The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  “But whoever wrote that wasn’t over there. When you’re alive but you’re that close to dying, you think about those things. And then it does matter. . . . And so we made the promise.”

  Bosch knew he hadn’t explained a thing. He told her he was going to get another beer. She said she was fine. When he came back out she smiled at him and said nothing.

  “Let me tell you a story about Meadows,” he said. “See, the way they worked it was, they’d assign a couple, maybe three of us tunnel rats to go out with a company. So when they’d come across a tunnel, we’d zip on down, check it out, mine it, whatever.”

  He took a long pull on the fresh beer.

  “And so once, this would have been in 1970, Meadows and me were tagging at the back of a patrol. We were in a VC stronghold and, man, it was just riddled with tunnels. Anyway, we were about three miles from a village called Nhuan Luc when we lost a point man. He got — I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to hear this. With your brother and all.”

  “I do want to hear. Please.”

  “So this point got shot by a sniper who was in a spider hole. That was what they called the little entrances to a tunnel network. So somebody took out the sniper and then me and Meadows had to go down the hole to check it out. We went down, and right away we had to split up. This was a big network. I followed one line one way and he went the other. We had said we’d go for fifteen minutes, set charges with a twenty-minute delay, then head back, setting more along the way. . . . I remember I found a hospital down there. Four empty grass mats, a cabinet of supplies, all just sitting in the middle of this tunnel. I remember I thought, Jesus Christ, what’s going to be around the bend, a drive-in movie or something? I mean these people had dug themselves in. . . . Anyway, there was a little altar in there and there was incense burning. Still burning. I knew then that they were still in there somewhere, the VC, and it scared me. I set a charge and hid it behind the altar, and then I started back as fast as I could. I set two more charges along the way, timing everything so it would all go off at once. So I get back to the drop-in point, you know, the original spider hole, and no Meadows. I waited a few minutes and it’s getting close. You don’t want to be down there when the C-4 goes. Some of those tunnels are a hundred years old. There was nothing I could do, so I climbed out. He wasn’t up top either.”

  He stopped to drink some beer and think about the story. She watched intently but didn’t prod him.

  “A few minutes later my charges went off and the tunnel, at least the part I had been in, came down. Whoever was in there was dead and buried. We waited a couple hours for the smoke and dust to settle. We hooked a Mighty Mite fan up and blew air down the entry shaft, and then you could see smoke being pushed out and coming up out of the air vents and other spider holes all around the jungle.

  “And when it was clear, me and another guy went in to find Meadows. We thought he was dead, but we had the promise; no matter what, we were going to get him out and send him home. But we didn’t find him. Spent the rest of the day down there looking, but all we found were dead VC. Most of them had been shot, some had cut throats. All of them had ears slashed off. When we came up, the top told us we couldn’t wait anymore. We had orders. We pulled out, and I had broken the promise.”

  Bosch was staring blankly out into the night, seeing only the story he was telling.

  “Two days later, another company was in the village, Nhuan Luc, and somebody found a tunnel entrance in a hootch. They get their rats to check it out, and they aren’t in that tunnel more than five minutes when they find Meadows. He was just sitting like Buddha in one of the passageways. Out of ammo. Talking gibberish. Not making sense, but he was okay. And when they tried to get him to come up with them, he didn’t want to. They finally had to tie him up and put a rope on him and have the patrol up there pull him out. Up in the sunlight they saw he was wearing a necklace of human ears. Strung with his tags.”

  He finished the beer and walked in off the balcony. She followed him to the kitchen, where he got a fresh bottle. She put her half-finished bottle on the counter.

  “So that’s my story. That was Meadows. He went to Saigon for some R and R but he came back. He couldn’t stay away from the tunnels. After that one, though, he was never the same. He told me that he just got mixed up and lost down there. He just kept going in the wrong direction, killing anything he came across. The word was that there were thirty-three ears on his necklace. And somebody asked me once why Meadows let one of the VC keep an ear. You know, accounting for the odd number. And I told him that Meadows let them all keep an ear.”

  She shook her head. He nodded his.

  Bosch said, “I wish I had found him that time I went back in to look. I let him down.”

  They both stood for a while looking down at the kitchen floor. Bosch poured the rest of his beer down the sink.

  “One question about Meadows’s sheet and then no more business,” he said. “He got jammed up at Lompoc on an escape attempt. Then sent to TI. You know anything about that?”

  “Yes. And it was a tunnel. He was a trusty and he worked in the laundry. The gas dryers had underground vents going out of the building. He dug beneath one of them. No more than an hour a day. They said he had probably been at it at least six months before it was discovered, when the sprinklers they use in the summer on the rec field softened the ground and there was a cave-in.”

  He nodded his head. He figured it had been a tunnel.

  “The two others that were in on it,” she said. “A drug dealer and a bank robber. They’re still inside. There’s no connection to this.”

  He nodded again.

  “I think I should go now,” she said. “We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. I have a lot more questions.”

  “I’ll try to answer them if I can.”

