Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

“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.”

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?”