The Black Echo Read online

  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 thought 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 spinoff 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.”

  “I want to know.”

  “The therapy for PTS. I mean, you are completely functional. But you have infrequent manifestation of post-traumatic stress in forms of insomnia and other things, claustrophobia. A doctor even wrote once that you wouldn’t go into a tunnel like that, never again. Anyway, we put a profile of you through our behavioral sciences lab in Quantico. They discounted you as a suspect, said it was unlikely that you would cross the line for something like financial gain.”

  She let all of that sink in for a few moments.

  “Those VA files are old,” Bosch said. “The whole story is old. I’m not going to sit here and present a case for why I should be a suspect. But that VA stuff is old. I haven’t seen a shrink, VA or otherwise, in five years. And as far as that phobia shit goes, I went into a tunnel to look at Meadows yesterday. What do you think your shrinks in Quantico would write about that?”

  He could feel his face turn red with embarrassment. He had said too much. But the more he tried to control and hide it, the more blood rushed into his face. The wide-hipped waitress chose that moment to come back and freshen his coffee.

  “Ready to order?” she said.

  “No,” Wish said without taking her eyes off Bosch. “Not yet.”

  “Hon, we have a big lunch crowd come in here, and we’re going to need the table for people what want to eat. I make my living off the hungry ones. Not the ones too angry to eat.”

  She walked away with Bosch thinking that waitresses were probably better observers of human behavior than most cops. Wish said, “I am sorry about all of this. You should have let me get up when I first wanted to.”

  The embarrassment was gone but the anger was still there. He wasn’t looking out of the booth anymore. He was looking right at her.

  “You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don’t know me. Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know you. I know about you,” she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. “You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another.”

  She sipped some water and seemed to be deciding whether to go on. She did. “Hieronymus Bosch. . . . The only thing your mother gave you was the name of a painter dead five hundred years. But I imagine the stuff you’ve seen would make the bizarre stuff of dreams he painted look like Disneyland. Your mother was alone. She had to give you up. You grew up in foster homes, youth halls. You survived that and you survived Vietnam and you survived the police department. So far, at least. But you are an outsider in an insider’s job. You made it to RHD and worked the headline cases, but you were an outsider all along. You did things your way and eventually they busted you out for it.”

  She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.

  “It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”

  Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn’t say anything, and there was a long
period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.

  “When you get back to the office,” he finally began, “you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on.”

  “I can’t do it. He won’t do it.”

  “Yes, he’ll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it.”

  “Or what? What can you do? I mean, let’s be honest. With your record, you’ll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn’t do it himself.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he’ll be reading a story in the Times about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau’s nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it’ll make waves all the way to D.C. It’ll be embarrassing and it’ll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You’ll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away.”

  She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. “It’s not my call. I’ll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I’d call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that’s what I’ll tell him to do.”

  “It’s no bluff. You’ve checked me out, you know I’ll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it’s no bluff. I’ll have nothing to lose by doing it. He’ll have nothing to lose by bringing me in.”

  He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.

  “You’ve got my file. You know where you can reach me.”

  “Yes, we do,” she said, and then, “Hey, Bosch?”