The Black Echo Part 19

"Nope. Get this: Pounds put me with Porter from autos. The guy's a burned-out lush."

"I know. How'd you even get him out of bed for this?"

"He wasn't in bed. I had to track him down at the Parrot up in North Hollywood. It's one of them private bottle clubs. Porter gives me the number when we're first introduced as partners and tells me that's where he'll be most nights. Tells me he works a security detail there. But I called the off-duty a.s.signments office at Parker Center to check it out and they got no record. I know the only thing he does there is booze. He must've been practically pa.s.sed out when I called. The bartender said the pager on his belt went off but he didn't even hear it. Harry, I think the guy could blow a point two right now if we put a Breathalyzer on him."

Bosch nodded and frowned the required three seconds and then put Jerry Edgar's troubles aside. He felt Eleanor step down beside him and he introduced her to Edgar. They shook hands and smiled and Bosch said, "So, what have we got?"

"Well, we got these on the body," Edgar said, and he held up a clear plastic bag. There was a short stack of Polaroids in it. More nude shots of Sharkey. He hadn't wasted any time resupplying. Edgar turned the bag and there was Bosch's business card.

"It looks like the kid was a hustler down in Boytown," Edgar said, "but if you already pulled him in once you already know that. Anyway, I saw the card and figured he might be the kid from the nine one one call. If you want to come down and take a look, be my guest. We already processed the scene, so touch whatever you want. You can't hear yourself think in there, though. Somebody went through and knocked out every light in the tunnel. Haven't figured out whether that was the perp or the lights were knocked out before.

"Anyway, we had to set up our own. And our cables weren't long enough to put the generator up here. It's in there screaming like a five-horsepower baby."

He turned to head back into the tunnel but Bosch reached out and touched his shoulder.

"Jed, how'd you get the call on this?"

"Anonymous. It wasn't a nine one one line, so there's no tape or trace. Came in right to the Hollywood desk. Caller was a male, that's all the dips.h.i.+t, one of those fat Explorer kids who took it, could tell us."

Edgar turned back into the subway. Bosch and Wish followed. It was a long hallway that curved to the right. The floor was dirty concrete, its walls were white stucco with a heavy overlay of graffiti. Nothing like a dose of urban reality as you are leaving the symphony at the bowl, Bosch thought. The tunnel was dark except for the bright splash of light that bathed the crime scene about halfway in. There Bosch could see a human form sprawled on its back. Sharkey. He could see men standing and working in the light. Bosch walked with the fingers of his right hand trailing along the stuccoed wall. It steadied him. There was an old, damp smell in the tunnel that was mixed with the new odor of gasoline and exhaust from the generator. Bosch felt beads of sweat start to form on his scalp and under his s.h.i.+rt. His breathing was fast and shallow. They pa.s.sed the generator thirty feet in and in another thirty feet or so Sharkey was lying on the tunnel floor under the brutal light of the strobes.

The boy's head was propped against the tunnel wall at an unnatural angle. He seemed smaller and younger than Bosch remembered him. His eyes were half open and had the familiar glaze of the unseeing on them. He wore a black T-s.h.i.+rt that said Guns N Roses on it, and it was matted with his blood. The pockets of his faded jeans were pulled out and empty. At his side stood a can of spray paint in a plastic evidence bag. On the wall above his head a painted inscription read RIP Sharkey. The paint had been applied with an inexperienced hand and too much had been used. Black paint had run down the wall in thin lines, some of them into Sharkey's hair.

When Edgar yelled, "You want to see it?" above the din of the generator Bosch knew that he meant the wound. Because Sharkey's head was angled forward, the throat wound was not visible. Only the blood. Bosch shook his head no.

Bosch noticed the blood splatter on the wall and floor about three feet from the body. Porter the lush was comparing the shapes of the drops with those on splatter cards on a steel ring. A crime scene tech named Roberge was also photographing the spots. The blood on the floor was in round spots. The wall splatter drops were elliptical. You didn't need splatter cards to know the kid had been killed right here in the tunnel.

"The way it's looking," Porter said loudly to no one in particular, "somebody comes up behind him here, cuts him and pushes him down against the wall there."

