The Black Echo (1992) Page 6

  He next called up the information on the two bulletins. Both had come from the FBI, the first issued two weeks after Beecham had been burglarized. It was then reissued three months later when Beecham’s jewelry had still not turned up. Bosch wrote down the bulletin number and turned off the computer. He went across the room to the robbery/commercial burglary section. On a steel shelf that ran along the back wall were dozens of black binders that held the bulletins and BOLOs from past years. Bosch took down the one marked September and began looking through it. He quickly realized that the bulletins were not in chronological order and weren’t all issued in September. In fact, there was no order. He might have to look through all ten months since Beecham’s burglary to find the bulletin he needed. He pulled an armful of the binders off the shelf and sat down at the burglary table. A few moments later he felt the presence of someone across the table from him.

  “What do you want?” he said without looking up.

  “What do I want?” the duty detective said. “I want to know what the fuck you are doing, Bosch. This isn’t your place anymore. You can’t just come in here like you’re running the crew. Put that shit back on the shelf, and if you want to look through it come back down here tomorrow and ask, goddammit. And don’t give me any bullshit about an autopsy. You’ve already been here a half hour.”

  Bosch looked up at him. He put his age at twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, even younger than Bosch had been when he had made it to Robbery-Homicide. Either standards had dropped or RHD wasn’t what it was. Bosch knew it was actually both. He looked back down at the bulletin binder.

  “I’m talking to you, asshole!” the detective boomed.

  Bosch reached his foot up under the table and kicked the chair that was across from him. The chair shot out from the table and its backrest hit the detective in the crotch. He doubled over and made an oomph sound, grabbing the chair for support. Bosch knew he had his reputation going for him now. Harry Bosch: a loner, a fighter, a killer. C’mon kid, he was saying, do something.

  But the young detective just stared at Bosch, his anger and humiliation in check. He was a cop who could pull the gun but maybe not the trigger. And once Bosch knew that, he knew the kid would walk away.

  The young cop shook his head, waved his hands like he was saying Enough of this, and walked back to the duty desk.

  “Go ahead, write me up, kid,” Bosch said to his back.

  “Fuck you,” the kid feebly returned.

  Bosch knew he had nothing to worry about. IAD wouldn’t even look at an officer-on-officer beef without a corroborating witness or tape recording. One cop’s word against another’s was something they wouldn’t touch in this department. Deep down, they knew a cop’s word by itself was worthless. That was why Internal Affairs cops always worked in pairs.

  An hour and seven cigarettes later, Bosch found it. A photocopy of another Polaroid of the gold-and-jade bracelet was part of a fifty-page packet of descriptions and photos of property lost in a burglary at WestLand National Bank at Sixth and Hill. Now Bosch was able to place the address in his mind, and he remembered the dark smoked glass of the building. He had never been inside the bank. A bank heist with jewelry taken, he thought. It didn’t make much sense. He studied the list. Almost every item was a piece of jewelry and there was too much there for a walk-in robbery. Harriet Beecham alone was listed as having lost eight antique rings, four bracelets, four earrings. Besides that, these were listed as burglary losses, not robbery losses. He looked through the Be on Lookout package for any kind of crime summary, but didn’t find any. Just a bureau contact: Special Agent E. D. Wish.

  Then he noticed in a block on the BOLO sheet that there were three dates noted for the date of the crime. A burglary over a three-day span during the first week of September. Labor Day weekend, he realized. Downtown banks are closed three days. It had to have been a safe-deposit caper. A tunnel job? Bosch leaned back and thought about that. Why hadn’t he remembered it? A heist like that would have played in the media for days. It would have been talked about in the department even longer. Then he realized he had been in Mexico on Labor Day, and for the next three weeks. The bank heist had occurred while he was serving the one-month suspension for the Dollmaker case. He leaned forward, picked up a phone and dialed.

  “Times, Bremmer.”

  “It’s Bosch. Still got you working Sundays, huh?”

  “Two to ten, every Sunday, no parole. So, what’s up? I haven’t talked to you since, uh, your problem with the Dollmaker case. How you liking Hollywood Division?”

  “It’ll do. For a while, at least.” He was speaking low so the duty detective would not overhear.

  Bremmer said, “Like that, huh? Well, I heard you caught the stiff up at the dam this morning.”

  Joel Bremmer had covered the cop shop for the Times longer than most cops had been on the force, including Bosch. There was not much he didn’t hear about the department, or couldn’t find out with a phone call. A year ago he called Bosch for comment on his twenty-two-day suspension, no pay. Bremmer had heard about it before Bosch. Generally, the police department hated the Times, and the Times was never short in its criticism of the department. But in the middle of that was Bremmer, whom any cop could trust and many, like Bosch, did.

