The Black Echo Read online

  When he reached the body, he found the dead man’s shirt — a black, open-collar crew shirt — pulled up over his head with his arms tangled inside. Bosch had seen enough dead people to know that literally nothing was impossible during the last breaths. He had worked a suicide in which a man who had shot himself in the head had then changed pants before dying, apparently because he did not want his body to be discovered soaked in human waste. But the shirt and the arms on the dead man in the pipe did not seem acceptable to Harry. It looked to Bosch as if the body had been dragged into the pipe by someone who had pulled the dead man by the collar.

  Bosch had not disturbed the body or pulled the shirt away from the face. He noted that it was a white male. He detected no immediate indication of the fatal injury. After finishing his survey of the body, Bosch carefully moved over the corpse, his face coming within a half foot of it, and then continued through the pipe’s remaining forty yards. He found no tracks and nothing else of evidentiary value. In twenty minutes he was back in the sunlight. He then sent a crime scene tech named Donovan in to chart the location of debris in the pipe and video the body in place. Donovan’s face had betrayed his surprise at having to go into the pipe on a case he’d already written off as an OD. He had tickets to the Dodgers, Bosch figured.

  After leaving the pipe to Donovan, Bosch had lit a cigarette and walked to the dam’s railing to look down on the fouled city and brood.

  At the railing he could hear the sound of traffic filtering up from the Hollywood Freeway. It almost sounded gentle from such a distance. Like a calm ocean. Down through the cleft of the canyon he saw blue swimming pools and Spanish tile roofs.

  A woman in a white tank top and lime-green jogging shorts ran by him on the dam. A compact radio was clipped to her waistband, and a thin yellow wire carried sound to the earphones clamped to her head. She seemed to be in her own world, unaware of the grouping of police ahead of her until she reached the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the end of the dam. It told her to stop in two languages. She jogged in place for a few moments, her long blond hair clinging to sweat on her shoulders, and watched the police, who were mostly watching her. Then she turned and headed back past Bosch. His eyes followed her, and he noticed that when she went by the pump house she deviated her course to avoid something. He walked over and found glass on the pavement. He looked up and saw the broken bulb in the socket above the pump house door. He made a mental note to ask the caretaker if the bulb had been checked lately.

  When Bosch returned to his spot at the railing a blur of movement from below drew his attention. He looked down and saw a coyote sniffing among the pine needles and trash that covered the earth below the trees in front of the dam. The animal was small and its coat was scruffy and completely missing some patches of hair. There were only a few of them left in the city’s protected areas, left to scavenge among the debris of the human scavengers.

  “They’re pulling it out now,” a voice said from behind.

  Bosch turned and saw one of the uniforms that had been assigned to the crime scene. He nodded and followed him off the dam, under the yellow tape, and back to the pipe.

  A cacophony of grunts and heavy gasps echoed from the mouth of the graffiti-scarred pipe. A shirtless man, with his heavily muscled back scratched and dirty, emerged backward, towing a sheet of heavy black plastic on top of which lay the body. The dead man was still face up with his head and arms mostly obscured in the wrapping of the black shirt. Bosch looked around for Donovan and saw him stowing a video recorder in the back of the blue crime scene van. Harry walked over.

  “Now I’m going to need you to go back in. All the debris in there, newspapers, cans, bags, I saw some hypos, cotton, bottles, I need it all bagged.”

  “You got it,” Donovan said. He waited a beat and added, “I’m not saying anything, but, Harry, I mean, you really think this is the real thing? Is it worth busting our balls on?”

  “I guess we won’t know until after the cut.”

  He started to walk away but stopped.

  “Look, Donnie, I know it’s Sunday and, uh, thanks for going back in.”

  “No problem. It’s straight OT for me.”

  The shirtless man and a coroner’s technician were sitting on their haunches, huddled over the body. They both wore white rubber gloves. The technician was Larry Sakai, a guy Bosch had known for years but had never liked. He had a plastic fishing-tackle box open on the ground next to him. He took a scalpel from the box and made a one-inch-long cut into the side of the body, just above the left hip. No blood came from the slice. From the box he then removed a thermometer and attached it to the end of a curved probe. He stuck it into the incision, expertly though roughly turning it and driving it up into the liver.

