Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

Bosch had thought of that and didn’t have an answer. He said, “I don’t know.”

“If he was tortured as you say, why was the pawn ticket there for you to find? And why did they have to break into the pawnshop? You’re suggesting that he told them where the bracelet was but didn’t give up the ticket?”

Bosch had thought about this, too. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe he knew they wouldn’t let him live. So he only gave them half of what they needed. He kept something back. It was a clue. He left the pawn stub behind as a clue.”

Bosch thought about the scenario. He had first begun to put it together when rereading his notes and the reports he had typed. He decided it was time to play one more card.

“I knew Meadows twenty years ago.”

“You knew this victim, Detective Bosch?” Her voice was louder now, accusatory. “Why didn’t you say that when you first came in here? Since when does the LAPD allow its detectives to go around investigating the deaths of their friends?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I knew him. Twenty years ago. And I didn’t ask for the case. It was my turn in the bucket. I got the call out. It was…”

He didn’t want to say coincidence.

“This is all very interesting,” Wish said. “It is also irregular. We-I’m not sure we can help you. I think-”

“Look, when I knew him, it was with the U.S. Army, First Infantry in Vietnam. Okay? We were both there. He was what they called a tunnel rat. Do you know what that means?… I was one too.”

Wish said nothing. She was looking down at the bracelet again. Bosch had totally forgotten about Gray Suit.

“The Vietnamese had tunnels under their villages,” Bosch said. “Some were a century old. The tunnels went from hootch to hootch, village to village, jungle to jungle. They were under some of our own camps, everywhere. And that was our job, the tunnel soldiers, to go down into those things. There was a whole other war under the ground.”

Bosch realized that aside from a shrink and a circle group at the VA in Sepulveda he had never told anyone about the tunnels and what he did.

“And Meadows, he was good at it. As much as you could like going down into that blackness with just a flashlight and a.45, well, he did. Sometimes we’d go down and it would take hours, and sometimes it would take days. And Meadows, well, he was the only one I ever knew over there that wasn’t scared of going down there. It was life above ground that scared him.”

She didn’t say anything. Bosch looked over at Gray Suit, who was writing on a yellow tablet Bosch couldn’t read. Bosch heard someone report on the tac channel that he was transporting two prisoners to the Metro lockup.

“So now twenty years later you’ve got a tunnel caper and I’ve got a dead tunnel fighter. He was found in a pipe, a tunnel. He had property from your caper.” Bosch felt around in his pockets for his cigarettes, then remembered she had said no. “We have to work together on this one. Right now.”

He knew by her face it hadn’t worked. He emptied his coffee cup, ready for the door. He didn’t look at Wish now. He heard Gray Suit pick up the phone again and punch a number out. He stared down at the residue of sugar in the bottom of his cup. He hated sugar in his coffee.

“Detective Bosch,” Wish began, “I am sorry you had to wait in the hall so long this morning. I am sorry this fellow soldier you knew, Meadows, is dead. Whether it was twenty years ago or not, I am. I have sympathy for him, and you, and what you may have had to go through… But I am also sorry that I can’t help you at the moment. I will have to follow established protocol and talk to my supervisor. I will get back to you. As soon as possible. That is all I can do at the moment.”

Bosch dropped the cup into a trash can next to her desk and reached over to pick up the Polaroid and the bulletin page.

“Can we keep the photo here?” Agent Wish asked. “I need to show it to my supervisor.”

Bosch kept the Polaroid. He got up and stepped in front of Gray Suit’s desk. He held the Polaroid up to the man’s face. “He’s seen it,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out of the office.

Deputy Chief Irvin Irving sat at his desk, bruxing his teeth and working the muscles of his jaw into hard rubber balls. He was disturbed. And this clenching and gnashing of teeth was his habit when disturbed or in solitary, contemplative moods. As a result, the musculature of his jaw had become the most pronounced feature of his face. When looked at head-on, Irving’s jawline was actually wider than his ears, which were pinned flat against his shaven skull and had a winglike shape to them. The ears and the jaw gave Irving an intimidating if not odd visage. He looked like a flying jaw, as though his powerful molars could crush marbles. And Irving did all he could to promote this image of himself as a fearsome junkyard dog who might sink his teeth into a shoulder or leg and tear out a piece of meat the size of a softball. It was an image that had helped overcome his one impediment as a Los Angeles policeman-his silly name-and could only aid him in his long-planned ascendancy to the chief’s office on the sixth floor. So he indulged the habit, even if it did cost him a new set of $2,000 molar implants every eighteen months.

Irving pulled his tie tight against his throat and ran his hand over his gleaming scalp. He reached to the intercom buzzer. Though he could have easily pushed the speaker button then and barked his command, he waited for his new adjutant’s reply first. This was another of his habits.

“Yes, Chief?”

He loved hearing that. He smiled, then leaned forward until his great, wide jaw was inches from the intercom speaker. He was a man who did not trust that technology could do what it was supposed to do. He had to put his mouth to the speaker and shout.

“Mary, get me the jacket on Harry Bosch. It should be in the actives.”

He spelled the first and last names for her.

“Right away, Chief.”

Irving leaned back, smiled through clenched teeth but then thought he felt something out of alignment. He deftly ran his tongue over his left rear lower molar, searching for a defect in its smooth surface, maybe a slight fissure. Nothing. He opened the desk drawer and took out a small mirror. He opened his mouth and studied the back teeth. He put the mirror back and took out a pale blue Post-it pad and made a note to call for a dental checkup. He closed the drawer and remembered the time he had popped a fortune cookie into his mouth while dining with the city councilman from the Westside. The right rear lower molar had crumbled on the stale cookie. The junkyard dog decided to swallow the dental debris rather than expose the weakness to the councilman, whose confirmation vote he would someday need and expect. During the meal, he had brought to the councilman’s attention the fact that his nephew, an LAPD motorman, was a closet homosexual. Irving mentioned that he was doing his best to protect the nephew and prevent his exposure. The department was as homophobic as a Nebraska church, and if the word leaked to the rank and file, Irving explained to the councilman, the officer could forget any hope for advancement. He could also expect brutal harassment from the rest of L.A.’s finest. Irving didn’t need to mention the consequences if a scandal broke publicly. Even on the liberal Westside, it wouldn’t help a councilman’s mayoral ambitions.

Irving was smiling at the memory when Officer Mary Grosso knocked and then walked into the office with a one-inch-thick file in her hand. She placed it on Irving’s glass-topped desk. There was nothing else on its gleaming surface, not even a phone.

“You were right, Chief. It was still in the actives files.”