The Black Echo Part 10

Then he, too, hung up, privately embarra.s.sed that his commander had not deemed it necessary to say good night to him. Clarke quickly walked up.

"So?"

"So we pick him up again tomorrow morning. Bring your p.i.s.s bottle."

"That's it? Just surveillance?"

"At this time."

"s.h.i.t. I want to search that f.u.c.ker's house. Break some stuff. He's probably got the s.h.i.t from that heist sitting up there."

"If he was involved, I doubt he would be so stupid. We sit back, for now. If he's dirty on this, we'll see."

"Oh, he's dirty. Don't worry."

"We'll see."

Sharkey sat on the concrete block wall that fronted a parking lot on Santa Monica Boulevard. He closely watched the lighted front of the 7-Eleven across the Street, checking out who was coming and who was going. Mostly tourist trade and couples. No singles yet. None that fit the bill. The boy called Arson sauntered over and said, "This ain't going nowhere, budro."

Arson's hair was red and waxed into spiky flames. He wore black jeans and a dirty black T-shirt. He was smoking a Salem. He wasn't stoned but he was hungry. Sharkey looked at him and then past him to where the third boy, the one known as Mojo, sat on the ground near the bikes. Mojo was shorter and wider, with his black hair slicked back in a k.n.o.b behind his head. Acne scars marked his face forever as sullen.

"Give it a few more minutes," Sharkey said.

"I want to eat, man," Arson said.

"Well, what do you think I'm trying to do? We all want to eat."

"Maybe we could see how Bettijane's doing," Mojo said. "She'll have made enough for us to eat."

Sharkey looked over at him and said, "You two go ahead. I'm staying till I score. I'm gonna eat."

As he said this he watched a maroon Jaguar XJ6 pull into the convenience store's lot.

"How about the guy in the pipe?" Arson asked. "You think they found him yet? We could go up there and check him out, see if there is any bread. I don't know why you didn't have the b.a.l.l.s to do it last night, Shark."

"Hey, you go up there by yourself and check it out if you want," Sharkey said. "See who has b.a.l.l.s then."

He hadn't told them that he had called 911 about the body. That would be harder for them to forgive than his fear of going into the pipe. A lone man got out of the Jaguar. He looked like late thirties, brush cut, baggy white slacks and shirt, sweater draped around his shoulders. Sharkey saw no one waiting in the car.

"Hey, check out the Jag," he said. The other two looked over at the store. "This is it. I'm going."

"We'll be here," Arson said.

Sharkey got off the wall and trotted across the boulevard. He watched the Jag's owner through the windows of the store. He had an ice cream in his hand and was looking at the magazine rack. His eyes were constantly on the prowl as he looked at the other men in the store. Sharkey was encouraged as he saw the man head toward the counter to pay for the ice cream. He squatted against the front of the store, the grille of the Jag four feet away.

When the man came out, Sharkey waited for their eyes to lock and the man to smile before he spoke up.

"Hey, mister?" he said as he got up. "I was wondering if you could do me a favor?"

The man looked around the parking lot before answering.

"Sure. What do you need?"

"Well, I was wondering if you might go in and get me a beer. I'll give you the money and all. I just want a beer. To relax, you know?"

The man hesitated. "I don't know . . . that would be illegal, wouldn't it? You're not twenty-one. I could get in trouble."

"Well," Sharkey said with a smile, "do you have any beer at home? Then you wouldn't have to be buying it. Just giving somebody a beer ain't no crime."

"Well . . ."

"I wouldn't stay long. We could probably relax each other a little bit, you know?"

The man took another look around the parking lot. No one was watching. Sharkey thought he had him now.

"Okay," he said. "I can take you back here later if you want."

"Sure. That'd be cool."

They drove east on Santa Monica to Flores and then south a couple of blocks to a townhouse development. Sharkey never turned around or tried to look in the mirrors. They would be back there. He knew it. There was a security gate on the outside of the property which the man had a key for and pulled closed behind them. Then they went into his townhouse.

"My name is Jack," the man said. "What can I get you?"

"I'm Phil. Do you have any food? I'm kind of hungry, too." Sharkey looked around for the security intercom, and the b.u.t.ton that would unlatch the gate. The apartment was mostly light-colored furniture on an off-white deep pile carpet. "Nice place."

"Thanks. Let me see what I have. If you want to wash your clothes, we can get that done, too, while you are here. I don't do this very often, you know. But when I can help someone I try."

Sharkey followed him into the kitchen. The security console was on the wall next to the phone. When Jack opened the refrigerator and bent down to look in, Sharkey pushed the b.u.t.ton that opened the gate outside. Jack didn't notice.

"I have tuna fish. And I can make a salad. How long have you been on the street? I'm not going to call you Phil. If you don't want to tell me your real name, that's fine."

"Um, tuna fish would be good. Not too long."

"Are you clean?"

"Yeah, sure. I'm okay."

"We'll take precautions."