  The shirtless man grimaced, and Bosch noticed he had a blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of his right eye. It somehow seemed appropriate to Bosch. It was the most sympathy the dead man would get here.

  “Time of death is going to be a pisser,” Sakai said. He did not look up from his work. “That pipe, you know, with the heat rising, it’s going to skew the temperature loss in the liver. Osito took a reading in there and it was eighty-one. Ten minutes later it was eighty-three. We don’t have a fixed temp in the body or the pipe.”

  “So?” Bosch said.

  “So I am not giving you anything here. I gotta take it back and do some calculating.”

  “You mean give it to somebody else who knows how to figure it?” Bosch asked.

  “You’ll get it when you come in for the autopsy, don’t worry, man.”

  “Speaking of which, who’s doing the cutting today?”

  Sakai didn’t answer. He was busy with the dead man’s legs. He grabbed each shoe and manipulated the ankles. He moved his hands up the legs and reached beneath the thighs, lifting each leg and watching as it bent at the knee. He then pressed his hands down on the abdomen as if feeling for contraband. Lastly, he reached inside the shirt and tried to turn the dead man’s head. It didn’t move. Bosch knew rigor mortis worked its way from the head through the body and then into the extremities.

  “This guy’s neck is locked but good,” Sakai said. “Stomach’s getting there. But the extremities still have good movement.”

  He took a pencil from behind his ear and pressed the eraser end against the skin on the side of the torso. There was purplish blotching on the half of the body closest to the ground, as if the body were half full of red wine. It was post-mortem lividity. When the heart stops pumping, the blood seeks the low ground. When Sakai pressed the pencil against the dark skin, it did not blanch white, a sign the blood had fully clotted. The man had been dead for hours.

  “The po-mo lividity is steady,” Sakai said. “That and the rig makes me estimate that this dude’s been dead maybe six to eight hours. That’s going to have to hold you, Bosch, until we can work with the temps.”

  Sakai didn’t look up as he said this. He and the one called Osito began pulling the pockets on the dead man’s green fatigue pants inside out. They were empty, as were the large baggy pockets on the thighs. They rolled the body to one side to check the back pockets. As they did this, Bosch leaned down to look closely at the exposed back of the dead man. The skin was purplish with lividity and dirty. But he saw no scratches or marks that allowed him to conclude that the body had been dragged.

  “Nothing in the pants, Bosch, no ID,” Sakai said, still not looking up.

  Then they began to gently pull the black shirt back over the head and onto the torso. The dead man had straggly hair that had more gray in it than the original black. His beard was unkempt and he looked to be about fifty, which made Bosch figure him at about forty. There was something in the breast pocket of the shirt and Sakai fished it out, looked at it a moment and then put it into a plastic bag held open by his partner.

  “Bingo,” Sakai said and handed the bag up to Bosch. “One set of works. Makes our jobs all a lot easier.”

  Sakai next peeled the dead man’s cr
acked eyelids all the way open. The eyes were blue with a milky caul over them. Each pupil was constricted to about the size of a pencil lead. They stared vacantly up at Bosch, each pupil a small black void.

  Sakai made some notes on a clipboard. He’d made his decision on this one. Then he pulled an ink pad and a print card from the tackle box by his side. He inked the fingers of the left hand and began pressing them on the card. Bosch admired how quickly and expertly he did this. But then Sakai stopped.

  “Hey. Check it out.”

  Sakai gently moved the index finger. It was easily manipulated in any direction. The joint was cleanly broken, but there was no sign of swelling or hemorrhage.

  “It looks post to me,” Sakai said.

  Bosch stooped to look closer. He took the dead man’s hand away from Sakai and felt it with both his own, ungloved hands. He looked at Sakai and then at Osito.

  “Bosch, don’t start in,” Sakai barked. “Don’t be looking at him. He knows better. I trained him myself.”

