The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  “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 Country 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 wou
ld 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.