The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  “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 had 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 fuck.”

  “What?”

  “TV reporters. That’s what they call one of these gangbangs. 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 fucked 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 ignor
ed 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.