It was time. Sharkey stepped backward into the hall. Jack looked up from the refrigerator, a plastic bowl in his hand, his mouth slightly ajar. Sharkey thought there was a look of recognition in his face, like he knew what was about to happen. Sharkey twisted the dead bolt and opened the door. Arson and Mojo walked in.

"Hey, what is this?" Jack said, though there was no confidence in his voice. He rushed into the hall and Arson, who was the biggest of all four of them, hit him with a fist on the bridge of his nose. There was a sound like a pencil breaking, and the plastic bowl of tuna fish clumped to the ground. Then there was a lot of blood on the off-white carpet.

Part III

Tuesday,May 22

Eleanor Wish called again Tuesday morning while Harry Bosch was fiddling with his tie in front of the bathroom mirror. She said she wanted to meet at a coffee shop in Westwood before taking him into the bureau. He had already had two cups of coffee but said he'd be there. He hung up, fastened the top b.u.t.ton on his white shirt and pulled the tie snugly to his neck. He couldn't remember the last time he had paid such attention to the details of his appearance.

When he got there, she was in one of the booths along the front windows. She had both hands on the water gla.s.s in front of her and looked content. There was a plate pushed off to the side that had the paper wrapping from a m.u.f.fin on it. She gave him a short courtesy smile as he slid in and waved a hand at a waitress.

"Just coffee," Bosch said.

"You already ate?" Wish said when the waitress went away.

"Uh, no. But I'm fine."

"You don't eat much, I can tell."

Said more like a mother than a detective.

"So, who's going to tell me about it? You or Rourke?"

"Me."

The waitress put down a cup of coffee. Bosch could hear four salesmen in the next booth d.i.c.kering over the table's breakfast bill. He took a small swallow of hot coffee.

"I would like the FBI's request for my help put on paper, signed by the senior special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office." She hesitated a moment, put her gla.s.s down and looked directly at him for the first time. Her eyes were so dark they betrayed nothing about her. At their corners, he saw just the beginning of a gentle web of lines in the tan skin.

At the line of her chin there was a small, white crescent scar, very old and almost unnoticeable. He wondered if the scar and the lines bothered her, as he believed they would most women. Her face seemed to him to have a slight sadness cast in it, as if a mystery carried inside had worked its way outside. Perhaps it was fatigue, he thought. Nevertheless, she was an attractive woman. He figured her age for early thirties.

"I think that can be arranged," she said. "Any other demands before we get to work?"

He smiled and shook his head no.

"You know, Bosch, I got your murder book yesterday and read through it last night. For what you had there, and for one day's work, it was very good work, Most other detectives, that body'd still be in the waiting line at the morgue and listed as probable accidental OD."

He said nothing.

"Where should we begin on it today?" she asked.

"I've got some things working that weren't in the book yet. Why don't you tell me about the bank burglary first? I need the background. All I know is what you put out to the papers and on the BOLOs. You bring me up, then I'll take it from there, tell you about Meadows." The waitress came and checked his cup and her gla.s.s. Then Eleanor Wish told the story of the bank heist. Bosch thought of questions as she went along, but he tried to note them in his head to ask afterward. He sensed that she marveled at the story, the planning and execution of the caper. Whoever they were, the tunnelers, they had her respect. He found himself almost jealous.

"Beneath the streets of L.A.," she said, "there are more than four hundred miles of storm lines that are wide enough and tall enough to drive a car through. After that, you've got even more tributary lines. Eleven hundred more miles that you could walk or at least crawl through.

"This means anybody can go under and, if they know the way, get close to any building they want to in the city. And it is not that difficult to find the way. The plans for the whole network are public record, on file with the county recorder's office. Anyway, these guys used the drainage system to get to WestLand National."

He had already figured as much but didn't bother to say. She said the FBI believed there were at least three underground men and then at least one on top to act as lookout, provide other necessary functions. The topsider probably communicated with them by radio, except possibly near the end because of the danger that radio waves might set off the explosive detonators.

The underground men made their way through the drainage system on Honda all-terrain vehicles. There was a drive-in entrance to the storm sewer system at a wash in the Los Angeles River basin northeast of downtown. They drove in there, probably under cover of darkness, and following recorder's maps, made their way through the tunnel network to a spot under Wilshire Boulevard in downtown, about 30 feet below and 150 yards west of WestLand National. It was a two-mile trip.

An industrial drill with a twenty-four-inch circle bit, probably diamond-tipped, was attached to a generator on one of the ATVs and used to cut a hole through the six-inch concrete wall of the stormwater tunnel. From there the underground men began to dig.

"The actual break-in to the vault occurred on Labor Day weekend," Wish said. "We think they must have begun the tunnel three or four weeks earlier. They'd only work nights. Go in, dig some and be back out by dawn. The DWP has inspectors that routinely go through the system looking for cracks and other problems. They work days, so the perps probably didn't risk it."

"What about the hole they cut in the side, wouldn't the water and power people have seen that?" asked Bosch, who immediately became annoyed with himself for asking a question before she was done.

