The Black Echo (4 page)

Bosch was immediately sorry for the cheap shot, but didn’t say so. He said, “Okay. You go on up there, see if anybody’s home. I’ll meet you after I sign off on the scene.”

Edgar walked over to the pipe and took one of the Polaroid photos of Meadows. He slipped it into his coat pocket, then walked down the access road toward his car without saying another word to Bosch.

After Bosch took off his jumpsuit and folded it away in the trunk of his car, he watched Sakai and Osito slide the body roughly onto a stretcher and then into the back of a blue van. He started over, thinking about what would be the best way to get the autopsy done as a priority, meaning by at least the next day instead of four or five days later. He caught up with the coroner’s tech as he was opening the driver’s door.

“We’re outta here, Bosch.”

Bosch put his hand on the door, holding it from opening enough for Sakai to climb in.

“Who’s doing the cutting today?”

“On this one? Nobody.”

“Come on, Sakai. Who’s on?”

“Sally. But he’s not going near this one, Bosch.”

“Look, I just went through this with my partner. Not you, too, okay?”

“Bosch, you look. You listen. I’ve been working since six last night and this is the seventh scene I’ve been to. We got drive-bys, floaters, a sex case. People are dying to meet us, Bosch. There is no rest for the weary, and that means no time for what you think might be a case. Listen to your partner for once. This one is going on the routine schedule. That means we’ll get to it by Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I promise Friday at the latest. And tox results is at least a ten-day wait, anyway. You know that. So what’s your goddam hurry?”

“Are. Tox results
are
at least a ten-day wait.”

“Fuck off.”

“Just tell Sally I need the prelim done today. I’ll be by later.”

“Christ, Bosch, listen to what I’m telling you. We’ve got bodies on gurneys stacked in the hall that we already know are one eighty-sevens and need to be cut. Salazar is not going to have time for what looks to me and everybody else around here except you like a hype case. Cut and dried, man. What am I going to say to him that’s going to make him do the cut today?”

“Show him the finger. Tell him there were no tracks in the pipe. Think of something. Tell him the DB was a guy who knew needles too well to’ve OD’d.”

Sakai put his head back against the van’s side panel and laughed loudly. Then he shook his head as if a child had made a joke.

“And you know what he’ll say to me? He’ll say that it doesn’t matter how long he’d been spiking. They all fuck up. Bosch, how many sixty-five-year-old junkies do you see around? None of them go the distance. The needle gets them all in the end. Just like this guy in the pipe.”

Bosch turned and looked around to make sure none of the uniforms were watching and listening. Then he turned back to Sakai’s face.

“Just tell him I’ll be by there later,” he said quietly. “If he doesn’t find anything on the prelim, then fine, you can stick the body at the end of the line in the hall, or you can park it down at the gas station on Lankershim. I won’t care then, Larry. But you tell him. It’s his decision, not yours.”

Bosch dropped his hand from the door and stepped back. Sakai got in the van and slammed the door. He started the engine and looked at Bosch through the window for a long moment before rolling it down.

“Bosch, you’re a pain in the ass. Tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do. Today is no way.”

“First cut of the day?”

“Just leave us alone today, okay?”

“First cut?”

“Yeah. Yeah. First cut.”

“Sure, I’ll leave you alone. See you tomorrow, then.”

“Not me, man. I’ll be sleeping.”

Sakai rolled the window back up and the van moved away. Bosch stepped back to let it pass, and when it was gone he was left staring at the pipe. It was really for the first time then that he noticed the graffiti. Not that he hadn’t seen that the exterior of the pipe was literally covered with painted messages, but this time he looked at the individual scrawls. Many were old, faded together-a tableau of letters spelling threats either long forgotten or since made good. There were slogans: Abandon LA. There were names: Ozone, Bomber, Stryker, many others. One of the fresher tags caught his eye. It was just three letters, about twelve feet from the end of the pipe-
Sha.
The three letters had been painted in one fluid motion. The top of the S was jagged and then contoured, giving the impression of a mouth. A gaping maw. There were no teeth but Bosch could sense them. It was as though the work wasn’t completed. Still, it was good work, original and clean. He aimed the Polaroid at it and took a photo.

