The Black Echo (3 page)

“You find a stove in there?” Bosch asked.

“Shit, he’s a hype?” Donovan said. “I knew it. What the fuck are we doin’ all this for?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He waited him out.

“Answer is yes, I found a Coke can,” Donovan said.

The crime scene tech looked through the plastic bags in his hands and held one up to Bosch. It contained two halves of a Coke can. The can looked reasonably new and had been cut in half with a knife. The bottom half had been inverted and its concave surface used as a pan to cook heroin and water. A stove. Most hypes no longer used spoons. Carrying a spoon was probable cause for arrest. Cans were easy to come by, easy to handle and disposable.

“We need the kit and the stove printed as soon as we can,” Bosch said. Donovan nodded and carried his burden of plastic bags toward the police van. Bosch turned his attention back to the ME’s men.

“No knife on him, right?” Bosch said.

“Right,” Sakai said. “Why?”

“I need a knife. Incomplete scene without a knife.”

“So what. Guy’s a hype. Hypes steal from hypes. His pals probably took it.”

Sakai’s gloved hands rolled up the sleeves of the dead man’s shirt. This revealed a network of scar tissue on both arms. Old needle marks, craters left by abscesses and infections. In the crook of the left elbow was a fresh spike mark and a large yellow-and-purplish hemorrhage under the skin.

“Bingo,” Sakai said. “I’d say this guy took a hot load in the arm and, phssst, that was it. Like I said, you got a hype case, Bosch. You’ll have an early day. Go get a Dodger dog.”

Bosch crouched down again to look closer.

“That’s what everybody keeps telling me,” he said.

And Sakai was probably right, he thought. But he didn’t want to fold this one away yet. Too many things didn’t fit. The missing tracks in the pipe. The shirt pulled over the head. The broken finger. No knife.

“How come all the tracks are old except the one?” he asked, more of himself than Sakai.

“Who knows?” Sakai answered anyway. “Maybe he’d been off it awhile and decided to jump back in. A hype’s a hype. There aren’t any reasons.”

Staring at the tracks on the dead man’s arms, Bosch noticed blue ink on the skin just below the sleeve that was bunched up on the left bicep. He couldn’t see enough to make out what it said.

“Pull that up,” he said and pointed.

Sakai worked the sleeve up to the shoulder, revealing a tattoo of blue and red ink. It was a cartoonish rat standing on hind legs with a rabid, toothy and vulgar grin. In one hand the rat held a pistol, in the other a booze bottle marked XXX. The blue writing above and below the cartoon was smeared by age and the spread of skin. Sakai tried to read it.

“Says ‘Force’-no, ‘First.’ Says ‘First Infantry.’ This guy was army. The bottom part doesn’t make-it’s another language. ‘Non… Gratum… Anum… Ro-’ I can’t make that out.”

“Rodentum,” Bosch said.

Sakai looked at him.

“Dog Latin,” Bosch told him. “Not worth a rat’s ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.”

“Whatever,” Sakai said. He took an appraising look at the body and the pipe. He said, “Well, he ended up in a tunnel, didn’t he? Sort of.”

Bosch reached his bare hand to the dead man’s face and pushed the straggly black and gray hairs off the forehead and away from the vacant eyes. His doing this without gloves made the others stop what they were doing and watch this unusual, if not unsanitary, behavior. Bosch paid no notice. He stared at the face for a long moment, not saying anything, not hearing if anything was said. In the moment that he realized that he knew the face, just as he knew the tattoo, the vision of a young man flashed in his mind. Rawboned and tan, hair buzzed short. Alive, not dead. He stood up and turned quickly away from the body.

Making such a quick, unexpected motion, he banged straight into Jerry Edgar, who had finally arrived and walked up to huddle over the body. They both took a step back, momentarily stunned. Bosch put a hand to his forehead. Edgar, who was much taller, did the same to his chin.

“Shit, Harry,” Edgar said. “You all right?”

“Yeah. You?”

Edgar checked his hand for blood.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. What are you jumping up like that for?”

“I don’t know.”

Edgar looked over Harry’s shoulder at the body and then followed his partner away from the pack.

“Sorry, Harry,” Edgar said. “I sat there waiting an hour till somebody came out to cover me on my appointments. So tell me, what have we got?”

Edgar was still rubbing his jaw as he spoke.

“Not sure yet,” Bosch said. “I want you to get in one of these patrol cars that has an MCT in it. One that works. See if you can get a sheet on a Meadows, Billy, er, make that William. DOB would be about 1950. We need to get an address from DMV.”

“That’s the stiff?”

Bosch nodded.

“Nothing, no address with his ID?”

“There is no ID. I made him. So check it out on the box. There should be some contact in the last few years. Hype stuff, at least, out of Van Nuys Division.”

Edgar sauntered off toward the line of parked black-and-whites to find one with a mobile computer terminal mounted on the dashboard. Because he was a big man, his gait seemed slow, but Bosch knew from experience that Edgar was a hard man to keep pace with. Edgar was impeccably tailored in a brown suit with a thin chalk line. His hair was close cropped and his skin was almost as smooth and as black as an eggplant’s. Bosch watched Edgar walk away and couldn’t help but wonder if he had timed his arrival to be just late enough to avoid having to wrinkle his ensemble by stepping into a jumpsuit and crawling into the pipe.

