The Black Echo (41 page)

She let some time slide between them before she said, “I think your going to the funeral is nice.”

“Is something wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. The way you’re talking. You haven’t seemed right since last night. Like something-I don’t know, forget it.”

“I don’t know, either, Harry. You know, after the adrenaline wore off, I guess I kind of just got scared. Made me start thinking about things.”

Bosch nodded his head but didn’t say anything. His mind drifted and he remembered a time in the Triangle when a company that had taken heavy casualties from sniper fire stumbled onto the entrance to a tunnel complex. Bosch, Meadows and a couple of other rats named Jarvis and Hanrahan were dropped at a nearby LZ and escorted to the hole. The first thing they did was drop a couple of LZ flares, a blue one and a red one, into the hole and blow the smoke in with a Mighty Mite fan, to find the other entrances in the jungle. Pretty soon ribbons of smoke started curling out of the ground at a couple dozen spots for two hundred yards in all directions. The smoke was coming up through the spider holes the snipers used as firing positions or to move in and out of the tunnels. There were so many of them, the jungle was turning purple from the smoke. Meadows was stoned. He popped a cassette into the portable tape player he always carried and started blasting Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” into the tunnel. It was one of Bosch’s most vivid memories, aside from his dreams, of the war.

He never liked rock and roll after that. The jolting energy of the music reminded him too much of the war.

“Did you ever go see the memorial?” Eleanor asked.

She didn’t have to say which one. There was only the one, in Washington. But then he remembered the long black replica he had watched them installing at the cemetery by the Federal Building.

“No,” he said after a while. “I’ve never seen it.”

After the air in the jungle cleared and the Hendrix tape was done, the four of them had gone into the tunnel while the rest of the company sat on backpacks and chowed and waited. An hour later, only Bosch and Meadows had come back. Meadows carried with him three NVA scalps. He held them up for the troops above ground and yelled, “You’re looking at the baddest blood brother in the black echo.” And so came the name. Later, they found Jarvis and Hanrahan in the tunnels. They had fallen into punji traps. They were dead.

Eleanor said, “I visited it when I was living in D.C. I couldn’t make myself go to the dedication in eighty-two. But a lot of years later I finally got the courage. I wanted to see my brother’s name. I thought maybe it would help me sort things out, you know, about what happened with him.”

“And did it?”

“No. Made it worse. It made me angry. It left me with this need for justice, if that makes sense. I wanted justice for my brother.”

The silence filled the car again and Bosch poured more coffee into his cup. He was beginning to feel the onset of caffeine jitters but couldn’t stop. He was addicted. He watched a couple of drunks who were stumbling down the street stop in front of the window before the vault. One of the men threw his hands up as if trying to gain a measure of the vault’s huge door. After a while they moved on. He thought of the rage Eleanor must have felt because of her brother. The helplessness. He thought of his own rage. He knew the same feelings, maybe not to the same degree but from a different perspective. Anybody who was touched by the war knew some part of those feelings. He had never worked it out completely and wasn’t sure he wanted to. The anger and sadness gave him something that was better than complete emptiness. Is that what Meadows felt? He wondered. The emptiness. Is that what bounced him from job to job and needle to needle until he was finally and fatally used up on this last mission? Bosch decided that he would go to Meadows’s funeral, that he owed him that much.

“You know what you were telling me the other day about that guy, the Dollmaker killer?” Eleanor asked.

“What about it?”

“IAD, they tried to make a case that you executed him?”

“Yes, I told you. They tried. But it wasn’t there. All they got me on was suspension for procedure violations.”

“Well, I just wanted to say that even if they were right, they were wrong. That would have been justice in my book. You knew what would happen with a guy like that. Look at the Night Stalker. He’ll never get the gas. Or it’ll take twenty years.”

Bosch felt uncomfortable. He had only thought of his motives and actions in the Dollmaker case when alone. He never spoke aloud about it. He didn’t know where she was going with this.

She said, “I know if it was true you could never admit it, but I think you either consciously or subconsciously made a decision. You went for justice for all those women, his victims. Maybe even for your mother.”

Shocked, Bosch turned to her and was about to ask how she knew about his mother and how she had come to think of her relation to the Dollmaker. Then he remembered the files again. It was probably in there somewhere. When he had applied to the department, he had to say on the forms if he or any close relatives had ever been the victim of a crime. He had been orphaned at eleven, he wrote, when his mother was found strangled in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard. He didn’t need to write what she did for a living. The location and crime said enough.