Bosch walked to the police van, putting the exposure in his pocket. Donovan was stowing his equipment on shelves and the evidence bags in wooden Napa Valley wine boxes.

“Did you find any burned matches in there?”

“Yeah, one fresh one,” Donovan said. “Burned to the end. It was about ten feet in. It’s there on the chart.”

Bosch picked up a clipboard on which there was a piece of paper with a diagram of the pipe showing the body location and where the other material taken from the pipe had been. Bosch noticed that the match was found about fifteen feet from the body. Donovan then showed him the match, sitting at the bottom of its own plastic evidence bag. “I’ll let you know if it matches the book in the guy’s kit,” he said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

Bosch said, “What about the uniforms? What’d they find?”

“It’s all there,” Donovan said, pointing to a wooden bin in which there were still more plastic evidence bags. These contained debris picked up by patrol officers who had searched the area within a fifty-yard radius of the pipe. Each bag contained a description of the location where the object had been found. Bosch took each bag out and examined its contents. Most of it was junk that would have nothing to do with the body in the pipe. There were newspapers, clothing rags, a high-heeled shoe, a white sock with dried blue paint in it. A sniff rag.

Bosch picked up a bag containing the top to a can of spray paint. The next bag contained the spray paint can. The Krylon label said it was Ocean Blue. Bosch hefted the bag and could tell there was still paint in the can. He carried the bag to the pipe, opened it and, touching the nozzle with a pen, sprayed a line of blue next to the letters
Sha.
He sprayed too much. The paint ran down the curved side of the pipe and dripped onto the gravel. But Bosch could see the colors matched.

He thought about that for a moment. Why would a graffiti tagger throw half a can of paint away? He looked at the writing on the evidence bag. It had been found near the edge of the reservoir. Someone had attempted to throw the can into the lake but came up short. Again he thought, Why? He squatted next to the pipe and looked closely at the letters. He decided that whatever the message or name was, it wasn’t finished. Something had happened that made the tagger stop what he was doing and throw the can, the top and his sniff sock over the fence. Was it the police? Bosch took out his notebook and wrote a reminder to call Crowley after midnight to see if any of his people had cruised the reservoir during theA.M. watch.

But what if it wasn’t a cop that made the tagger throw the paint over the fence? What if the tagger had seen the body being delivered to the pipe? Bosch thought about what Crowley had said about an anonymous caller reporting the body. A kid, no less. Was it the tagger who called? Bosch took the can back to the SID truck and handed it to Donovan.

“Print this after the kit and the stove,” he said. “I think it might belong to a witness.”

“Will do,” Donovan said.

Bosch drove down out of the hills and took the Barham Boulevard ramp onto the northbound Hollywood Freeway. After coming up through the Cahuenga Pass he went west on the Ventura Freeway and then north again on the San Diego Freeway. It took about twenty minutes to go the ten miles. It was Sunday and traffic was light. He exited on Roscoe and went east a couple of blocks into Meadows’s neighborhood on Langdon.

Sepulveda, like most of the suburban communities within Los Angeles, had both good and bad neighborhoods. Bosch wasn’t expecting trimmed lawns and curbs lined with Volvos on Meadows’s street, and he wasn’t disappointed. The apartments were at least a decade past being attractive. There were bars over the windows of the bottom units and graffiti on every garage door. The sharp smell of the brewery on Roscoe wafted into the neighborhood. The place smelled like a 4A.M. bar.

Meadows had lived in a U-shaped apartment building that had been built in the 1950s, when the smell of hops wasn’t yet in the air, gangbangers weren’t on the street corner and there was still hope in the neighborhood. There was a pool in the center courtyard but it had long been filled in with sand and dirt. Now the courtyard consisted of a kidney-shaped plot of brown grass surrounded by dirty concrete. Meadows had lived in an upstairs corner apartment. Bosch could hear the steady drone of the freeway as he climbed the stairs and moved along the walkway that fronted the apartments. The door to 7B was unlocked and it opened into a small living room-dining room-kitchen. Edgar was leaning against a counter, writing in his notebook. He said, “Nice place, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bosch said and looked around. “Nobody home?”

