The Black Echo Page 8

  He cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to slow his gasping for air. It didn’t work. He was losing it. He was panicking. He was twenty years old and he was scared. The walls of the tunnel were closing tighter on him. He rolled away from the body and dropped the light, its beam still focused on Crofton. Bosch kicked at the clay walls of the tunnel and curled into a fetal position. The sweat in his eyes was replaced by tears. At first they came silently, but soon his sobs racked his entire body and his noise seemed to echo in all directions in the darkness, right to where Charlie sat and waited. Right to hell.

  PART II

  MONDAY, MAY 21

  Bosch came awake in his watch chair about 4 A.M. He had left the sliding glass door open to the porch, and the Santa Ana winds were billowing the curtains, ghostlike, out across the room. The warm wind and the dream had made him sweat. Then the wind had dried the moisture on his skin like a salty shell. He stepped out onto the porch and leaned against the wood railing, looking down at the lights of the Valley. The searchlights at Universal were long since retired for the night and there was no traffic sound from the freeway down in the pass. In the distance, maybe from Glendale, he heard the whupping sound of a helicopter. He searched and found the red light moving low in the basin. It wasn’t circling and there was no searchlight. It wasn’t a cop. He thought then that he could smell the slight scent of malathion, sharp and bitter, on the red wind.

  He went back inside and closed the sliding glass door. He thought about bed but knew there would be no more sleep this night. It was often this way with Bosch. Sleep would come early in the night but not last. Or it would not come until the arriving sun softly cut the outline of the hills in the morning fog.

  He had been to the sleep disorder clinic at the VA in Sepulveda but the shrinks couldn’t help him. They told him he was in a cycle. He would have extended periods of deep sleep trances into which torturous dreams invaded. This would be followed by months of insomnia, the mind reacting defensively to the terrors that awaited in sleep. Your mind has repressed the anxiety you feel over your part in the war, the doctor told him. You must assuage these feelings in your waking hours before your sleep time can progress undisturbed. But the doctor didn’t understand that what was done was done. There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

  He showered and shaved, afterward studying his face in the mirror and remembering how unkind time had been to Billy Meadows. Bosch’s hair was turning to gray but it was full and curly. Other than the circles under his eyes, his face was unlined and handsome. He wiped the remaining shaving cream off and put on his beige summer suit with a light-blue button-down oxford. On a hanger in the closet he found a maroon tie with little gladiator helmets on it that was not unreasonably wrinkled or stained. He pegged it in place with the 187 tie pin, clipped his gun to his belt and then headed out into the predawn dark. He drove into downtown for an omelet, toast and coffee at the Pantry on Figueroa. Open twenty-four hours a day since before the Depression. A sign boasted that the place had not gone one minute in that time without a customer. Bosch looked around from the counter and saw that at the moment he was personally carrying the record on his shoulders. He was alone.

  The coffee and cigarettes got Bosch ready for the day. After, he took the freeway back up to Hollywood, passing a frozen sea of cars already fighting to get downtown.

  Hollywood Station was on Wilcox just a couple of blocks south of the Boulevard, where most of its business came from. He parked at the curb out front because he was only staying awhile and didn’t want to get caught in the back lot traffic jam at the change of watch. As he walked through the small lobby he saw a woman with a blackened eye, who was crying and filling out a report with the desk officer. But down the hall to the left the detective bureau was quiet. The night man must have been out on a call or up in the Bridal Suite, a storage room on the second floor where there were two cots, first come, first served. The detective bureau’s hustle and bustle seemed to be frozen in place. No one was there, but the long tables assigned to burglary, auto, juvenile, robbery and homicide were all awash in paperwork and clutter. The detectives came and went. The paper never changed.

  Bosch went to the back of the bureau to start a pot of coffee. He glanced through a rear door and down the back hallway where the lockup benches and the jail were located. Halfway down the hall to the holding tank, a young white boy with blond dreadlocks sat handcuffed to a bench. A juvie, maybe seventeen at most, Bosch figured. It was against California law to put them in a holding tank with adults. Which was like saying it might be dangerous for coyotes to be put in a pen with Dobermans.

  “What you looking at, fuckhead?” the boy called down the hall to Bosch.

  Bosch didn’t say anything. He dumped a bag of coffee into a paper filter. A uniform stuck his head out of the watch commander’s office farther down the hall.

  “I told you,” the uniform yelled at the kid. “Once more and I’m going to go up a notch on the cuffs. Half hour and you won’t feel your hands. Then how you going to wipe your ass in the john?”

  “I guess I’ll have to use your fuckin’ face.”

  The uniform stepped into the hall and headed toward the kid, his hard black shoes making long, mean strides. Bosch shoved the filter bowl into the coffee machine and hit the brewing cycle switch. He walked away from the hallway door and over to the homicide table. He didn’t want to see what happened with the kid. He dragged his chair away from his spot at the table and over to one of the community typewriters. The pertinent forms he needed were in slots on a rack on the wall above the machine. He rolled a blank crime scene report into the typewriter. Then he took his notebook out of his pocket and opened to the first page.

