The Black Echo Page 6

  “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 Sakai 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.”
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br />   “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 palpable fracture without laceration or petechial contusion or hemorrhage.”

  Bosch glanced over his shoulder and saw that Salazar was wiggling the broken digit with the blunt end of the scalpel as he spoke to the tape recorder. He concluded his external description of the body by mentioning the skin punctures.

  “There are hemorrhagic puncture wounds, hypodermic type, on the upper inside thighs and interior side of the left arm. The arm puncture exudes a bloody fluid and appears to be most recent. No scabbing. There is another puncture, in the upper left chest, which exudes a small amount of bloody fluid and appears to be slightly larger than that caused by hypodermic puncture.”

  Salazar put his hand over the tape recorder’s mike and said to Bosch, “I’m having Sakai get slides of this chest puncture. It looks very interesting.”

  Bosch nodded and turned back to the counter and began spreading out Meadows’s clothes. Behind him he heard Salazar using the shears to open up the dead man’s chest.

  The detective pulled each pocket out and looked at the lint. He turned the socks inside out and checked the inside lining of the pants and shirt. Nothing. He took a scalpel out of the To Be Sharpened pan and cut the stitches out of Meadows’s leather belt and pulled it apart. Again nothing. Over his shoulder he heard Salazar saying, “The spleen weighs one hundred ninety grams. The capsule is intact and slightly wrinkled, and the parenchyma is pale purple and trabecular.”

  Bosch had heard it all hundreds of times before. Most of what a pathologist said into his tape recorder meant nothing to the detective who stood by. It was the bottom line the detective waited for. What killed the person on the cold steel table? How? Who?

  “The gallbladder is thin walled,” Salazar was saying. “It contains a few cc’s of greenish bile with no stones.”

  Bosch shoved the clothes back into the plastic bag and sealed it. Then he dumped the leather work shoes Meadows had been wearing out of a second plastic bag. He noticed reddish-orange dust fall from inside the shoes. Another indication the body had been dragged into the pipe. The heels had scraped on the dried mud at the bottom of the pipe, drawing the dust inside the shoes.

  Salazar said, “The bladder mucosa is intact, and there are only two ounces of pale yellow urine. The external genitalia and vagina are unremarkable.”

  Bosch turned around. Salazar had his hand on the tape recorder speaker. He said, “Coroner’s humor. Just wanted to see if you were listening, Harry. You might have to testify to this one day. To back me up.”

  “I doubt it,” Bosch said. “They don’t like boring juries to death.”

  Salazar started the small circular saw that was used to open the skull. It sounded like a dentist’s drill. Bosch turned back to the shoes. They were well oiled and cared for. The rubber soles showed only modest wear. Stuck in one of the deep grooves of the tread of the right shoe was a white stone. Bosch pried it out with the scalpel. It was a small chunk of cement. He thought of the white dust in the rug in Meadows’s closet. He wondered if the dust or the chunk from the shoe tread could be matched to the concrete that had guarded the WestLand Bank’s vault. But if the shoes were so well cared for, could the chunk have been in the tread for nine months since the vault break-in? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was from his work on the subway project. If he actually had such a job. Bosch slipped the chunk of cement into a small plastic envelope and put it in his pocket with the others he had collected throughout the day.

  Salazar said, “Examination of the head and cranial contents reveals no trauma or underlying pathological disease conditions or congenital anomalies. Harry, I’m going to do the finger now.”

  Bosch put the shoes back in their plastic bag and returned to the autopsy table as Salazar placed an X ray of Meadows’s left hand on a light window on the wall.

  “See here, these fragments?” he said as he traced small, sharp white spots on the negative. There were three of them near the fractured joint. “If this was an old break, these would, over time, have moved into the joint. There is no scarring discernible on the X ray but I am going to take a look.”

  He went to the body and used a scalpel to make a T-incision in the skin on the top of the finger joint. He then folded the skin back and dug around with the scalpel in the pink meat, saying, “No . . . no . . . nothing. This was post, Harry. You think it could have been one of my people?”

  “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Doesn’t look like it. Sakai said he and his sidekick were careful. I know I didn’t do it. How come there’s no damage to the skin?”

  “That is an interesting point. I don’t know. Somehow the finger was broken without the exterior being damaged. I can’t answer that one. But it shouldn’t have been too hard to do. Just grab the finger and yank down. Provided you have the stomach for it. Like so.”

  Salazar went around the table. He lifted Meadows’s right hand and yanked the finger backward. He couldn’t get the leverage needed and couldn’t break the joint.

  “Harder than I thought,” he said. “Perhaps the digit was struck with a blunt object of some kind. One that did not blemish the skin.”

  When Sakai came in with the slides fifteen minutes later, the autopsy was completed and Salazar was sewing Meadows’s chest closed with thick, waxed twine. He
then used an overhead hose to spray debris off the body and wet down the hair. Sakai bound the legs together and the arms to the body with rope, to prevent them from moving during the different stages of rigor. Bosch noticed that the rope cut across the tattoo on Meadows’s arm, across the rat’s neck.

  Using his thumb and forefinger, Salazar closed Meadows’s eyes.

  “Take him to the box,” he said to Sakai. Then to Bosch, “Let’s take a look at these slides. This seemed odd to me because the hole was bigger than your normal scag spike and its location, in the chest, was unusual.

  “The puncture is clearly antemortem, possibly perimortem — there was only slight hemorrhaging. But the wound is not scabbed over. So we’re talking shortly before, or even during death. Maybe the cause of death, Harry.”

  Salazar took the slides to a microscope that was on the counter at the back of the room. He chose one of the slides and put it on the viewing plate. He bent over to look and after half a minute finally said, “Interesting.”

  He then looked briefly at the other slides. When he was done, he put the first slide back on the viewing plate.

  “Okay, basically, I removed a one-inch-square section of the chest where this puncture was located. I went into the chest about one and a half inches deep with the cut. The slide is a vertical dissection of the sample, showing the track of the perforation. Do you follow me?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Good. It’s kind of like slicing an apple open to expose the track of a worm. The slide traces the path of the perforation and any immediate impact or damage. Take a look.”

  Bosch bent to the eyepiece of the microscope. The slide showed a straight perforation about one inch deep, through the skin and into the muscle, tapering in width like a spike. The muscle’s pink color changed to a dark brownish color around the deepest point of the penetration.