Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

He drove into the cemetery off Sepulveda Boulevard and up to the great black iron gates that stood closed across the gravel entrance road. Bosch got out and walked up, but they were locked with a chain and padlock. He looked through the black bars and saw a small stone-block house about thirty yards up the gravel road. He saw the pale blue glow of TV light against a curtained window. Bosch went back to the car and flipped the siren. He let it wail until a light came on behind the curtain. The cemetery attendant came out a few moments later and walked toward the gate with a flashlight, while Bosch got his badge case out and held it open through the bars. The man wore dark pants and a light-blue shirt with a tin badge on it.

“You police?” he asked.

Bosch felt like saying no, Amway. Instead, he said, “LAPD. I wonder if you can open ’er up for me.”

The attendant put the flashlight on his badge and ID. In the light Bosch could see the white whiskers on the man’s face and smell the slight scent of bourbon and sweat.

“What’s the problem, officer?”

“Detective. I’m on a homicide investigation, Mr…?”

“Kester. Homicide? We got plenty dead people here, but these cases are closed, I guess you could say.”

“Mr. Kester, I don’t have time to go through all the details but what I need to do is take a look at the Vietnam memorial, the replica that is on display here for the holiday weekend.”

“What’s wrong with your arm, and where’s your partner? Don’t you guys travel in twos?”

“I was hurt, Mr. Kester. My partner is working on another part of the investigation. You watch too much TV in that little room of yours. That’s TV cops stuff.”

Bosch said this last part with a smile, but he was already getting tired of the old security guard. Kester turned and looked at the cemetery house and then back at Bosch.

“You seen the TV light, right? I figured that one. Uh, this is federal property and I don’t know if I can open it up without-”

“Look, Kester, I know you’re civil service and they haven’t fired anyone since maybe Truman was president. But if you give me a bad time on this, I’m going to give you a bad time. I’ll put a drinking-on-the-job beef in on you Tuesday morning. First thing. Now let’s do it. Open it up and I won’t bother you. I just need to take a look at the wall.”

Bosch rattled the chain. Kester stared dull-eyed at the lock and then fished a ring of keys off his belt and opened the gate.

“Sorry,” Bosch said.

“I still don’t think this is proper,” Kester said angrily. “What’s that black stone got to do with a homicide anyway?”

“Maybe everything,” Bosch said. He started walking back to his car but then turned around, remembering something he had read about the memorial. “There’s a book. It tells where the names are on the wall. You can look them up. Is that up there at the wall?”

Kester had a puzzled look on his face that Bosch could see even in the dark. He said, “Don’t know about any book. All I know is that the U.S. Park Service people brought that thing in here, set it up. Took a bulldozer to clear a spot on the hill. They got some guy that stays with it during proper visiting hours. He’s the one you’ll have to ask about books. And don’t ask me where he is. I don’t even know his name. You gonna be a while or should I leave it unlocked?”

“Better lock it up. I’ll come get you when I’m leaving.”

He drove the car through the gate after the old man pulled it open, then up to a gravel parking area near the hill. Bosch could see the dark shine of the wall in the gash carved out of the rise. There were no lights and the area was deserted. He took a flashlight off the car seat and headed up the slope.

He first swung the light around to get an idea of the wall’s size. It was about sixty feet long, tapering at each end. Then he walked up close enough to read the names. An unexpected feeling came over him. A dread. He did not want to see these names, he realized. There would be too many that he knew. And what was worse was that he might come across names he didn’t expect, that belonged to men he didn’t know were here. He swept the beam around and saw a wooden lectern, its top canted and ledged to hold a book, like a church Bible stand. But when he walked over, he found nothing on the stand. The park service people must have taken the directory with them for safekeeping. Bosch turned and looked back at the wall, its far end tapering off into darkness. He checked his cigarettes and saw he had nearly a whole pack. He admitted to himself that he had expected it would be this way. He would have to read every name. He knew it before he came. He lit a cigarette and put the beam on the first panel of the wall.

It was four hours before he saw a name he recognized. It wasn’t Michael Scarletti. It was Darius Coleman, a boy Bosch had known from First Infantry. Coleman was the first guy Bosch had known, really known, to get blown away. Everybody had called him Cake. He had a knife-cut tattoo on his forearm that said Cake. And he was killed by friendly fire when a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant called in the wrong chart coordinates for an air strike in the Triangle.

Bosch reached to the wall and ran his fingers along the letters in the dead soldier’s name. He had seen people do that on TV and in movies. He pictured Cake with a reefer tucked behind his ear, sitting on his pack and eating chocolate cake out of a can. He was always trading for everybody’s cake. The reefer made him crave the chocolate.

Harry moved on to other names after that, stopping only to light cigarettes, until he had none left. In nearly four more hours he had come across three dozen more names belonging to soldiers he had known and knew were dead. There were no surprise names, and so his fear in that regard was unfounded. But despair came from something else. A small picture of a man in uniform was wedged into the thin crack between the false marble panels of the memorial. The man offered his full, proud smile to the world. Now he was a name on the wall. Bosch held the photo in his hand and turned it over. It said: “George, we miss your smile. All our love, Mom and Teri.”

Bosch carefully put the photo back into the crack, feeling like an intruder on something very private. He thought about George, a man he never knew, and grew sad for no reason he could explain to himself. After a while, he moved on.

At the end, after 58,132 names, there was one he had not seen. Michael Scarletti. It was what he had expected. Bosch looked up at the sky. It was turning orange in the east and he could feel a slight breeze coming out of the northwest. To the south the Federal Building loomed above the cemetery tree line like a giant dark tombstone. Bosch was lost. He didn’t know why he was here or whether what he had found meant a damned thing. Was Michael Scarletti still alive? Had he ever existed? What Eleanor had said about her trip to the memorial had seemed so real and true. How could any of this make sense? The beam of the flashlight was weak and dying. He turned it off.

Bosch napped a couple of hours in his car at the cemetery. When he woke the sun was high in the sky, and for the first time he noticed that the cemetery lawns were awash in flags, each grave marked by a small plastic Old Glory on a wooden stick. He started the car and slowly made his way along the thin cemetery roads, looking for the spot where Meadows would be buried.

It wasn’t hard to find. Nestled on the side of one of the roads that wound into the northeast section of the cemetery were four vans with microwave antennas. There was a grouping of other cars as well. The media. Bosch hadn’t expected all of the TV cameras and the reporters. But once he saw this crowd he realized that he had forgotten that holidays were slow news days. And the tunnel caper, as it had been dubbed by the media, was still a hot item. The video vampires would need fresh footage for the evening’s broadcasts.