  Bosch didn’t remind Sakai that it was he who had been driving the ME wagon that dumped a body strapped to a wheeled stretcher onto the Ventura Freeway a few months back. During rush hour. The stretcher rolled down the Lankershim Boulevard exit and hit the back end of a car at a gas station. Because of the fiberglass partition in the cab, Sakai didn’t know he had lost the body until he arrived at the morgue.

  Bosch handed the dead man’s hand back to the coroner’s tech. Sakai turned to Osito and spoke a question in Spanish. Osito’s small brown face became very serious and he shook his head no.

  “He didn’t even touch the guy’s hands in there. So you better wait until the cut before you go saying something you aren’t sure about.”

  Sakai finished transferring the fingerprints and then handed the card to Bosch.

  “Bag the hands,” Bosch said to him, though he didn’t need to. “And the feet.”

  He stood back up and began waving the card to get the ink to dry. With his other hand he held up the plastic evidence bag Sakai had given him. In it a rubber band held together a hypodermic needle, a small vial that was half filled with what looked like dirty water, a wad of cotton and a pack of matches. It was a shooter’s kit and it looked fairly new. The spike was clean, with no sign of corrosion. The cotton, Bosch guessed, had only been used as a strainer once or twice. There were tiny whitish-brown crystals in the fibers. By turning the bag he could look inside each side of the matchbook and see only two matches missing.

  Donovan crawled out of the pipe at that moment. He was wearing a miner’s helmet equipped with a flashlight. In one hand he carried several plastic bags, each containing a yellowed newspaper, or a food wrapper or a crushed beer can. In the other he carried a clipboard on which he had diagramed where each item had been found in the pipe. Spiderwebs hung off the sides of the helmet. Sweat was running down his face and staining the painter’s breathing mask he wore over his mouth and nose. Bosch held up the bag containing the shooter’s kit. Donovan stopped in his tracks.

  “You find a stove in there?” Bosch asked.

  “Shit, he’s a hype?” Donovan said. “I knew it. What the fuck are we doin’ all this for?”

  Bosch didn’t answer. He waited him out.

  “Answer is yes, I found a Coke can,” Donovan said.

  The crime scene tech looked through the plastic bags in his hands and held one up to Bosch. It contained two halves of a Coke can. The can looked reasonably new and had been cut in half with a knife. The bottom half had been inverted and its concave surface used as a pan to cook heroin and water. A stove. Most hypes no longer used spoons. Carrying a spoon was probable cause for arrest. Cans were easy to come by, easy to handle and disposable.

  “We need the kit and the stove printed as soon as we can,” Bosch said. Donovan nodded and carried his burden of plastic bags toward the police van. Bosch turned his attention back to the ME’s men.

  “No knife on him, right?” Bosch said.

  “Right,” Sakai said. “Why?”

  “I need a knife. Incomplete scene without a knife.”

  “So what. Guy’s a hype. Hypes steal from hypes. His pals probably took it.”

  Sakai’s gloved hands rolled up the sleeves of the dead man’s shirt. This revealed a network of scar tissue on both arms. Old needle marks, craters left by abscesses and infections. In the crook of the left elbow was a fresh spike mark and a large yellow-and-purplish hemorrhage under the skin.

  “Bingo,” Sakai said. “I’d say this guy took a hot load in the arm and, phssst, that was it. Like I said, you got a hype case, Bosch. You’ll have an early day. Go get a Dodger dog.”

  Bosch crouched down again to look closer.

  “That’s what everybody keeps telling me,” he said.

  And Sakai was probably right, he thought. But he didn’t want to fold this one away yet. Too many things didn’t fit. The missing tracks in the pipe. The shirt pulled over the head. The broken finger. No knife.

  “How come all the tracks are old except the one?” he asked, more of himself than Sakai.

  “Who knows?” Sakai answered anyway. “Maybe he’d been off it awhile and decided to jump back in. A hype’s a hype. There aren’t any reasons.”

  Staring at the tracks on the dead man’s arms, Bosch noticed blue ink on the skin just below the sleeve that was bunched up on the left bicep. He couldn’t see enough to make out what it said.

  “Pull that up,” he said and pointed.