“Nah. I checked with a neighbor next door and she hadn’t seen anybody around since the day before yesterday. Said the guy that lived here told her his name was Fields, not Meadows. Cute, huh? She said he lived all by himself. Been here about a year, kept to himself, mostly. That’s all she knew.”

“You show her the picture?”

“Yeah, she made him. Didn’t like looking at a picture of a dead guy, though.”

Bosch walked into a short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. He said, “You pick the door?”

“Nah-it was unlocked. No shit, I knock a couple times and I’m fixing to get my pouch outta the car and finesse the lock when, for the hell of it, I try the door.”

“And it opens.”

“It opens.”

“You talk to the landlord?”

“Landlady’s not around. Supposed to be, but maybe she went out to eat lunch or score some horse. I think everybody I seen around here is a spiker.”

Bosch came back into the living room and looked around. There wasn’t much. A couch covered with green vinyl was pushed against one wall, a stuffed chair was against the opposite wall with a small color television on the carpet next to it. There was a Formica-topped table with three chairs around it in the dining room. The fourth chair was by itself against the wall. Bosch looked at an old cigarette-scarred coffee table in front of the couch. On it were an overloaded ashtray and a crossword puzzle book. Playing cards were laid out in an unfinished game of solitaire. There was a
TV Guide.
Bosch had no idea if Meadows smoked but knew that no cigarettes had been found on the body. He made a mental note to check on it later.

Edgar said, “Harry, this place was turned. Not just the door being open and all, but, I mean, there are other things. The whole place has been searched. They did a halfway decent job, but you can tell. It was rushed. Go check out the bed and the closet, you’ll see what I mean. I’m gonna give the landlady another try.”

Edgar left and Bosch walked back through the living room to the bedroom. Along the way he noted the smell of urine. In the bedroom, he found a queen-sized bed without a backboard pushed against one wall. There was a greasy discoloration on the white wall at about the level where Meadows would have leaned his head while sitting up in bed. Opposite the bed an old six-drawer dresser was against the wall. A cheap rattan night table with a lamp on it stood next to the bed. Nothing else was in the room, not even a mirror.

Bosch studied the bed first. It was unmade, with pillows and sheets in a pile in the center. Bosch noticed that a corner of one of the sheets was folded between the mattress and the box spring, in the midsection of the left side of the bed. The bed would not have been made that way, obviously. Bosch pulled the corner out from under the mattress and let it hang loosely off the side of the bed. He lifted the mattress as if to search underneath it, then lowered it back into place. The corner of the sheet was back between the mattress and the box spring. Edgar was right.

He next opened the six bureau drawers. What clothes there were-underwear, white and dark socks and several T-shirts-were neatly folded and seemed undisturbed. When he closed the bottom left drawer he noticed that it slid unevenly and would not close all the way. He pulled it all the way out of the bureau. Then he pulled another drawer completely out of the dresser. Then the rest. When he had all the drawers out he checked the underside of each to see if something was or had been taped to it. He found nothing. He put them back in but kept changing their order until each one slid easily into place and closed completely. When he was done the drawers were in a different order. The right order. He was satisfied that someone had pulled the drawers out to search beneath and behind them, and had then put them back in the wrong order.

He went into the walk-in closet. He found only a quarter of the available space used. On the floor were two pairs of shoes, a pair of black Reebok running shoes that were dirty with sand and gray dust, and a pair of laced work boots that looked as though they had been recently cleaned and oiled. There was more of the gray dust from the shoes in the carpet. He crouched down and pinched some between his fingers. It seemed like concrete dust. He took a small evidence bag from his pocket and put some of the granules into it. Then he put the bag away and stood up. There were five shirts on hangers, a single white button-down oxford and four long-sleeved black pullovers, like the one Meadows had been wearing. On hangers next to the shirts were two pairs of well-faded jeans and two pairs of black pajamas or karate-style pants. The pockets on all four pairs of pants had been turned inside out. A plastic laundry basket on the floor contained dirty black pants, T-shirts, socks and a pair of boxer shorts.