When he recovered his cool, Bosch asked Eleanor what her point was.

“No point,” she said. “I just… respect that. If it were me, I would have liked to have done the same thing, I think. I hope I would have been brave enough.”

He looked over at her, the darkness shielding both their faces. It was late now and no car lights drifted by to show them to each other.

“You go ahead and take the first shift sleeping,” he said. “I drank too much coffee.”

She didn’t answer. He offered to get out a blanket he had put in the trunk, but she declined.

“Did you ever hear what J. Edgar Hoover said about justice?” she asked.

“He probably said a lot, but I don’t recall any of it offhand.”

“He said that justice is incidental to law and order. I think he was right.”

She said nothing else and after a while he could hear her breathing turn deeper and longer. When the rare car drove by he would look over at her face as the light washed across it. She slept like a child, with her head leaning against her hands. Bosch cracked the window and lit a cigarette. He smoked and wondered if he could or would fall in love with her, and she with him. He was thrilled and disquieted by the thought, all at the same time.

Gray dawn came up over the street and filled the car with weak light. The morning also brought with it a gentle drizzle that wet the street and put a smear of condensation on the lower half of the windows of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. It was the first rain of any kind in months that Bosch could remember. Wish slept and he watched the vault: overhead lights still glowed on the chrome-and-brushed-steel finish. It was past six o’clock, but Bosch had forgotten the check-in call to Rourke and let Eleanor sleep. In fact, during the night he had never wakened her so that he could take a turn sleeping. He just never got tired. Houck checked in on the radio at three-thirty to make sure someone was awake. After that there were no disturbances and no activity in the vault room. For the rest of the night Bosch thought alternately of Eleanor Wish and the vault he watched.

He reached for the cup on the dashboard and checked for even a cold gulp of coffee, but it was empty. He dropped the empty over the seat to the floor. As he did this, he noticed the package from St. Louis on the backseat. He reached back and grabbed the manila envelope. He pulled out the thick sheaf of papers and idly looked through them while glancing up at the vault every few seconds.

Most of Meadows’s military records he had already seen. But he quickly noticed that there were several that had not been in the FBI jacket Wish had given him. This was a more complete record. There was a photostat of his draft report notice and medical exam. There were also medical records from Saigon. He had been treated twice for syphilis, once for acute stress reaction.

Paging through the package, he stopped when his eyes fell on a copy of a two-page letter from a Louisiana congressman named Noone. Curious, Bosch began to read. It was dated 1973 and was addressed to Meadows at the embassy in Saigon. The letter, bearing the official congressional seal, thanked Meadows for his hospitality and help during the congressman’s recent fact-finding visit. Noone noted that it had been a pleasant surprise to find a fellow New Iberian in the strange country. Bosch wondered how much of a coincidence it had been. Meadows had probably been assigned to security for the congressman so they would hit it off and the legislator would go back to Washington with a high opinion of personnel and morale in Southeast Asia. There are no coincidences.

The second page of the letter congratulated Meadows on a fine career and referred to the good reports Noone had received from Meadows’s commanding officer. Bosch read on. Meadows’s involvement in stopping an illegal entry into the embassy hotel during the congressman’s stay was mentioned; a Lieutenant Rourke had furnished details of Meadows’s heroics to the congressman’s staff. Bosch felt a trembling below his heart, as if the blood was draining from it. The letter finished with some small talk about the home parish. There was the large, flowing signature of the congressman and a typed notation in the bottom left margin:

cc: U.S. Army, Records Division, Washington, D.C. Lt. John H. Rourke, U.S. Embassy, Saigon, V.N. The Daily Iberian; attention news editor

Bosch stared at the second page for a long time without moving or breathing. He actually thought he felt the beginning sensation of nausea and wiped his hand across his forehead. He tried to think if he had ever heard Rourke’s middle name or initial. He couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter. There was no doubt. No coincidences.

Eleanor’s pager sounded, startling them both like a shot. She sat forward and began fumbling with her purse until she found the pager and shut off the noise.

“Oh, God, what time is it?” she said, still disoriented.

He said it was six-twenty and only then remembered that they were supposed to have checked in with Rourke on a landline twenty minutes earlier. He slid the letter back into the stack of papers and put them back in the envelope. He threw it back on the backseat.

“I’ve got to call in,” Wish said.

