Harry Bosch 01 - The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  "The FBI."

  "You know something I don't know?"

  "I haven't exactly been sitting on my ass. They say when the bureau took it or why?"

  "They weren't told why. FBI agent just came in with the warrant and took it. Checked it out last September and hasn't brought it back since. Didn't give a reason. The Fucking-B-I doesn't have to.'

  Bosch was quiet while he thought about this. They knew all along. Wish knew about Meadows and the tunnels and everything else he had just told her. It had all been a show.

  "Harry, you there?"

  "Yeah, listen, did they show you a copy of the paperwork or know the name of the agent?"

  "No, they couldn't find the subpoena receipt and nobody remembered the agent's name, except that she was a woman."

  "Take this number where I'm at. Go back to them in records and ask for another file, just see if it's there. My file."

  He gave Edgar the pay phone number, his date of birth, social security number and his full name, spelling out his real first name.

  "Jesus, that's your first name?" Edgar said. "Harry for short. How'd your momma come up with that one?"

  "She had a thing about fifteenth-century painters. It goes with the last name. Go check on the file, then call me back. I'll wait here."

  "I can't even pronounce it, man."

  "Rhymes with 'anonymous.' "

  "Okay, I'll try that. Where you at, anyway?"

  "A pay phone. Outside the FBI."

  Bosch hung up before his partner could ask any questions. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the phone booth while watching a small group of people walking in a circle on the long green lawn in front of the building. They were holding up homemade signs and placards that protested a proposal to open new oil leases in Santa Monica Bay. He saw signs that said Just Say No to Oil and Isn't the Bay Polluted Enough? and United States of Exxon and so on.

  He noticed a couple of TV news crews on the lawn filming the protest. That was the key, he thought. Exposure. As long as the media showed up and put it on the six o'clock news, the protest was a success. A sound-bite success. Bosch noticed that the group's apparent spokesman was being interviewed on camera by a woman he recognized from Channel 4. He also recognized the spokesman but he wasn't sure from where. After a few moments of watching the man's ease during the interview in front of the camera, Bosch placed him. The guy was a TV actor who used to play a drunk on a popular situation comedy that Bosch had seen once or twice. Though the guy still looked like a drunk, the show wasn't on anymore.

  Bosch was on his second cigarette, leaning on the phone booth and beginning to feel the heat of the day, when he looked up at the glass doors of the building and saw Agent Eleanor Wish walking through. She was looking down and digging a hand through her purse and hadn't noticed him. Quickly and without analyzing why, he ducked behind the phones and, using them as a shield, moved around them as she walked by. It was sunglasses she had been looking for in the purse. Now she had them on as she walked past the protestors without even a glance in their direction. She headed up Veteran Avenue to Wilshire Boulevard. Bosch knew the federal garage was under the building. Wish was walking in the opposite direction. She was going somewhere nearby. The phone rang.

  "Harry, they have your file, too. The FBI. What's going on?"

  Edgar's voice was urgent and confused. He didn't like waves. He didn't like mysteries. He was a straight nine-to-five man.

  "I don't know what's going on, they wouldn't tell me," Bosch replied. "You head into the office. We'll talk there. If you get there before me, I want you to make a call over to the subway project. Personnel. See if they had Meadows working there. Try under the name Fields, too. Then just do the paper on the TV stabbing. Like we said. Keep your end of our deal. I'll meet you there."

  "Harry, you told me you knew this guy, Meadows. Maybe we should tell Ninety-eight it's a conflict, that we ought to turn the case over to RHD or somebody else on the table."

  "We'll talk about it in a little while, Jed. Don't do anything or talk to anybody about it till I get there."

  Bosch hung up the phone and walked off toward Wilshire. He could see Wish already had turned east toward Westwood Village. He closed the distance between them, crossed to the other side of the street and followed behind. He was careful not to get too close, so that his reflection would not be in the shop windows she was looking in as she walked. When she reached Westwood Boulevard she turned north and crossed Wilshire, coming to Bosch's side of the street. He ducked into a bank lobby. After a few moments he went back out on the sidewalk and she was gone. He looked both ways and then trotted up to the corner. He saw her a half block up Westwood, going into the village.