  “Yeah, that’s my case,” Bosch said. “Right now, it’s nothing much. But I need a favor. If it works out the way it’s looking, then it will be something you’d want to know about.”

  Bosch knew he didn’t have to bait him, but he wanted the reporter to know there might be something later.

  “What do you need?” Bremmer said.

  “As you know, I was out of town last Labor Day on my extended vacation, courtesy of IAD. So I missed this one. But there was—”

  “The tunnel job? You’re not going to ask about the tunnel job, are you? Over here in downtown? All the jewelry? Negotiable bonds, stock certificates, maybe drugs?”

  Bosch heard the reporter’s voice go up a notch in urgency. He had been right, it had been a tunnel and the story had played well. If Bremmer was this interested, then it was a substantial case. Still, Bosch was surprised he had not heard of it after coming back to work in October.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “I was gone then, so I missed it. Ever any arrests?”

  “No, it’s open. FBI’s doing it, last I checked.”

  “I want to look at the clips on it tonight. Is that all right?”

  “I’ll make copies. When are you coming?”

  “I’ll head over in a little while.”

  “I take it this has got something to do with this morning’s stiff?”

  “It’s looking that way. Maybe. I can’t talk right now. And I know the feebees have the case. I’ll go see them tomorrow. That’s why I want to see the clips tonight.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  After hanging up the phone, Bosch looked down at the FBI photocopy of the bracelet. There was no doubt it was the piece that had been pawned by Meadows and was in Obinna’s Polaroid. The bracelet in the FBI photo was in place on a woman’s liver-spotted wrist. Three small carved fish swimming on a wave of gold. Bosch guessed it was Harriet Beecham’s seventy-one-year-old wrist and the photo had probably been taken for insurance purposes. He looked over at the duty detective, who was still leafing through the gun catalog. He coughed loudly like he had seen Nicholson do in a movie once and at the same time tore the BOLO sheet out of the binder. The kid detective looked over at Bosch and then went back to the guns and bullets.

  As he folded the BOLO sheet into his pocket, Bosch’s electronic pager went off. He picked up the phone and called Hollywood Station, expecting to be told there was another body waiting for him. It was a watch sergeant named Art Crocket, whom everyone called Davey, who took the call.

  “Harry, you still out in the field?” he said.

  “I’m at Parker Center. Had to check on a few things.”

  “Good, then you’re already near the morgue. A tech over there name of S
akai called, said he needs to see you.”

  “See me?”

  “He said to tell you that something came up and they’re doing your cut today. Right now, matter of fact.”

  It took Bosch five minutes to get over to County-USC Hospital and fifteen minutes to find a parking spot. The medical examiner’s office was located behind one of the medical center buildings that had been condemned after the ’87 earthquake. It was a two-story yellow prefab without much architectural style or life. As Bosch was going through the glass doors where the living people entered and into the front lobby, he passed a sheriff’s detective he had spent some time with while working the Night Stalker task force in the early eighties.

  “Hey, Bernie,” Bosch said and smiled.

  “Hey, fuck you, Bosch,” Bernie said. “The rest of us catch ones that count, too.”

  Bosch stopped there a moment to watch the detective walk into the parking lot. Then he went in and to the right, down a government-green corridor, passing through two sets of double doors—the smell getting worse each time. It was the smell of death and industrial-strength disinfectant. Death had the upper hand. Bosch stepped into the yellow-tiled scrub room. Larry Sakai was in there, putting a paper gown over his hospital scrubs. He already had on a paper mask and booties. Bosch took a set of the same out of cardboard boxes on a stainless steel counter and started putting them on.

  “What’s with Bernie Slaughter?” Bosch asked. “What happened in here to piss him off?”

  “You’re what happened, Bosch,” Sakai said without looking at him. “He got a call out yesterday morning. Some sixteen-year-old shoots his best friend. Up in Lancaster. Looks like accidental but Bernie’s waiting on us to check the bullet track and powder stippling. He wants to close it. I told him we’d get to it late today, so he came in. Only we aren’t going to get to it at all today. ’Cause Sally’s got a bug up his ass about doing yours. Don’t ask me why. He just checked the stiff out when I brought it in and said we’d do it today. I told him we’d have to bump somebody, and he said bump Bernie. But I couldn’t get him on the line in time to stop him from coming in. So that’s why Bernie’s pissed. You know he lives all the way down to Diamond Bar. Long ride in for nothing.”

  Bosch had the mask, gown and booties on and followed Sakai down the tiled hall to the autopsy suite. “Then maybe he ought to be pissed at Sally, not me,” he said.

  Sakai didn’t answer. They walked to the first table, where Billy Meadows lay on his back, naked, his neck braced against a short cut of two-by-four wood. There were six of the stainless steel tables in the room. Each had gutters running alongside its edges and drain holes in the corners. There was a body on each. Dr. Jesus Salazar was huddled over Meadows’s chest with his back to Bosch and Sakai.