  She passed closely by him in the small space between the refrigerator and counter and moved out into the hallway. He could smell her hair as she went by. An apple scent, he thought. He noticed that she was looking at the print hanging on the wall opposite the mirror in the hallway. It was in three separate framed sections and was a print of a fifteenth-century painting called The Garden of Delights. The painter was a Dutchman.

  “Hieronymus Bosch,” she said as she studied the nightmarish landscape of the painting. “When I saw that was your full name I wondered if—”

  “No relation,” he said. “My mother, she just liked his stuff. I guess ’cause of the last name. She sent that print to me once. Said in the note that it reminded her of L.A. All the crazy people. My foster parents . . . they didn’t like it, but I kept it for a lot of years. Had it hanging there as long as I’ve had this place.”

  “But you like to be called Harry.”

  “Yeah, I like Harry.”

  “Good night, Harry. Thanks for the beer.”

  “Good night, Eleanor. . . . Thanks for the company.”

  PART IV

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 23

  By 10 A.M. they were on the Ventura Freeway, which cuts across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and out of the city. Bosch was driving and they were going against the grain of traffic, heading northwest, toward Ventura County, and leaving behind the blanket of smog that filled the Valley like dirty cream in a bowl.

  They were heading to Charlie Company. The FBI had only done a cursory check on Meadows and the prison outreach program the year before. Wish said she had thought its importance was minimal because Meadows’s stay had ended nearly a year before the tunnel caper. She said the bureau had requested a copy of Meadows’s file but had not checked the names of other convicts who were part of the program at the same time as Meadows. Bosch thought this was a mistake. Meadows’s work record indicated the bank caper was part of a long-range plan, he told Wish. The bank burglary might have been hatched at Charlie Company.

  Before leaving, Bosch had called Meadows’s parole officer, Daryl Slater, and was given a rundown on Charlie Company. Slater said the place was a vegetab
le farm owned and operated by an army colonel who was retired and born again. He contracted with the state and federal prisons to take early release cases, the only requirement being that they be Vietnam combat veterans. That wasn’t too difficult a bill to fill, Slater said. As in every other state in the country, the prisons in California had high populations of Vietnam vets. Gordon Scales, the former colonel, didn’t care what crimes the vets had been convicted of, Slater said. He just wanted to set them right again. The place had a staff of three, including Scales, and held no more than twenty-four men at a time. The average stay was nine months. They worked the vegetable fields from six to three, stopping only for lunch at noon. After the work day there was an hour-long session called soul talk, then dinner and TV. Another hour of religion before lights-out. Slater said Scales used his connections in the community to place the vets in jobs when they were ready for the outside world. In six years, Charlie Company had a recidivist record of only 11 percent. A figure so enviable that Scales got a favorable mention in a speech by the president during his last campaign swing through the state.

  “The man’s a hero,” Slater said. “And not ’cause of the war. For what he did after. When you get a place like that, moving maybe thirty, forty cons through it a year, and only one in ten gets his ass in a jam again, then you are talking about a major success. Scales, he has the ear of the federal and state parole boards and half the wardens in this state.”

  “Does that mean he gets to pick who goes to Charlie Company?” Bosch asked.

  “Maybe not pick, but give final approval to, yes,” the PO said. “But the word on this guy is out. His name is known in every and any cellblock where you got a vet doing time. These guys come to him. They send letters, send Bibles, make phone calls, have lawyers get in contact. All to get Scales to sponsor them.”

  “Is that how Meadows got there?”

  “Far as I know. He was already heading there when he was assigned to me. You’d have to call Terminal Island and have them check their files. Or talk to Scales.”

  Bosch filled Wish in on the conversation while they were on the road. Otherwise, it was a long ride and there were long periods of silence. Bosch spent much of the time wondering about the night before. Her visit. Why had she come? After they crossed into Ventura County his mind came back to the case, and he asked her some of the questions he had come up with the night before while reviewing the files.

  “Why didn’t they hit the main vault? At WestLand there were two vaults. Safe-deposit and then the bank’s main vault, for the cash and the tellers’ boxes. The crime scene reports said the design of both vaults was the same. The safe-deposit vault was bigger but the armoring in the floor was the same. So it would seem that Meadows and his partners could just as easily have tunneled to the main vault, gotten in and taken whatever was there and gotten out. No need to risk spending a whole weekend inside. No need to pry open safe-deposit boxes either.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know they were the same. Maybe they assumed the main vault would be tougher.”

  “But we are assuming they had some knowledge of the safe-deposit vault’s structure before they started on this. Why didn’t they have the same knowledge of the other vault?”

  “They couldn’t recon the main vault. It’s not open to the public. But we think one of them rented a box in the safe-deposit vault and went in to check it out. Used a phony name, of course. But, see, they could check out one vault and not the other. Maybe that’s why.”

  Bosch nodded and said, “How much was in the main vault?”

  “Don’t know offhand. It should have been in the reports I gave you. If not, it’s in the other files back at the bureau.”

