The Black Echo (1992) Page 7

  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.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “It means,” said Salazar, “that the puncture was through the skin, through the fascia—that’s the fibrous fat layer—and then directly into the pectoral muscle. You notice the deepening color of the muscle around the penetration?”

  “Yes, I notice.”

  “Harry, that’s because the muscle is burned there.”

  Bosch looked away from the microscope to Salazar. He thought he could make out the line of a thin smile beneath the pathologist’s breathing mask.

  “Burned?”

  “A stun gun,” the pathologist said. “Look for one that fires its electrode dart deep into the skin tissue. About three to four centimeters deep. Though in this case, it is likely the electrode was manually pressed deeper into the chest.”

  Bosch thought a moment. A stun gun would be virtually impossible to trace. Sakai came back into the room and leaned on the counter by the door, watching. Salazar col
lected three glass vials of blood and two containing yellowish liquid from the tool cart. There was also a small steel pan containing a brown lump of material that Bosch recognized from experience in this room as liver.

  “Larry, here are the tox samples,” Salazar said. Sakai took them and disappeared from the room again.

  “You’re talking about torture, electric shock,” Bosch said.

  “I would say it looks so,” Salazar said. “Not enough to kill him, the trauma is too small. But possibly enough to get information from him. An electric charge can be very persuasive. I think there is ample history on that. With the electrode positioned in the subject’s chest, he could probably feel the juice going right into his heart. He would have been paralyzed. He’d tell them what they wanted and then could only watch while they put a fatal dosage of heroin into his arm.”

  “Can we prove any of this?”

  Salazar looked down at the tile floor and put his finger on his mask, and scratched his lip beneath it. Bosch was dying for a cigarette. He had been in the autopsy room nearly two hours.

  “Prove any of it?” Salazar said. “Not medically. Tox tests will be done in a week. For the sake of argument, say they come back heroin overdose. How do we prove that someone else put it in his arm, not himself? Medically, we can’t. But we can show that at the time of death or shortly before, there was a traumatic assault on the body in the form of electric shock. He was being tortured. After death there is the unexplained damage to the first digit of the left hand.”

  He rubbed the finger over his mask again and then concluded, “I could testify that this was a homicide. The totality of the medical evidence indicates death at the hands of others. But, for the moment, there is no cause. We wait for the tox studies to be completed and then we’ll put our heads together again.”

  Bosch wrote a paraphrase of what Salazar had just said into his notebook. He would have to type it into his own reports.

  “Of course,” Salazar said, “proving any of this beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is another matter. I would guess that, Harry, you have to find that bracelet and find out why it was worth torturing and killing a man for.”

  Bosch closed his notebook and started to pull off the paper gown.

  The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

  The sun hung like a ball of copper in the driver’s-side window. He had the car radio tuned to a jazz station and Coltrane was playing “Soul Eyes.” On the seat next to him was a file containing the newspaper clippings from Bremmer. The file was weighted down by a six-pack of Henry’s. Bosch got off at Barham and then took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills above Studio City. His home was a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage. It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its midpoint. It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled. But the view was the trade-off. From the back porch Bosch could look northeast across Burbank and Glendale. He could see the purple-hued mountains past Pasadena and Altadena. Sometimes he could see the smoky loom-up and orange blaze of brush fires in the hills. At night the sound of the freeway below softened and the searchlights at Universal City swept the sky. Looking out on the Valley never failed to give Bosch a sense of power which he could not explain to himself. But he did know that it was one reason—the main reason—he bought the place and would never want to leave it.

  Bosch had bought it eight years earlier, before the real estate boom got seriously endemic, with a down payment of $50,000. That left a mortgage of $1,400 a month, which he could easily afford because the only things he spent money on were food, booze and jazz.

  The down payment money had come from a studio that gave it to him for the rights to use his name in a TV miniseries based on a string of murders of beauty shop owners in Los Angeles. Bosch and his partner during the investigation were portrayed by two midlevel TV actors. His partner took his fifty grand and his pension and moved to Ensenada. Bosch put his down on a house he wasn’t sure could survive the next earthquake but that made him feel as though he were prince of the city.