"You only got it half right, Porter," Edgar said. "How's somebody come up behind somebody in a tunnel like this? He was with somebody and they did him. It was no sneak job, Porter."

Porter put the splatter cards in his pocket and said, "Sorry, partner."

He didn't say anything else. He was fat and broken down the way many cops get when they stay on longer than they should. Porter could still wear a size 34 belt, but above it a tremendous gut bloomed outward like an awning. He wore a tweed sport coat with a frayed elbow. His face was gaunt and as pallid as a flour tortilla, behind a drinker's nose that was large, misshapen and painfully red.

Bosch lit a cigarette and put the burnt match in his pocket. He crouched down like a baseball catcher next to the body and lifted the bag containing the paint can and hefted it. It was almost full, and that confirmed what he already knew, already feared. It was he who had killed Sharkey. In a way, at least. Bosch had tracked him down and made him valuable, or potentially valuable, to the case. Someone could not allow this. Bosch squatted there, elbows on knees, holding cigarette to mouth, smoking and studying the body, making sure he would not forget it.

Meadows had been part of this thing-the circle of connected events that had gotten him killed. But not Sharkey. He was street trash and his death here probably saved someone else's life down the line. But he did not deserve this. In this circle he was an innocent. And that meant things were out of control and there were new rules-for both sides. Bosch signaled with his hand to Sharkey's neck and a coroner's investigator pulled the body away from the wall. Bosch put one hand down on the ground to balance himself and stared for a long time at the ravaged neck and throat. He did not want to forget a single detail. Sharkey's head lolled back, exposing the gaping neck wound. Bosch's eyes never wavered.

When Bosch finally looked up from the body, he noticed that Eleanor was no longer in the tunnel. He stood up and signaled Edgar to come outside to talk. Harry didn't want to have to shout over the sound of the generator. When they got out of the tunnel, he saw that Eleanor was sitting alone on the top step. They walked up past her, and Harry put his hand on her shoulder as he went by. He felt it go rigid at his touch.

When he and his old partner were reasonably away from the noise, Harry said, "So what do the techs have?"

"Not a d.a.m.ned thing," Edgar said. "If it was a gang thing, it's one of the cleanest I've ever seen. Not a single print or partial. The spray can is clean. No weapon. No wits."

"Sharkey had a crew, used to stay at a motel near the Boulevard until today, but he wasn't into gangs," Bosch said. "It's in the files. He was a scammer. You know, with the Polaroids, rolling h.o.m.os.e.xuals, stuff like that."

"You're saying he's in the gang files but he isn't in a gang?"

"Right."

Edgar nodded and said, "He still could've been taken down by somebody who thought he was a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger."

Wish walked over to them then but said nothing.

"You know this isn't a gang thing, Jed," Bosch said.

"I do?"

"Yeah, you do. If it was, there wouldn't be a full can of paint in there. No g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger's going to leave something like that behind. Also, whoever painted the wall in there didn't have the touch. The paint ran. Whoever did it, didn't know about spraying a wall."

"Come here a sec," Edgar said.

Bosch looked at Eleanor and nodded that it was okay.

He and Edgar walked away a few steps and stood near the crime scene tape.

"What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he's part of the case?" he asked.

Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn't know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently did or couldn't risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn't looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.

"Harry, you know what this weekend is?" he said. "It's Memorial Day weekend. It's the biggest three-day showing weekend of the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year as a cop."

Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. "What are you talking about?"

"What I'm talking about is . . . I'm not going to be busting my a.s.s on this case. It isn't going to f.u.c.k up my weekend like the last one. So, what I'm saying is if you want it, I'll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it 'cause it goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I'm going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five."

"You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It's not my call."

Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, "Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?"

Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, "We took him off the street. We interviewed him over on Wilc.o.x. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?"

"Nothing," Edgar said. "But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe saved me some time and that boy some life."

Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, "Who knew?"

"What do you mean?" she said.

"What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?" She thought for a moment. Then said, "On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked in my desk. n.o.body's heard that. It hasn't been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don't even think about that, Harry. n.o.body . . . It can't be."

"Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What's that tell you? They've got to have somebody on the inside."

"Harry, that's speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey."

Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made sense.