  “More, though. Right? There was more cash in the main vault than what, the two or three million in property they got from the boxes.”

  “I think that is probably right.”

  “See what I’m saying? If they had hit the main vault the stuff would have been laying around in stacks and bags. Right there for the taking. It would have been easier. There probably would have been more money for less trouble.”

  “But, Harry, we know that from hindsight. Who knows what they knew going in? Maybe they thought there was more in the boxes. They gambled and lost.”

  “Or maybe they won.”

  She looked over at him.

  “Maybe there was something there in the boxes that we don’t even know about. That nobody reported missing. Something that made the safe-deposit vault the better target. Made it worth more than the main vault.”

  “If you’re thinking drugs, the answer is no. We thought of that. We had the DEA bring around one of their dogs and he went through the broken boxes. Nothing. No trace of drugs. He then sniffed around the boxes the thieves hadn’t gotten to and he got one hit. On one of the small ones.”

  She laughed for a moment and said, “So then we drilled this box the dog went nuts over and found five grams of coke in a bag. This poor guy who kept his coke stash at the bank got busted just because somebody happened to tunnel into the same vault.”

  Wish laughed again, but it seemed to be a little forced to Bosch. The story wasn’t that funny. “Anyway,” she said, “the case against the guy was kicked by an assistant U.S. attorney because he said it was a bad search. We violated the guy when we drilled his box without a warrant.”

  Bosch exited the freeway into the town of Ventura and headed north. “I still like the drug angle, despite the dog,” he said after a quarter hour of silence. “They aren’t infallible, those dogs. If the stuff was packed in there right and the thieves got it, there may not have been a trace. A couple of those boxes with coke in them and the caper starts being worth their while.”

  “Your next question will be about the customer lists, right?” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Well, we did a lot of work on that. We checked everybody, right down to tracing purchases of things they said were in the boxes. We didn’t find who did the job, but we probably saved the bank’s insurance companies a couple million in paying for things that were reported stolen but never really existed.”

  He pulled into a gas station so he could take out a map book from under the seat and figure out the way to Charlie Company. She continued to defend the FBI investigation.

  “The DEA looked at every name on the boxholder list and drew a blank. We ran the names through NCIC. We got a few hits but nothing serious, mostly old stuff.” She gave another one of those short fake laughs. “One of the holders of one of the bigger boxes had a kiddy porn conviction from the seventies. Served a deuce at Soledad. Anyway, after the bank job he was contacted and he reported nothing was taken, said he had recently emptied his box. But they say these pedophiles can never part with their stuff, their photos and films, even letters written about kids. And there was no record at the bank of him going into the box in the two months before the burglary. So we figured that the box was for his collection. But, anyway, that had nothing to do with the job. Nothing we turned up did.”

  Bosch found the way on the map and pulled out of the service station. Charlie Company was in grove country. He thought about her story about the pedophile. Something about it bothered him. He rolled it around in his head but couldn’t get to it. He let it drift and went on to another question.

  “Why was nothing ever recovered? All that jewelry and bonds and stocks, and nothing ever turns up except for a single bracelet. Not even any of the other worthless things that were taken.”

  “They are sitting on it until they think they are clear,” Wish said. “That’s why Meadows was smoked. He went out of line and pawned the bracelet before he should have, maybe before everyone agreed they were clear. They found out he’d sold it. He wouldn’t say where, so they buzzed him until he told them. Then they killed him.”

  “And by coincidence, I get the call.”

  “It happens.”

  “There is something in that story that doesn’t work,” Bosch said. “We start out with Meadows getting juic
ed, tortured, right? He tells them what they want, they put the hot load in his arm and they go get the bracelet from the pawnshop, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But, see, it doesn’t work. I’ve got the pawn slip. It was hidden. So he didn’t give it to them, and they had to go break in the shop and take the bracelet, covering the scam by also taking a lot of other junk. So if he didn’t give them the pawn slip, how’d they know where the bracelet was?”

  “He told them, I guess,” Wish said.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t see him giving up one and not the other. He had nothing to gain from holding back the slip. If they got the name of the shop out of him, they would’ve gotten the slip.”

  “So, you’re saying he died before he told them anything. And they already knew where the bracelet was pawned.”

  “Right. They worked him to get the ticket, but he wouldn’t give it up, wouldn’t break. They killed him. Then they dump the body and roll his place. But they still don’t find the pawn stub. So they hit the pawnshop like third-rate burglars. The question is, if Meadows didn’t tell them where he had sold the bracelet and they didn’t find the stub, how did they know where it was?”

  “Harry, this is speculation on top of speculation.”

  “That’s what cops do.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Could have been a lot of things. They could have had a tail on Meadows ’cause they didn’t trust him and could have seen him go into the pawnshop. Could’ve been a lot of things.”

  “Could’ve been they had somebody, say a cop, who saw the bracelet on the monthly pawn sheets and told them. The sheets go to every police department in the county.”

  “I think that kind of speculation is reckless.”