Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

As he folded the BOLO sheet into his pocket, Bosch’s electronic pager went off. He picked up the phone and called Hollywood Station, expecting to be told there was another body waiting for him. It was a watch sergeant named Art Crocket, whom everyone called Davey, who took the call.

“Harry, you still out in the field?” he said.

“I’m at Parker Center. Had to check on a few things.”

“Good, then you’re already near the morgue. A tech over there name of Sakai called, said he needs to see you.”

“See me?”

“He said to tell you that something came up and they’re doing your cut today. Right now, matter of fact.”

It took Bosch five minutes to get over to County-USC Hospital and fifteen minutes to find a parking spot. The medical examiner’s office was located behind one of the medical center buildings that had been condemned after the ’87 earthquake. It was a two-story yellow prefab without much architectural style or life. As Bosch was going through the glass doors where the living people entered and into the front lobby, he passed a sheriff’s detective he had spent some time with while working the Night Stalker task force in the early eighties.

“Hey, Bernie,” Bosch said and smiled.

“Hey, fuck you, Bosch,” Bernie said. “The rest of us catch ones that count, too.”

Bosch stopped there a moment to watch the detective walk into the parking lot. Then he went in and to the right, down a government-green corridor, passing through two sets of double doors-the smell getting worse each time. It was the smell of death and industrial-strength disinfectant. Death had the upper hand. Bosch stepped into the yellow-tiled scrub room. Larry Sakai was in there, putting a paper gown over his hospital scrubs. He already had on a paper mask and booties. Bosch took a set of the same out of cardboard boxes on a stainless steel counter and started putting them on.

“What’s with Bernie Slaughter?” Bosch asked. “What happened in here to piss him off?”

“You’re what happened, Bosch,” Sakai said without looking at him. “He got a call out yesterday morning. Some sixteen-year-old shoots his best friend. Up in Lancaster. Looks like accidental but Bernie’s waiting on us to check the bullet track and powder stippling. He wants to close it. I told him we’d get to it late today, so he came in. Only we aren’t going to get to it at all today. ’Cause Sally’s got a bug up his ass about doing yours. Don’t ask me why. He just checked the stiff out when I brought it in and said we’d do it today. I told him we’d have to bump somebody, and he said bump Bernie. But I couldn’t get him on the line in time to stop him from coming in. So that’s why Bernie’s pissed. You know he lives all the way down to Diamond Bar. Long ride in for nothing.”

Bosch had the mask, gown and booties on and followed Sakai down the tiled hall to the autopsy suite. “Then maybe he ought to be pissed at Sally, not me,” he said.

Sakai didn’t answer. They walked to the first table, where Billy Meadows lay on his back, naked, his neck braced against a short cut of two-by-four wood. There were six of the stainless steel tables in the room. Each had gutters running alongside its edges and drain holes in the corners. There was a body on each. Dr. Jesus Salazar was huddled over Meadows’s chest with his back to Bosch and Sakai.

“Afternoon, Harry, I’ve been waiting,” Salazar said, still not looking. “Larry, I’m going to need slides on this.”

The medical examiner straightened up and turned. In his rubber-gloved hand he held what looked like a square plug of flesh and pink muscle tissue. He placed it in a steel pan, the kind brownies are cooked in, and handed it to Sakai. “Give me verticals, one of the puncture track, then two on either side for comparison.”

Sakai took the pan and left the room to go to the lab. Bosch saw that the plug of meat had been cut from Meadows’s chest, about an inch above the left nipple.

“What’d you find?” Bosch asked.

“Not sure yet. We’ll see. The question is, what did you find, Harry? My field tech told me you were demanding an autopsy on this case today. Why is that?”

“I told him I needed it today because I wanted to get it done tomorrow. I thought that was what we had agreed on, too.”

“Yes, he told me so, but I got curious about it. I love a good mystery, Harry. What made you think this was hinky, as you detectives say?”

We don’t say it anymore, Bosch thought. Once it’s said in the movies and people like Salazar pick it up, it’s ancient.

“Just some things didn’t fit at the time,” Bosch said. “There are more things now. From my end, it looks like a murder. No mystery.”

“What things?”

Bosch got out his notebook and started flipping through the pages as he talked. He listed the things he had noticed wrong at the death scene: the broken finger, the lack of distinct tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head.

“He had a hype kit in his pocket and we found a stove in the pipe, but it doesn’t look right. Looks like a plant to me. Looks to me like the pop that killed him is in the arm there. Those other scars on his arms are old. He hasn’t been using his arms in years.”

“You’re right about that. Aside from the one recent puncture in the arm, the groin area is the only area where punctures are fresh. The inside thighs. An area usually used by people going to great lengths to hide their addiction. But then again, this could have just been his first time back on the arms. What else you got, Harry?”

“He smoked, I’m pretty sure. There was no pack of cigarettes with the body.”

“Couldn’t somebody have taken them off the body? Before it was discovered. A scavenger?”

“True. But why take the smokes and not the kit? There’s also his apartment. Somebody searched the place.”

“Could have been someone who knew him. Someone looking for his stash.”

“True again.” Bosch flipped through a few more pages in the notebook. “The kit on the body had whitish-brown crystals in the cotton. I’ve seen enough tar heroin to know it turns the straining cotton dark brown, sometimes black. So it looks like it was some fine stuff, probably overseas, that was put in his arm. That doesn’t go with the way he was living. That’s uptown stuff.”

Salazar thought a moment before saying, “It’s all a lot of supposition, Harry.”

“The last thing, though, is-and I am just starting to work on this-he was involved in some kind of caper.”

Bosch gave him a brief synopsis of what he knew about the bracelet, its theft from the bank vault and then from the pawnshop. Salazar’s domain was the forensic detail of the case. But Bosch had always trusted Sally and found that it sometimes helped to bounce other details of a case off him. The two had met in 1974, when Bosch was a patrolman and Sally was a new assistant coroner. Bosch was assigned guard duty and crowd control on East Fifty-fourth in South-Central where a firefight with the Symbionese Liberation Army had left a house burned to the ground and five bodies in the smoking rubble. Sally was assigned to see if there was a sixth-Patty Hearst-somewhere in the char. The two of them spent three days there, and when Sally finally gave up, Bosch had won a bet that she was still alive. Somewhere.

When Bosch was finished with the story about the bracelet, it seemed to have mollified Sally’s worries about the death of Billy Meadows not being a mystery. He seemed energized. He turned to a cart on which his cutting tools were piled and rolled it next to the autopsy table. He switched on a sound-activated tape recorder and picked up a scalpel and a pair of regular gardening shears. He said, “Well, let’s get to work.”