“Hey, take a couple of minutes to wake up,” Bosch replied quickly. “I’ll call in. I’ve got to find a restroom anyway, and I’ll get some coffee and water.”

He opened the door and stepped out before she could protest the plan. She said, “Harry, why did you let me sleep?”

“I don’t know. What’s his number?”

“I should call him.”

“Let me. Give me the number.”

She gave it to him and Bosch walked around the corner and a short distance to the twenty-four-hour diner called Darling’s. He was in a daze the whole way, ignoring the panhandlers who had come out with the sun, trying to fathom that it was Rourke who was the inside man. What was he doing? There was a part of this that was missing and Bosch couldn’t figure it. If Rourke was the insider, then why would he allow them to set up surveillance on the vault? Did he want his people caught? He saw the pay phones out front of the restaurant.

“You’re late,” Rourke said after picking up on half a ring.

“We forgot.”

“Bosch? Where’s Wish? She’s supposed to make the call.”

“Don’t worry about it, Rourke. She’s watching the vault like she’s supposed to. What are you doing?”

“I’ve been waiting to hear from you people before I headed in. Did you two fall asleep or what? What is happening there?”

“Nothing is happening. But you already know that, don’t you?”

There was a silence during which an old panhandler walked up to the booth and asked Bosch for money. Bosch put his hand on the man’s chest and firmly pushed him away.

“You still there, Rourke?” he said into the phone.

“What was that supposed to mean? How do I know what’s going on there when you people don’t call in like you’re supposed to? And you with the veiled references all the time. Bosch, I don’t get you.”

“Let me ask you something. Did you really put people down at the tunnel exits, or was that blueprint and your pointer and the SWAT guy all for show?”

“Put Wish on the line. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Sorry, she can’t come to the phone at the moment.”

“Bosch, I’m calling you in. Something is wrong. You’ve been out all night on this. I think you should-no, I’ll get a couple of fresh people out there. I’m going to have to call your lieutenant and-”

“You knew Meadows.”

“What?”

“What I said. You knew him. I have his file, man. His
complete
file. Not the edited version you gave Wish to give me. You were his CO at the embassy in Saigon. I know.”

More silence. Then, “I was CO to a lot of people, Bosch. I didn’t know them all.”

Bosch shook his head.

“That’s weak, Lieutenant Rourke. Really weak. That was worse than just admitting it. I tell you what, I’ll see you around.”

Bosch hung up the phone and went into Darling’s, where he ordered two coffees and two mineral waters. He stood by the cash register, waiting for the girl to put the order together, and looking out the window. He was thinking only of Rourke.

The girl came up to the cash register with the order in a cardboard carry-out box. He paid and tipped her and went back out to the pay phone.

Bosch called Rourke’s number again with no plan other than to see if he was on the phone or had left. He hung up after ten rings. Then he called the LAPD dispatch center and told an operator to call FBI dispatch and ask if they had a SWAT callout working in the Wilshire area in or near Beverly Hills and if they needed any help. While he waited he tried to put his mind inside Rourke’s caper. He opened up one of the coffees and sipped it.

The dispatcher came back on the line with a confirmation that FBI did have a SWAT surveillance in the Wilshire district. No backup was requested. Bosch thanked her and hung up. Now he thought he knew what Rourke was doing. It had to be that there were no men about to break into the vault. The setup on the vault was just that, a setup. The vault was a decoy. Bosch thought about how he had let Tran go his way after following him to the vault. What he had done was flush the second captain out, with his diamonds, so Rourke could have at him. Bosch had simply played into his hands.

When Bosch got back to the car he saw that Eleanor was looking through Meadows’s files. She hadn’t gotten to the congressman’s letter yet.

“Where have you been?” she said good-naturedly.

“Rourke had a lot of questions.” He took the Meadows file out of her hands and said, “There is something I want you to see here. Where did you get the file on Meadows that you showed me?”

“I don’t know. Rourke got it. Why?”

He found the letter and handed it to her without saying anything.

“What is this? Nineteen seventy-three?”

“Read it. This is Meadows’s file, the one I had copied and sent from St. Louis. There is no letter like this one in the file Rourke gave you to give me. He sanitized it. Read, you’ll see why.”

He glanced over at the vault door. Nothing was happening and he didn’t expect anything to be. Then he watched her as she read. She raised an eyebrow as she scanned both pages, not seeing the name.