  Wish slowed in front of some shop windows and came to a stop in front of a sporting goods store. Bosch could see female manikins in the window, dressed in lime-green running shorts and shirts. Last year's fad on sale today. Wish looked at the outfits for a few moments and then headed off, not stopping until she was in the theater district. She turned into Stratton's Bar & Grill.

  Bosch, on the other side of the street, passed the restaurant without looking and went up to the next corner. He stood in front of the Bruin, below the old theater's marquee, and looked back. She hadn't come out. He wondered if there was a rear door. He looked at his watch. It was a little early for lunch but maybe she liked to beat the crowd. Maybe she liked to eat alone. He crossed the street to the other corner and stood below the canopy of the Fox Theater. He could see through the front window of Stratton's but didn't see her. He walked through the parking lot next to the restaurant and into the rear alley. He saw a public access door at the back. Had she seen him and used the restaurant to slip away? It had been a long while since he had been on a one-man tail, but he didn't think she had made him. He headed down the alley and went in the back door.

  Eleanor Wish was sitting alone in the row of wooden booths along the restaurant's right wall. Like any careful cop she sat facing the front door, so she didn't see Bosch until he slid onto the bench across from her and picked up the menu she had already scanned and dropped on the table.

  He said, "Never been here, anything good?"

  "What is this?" she said, surprise clearly showing on her face.

  "I don't know, I thought you might want some company."

  "Did you follow me? You followed me."

  "At least I'm being up front about it. You know, you made a mistake back at the office. You played it too cool. I walk in with the only lead you've had in nine months and you want to talk about liaisons and bullshit. Something wasn't right but I couldn't figure out what. Now I know."

  "What are you talking about? Never mind, I don't want to know."

  She made a move to slide out of the booth, but Bosch reached across the table and firmly put his hand on her wrist. Her skin was warm and moist from the walk over. She stopped and turned and smoked him with brown eyes so angry and hot they could have burned his name on a tombstone.

  "Let go," she said, her voice tightly controlled but carrying enough of an edge to suggest she could lose it. He let go.

  "Don't leave. Please." She lingered a moment and he worked quickly. He said, "It's all right. I understand the reasons for the whole thing, the cold reception back there, everything. I have to say it actually was good work, what you did. I can't hold it against you."

  "Bosch, listen to me, I don't know what you are talking about. I think—"

  "I know you already knew about Meadows, the tunnels, the whole thing. You pulled his military files, you pulled mine, you probably pulled files on every rat that made it out of that place alive. There had to have been something in the WestLand job that connected to the tunnels back there."

  She looked at him for a long moment and was about to speak, when a waitress approached with a pad and pencil.

  "For now, just one coffee, black, and an Evian. Thank you," Bosch said before Wish or the waitress could speak. The waitress walked away, writing on the pad.

  "I thou
ght you were a cream-and-sugar cop," Wish said.

  "Only when people try to guess what I am."

  Her eyes seemed to soften then, but only a bit.

  "Detective Bosch, look, I don't know how you know what you think you know, but I am not going to discuss the WestLand case. It is exactly as I said at the bureau. I can't do it. I am sorry. I really am."

  Bosch said, "I guess maybe I should resent it, but I don't. It was a logical step in the investigation. I would've done the same. You take anybody who fit the profile—tunnel rat—and sift them through the evidence."

  "You're not a suspect, Bosch, okay? So drop it."

  "I know I'm not a suspect." He gave a short, forced burst of laughter. "I was serving a suspension down in Mexico and can prove it. But you already know that. So for me, fine, I'll drop it. But I need what you have on Meadows. You pulled his files back in September. You must have done a workup on him. Surveillance, known associates, background. Maybe . . . I bet you even pulled him in and talked to him. I need it all now—today, not in three, four weeks when some liaison puts a stamp on it."

  The waitress came back with the coffee and water. Wish pulled her glass close but didn't drink.

  "Detective Bosch, you are off the case. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be the one to tell you. But you're off. You go back to your office and you'll find out. We made a call after you left."

  He was holding his coffee with two hands, elbows on the table. He carefully put the cup down on the saucer, in case his hands began to shake.

  "What did you do?" Bosch asked.