Bosch went to the trunk of his car and got out the Polaroid camera. He then went back to the body, straddled it and stooped to take photographs of the face. Three would be enough, he decided, and he placed each card that was ejected from the camera on top of the pipe while the photo developed. He couldn’t help but stare at the face, at the changes made by time. He thought of that face and the inebriated grin that creased it on the night that all of the First Infantry rats had come out of the tattoo parlor in Saigon. It had taken the burned-out Americans four hours, but they had all been made blood brothers by putting the same brand on their shoulders. Bosch remembered Meadows’s joy in the companionship and fear they all shared.

Harry stepped away from the body while Sakai and Osito unfolded a black, heavy plastic bag with a zipper running up the center. Once the body bag was unfolded and opened, the coroner’s men lifted Meadows and placed him inside.

“Looks like Rip Van-fucking-Winkle,” Edgar said as he walked up.

Sakai zipped the bag up and Bosch saw a few of Meadows’s curling gray hairs had been caught in the zipper. Meadows wouldn’t mind. He had once told Bosch that he was destined for the inside of a body bag. He said everybody was.

Edgar held a small notepad in one hand, a gold Cross pen in the other.

“William Joseph Meadows, 7-21-50. That sound like him, Harry?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Well, you were right, we have multiple contacts. But not just hype shit. We’ve got bank robbery, attempted robbery, possession of heroin. We got a loitering right here at the dam a year or so ago. And he did have a couple hype beefs. The one in Van Nuys you were talking about. What was he to you, a CI?”

“No. Get an address?”

“Lives up in the Valley. Sepulveda, up by the brewery. Tough neighborhood to sell a house in. So if he wasn’t an informant, how’d you know this guy?”

“I didn’t know him-at least recently. I knew him in a different life.”

“What does that mean? When did you know the guy?”

“Last time I saw Billy Meadows was twenty years ago, or thereabouts. He was-it was in Saigon.”

“Yeah, that’d make it about twenty years.” Edgar walked over to the Polaroids and looked down at the three faces of Billy Meadows. “You know him good?”

“Not really. About as well as anybody got to know somebody there. You learned to trust people with your life, then when it’s over you realize you didn’t really even know most of them. I never saw him once I got back here. Talked to him once on the phone last year, that’s all.”

“How’d you make him?”

“I didn’t, at first. Then I saw the tattoo on his arm. That brought the face back. I guess you remember guys like him. I do, at least.”

“I guess…”

They let the silence sit there awhile. Bosch was trying to decide what to do, but could only wonder about the coincidence of being called to a death scene to find Meadows. Edgar broke the reverie.

“So you want to tell me what you’ve got that looks hinky here? Donovan over there looks like he’s getting ready to shit his pants, all the work you’re putting him through.”

Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.

“No knife?” his partner said.

“Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove-if the stove was his.”

“Could’ve brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife.”

“Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything.”

“Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?”

“To a degree. A user and seller.”

“Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can’t predict what they’re going to do, when they’re going to get off the shit or on it. They’re lost people, Harry.”

“He was off it, though-at least I thought he was. He’s only got one fresh pop in his arm.”

“Harry, you said you hadn’t seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?”

“I hadn’t seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He’d been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something-it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing-he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would’ve only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn’t do the time this time, couldn’t kick alone like that…”

Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.

“And?… Come on, Harry, what’d you do?”

“And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He’s a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he’d completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that’s what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling… I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn’t try to look him up.”

Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.

“Look, Harry,” Edgar said, “that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That’s not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?”

“Do you believe in coincidence?” Bosch asked.

“I don’t know. I-”

“There are no coincidences.”

“Harry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know what I think? I don’t see anything here that’s screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can’t see what he’s doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That’s it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could be a hundred dif-”

“Sometimes they don’t scream, Jerry. That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions. Don’t you see that that’s what they are counting on?”

“Who is ‘they, ’ Harry?”

“Whoever did this.”

He shut up for a minute. He was convincing no one, and that almost included himself. Playing to Edgar’s sense of dedication was wrong. He’d be off the job as soon as he put in twenty. He’d then put a business card-sized ad in the union newsletter-“LAPD retired, will cut commission for brother officers”-and make a quarter million a year selling houses to cops or for cops in the San Fernando Valley or the Santa Clarita Valley or the Antelope Valley or whatever valley the bulldozers aimed at next.

“Why go in the pipe?” Bosch said then. “You said he lived up in the Valley. Sepulveda. Why come down here?”

“Harry, who knows? The guy was a junkie. Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he croaked himself up there and his friends dragged his dead ass down here because they didn’t want to be bothered with explaining it.”

“That’s still a crime.”

“Yeah, that’s a crime, but let me know when you find a DA that’ll file it for you.”

“His kit looked clean. New. The other tracks on his arm look old. I don’t think he was slamming again. Not regularly. Something isn’t right.”

“Well, I don’t know… You know, AIDS and everything, they’re supposed to keep a clean kit.”

Bosch looked at his partner as if he didn’t know him.

“Harry, listen to me, what I’m telling you is that he may have been your foxhole buddy twenty years ago but he was a junkie this year. You’ll never be able to explain every action he took. I don’t know about the kit or the tracks, but I do know that this does not look like one we should bust our humps on. This is a nine-to-fiver, weekends and holidays excluded.”

Bosch gave up-for the moment.

“I’m going up to Sepulveda,” he said. “Are you coming, or are you going back to your open house?”

“I’ll do my job, Harry,” Edgar said softly. “Just because we don’t agree on something doesn’t mean I’m not gonna do what I’m paid to do. It’s never been that way, never will be. But if you don’t like the way I do business, we’ll go see Ninety-eight tomorrow morning and see about a switch.”