  Despite Bosch’s resolve never to move, Jerry Edgar, his current partner and part-time real estate man, told him the house was now worth three times what he had paid for it. Whenever the subject of real estate came up, which was often, Edgar counseled Bosch to sell and trade up. Edgar wanted the listing. Bosch just wanted to stay where he was.

  It was dark by the time he reached the hill house. He drank the first beer standing on the back porch, looking out at the blanket of lights below. He had a second bottle while sitting in his watch chair, the file closed on his lap. He hadn’t eaten all day and the beer hit him quickly. He felt lethargic and yet jumpy, his body telling him it needed food. He got up and went to the kitchen and made a pressed turkey sandwich that he brought back to the chair with another beer.

  When he was finished eating he brushed the sandwich crumbs off the file and opened it up. There had been four Times stories on the WestLand bank caper. He read them in the order of publication. The first was just a brief that had run on page 3 of the Metro section. The information had apparently been gathered on the Tuesday the break-in was discovered. At the time, the LAPD and the FBI weren’t that interested in talking to the press or letting the public know what had happened.

  AUTHORITIES PROBE BANK BREAK-IN

  An undisclosed amount of property was stolen from the WestLand National Bank in downtown during the three-day holiday weekend, authorities said Tuesday.

  The burglary, being investigated by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, was discovered when managers of the bank located at the corner of Hill Street

  and Sixth Avenue

  arrived Tuesday and found the safe-deposit vault had been looted, FBI Special Agent John Rourke said.

  Rourke said an estimate on the loss of property had not been made. But sources close to the investigation said more than $1 million worth of jewels and other valuables stored in the vault by customers of the bank was taken.

  Rourke also declined to say how the burglars entered the vault but did say that the alarm system was not working properly. He declined to elaborate.

  A spokesman for WestLand declined Tuesday to discuss the burglary. Authorities said there were no arrests or suspects.

  Bosch wrote the name John Rourke in his notebook and went on to the next newspaper story, which was much longer. It had been published the day after the first and had been bannered across the top of the front page of the Metro section. It had a two-deck headline and was accompanied by a photograph of a man and woman standing in the safe-deposit vault looking down at a manhole-sized opening in the floor. Behind them was a pile of deposit boxes. Most of the small doors on the back wall were open. Bremmer’s byline was on the story.

  AT LEAST $2 MILLION TAKEN IN BANK TUNNEL JOB;

  BANDITS HAD HOLIDAY WEEKEND TO DIG INTO VAULT

  The article expanded on the first story, filling in the detail that the perpetrators had tunneled into the bank, digging an approximately 150-yard line from a city storm main that ran under Hill Street

  . The story said an explosive device had been used to make the final break through the floor of the vault. According to the FBI, the burglars probably were in the vault through most of the holiday weekend, drilling open the individual safe-deposit boxes. The entry tunnel from the stormwater main to the vault was believed to have been dug during seven to eight weeks before the heist.

  Bosch made a note to ask the FBI how the tunnel had been dug. If heavy equipment was used, most banks’ alarms, which measured sound as well as earth vibrations, would have picked up the ground movement and so
unded. Also, he wondered, why hadn’t the explosive device set off alarms?

  He looked then at the third article, published the day after the second. This one wasn’t written by Bremmer, though it still had been played on the front of Metro. It was a feature on the dozens of people lining up at the bank to see if their safe-deposit boxes were among those pried open and emptied. The FBI was escorting them into the vault and then taking their statements. Bosch scanned the story but saw the same thing over and over again: people angry or upset or both because they had lost items that they had placed in the vault because they believed it was safer than their homes. Near the bottom of the story Harriet Beecham was mentioned. She had been interviewed as she came out of the bank, and she told the reporter she had lost a lifetime’s collection of valuables bought while traveling the world with her late husband, Harry. The story said Beecham was dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief.

  “I lost the rings he bought me in France, a bracelet of gold and jade from Mexico,” Beecham said. “Whoever they were that did this, they took my memories.”