  “Afternoon, Harry, I’ve been waiting,” Salazar said, still not looking. “Larry, I’m going to need slides on this.”

  The medical examiner straightened up and turned. In his rubber-gloved hand he held what looked like a square plug of flesh and pink muscle tissue. He placed it in a steel pan, the kind brownies are cooked in, and handed it to Sakai. “Give me verticals, one of the puncture track, then two on either side for comparison.”

  Sakai took the pan and left the room to go to the lab. Bosch saw that the plug of meat had been cut from Meadows’s chest, about an inch above the left nipple.

  “What’d you find?” Bosch asked.

  “Not sure yet. We’ll see. The question is, what did you find, Harry? My field tech told me you were demanding an autopsy on this case today. Why is that?”

  “I told him I needed it today because I wanted to get it done tomorrow. I thought that was what we had agreed on, too.”

  “Yes, he told me so, but I got curious about it. I love a good mystery, Harry. What made you think this was hinky, as you detectives say?”

  We don’t say it anymore, Bosch thought. Once it’s said in the movies and people like Salazar pick it up, it’s ancient.

  “Just some things didn’t fit at the time,” Bosch said. “There are more things now. From my end, it looks like a murder. No mystery.”

  “What things?”

  Bosch got out his notebook and started flipping through the pages as he talked. He listed the things he had noticed wrong at the death scene: the broken finger, the lack of distinct tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head.

  “He had a hype kit in his pocket and we found a stove in the pipe, but it doesn’t look right. Looks like a plant to me. Looks to me like the pop that killed him is in the arm there. Those other scars on his arms are old. He hasn’t been using his arms in years.”

  “You’re right about that. Aside from the one recent puncture in the arm, the groin area is the only area where punctures are fresh. The inside thighs. An area usually used by people going to great lengths to hide their addiction. But then again, this could have just been his first time back on the arms. What else you got, Harry?”

  “He smoked, I’m pretty sure. There was no pack of cigarettes with the body.”

  “Couldn’t somebody have taken them off the body? Before it was discovered. A scavenger?”

  “True. But why take the smokes and not the kit? There’s also his apartment. Somebody searched the place.”

  “Could have been someone who knew him. Someone looking for his stash.”

  “True again.” Bosch flipped through a few more pages in the notebook. “The kit on the body had whitish-brown crystals in the cotton. I’ve seen enough tar heroin to know it turns the straining cotton dark brown, sometimes black. So it looks like it was some fine stuff, probably overseas, that was put in his arm. That doesn’t go with the way he was living. That’s uptown stuff.”

  Salazar thought a moment before saying, “It’s all a lot of supposition, Harry.”

  “The last thing, though, is—and I am just starting to work on this—he was involved in some kind of caper.”

  Bosch gave him a brief synopsis of what he knew about the bracelet, its theft from the bank vault and then from the pawnshop. Salazar’s domain was the forensic detail of the case. But Bosch had always trusted Sally and found that it sometimes helped to bounce other details of a case off him. The two had met in 1974, when Bosch was a patrolman and Sally was a new assistant coroner. Bosch was assigned guard duty and crowd control on East Fifty-fourth in South-Central where a firefight with the Symbionese Liberation Army had left a house burned to the ground and five bodies in the smoking rubble. Sally was assigned to see if there was a sixth—Patty Hearst—somewhere in the char. The two of them spent three days there, and when Sally finally gave up, Bosch had won a bet that she was still alive. Somewhere.

  When Bosch was finished with the story about the bracelet, it seemed to have mollified Sally’s worries about the death of Billy Meadows not being a mystery. He seemed energized. He turned to a cart on which his cutting tools were piled and rolled it next to the autopsy table. He switched on a sound-activated tape recorder and picked up a scalpel and a pair of regular gardening shears. He said, “Well, let’s get to work.”

  Bosch moved back a few steps to avoid any spatter and leaned against a counter on which there was a tray full of knives and saws and scalpels. He noticed that a sign taped to the side of the tray said: To Be Sharpened.

  Salazar looked down at the body of Billy Meadows and began: “The body is that of a well-developed Caucasian male measuring sixty-nine inches in length, weighing one hundred sixty-five pounds and appearing generally consistent with the stated age of forty years. The body is cold and unembalmed with full rigor and posterior dependent fixed lividity.”

  Bosch watched him start but then noticed the plastic bag containing Meadows’s clothes on the counter next to the tool pan. He pulled it over and opened it up. The smell of urine immediately assaulted his nostrils, and he thought for a moment of the living room at Meadows’s apartment. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves as Salazar continued to describe the body.

  “The left index finger shows a pa
lpable fracture without laceration or petechial contusion or hemorrhage.”