off, there was the C-4,” she said. “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent a team out to go through the concrete and steel from the blast hole. There were trace elements of the explosive. The ATF guys ran some tests and came up with C-4. I’m sure you know it. It was used in Vietnam. Tunnel rats used it especially to implode tunnels. The thing is, you can get much better stuff now, with more compressed impact area, easier handling and detonation. It’s even cheaper. Also less dangerous to handle and easier to get ahold of. So we figured — I mean the ATF lab guy figured — the reason C-4 was used was because the user was comfortable with it, had used it before. So right off we thought it would be a Vietnam-era vet.

  “Another corollary to Vietnam was the booby traps. We think that before they went up into the vault to start drilling, they wired the tunnel to protect their rear. We sent an ATF dog through as a precaution, you know, to make sure there wasn’t any more live C-4 lying around. The animal got a reading — indicated explosives — in two places in the tunnel. The midway point and at the entrance cut in the wall of the storm line. But there was nothing there anymore. The perps took it with them. But we found peg holes in the floor of the tunnel and snippets of steel wire at both spots — like the leftover stuff when you are cutting lengths with a wire cutter.”

  “Tripwires,” Bosch said.

  “Right. We’re thinking they had the tunnel wired for intruders. If anybody had come in from behind to take them, the tunnel would have gone up. They’d’ve been buried under Hill Street. At least, the tunnelers took the explosives out with them when they left. Saved us stumbling across them.”

  “But an explosion like that probably would’ve killed the tunnelers along with the intruders,” Bosch said.