"Sharkey was a tough little b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said. "You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he didn't have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge."

"Or maybe somebody with money. You know he'd go with somebody if there was money in it."

She didn't start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, "Sharkey was a message."

"What?"

"A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They want us to know they did it. They want us to know they've got somebody inside. They're laughing at us."

She started the car. "Where to?"

"The bureau."

"Harry, be careful with that stuff about an inside man. If you go trying to sell that and it's not true, you could give your enemies all they need to bury you."

Enemies, Bosch thought. Who are my enemies this time?

"I got that kid killed," he said. "The least I am going to do is find who did it."

Bosch looked through the cotton curtains in the waiting room, down at the veterans cemetery, while Eleanor Wish unlocked the door to the bureau offices. The ground fog had not burned off the field of stones yet, and from above it looked like a thousand ghosts rising from their boxes at once. Bosch could see the dark gash dug into the crest of the hill at the north side of the cemetery but still could not make out what it was. It looked almost like a ma.s.s grave, a long gouge into the hill, a huge wound. The exposed soil was covered with black plastic sheets.

"You want coffee?" Wish said from behind him.

"Of course," he said. He pulled himself away from the curtains and followed her in. The bureau was empty. They went into the office kitchen and he watched as she dumped a packet of ground coffee into a filter basket and turned the machine on. They stood there silently, watching the coffee slowly drip into a round gla.s.s pot on the heating pad. Bosch lit a cigarette and tried only to think about the coffee that was coming. She waved the smoke away with a hand but didn't tell him to put it out.

When the coffee was ready, Bosch took it black and it hit his system like a shot. He filled up a second cup and carried both into the squad room. He lit a cigarette off the b.u.t.t of the first when he got to his temporary desk.

"My last one," he promised when he saw her looking.

Eleanor poured herself a cup of water from a bottle she took from her file drawer.

"You ever run out of that stuff?" he asked.

She ignored the question. "Harry, we can't blame ourselves for Sharkey. If we're to blame, then we might as well offer every person we talk to protection. Should we go up and grab his mother and put her in witness protection? What about the girl in the motel room that knew him? See, it gets crazy. Sharkey was Sharkey. You live by the street, you die by the street."

Bosch didn't say anything at first. Then he said, "Let me see the names."

Wish pulled out the files on the WestLand case. She rifled through them and pulled out a computer printout several pages long and folded accordion-style. She tossed it on the desk in front of him.

"That's the master there," she said. "Everybody who had a box. There are notes written after some of the names, but they probably are not germane. Most of that was if we thought they were scamming insurance or not."

Bosch started unfolding the printout and realized it was one long list and five shorter lists marked A through E. He asked what they were, and she came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. He smelled the apple in her hair.

"Okay, the long list is like I said, everybody who had a box. It's an all-inclusive list. Then we did five breakouts, A through E. The first-that's A-is a breakout on boxes rented within the three months prior to the burglary. Then B, we did a breakout on boxholders who reported no loss at all in the burglary. Then C is the list of dead ends; boxholders who were actually dead or we couldn't find because of changes in addresses or they had given phony information to rent them.

"Then the fourth and fifth breakouts are matching lists from the first three. D is anybody who rented a box in the previous three months and also reported no loss. E is anybody on the dead-end list who was also on the three-month list. Understand?"

He did. The FBI's thinking had been that the vault had to have been cased by the thieves before the break-in and that was most likely accomplished by simply going into the bank and renting a box. That way they had legitimate access; the guy who rented the box could go inside the vault anytime he wanted during business hours and have a look around. So the list including anybody who rented a box within three months of the robbery stood a good chance of also including the scout.

Second, it was likely that this scout would not want to draw attention to himself after the robbery, so he might report nothing stolen from his box. So that would put him on the D list. But if he made no report at all or had given untraceable information on his box rental card, then his name would be on the E list.

There were only seven names on the D list and five on the E list. One of the E names was circled. Frederic B. Isley of Park La Brea, the name of the man who had bought three Honda ATV's in Tustin. The other names had check marks next to them.

"Remember?" Eleanor said. "I said that name would come up again."

Harry nodded.

