The Black Echo (1992) Read online

  “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,” he 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 penc
il three times on the desk and shook her head like she was disciplining a child.

  “How about a name?” she said. “How about giving me some reason for the connection? We usually handle this kind of request through channels. We have liaisons that evaluate requests from other law enforcement agencies to share files and information. You know that. I think it might be best—”

  Bosch pulled the FBI bulletin with the insurance photo of the bracelet out of his pocket. He unfolded it and laid it on the blotter. Then he took the pawnshop Polaroid out of the other pocket and also dropped that on the desk.

  “WestLand National,” he said, tapping a finger on the bulletin. “The bracelet was pawned six weeks ago in a downtown shop. My guy pawned it. Now he’s dead.”

  She kept her eyes on the Polaroid bracelet and Bosch saw recognition there. The case had stayed that much with her.

  “The name is William Meadows. Found him in a pipe yesterday morning, up at the Mulholland Dam.”

  Gray Suit ended his one-sided conversation. He said, “I appreciate the information. I have to go, we’re wrapping up a two eleven. Uh huh. . . . Thank you. . . . You too, good-bye now.”

  Bosch didn’t look at him. He watched Wish. He thought he sensed that she wanted to look over at Gray Suit. Her eyes darted that way but then quickly went back to the photograph. Something wasn’t right, and Bosch decided to jump back into the silence.

  “Why don’t we skip the bullshit, Agent Wish? As far as I can tell, you’ve never recovered a single stock certificate, a single coin, a single jewel, a single gold-and-jade bracelet. You’ve got nothing. So screw the liaison stuff. I mean, what is this? My guy pawned the bracelet; he ended up dead. Why? We have parallel investigations here, don’t you think? More likely, the same investigation.”

  Nothing.

  “My guy was either given that bracelet by your perps or he stole it from them. Or possibly, he was one of them. So, maybe the bracelet wasn’t supposed to turn up yet. Nothing else has. And he goes and breaks the rules and pawns the thing. They whack him, then go to the pawnshop and steal it back. Whatever. The thing is, we are looking for the same people. And I need a direction to start in.”

  She remained silent still, but Bosch sensed a decision coming. This time he waited her out.

  “Tell me about him,” she finally said.

  He told her. About the anonymous call. About the body. About the apartment that had been searched. About finding the pawn stub hidden behind the photo. And then going to the pawnshop to find the bracelet stolen. He didn’t say that he had known Meadows.

  “Anything else taken from the pawnshop, or just this bracelet?” she asked when he was done.

  “Of course. Yes. But just as a cover for the real thing they wanted. The bracelet. Way I see it, Meadows was killed because whoever killed him wanted the bracelet. He was tortured before he was murdered because they wanted to know where it was. They got what they needed, killed him, then went and got the bracelet. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes, I do. What could be so important about one bracelet? This bracelet is only a drop in the bucket of what was taken, of what hasn’t ever turned up.”

  Bosch had thought of that and didn’t have an answer. He said, “I don’t know.”

  “If he was tortured as you say, why was the pawn ticket there for you to find? And why did they have to break into the pawnshop? You’re suggesting that he told them where the bracelet was but didn’t give up the ticket?”

  Bosch had thought about this, too. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe he knew they wouldn’t let him live. So he only gave them half of what they needed. He kept something back. It was a clue. He left the pawn stub behind as a clue.”

  Bosch thought about the scenario. He had first begun to put it together when rereading his notes and the reports he had typed. He decided it was time to play one more card.

  “I knew Meadows twenty years ago.”

  “You knew this victim, Detective Bosch?” Her voice was louder now, accusatory. “Why didn’t you say that when you first came in here? Since when does the LAPD allow its detectives to go around investigating the deaths of their friends?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I knew him. Twenty years ago. And I didn’t ask for the case. It was my turn in the bucket. I got the call out. It was . . .”

  He didn’t want to say coincidence.