  "I'm sorry," Eleanor Wish said. "After you left, Rourke —the guy you shoved the picture in front of?— he called the number on your card and talked to a Lieutenant Pounds. He told him about your visit today and suggested there was a conflict, you investigating a friend's death. He said some other things and—"

  "What other things?"

  "Look, Bosch, I know about you. I'll admit we pulled your files, we checked you out. Hell, but to do that, all we had to do was read the newspapers back then. You and that Dollmaker thing. So I know what you have been through with the internal people, and this isn't going to help, but it was Rourke's decision. He—"

  "What other things did he tell?"

  "He told the truth. He said both your name and Meadows's had come up in our investigation. He said you both knew each other. He asked that you be taken off the case.

  So all of this doesn't matter."

  Bosch looked off, out of the booth.

  "I want to hear you answer," he said. "Am I a suspect?"

  "No. At least you weren't until you walked in this morning. Now, I don't know. I'm trying to be honest. I mean, you have to look at this from our standpoint. One guy we looked at last year comes in and says he is investigating the murder of another guy we looked very hard at. This first guy says, 'Let me see your files.' "

  She didn't have to tell him as much as she had. He knew this and knew she was probably going out on a limb saying anything at all. For all the shit he had just stepped in or been put in, Harry Bosch was beginning to like cold, hard Eleanor Wish.

  "If you won't tell me about Meadows, tell me one thing about myself. You said I was looked at and then dropped. How'd you clear me? You go to Mexico?"

  "That and other things." She looked at him a moment before going on. "You were cleared early on. At first we got excited. I mean, we look through the files of people with tunnel experience in Vietnam and there sitting on the top was the famous Harry Bosch, detective superstar, a couple books written about his cases. TV movie, a spin-off series. And the guy the newspapers just happened to have been filled with, the guy whose star crashed with a one-month suspension and transfer from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division to . . ." She hesitated.

  "The sewer." He finished it for her.

  She looked down into her glass and continued.

  "So, right away Rourke started figuring that maybe that's how you spent your time, digging this tunnel into the bank. From hero to heel, this was your way to get back at society, something crazy like that. But when we backgrounded you and asked around quietly, we heard you went to Mexico for the month. We sent someone down to Ensenada and checked it out. You were clear. Around then we also had gotten your medical files from the VA up at Sepulveda—oh, that's it, that's who you checked with this morning, isn't it?"

  He nodded. She continued.

  "Anyway, in the medical there were the psychiatrist's reports . . . I'm sorry. This seems like such an invasion."

  Part II

  Monday, May 21

  Bosch came awake in his watch chair about 4 A.M. He had left the sliding glass door open to the porch, and the Santa Ana winds were billowing the curtains, ghostlike, out across the room. The warm wind and the dream had made him sweat. Then the wind had dried the moisture on his skin like a salty shell. He stepped out onto the porch and leaned against the wood railing, looking down at the lights of the Valley. The searchlights at Universal were long since retired for the night and there was no traffic sound from the freeway down in the pass. In the distance, maybe from Glendale, he heard the whupping sound of a helicopter. He searched and found the red light moving low in the basin. It wasn't circling and there was no searchlight. It wasn't a cop. He thought then that he could smell the slight scent of malathion, sharp and bitter, on the red wind.

  He went back inside and closed the sliding glass door. He thought about bed but knew there would be no more sleep this night. It was often this way with Bosch. Sleep would come early in the night but not last. Or it would not come until the arriving sun softly cut the outline of the hills in the morning fog.

  He had been to the sleep disorder clinic at the VA in Sepulveda but the shrinks couldn't help him. They told him he was in a cycle. He would have extended periods of deep sleep trances into which torturous dreams invaded. This would be followed by months of insomnia, the mind reacting defensively to the terrors that awaited in sleep. Your mind has repressed the anxiety you feel over your part in the war, the doctor told him. You must assuage these feelings in your waking hours before your sleep time can progress undisturbed. But the doctor didn't understand that what was done was done. There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