"Isley," she said. "We think he was the scout. Rented the box nine weeks before the burglary. The bank records show he made a total of four visits to the vault during the next seven weeks. But after the break-in, he never came back, whoever he was. Never filed a report. And when we tried to contact him we found the address was phony."

"Get a description?"

"Not one that would do us any good. Small, dark and maybe handsome was about as good as the vault clerks could do. We thought this guy was the scout even before we found out about the ATVs. When a boxholder wants to see his box, the clerk takes him in, unlocks the little door and then escorts him to one of the viewing rooms. When he's done, they both take the box back and the customer initials his box card. Kind of like at a library. So, when we looked at this guy's card we saw the initials- FBI. You're a man who doesn't like coincidences. Neither did we. We think somebody was having fun with us. Later, it was confirmed when we tracked the ATVs to Tustin."

Harry sipped his coffee.

"Not much good it did us," she said. "Never found him. In the debris of the vault after the burglary we were able to find his box. We printed it and the door. Nothing. We showed the vault clerks some mugs-Meadows was in there-and they couldn't make anybody."

"We could go back to them now with Franklin and Delgado, see if one of them was this Isley."

"Yeah. We will. I'll be right back."

She got up and left and Bosch went back to drinking coffee and studying the list. He read every name and address on the list, but nothing jogged his memory aside from the handful of names of celebrities, politicians and the like that had safe-deposit boxes. Bosch was going over the list a second time when Eleanor came back. She was carrying a piece of paper, which she slid onto his desk.

"I checked Rourke's office. He already sent most of the paperwork I turned in over to records. But the hypnosis memo was still in his in box, so he must not have seen it yet. I took it back. It's useless now and it might be better if he didn't see it."

Harry glanced at the memo and then folded the page and put it in his pocket.

"Frankly," she said, "I don't think any of the paper was out in the open long enough . . . I mean, I just don't see it. And Rourke . . . he's a technocrat, not a killer. Like they said about you at behavioral sciences, he wouldn't cross the line for money."

Bosch looked at her and found himself wanting to say something to please her, to get her back on his side. He could think of nothing and could not understand this new coldness in her manner.

"Forget it," he said, and then, looking down at the lists, he added, "How far did you people check out these people who reported no losses?"

She looked down at the printouts where Bosch had circled list B. There were nineteen names on the list.

"We ran each name for criminal records," she began. "We did a telephone interview and later a face-to-face. If an agent got weird vibes or somebody's story didn't play well, then another agent would come by unannounced to do a follow-up interview. Kind of get another opinion. I was not part of that. We had a second crew who handled most of the field interviews. If there is a particular name there that you are interested in, I could pull the interview summaries."

"What about the Vietnamese names on the lists? I count thirty-four boxholders with Vietnamese names, four are on the no-loss list, one on the dead-end list."

"What about the Vietnamese? There is also probably a breakout, if you look for it, on Chinese, Korean, whites, blacks and Latinos. These were equal opportunity bandits."

"Yeah, but you came up with a connection to Vietnam in Meadows. Now we have Franklin and Delgado, possibly involved. All three were MPs in Vietnam. We've got Charlie Company, which may or may not have a part in this. So, after Meadows became a suspect and you started pulling military records of tunnel rats, did you do any further checking with the Vietnamese on this list?"

"No-well, yes. On the foreign nationals we ran their names through INS to see how long they'd been here, whether they were legal. But that was about it." She was quiet a moment. "I can see what you are getting at. It's a flaw in the way we handled it. See, we didn't develop Meadows as a possible suspect until a few weeks after the robbery. By then most of these people had already been interviewed. After we started looking at Meadows, I don't think we went back to see if any of the names on the list fit in with him. You think one of the Vietnamese could have somehow been part of this?"

"I don't know what I'm thinking. Just looking for connections. Coincidences that aren't coincidences."

Bosch took a notebook out of his coat pocket and started making a list of the names, DOBs and addresses of the Vietnamese boxholders. He put the four who reported no loss and the name from the dead-end list at the top of his own list. He had just finished the list and closed the notebook when Rourke walked into the squad room, his hair still wet from his morning shower. He was carrying a coffee mug that said Boss on the side of it. He saw Bosch and Wish and then looked at his watch.

"Getting an early start?"