“Yes, so he was some kind of a hero, it says. I don’t-” Her eyes widened as she got to the bottom. “Copied to Lieutenant John Rourke.”

“Uh huh. You also missed the first reference.”

He pointed to the sentence that named Rourke as Meadows’s CO.

“The inside man. What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know. Are you sure? This doesn’t prove anything.”

“If it was a coincidence, he should have said he knew the guy, cleared it up. Like me. I came in. He didn’t because he didn’t want the connection known. I called him on it when we were on the phone. He lied. He didn’t know we had this.”

“Now he knows you know?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what he thinks I know. I hung up on him. The question is, what do we do about it? We’re probably spinning our wheels here. The whole thing’s a charade. Nobody’s going into that vault. They probably took Tran down after he checked his diamonds out and left. We led him right to slaughter.”

Then he realized that maybe the white LTD belonged to the robbers, not Lewis and Clarke. They had followed Bosch and Wish to Tran.

“Wait a minute,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know. What about the alarms all week? The fire hydrant and the arson? It has to be happening like we thought.”

“I don’t know. Nothing is making sense right now. Maybe Rourke is leading his people into a trap. Or a slaughter.”

They both stared ahead at the vault. The rain had slacked off, the sun was completely up now and it set the steel door aglow. Eleanor finally spoke.

“I think we have to get some help. We have Hanlon and Houck sitting on the other side of the bank, and SWAT, unless that was part of Rourke’s charade.”

Bosch told her he had checked on the SWAT surveillance and learned that it actually was in place.

“Then what is Rourke doing?” she said.

“Pushing all the buttons.”

They kicked it around for a few minutes and decided to call Orozco at Beverly Hills police. First, Eleanor checked in with Hanlon and Houck. Bosch wanted to keep them in place.

“You guys awake over there?” she said into the Motorola.

“That’s a ten-four, barely. I feel like that guy stuck in his car in the overpass after the earthquake up in Oakland. What’s up, anything?”

“No, just checking. How’s the front door?”

“Not a knock all night.”

She signed off and there was a moment of silence before Bosch turned to get out of the car, to call Orozco. He stopped and looked back at her.

“You know, he died,” he said.

“Who died?”

“The guy that was in that overpass.”

Just then there was a thump that slightly shook the car. Not as much a sound as a vibration, an impact, not unlike the first jolt of an earthquake. There was no following vibration. But after one or two seconds an alarm sounded. The ringing came loud and clear from the Beverly Hills Safe & Lock Company. Bosch sat bolt upright, staring into the vault room. There was no visible sign of intrusion. Almost immediately, the radio crackled with Hanlon’s voice.

“We’ve got a bell. What’s our plan of action?”

Neither Bosch nor Wish answered the radio call at first. They just sat staring at the vault, dumbfounded. Rourke had let his people walk right into a trap. Or so it seemed.

“Son of a bitch,” Bosch said. “They’re in.”

Bosch said, “Tell Hanlon and Houck to stay cool until we get orders.”

“And who is going to give the orders?” Eleanor asked.

Bosch didn’t answer. He was thinking of what was going on in the vault. Why would Rourke lead his people into a setup?

“He must not have been able to warn them, tell them that the diamonds aren’t there and that we’re up here,” he said. “I mean, twenty-four hours ago we didn’t know about this place or what was going on. Maybe by the time we got onto it, it was too late. They were too far in.”

“So they are just proceeding as planned,” Eleanor said.

“They’ll pop Tran’s box first, if they’ve done their homework and know which one it is. They’ll find it empty, and then what do they do? Split, or open more boxes until they get enough stuff to make the whole thing worth their while?”

“I think they split,” she answered. “I think when they open Tran’s box and find no diamonds, they figure something is going down and get the hell out of there.”

“Then we won’t have much time. My guess is they will get stuff ready in the vault but they won’t actually drill the box until after we’ve reset the alarm and cleared the scene. We can delay the resetting a bit, but too long and they might get suspicious and clear out, looking and ready for our people in the tunnels.”

He got out of the car and looked back at Eleanor.

“Get on the radio. Tell those guys to stay put, then get a message to your SWAT people. Tell them we think we’ve got people in the vault.”

“They’ll want to know why Rourke isn’t telling them.”

“Think of something. Tell them you don’t know where Rourke is.”

“Where are you going?”

“To meet the patrol callout for the alarm. I’ll have them call Orozco out here.”

He slammed the door shut and walked down the garage ramp. Eleanor made the radio calls.