  He showered and shaved, afterward studying his face in the mirror and remembering how unkind time had been to Billy Meadows. Bosch's hair was turning to gray but it was full and curly. Other than the circles under his eyes, his face was unlined and handsome. He wiped the remaining shaving cream off and put on his beige summer suit with a light-blue button-down oxford. On a hanger in the closet he found a maroon tie with little gladiator helmets on it that was not unreasonably wrinkled or stained. He pegged it in place with the 187 tie pin, clipped his gun to his belt and then headed out into the predawn dark. He drove into downtown for an omelet, toast and coffee at the Pantry on Figueroa. Open twenty-four hours a day since before the Depression. A sign boasted that the place had not gone one minute in that time without a customer. Bosch looked around from the counter and saw that at the moment he was personally carrying the record on his shoulders. He was alone.

  The coffee and cigarettes got Bosch ready for the day. After, he took the freeway back up to Hollywood, passing a frozen sea of cars already fighting to get downtown.

  Hollywood Station was on Wilcox just a couple of blocks south of the Boulevard, where most of its business came from. He parked at the curb out front because he was only staying awhile and didn't want to get caught in the back lot traffic jam at the change of watch. As he walked through the small lobby he saw a woman with a blackened eye, who was crying and filling out a report with the desk officer. But down the hall to the left the detective bureau was quiet. The night man must have been out on a call or up in the Bridal Suite, a storage room on the second floor where there were two cots, first come, first served. The detective bureau's hustle and bustle seemed to be frozen in place. No one was there, but the long tables assigned to bur
glary, auto, juvenile, robbery and homicide were all awash in paperwork and clutter. The detectives came and went. The paper never changed.

  Bosch went to the back of the bureau to start a pot of coffee. He glanced through a rear door and down the back hallway where the lockup benches and the jail were located. Halfway down the hall to the holding tank, a young white boy with blond dreadlocks sat handcuffed to a bench. A juvie, maybe seventeen at most, Bosch figured. It was against California law to put them in a holding tank with adults. Which was like saying it might be dangerous for coyotes to be put in a pen with dobermans.

  "What you looking at, fuckhead?" the boy called down the hall to Bosch.

  Bosch didn't say anything. He dumped a bag of coffee into a paper filter. A uniform stuck his head out of the watch commander's office farther down the hall.

  "I told you," the uniform yelled at the kid. "Once more and I'm going to go up a notch on the cuffs. Half hour and you won't feel your hands. Then how you going to wipe your ass in the john?"

  "I guess I'll have to use your fuckin' face."

  The uniform stepped into the hall and headed toward the kid, his hard black shoes making long, mean strides. Bosch shoved the filter bowl into the coffee machine and hit the brewing cycle switch. He walked away from the hallway door and over to the homicide table. He didn't want to see what happened with the kid. He dragged his chair away from his spot at the table and over to one of the community typewriters. The pertinent forms he needed were in slots on a rack on the wall above the machine. He rolled a blank crime scene report into the typewriter. Then he took his notebook out of his pocket and opened to the first page.

  Two hours of typing and smoking and drinking bad coffee later, a bluish cloud hung near the ceiling lights over the homicide table and Bosch had completed the myriad forms that accompany a homicide investigation. He got up and made copies on the Xerox in the back hall. He noticed the dreadlock kid was gone. Then he got a new blue binder out of the office supplies closet—after finessing the door with his LAPD ID card—and hooked one set of the typed reports onto the three rings. The other set he hid in an old blue binder he kept in a file drawer and that was labeled with the name of an old unsolved case. When he was done, he reread his work. He liked the order the paperwork gave the case. On many previous cases he had made it a practice to reread the murder book each morning. It helped him draw out theories. The smell of the binder's new plastic reminded him of other cases and invigorated him. He was in the hunt again. The reports he had typed and placed in the murder book were not complete, though. On the Investigating Officer's Chronological Report he had left out several parts of his Sunday afternoon and evening. He neglected to type in the connection he had made between Meadows and the WestLand bank burglary. He also left out the visits to the pawnshop and to see Bremmer at the Times. There were no typed summaries of these interviews either. It was only Monday, day two. He wanted to wait until he had been to the FBI before committing any of that information to the official record. He wanted to know, exactly, what was going on first. It was a precaution he took on every case. He left the bureau before any of the other detectives had arrived for the day.