  Two hours of typing and smoking and drinking bad coffee later, a bluish cloud hung near the ceiling lights over the homicide table and Bosch had completed the myriad forms that accompany a homicide investigation. He got up and made copies on the Xerox in the back hall. He noticed the dread-lock kid was gone. Then he got a new blue binder out of the office supplies closet — after finessing the door with his LAPD ID card — and hooked one set of the typed reports onto the three rings. The other set he hid in an old blue binder he kept in a file drawer and that was labeled with the name of an old unsolved case. When he was done, he reread his work. He liked the order the paperwork gave the case. On many previous cases he had made it a practice to reread the murder book each morning. It helped him draw out theories. The smell of the binder’s new plastic reminded him of other cases and invigorated him. He was in the hunt again. The reports he had typed and placed in the murder book were not complete, though. On the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Report he had left out several parts of his Sunday afternoon and evening. He neglected to type in the connection he had made between Meadows and the WestLand bank burglary. He also left out the visits to the pawnshop and to see Bremmer at the Times. There were no typed summaries of these interviews either. It was only Monday, day two. He wanted to wait until he had been to the FBI before committing any of that information to the official record. He wanted to know, exactly, what was going on first. It was a precaution he took on every case. He left the bureau before any of the other detectives had arrived for the day.

  By nine Bosch had driven to Westwood and was on the seventeenth floor of the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard. The FBI waiting room was austere, the usual plastic-covered couches and scarred coffee table with old copies of the FBI Bulletin fanned across its fake wood-grain veneer. Bosch didn’t bother to sit down or read. He stood before the sheer white curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the panorama. The northern exposure offered a view that stretched from the Pacific eastward around the rim of the Santa Monica Mountains to Hollywood. The curtains served as a layer of fog over the smog. He stood with his nose almost touching the soft gauze fabric and looked down, across Wilshire, at the Veterans Administration Cemetery. Its white stones sprouted
in the manicured grass like row after row of baby teeth. Near the cemetery’s entrance a funeral was in progress, with a full honor guard at attention. But there wasn’t much of a crowd of mourners. Farther north, at the top of a rise where there were no tombstones, Bosch could see several workers removing sod and using a backhoe to dig up a long slice of the earth. He checked their progress from time to time as he scanned the view, but he could not figure out what they were doing. The clearing was far too long and wide for a grave.

  By ten-thirty the soldier’s funeral was done but the cemetery workers were still toiling on the hill. And Bosch was still waiting at the curtain. A voice finally hit him from behind.

  “All those graves. Such neat rows. I try never to look out the windows here.”

  He turned. She was tall and lithesome with brown wavy hair about to the shoulder with blond highlights. A nice tan and little makeup. She looked hard-shell and maybe a little weary for so early in the day, the way lady cops and hookers get. She wore a brown business suit and a white blouse with a chocolate-brown western bow. He detected the unsymmetrical curves of her hips beneath the jacket. She was carrying something small on the left side, maybe a Rugar, which was unusual. Bosch had always known female detectives to carry their weapons in their purses.

  “That’s the veterans cemetery,” she said to him.

  “I know.”

  He smiled, but not at that. It was that he had expected Special Agent E. D. Wish to be a man. No reason other than that was who most of the bureau agents assigned to the bank detail were. Women were part of the newer image of the bureau and weren’t usually found in the heavy squads. It was a fraternity largely made up of dinosaurs and cast-outs, guys who couldn’t or wouldn’t cut it in the bureau’s hard-charging focus on white-collar, espionage and drug investigations. The days of Melvin Purvis, G-man, were just about over. Bank robbery wasn’t flashy anymore. Most bank robbers weren’t professional thieves. They were hypes looking for a score that would keep them going for a week. Of course, stealing from a bank was still a federal crime. That was the only reason the bureau still bothered.

  “Of course,” she said. “You must know that. How can I help you, Detective Bosch? I’m Agent Wish.”

  They shook hands, but Wish made no movement toward the door she had come through. It had closed and the lock had snapped home. Bosch hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, I’ve been waiting all morning to see you. It’s about the bank squad . . . One of your cases.”

  “Yes, that’s what you told the receptionist. Sorry to have kept you, but we had no appointment and I had another pressing matter. I wish you had called first.”

  Bosch nodded his understanding, but again there was no movement toward inviting him in. This isn’t working right, he thought.

  “Do you have any coffee back there?” he said.

  “Uh . . . yes, I believe we do. But can we make this quick? I’m really in the middle of something at the moment.”

  Who isn’t, Bosch thought. She used a card key to open the door and then pulled it open and held it for him. Inside, she led him down a corridor where there were plastic signs on the walls next to the doors. The bureau didn’t have the same affinity for acronyms as the police department. The signs were numbered — Group 1, Group 2 and so on. As they went along, he tried to place her accent. It had been slightly nasal but not like New York. Philadelphia, he decided, maybe New Jersey. Definitely not Southern California, never mind the tan that went with it.

  “Black?” she said.

  “Cream and sugar, please.”