  “This is all very interesting,” Wish said. “It is also irregular. We—I’m not sure we can help you. I think—”

  “Look, when I knew him, it was with the U.S. Army, First Infantry in Vietnam. Okay? We were both there. He was what they called a tunnel rat. Do you know what that means? . . . I was one too.”

  Wish said nothing. She was looking down at the bracelet again. Bosch had totally forgotten about Gray Suit.

  “The Vietnamese had tunnels under their villages,” Bosch said. “Some were a century old. The tunnels went from hootch to hootch, village to village, jungle to jungle. They were under some of our own camps, everywhere. And that was our job, the tunnel soldiers, to go down into those things. There was a whole other war under the ground.”

  Bosch realized that aside from a shrink and a circle group at the VA in Sepulveda he had never told anyone about the tunnels and what he did.

  “And Meadows, he was good at it. As much as you could like going down into that blackness with just a flashlight and a .45, well, he did. Sometimes we’d go down and it would take hours, and sometimes it would take days. And Meadows, well, he was the only one I ever knew over there that wasn’t scared of going down there. It was life above ground that scared him.”

  She didn’t say anything. Bosch looked over at Gray Suit, who was writing on a yellow tablet Bosch couldn’t read. Bosch heard someone report on the tac channel that he was transporting two prisoners to the Metro lockup.

  “So now twenty years later you’ve got a tunnel caper and I’ve got a dead tunnel fighter. He was found in a pipe, a tunnel. He had property from your caper.” Bosch felt around in his pockets for his cigarettes, then remembered she had said no. “We have to work together on this one. Right now.”

  He knew by her face it hadn’t worked. He emptied his coffee cup, ready for the door. He didn’t look at Wish now. He heard Gray Suit pick up the phone again and punch a number out. He stared down at the residue of sugar in the bottom of his cup. He hated sugar in his coffee.

  “Detective Bosch,” Wish began, “I am sorry you had to wait in the hall so long this morning. I am sorry this fellow soldier you knew, Meadows, is dead. Whether it was twenty years ago or not, I am. I have sympathy for him, and you, and what you may have had to go through. . . . But I am also sorry that I can’t help you at the moment. I will have to follow established protocol and talk to my supervisor. I will get back to you. As soon as possible. That is all I can do at the moment.”

  Bosch dropped the cup into a trash can next to her desk and reached over to pick up the Polaroid and the bulletin page.

  “Can we keep the photo here?” Agent Wish asked. “I need to show it to my supervisor.”

  Bosch kept the Polaroid. He got up and stepped in front of Gray Suit’s desk. He held the Polaroid up to the man’s face. “He’s seen it,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out of the office.

  Deputy Chief Irvin Irving sat at his desk, bruxing his teeth and working the muscles of his jaw into hard rubber balls. He was disturbed. And this clenching and gnashing of teeth was his habit when disturbed or in solitary, contemplative moods. As a result, the musculature of his jaw had become the most pronounced feature of his face. When looked at head-on, Irving’s jawline was actually wider than his ears, which were pinned flat against his shaven skull and had a winglike shape to them. The ears and the jaw gave Irving an intimidating if not odd visage. He looked like a flying jaw, as though his powerful molars could crush marbles. And Irving did all he could to promote this image of himself as a fearsome junkyard dog who might sink his teeth into a shoulder or leg and tear out a piece of meat the size of a
softball. It was an image that had helped overcome his one impediment as a Los Angeles policeman—his silly name—and could only aid him in his long-planned ascendancy to the chief’s office on the sixth floor. So he indulged the habit, even if it did cost him a new set of $2,000 molar implants every eighteen months.

  Irving pulled his tie tight against his throat and ran his hand over his gleaming scalp. He reached to the intercom buzzer. Though he could have easily pushed the speaker button then and barked his command, he waited for his new adjutant’s reply first. This was another of his habits.

  “Yes, Chief?”

  He loved hearing that. He smiled, then leaned forward until his great, wide jaw was inches from the intercom speaker. He was a man who did not trust that technology could do what it was supposed to do. He had to put his mouth to the speaker and shout.