Michael Connelly: The Black Echo

She said she knew from Meadows’s record that he had been busted for loitering at the reservoir. It wasn’t difficult for her to convince Rourke it was a good place to leave the body.

“But I also knew that the reservoir was Hollywood Division, that if you didn’t get the call you would at least hear about it and probably take an interest after Meadows was ID’d. See, I knew about you and Meadows. And now I knew Rourke was out of control. You were the safety valve, in case I needed to bring the whole thing down. I couldn’t let Rourke get away with it again.”

She swept her gaze across the stones and absentmindedly raised a hand and dropped it in her lap, a small show of resignation.

“After we put his body in the Jeep and covered it with the blanket, Rourke went back in to make a last sweep of the place. I stayed outside. There was a tire iron in the back. I took it and hit his fingers with it. Meadows’s fingers. It was so somebody would see it was murder. I remember the sound so clearly. The bone. So loud I thought Rourke might even have heard…”

“What about Sharkey?” Bosch asked.

“Sharkey,” she said wistfully, as if she were trying the name out for the first time.

“After the interview, I told Rourke that Sharkey didn’t see our faces at the dam. He even thought I was a man, sitting in the Jeep. But I made a mistake. I mentioned how we discussed hypnotizing him. Even though I stopped you and trusted that you wouldn’t do it without me, Rourke didn’t trust you. So he did what he did with Sharkey. After we were called out there and I saw him I…”

She didn’t finish but Bosch wanted to know everything.

“You what?”

“Later, I confronted Rourke and told him I was bringing the whole thing down because he was out of control, killing innocent people. He told me there was no way to stop it. Franklin and Delgado were in the tunnel and out of reach. They turned the radios off when they brought the C- 4 in. It’s too unstable. He said there was no stopping it without more spilled blood. Then the next night you and I were almost run down. That was Rourke, I’m sure.”

She said that the two of them played an unspoken game of mutual distrust and suspicion after that. The burglary of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock continued as planned, and Rourke steered Bosch and everybody else away from going underground to stop it. He had to let Franklin and Delgado go through with it, even though there were no diamonds left in Tran’s box. Rourke could not risk going underground to warn them, either.

Eleanor finally ended the game when she followed Bosch down into the tunnel and killed Rourke, his eyes staring at her as he slid down into the black water.

“And that’s the whole story,” she said quietly.

“My car is over this way,” Bosch said as he stood up from the bench. “I’ll take you back now.”

They found his car on the driveway, and Bosch noticed her eyes linger on the fresh soil on Meadows’s grave before she got in. He wondered if she had watched from the Federal Building as the casket was put in the ground. As he drove toward the exit, Harry said, “Why couldn’t you let it go? What happened to your brother was another time, another place. Why didn’t you let it go?”

“You don’t know how many times I’ve asked that and how many times I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t.”

They were at the light at Wilshire and Bosch was wondering what he was going to do. And once again she read him, she sensed his indecision.

“Are you going to take me in now, Harry? You might have a hard time proving your case. Everybody’s dead. It could look like you were part of it, too. You going to risk that?”

He didn’t say anything. The light changed and he drove down to the Federal Building, pulling to the curb near the garden of flags.

She said, “If it means anything to you at all, what happened between you and me, it wasn’t part of any plan. I know you won’t ever know if that’s the truth, but I wanted to say-”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say a thing about it.”

A few uneasy moments of silence passed between them.

“You’re just letting me go here?”

“I think it would be best for you, Eleanor, if you turned yourself in. Go get a lawyer and then come in. Tell them you didn’t have anything to do with the murders. Tell them the story about your brother. They are reasonable people and they’ll want to keep it low profile, avoid the scandal. The U.S. attorney will probably let you plead to something short of murder. The bureau will go along.”

“And what if I don’t turn myself in? You will tell them?”

“No. Like you said, I’m too much a part of it. They’d never go with what I’d tell them.”

He thought a long moment. He didn’t want to say what he was going to say next unless he was sure he meant it. And could, and would, do it.

“No, I won’t tell them… But if I don’t hear in a few days that you went in, I will tell Binh. And I’ll tell Tran. I won’t need to prove it to them. I’ll just tell them the story with enough facts that they’ll know it is true. Then, you know what they’ll do? They’ll act like they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and they’ll tell me to get out. And then they’ll come after you, Eleanor, looking for the same kind of justice you got for your brother.”

“You would do that, Harry?”

“I said I would. I’ll give you two days to go in. Then I tell them the story.”

She looked at him, and the pained expression on her face asked why.

Harry said, “Somebody has to answer for Sharkey.”

She turned away, put her hand on the door handle and looked out the car window at the flags flapping in the Santa Ana breeze. She didn’t look back at him when she said, “So, I guess I was wrong about you.”

“If you mean the Dollmaker case, the answer is yes, you were wrong about me.”

She looked back at him with a wan smile as she opened the door. She quickly leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She said, “Good-bye, Harry Bosch.”

Then she was out of the car, standing in the wind and looking in at him. She hesitated and then closed the door. As Harry drove away he glanced once in the mirror and saw her still at the curb. She stood there looking down like someone who had dropped something in the gutter. After that, he didn’t look back.

The morning after Memorial Day, Harry Bosch checked back into MLK, where he was severely chastised by his doctor, who seemed, to Harry at least, to take a perverse pleasure in ripping the home-applied bandages away from his shoulder and then using a stinging saline solution to rinse the wound. He spent two days resting and then was wheeled into the OR for surgery to reattach muscles that had been torn from bone by the bullet.

On the second day of his recovery from surgery, a nurse’s aide dropped off a day-old Los Angeles Times for him to while away a few hours with. Bremmer’s story was on the front page, and it accompanied a photograph of a priest standing before a lonely casket at a cemetery in Syracuse, New York. It was FBI Special Agent John Rourke’s casket. Bosch could tell from the photo that more mourners-albeit members of the media-had been at Meadows’s funeral. But Bosch tossed the front section aside after scanning the first few paragraphs of the story and realizing it wasn’t about Eleanor. He turned to the sports.

The next day, he had a visitor. Lieutenant Harvey Pounds told Bosch that when he was recovered, he would report back to Hollywood homicide. Pounds said that neither of them had any choice in the matter. The order came from the sixth floor at Parker Center. The lieutenant didn’t have much else to say, and didn’t mention the newspaper article at all. Harry took the news with a smile and a nod, not wanting to show a hint of what he felt or thought.