"No," she said. "These guys thought of everything. They had a piece of plywood cut in a circle twenty-four inches wide. They coated it with concrete-we found it there after. We think that when they left each morning, they put this in the hole, and then each time they'd caulk around the edges with more concrete. It would look like a pipeline from a storm drain that had been capped off. That's pretty common down there. I've been. You see capped lines all over the place. The twenty-four inches is a standard size. So this would have looked normal. It doesn't get noticed and the perps just come back the next night, go back in and dig a little farther toward the bank."

She said the tunnel was dug primarily with hand tools-shovels, picks, drills powered off the generator on the ATV. The tunnelers probably used flashlights but also candles. Some of them were found still burning in the tunnel after the robbery was discovered. They were propped in small indentations cut in the walls.

"That ring a bell?" Wish asked.

He nodded.

"We figure they made about ten to twenty feet of progress a night," she said. "We found two wheelbarrows in the tunnel, after. They had been cut in half and disa.s.sembled to fit through the twenty-four-inch hole and then strapped back together to be used during the digging. It must have been one or two of the perps' jobs to make runs back out of the tunnel and to dump the dirt and debris from the dig into the main drainage line. There is a steady flow of water on the floor of the line, and it would have washed the dirt away, eventually, to the river wash. We figure that on some nights their topside partner opened fire hydrants up on Hill to get more water flowing down there."

"So they had water down there, even in a drought."

"Even in a drought . . ."

Wish said that when the thieves finally dug their way under the bank, they tapped into the bank's own underground electric and telephone lines. With downtown a ghost town on weekends, the bank branch was closed on Sat.u.r.days. So on Friday, after business hours, the thieves bypa.s.sed the alarms. One of the perps had to be a bell-man. Not Meadows, he was probably the explosives man.

"The funny thing was, they didn't need a bellman," she said. "The vault's sensor alarm had repeatedly been going off all week. These guys, with their digging and their drills, must have been tripping the alarms. Four straight nights the cops are called out along with the manager. Sometimes three times in one night. They don't find anything and begin to think it's the alarm. The sound-and-movement sensor is off balance. So the manager calls the alarm company and they can't get anybody out until after the holiday weekend, you know, Labor Day. So this guy, the manager-"

"Turns the alarm off." Bosch finished for her.

"You got it. He decides he isn't going to get called out each night during the weekend. He's supposed to go down to the Springs to his time-share condo and play golf. He turns the alarms off. Of course, he no longer works for WestLand National."

Under the vault, the bandits used a water-cooled industrial drill, which was bolted upside down to the underside of the vault slab, to bore a two-and-a-half-inch hole through the five feet of concrete and steel. FBI crime scene a.n.a.lysts estimated that took five hours, and only if the drill didn't overheat. Water to cool it came from a tap into an underground water main. They used the bank's water.

"After they got the hole drilled, they packed it with C-4," she said. "Ran the wire down through their tunnel and out into the drainage tunnel. They popped it from there." She said LAPD emergency-response records showed that at 9:14 A.M. on that Sat.u.r.day, alarms were reported at a bank across the street from WestLand National and a jewelry store a half-block away.

"We figure that was the detonation time," Wish said. "Patrol was sent out, looked around and didn't find anything, decided the alarms were probably triggered by an earthquake tremor and left. n.o.body bothered to check WestLand National. Its alarm hadn't made a peep. They didn't know that it had been turned off."

Once into the vault, they didn't leave, she said. They worked right through the three-day weekend, drilling the locks on the deposit boxes, pulling the drawers and emptying them.

"We found empty food cans, potato chip bags, freeze-dried food packets, you know, survival store stuff," Wish said. "It looks like they stayed there, maybe slept in shifts. In the tunnel there was a wide part, it was like a small room. Like a sleeping room, we think. We found the pattern from a sleeping bag impressed on the dirt floor. We also found impressions in the sand left by the stocks of M-16s-they brought automatic weapons with them. They weren't planning on surrendering if things went wrong."

She let him think about that a few moments and then continued. "We estimate they were in the vault sixty hours, maybe a few more. They drilled four hundred and sixty-four of the boxes. Out of seven fifty. If there were three of them, then that's about a hundred and fifty-five boxes each. Subtract about fifteen hours for rest and eating over the three days they were in there, and you've got each man drilling three, four boxes an hour."

They must have had a time limit, she said. Maybe three o'clock or thereabouts Tuesday morning. If they quit drilling by then, it gave them plenty of time to pack up and get out. They took the loot and their tools and backed out. The bank manager, with a fresh Palm Springs tan on his face, discovered the heist when he opened the vault for business Tuesday morning.

"That's it in a nutsh.e.l.l," she said. "Best thing I've seen or heard of since I've been in the job. Only a few mistakes. We've found out a lot about how they did it but not much about who did it. Meadows was as close as we ever got, and now he's dead. That photograph you showed me yesterday. Of the bracelet? You were right, it's the first thing that's ever turned up from one of those boxes that we know of."

"But now it's gone."

Bosch waited for her to say something but she was done.

"How'd they pick the boxes to drill?" he asked.