  She turned and entered a room that was furnished as a small kitchen. There was a counter and cabinets, a four-cup coffeemaker, a microwave and a refrigerator. The place reminded Bosch of law offices he had been to to give depositions. Nice, neat, expensive. She handed him a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and signaled for him to put in his own cream and sugar. She wasn’t having any. If it was an attempt to make him uncomfortable, it worked. Bosch felt like an imposition, not someone who brought good news, a break in a big case. He followed her back into the hallway and they went through the next doorway, which was marked Group 3. It was the bank robbery-kidnap unit. The room was about the size of a convenience store. It was the first federal squad room Bosch had been in, and the comparison to his own office was depressing. The furniture here was newer than anything he had ever seen in any LAPD squad. There was actually carpet on the floor and a typewriter or computer at almost every desk. There were three rows of five desks and all of them but one were empty. A man in a gray suit sat at the first desk in the middle row, holding a phone to his ear. He didn’t look up as Bosch and Wish walked in. Except for the background noise of a tactical channel coming from a scanner on a file cabinet in the back, the place could have passed for a real estate office.

  Wish took a seat behind the first desk in the first row and gestured for Bosch to take the seat alongside it. This put him directly between Wish and Gray Suit on the phone. Bosch put his coffee down on her desk and began to figure right away that Gray Suit wasn’t really on the phone, even though the guy kept saying “Uh huh, uh huh” or “Uh uh” every few moments or so. Wish opened a file drawer in her desk and pulled out a plastic bottle of water, some of which she poured into a paper cup.

  “We had a two eleven at a savings and loan in Santa Monica, just about everybody’s out on it,” she explained as he scanned the almost empty room. “I was coordinating from here. That’s why you had to wait out there. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Get him?”

  “What makes you say it was a him?”

  Bosch shrugged his shoulders. “Percentages.”

  “Well, it was two of them. One of each. And yes, we got them. They were in a stolen from Reseda reported yesterday. Female went in and took care of business. Male was the wheel. They took the 10 to the 405, then into LAX, where they left the car in front of a skycap at United. Then they took the escalator to the arrivals level, got on a shuttle bus to the Flyaway station in Van Nuys and then took a cab all the way back down to Venice. To a bank. We had an LAPD copter over them the whole time. They never looked up. When she went into the second bank we thought we were going to see another two eleven so we rushed her while she was waiting in line for a teller. Got him in the parking lot. Turns out she was just going to deposit the take from the first bank. An interbank transfer, the hard way. See some dumb people in this business, Detective Bosch. What can I do for you?”

  “You can call me Harry.”

  “As I am doing what for you?”

  “Interdepartmental cooperation,” he said. “Kinda like you and our helicopter this morning.”

  Bosch drank some of his coffee and said, “Your name is on a BOLO I came across yesterday. Year-old case out of downtown. I’m interested in it. I work homicide out of Hollywood Div—”

  “Yes, I know,” Agent Wish interrupted.

  “—ision.”

  “The receptionist showed me the card you gave. By the way, do you need it back?”

  That was a cheap shot. He saw his sad-looking business card on her clean green blotter. It had been in his wallet for months and its corners were curled up at the edges. It was one of the generic cards the department gave detectives who worked out in the bureaus. It had the embossed police badge on it and the Hollywood Division phone number but no name. You could buy yourself an ink pad and order a stamp and sit at your desk at the beginning of each week and stamp out a couple dozen cards. Or you could just write your name on the line with a pen and not give out too many. Bosch had done the latter. Nothing the department could do could embarrass him anymore.

  “No, you can keep it. By the way, you have one?”

  In a quick, impatient motion, she opened the top middle drawer of the desk, took a card out of a little tray and put it down on the desk top next to the elbow Bosch had leaned there. He took another sip of coffee while glancing down at it. The E stood for Eleanor.

  “So anyway you know who I am and where I come from,” h
e began. “And I know a little bit about you. For instance, you investigated, or are investigating, a bank caper from last year in which the perps came in through the ground. A tunnel job. WestLand National.”

  He noticed her attention immediately pick up with that, and even thought he sensed Gray Suit’s breathing catch. Bosch had a line in the right water.

  “Your name is on the bulletins. I am investigating a homicide I believe is related to your case and I want to know . . . basically, I want to know what you’ve got. . . . Can we talk about suspects, possible suspects. . . . I think we might be looking for the same people. I think my guy might have been one of your perps.”

  Wish was quiet for a moment and played with a pencil she’d picked up off the blotter. She pushed Bosch’s card around on the green square with the eraser end. Gray Suit was still acting like he was on the phone. Bosch glanced over at him and their eyes briefly connected. Bosch nodded and Gray Suit looked away. Bosch figured he was looking at the man whose comments had been in the newspaper articles. Special Agent John Rourke.

  “You can do better than that, can’t you, Detective Bosch?” Wish said. “I mean, you just walk in here and wave the flag of cooperation and you expect me to just open up our files.”

  She tapped the pencil three times on the desk and shook her head like she was disciplining a child.