  Sakai worked the sleeve up to the shoulder, revealing a tattoo of blue and red ink. It was a cartoonish rat standing on hind legs with a rabid, toothy and vulgar grin. In one hand the rat held a pistol, in the other a booze bottle marked XXX. The blue writing above and below the cartoon was smeared by age and the spread of skin. Sakai tried to read it.

  “Says ‘Force’ — no, ‘First.’ Says ‘First Infantry.’ This guy was army. The bottom part doesn’t make — it’s another language. ‘Non . . . Gratum . . . Anum . . . Ro — ’ I can’t make that out.”

  “Rodentum,” Bosch said.

  Sakai looked at him.

  “Dog Latin,” Bosch told him. “Not worth a rat’s ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.”

  “Whatever,” Sakai said. He took an appraising look at the body and the pipe. He said, “Well, he ended up in a tunnel, didn’t he? Sort of.”

  Bosch reached his bare hand to the dead man’s face and pushed the straggly black and gray hairs off the forehead and away from the vacant eyes. His doing this without gloves made the others stop what they were doing and watch this unusual, if not unsanitary, behavior. Bosch paid no notice. He stared at the face for a long moment, not saying anything, not hearing if anything was said. In the moment that he realized that he knew the face, just as he knew the tattoo, the vision of a young man flashed in his mind. Rawboned and tan, hair buzzed short. Alive, not dead. He stood up and turned quickly away from the body.

  Making such a quick, unexpected motion, he banged straight into Jerry Edgar, who had finally arrived and walked up to huddle over the body. They both took a step back, momentarily stunned. Bosch put a hand to his forehead. Edgar, who was much taller, did the same to his chin.

  “Shit, Harry,” Edgar said. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  Edgar checked his hand for blood.

  “Yeah. Sorry about that. What are you jumping up like that for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Edgar looked over Harry’s shoulder at the body and then followed his partner away from the pack.

  “Sorry, Harry,” Edgar said. “I sat there waiting an hour till somebody came out to cover me on my appointments. So tell me, what have we got?”

  Edgar was still rubbing his jaw as he spoke.

  “Not sure yet,” Bosch said. “I want you to get in one of these patrol cars that has an MCT in it. One that works. See if you can get a sheet on a Meadows, Billy, er, make that William. DOB would be about 1950. We need to get an address from DMV.”


  “That’s the stiff?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Nothing, no address with his ID?”

  “There is no ID. I made him. So check it out on the box. There should be some contact in the last few years. Hype stuff, at least, out of Van Nuys Division.”

  Edgar sauntered off toward the line of parked black-and-whites to find one with a mobile computer terminal mounted on the dashboard. Because he was a big man, his gait seemed slow, but Bosch knew from experience that Edgar was a hard man to keep pace with. Edgar was impeccably tailored in a brown suit with a thin chalk line. His hair was close cropped and his skin was almost as smooth and as black as an eggplant’s. Bosch watched Edgar walk away and couldn’t help but wonder if he had timed his arrival to be just late enough to avoid having to wrinkle his ensemble by stepping into a jumpsuit and crawling into the pipe.

  Bosch went to the trunk of his car and got out the Polaroid camera. He then went back to the body, straddled it and stooped to take photographs of the face. Three would be enough, he decided, and he placed each card that was ejected from the camera on top of the pipe while the photo developed. He couldn’t help but stare at the face, at the changes made by time. He thought of that face and the inebriated grin that creased it on the night that all of the First Infantry rats had come out of the tattoo parlor in Saigon. It had taken the burned-out Americans four hours, but they had all been made blood brothers by putting the same brand on their shoulders. Bosch remembered Meadows’s joy in the companionship and fear they all shared.

  Harry stepped away from the body while Sakai and Osito unfolded a black, heavy plastic bag with a zipper running up the center. Once the body bag was unfolded and opened, the coroner’s men lifted Meadows and placed him inside.

  “Looks like Rip Van-fucking-Winkle,” Edgar said as he walked up.

  Sakai zipped the bag up and Bosch saw a few of Meadows’s curling gray hairs had been caught in the zipper. Meadows wouldn’t mind. He had once told Bosch that he was destined for the inside of a body bag. He said everybody was.