The Black Echo Part 11

"It looks random. I have a video at the office I'll show you. But it looks like they said, 'You take that wall, I'll take this one, you take that one,' and so on. Some boxes right next to others that were drilled were left untouched. Why, I don't know. Didn't look like a pattern. Still, we had losses reported in ninety percent of the boxes they drilled. Mostly untraceable stuff. They chose well."

"How did you come up with three of them?"

"We figured it would take at least that many to drill that many boxes. Plus, that's how many ATVs there were."

She smiled and he bit. "Okay, how'd you know about the ATVs?"

"Well, there were tracks in the mud in the drainage line and we identified them from tires. We also found paint, blue paint, on the wall on one of the curves of the drainage line. One of them had slid on the mud and hit the wall. The paint lab in Quantico came up with the model year and make. We hit all the Honda dealers in Southern California until we came up with a purchase of three blue ATVs at a dealership in Tustin, four weeks before Labor Day. Guy paid cash and loaded them on a trailer. Gave a phony name and address.

"What was it?"

"The name? Frederic B. Isley, as in FBI. It would come up again. We once showed the salesman some six-packs that included Meadows's, yours and a few other people's photos but he couldn't make anybody as Isley."

She wiped her mouth on a napkin and dropped it on the table. He could see no lipstick on it.

"Well," she said, "I've had enough water for a week. Meet me back at the bureau and we'll go over what we've got and what you've got on the Meadows thing. Rourke and I think that is the way to go. We've exhausted all leads on the bank job, been banging against the wall. Maybe the Meadows case will bring us the break we need."

Wish picked up the tab, Bosch put down the tip.

They took their separate cars to the Federal Building. Bosch thought about her as he drove and not the case. He wanted to ask her about that little scar on her chin and not how she connected the WestLand tunnelers to Vietnam tunnel rats. He wanted to know what gave the sweet sad look to her face. He followed her car through a neighborhood of student apartments near UCLA and then across Wilshire Boulevard. They met at the elevator in the parking garage of the Federal Building.

"I think this will be best if you basically just deal with me," she said as they rode up alone. "Rourke-You and Rourke did not start off well and-"

"We didn't even start off," Bosch said.

"Well, if you would give him the chance you would see he is a good man. He did what he thought was right for the case."

The elevator doors spread apart on the seventeenth floor, and there was Rourke.

"There you two are," he said. He put his hand out to Bosch, who took it without much conviction. Rourke introduced himself.

"I was just going down for coffee and a roll," he said. "Care to join me?"

"Uh, John, we just came from a coffee shop," Wish said. "We'll meet you back up here."

Bosch and Wish were now outside the elevator and Rourke was inside. The a.s.sistant special agent in charge just nodded his head, and the door closed. Bosch and Wish headed into the office.

"He's a lot like you in a way-been through the war and all," she said. "Give him a try. You're not going to help things if you don't thaw out."

He let it go by. They walked down the hall to the Group 3 squad and Wish pointed to a desk behind hers. She said it was empty since the agent who used it had been transferred to Group 2, the p.o.r.no squad. Bosch put his briefcase on the desk and sat down. He looked around the room. It was much more crowded than the day before. About a half-dozen agents were at desks and three more were in the back standing around a file cabinet where there was a box of doughnuts. He noticed a television and VCR on a rack in the back of the office. It hadn't been there the day before.

"You said something about a video," he said to Wish.

"Oh, yes. I'll get that set up and you can watch while I answer a few phone messages on other things."

She took a videotape out of a drawer in her desk and they walked to the back of the squad. The gang of three quietly moved away with their doughnuts, alarmed by the presence of an outsider. She set the tape up and left him there to watch alone.

The video, obviously shot with a hand-held camera, was a bouncy, unprofessional walk-through of the thieves' trail. It began in what Bosch surmised was the storm sewer, a square tunnel that curved away into a darkness the camera's strobe couldn't reach. Wish had been right, it was large. A truck could have driven down it. A small stream of water moved slowly down the center of the concrete floor. There was mold and algae on the floor and the lower part of the walls, and Bosch could almost smell the dampness. The camera panned down to the grayish-green floor. There were tire tracks in the slime. The next video scene was the entrance to the thieves' tunnel, a cleanly cut hole in the sewer wall. A pair of hands moved into the picture holding the plywood circle Wish said had been used to cover the hole during the day. The hands moved further into the screen, then a head of dark hair. It was Rourke. He was wearing a dark jumpsuit with white letters across the back. FBI. He held the plywood up to the hole. It was a perfect fit.

The video jumped then, and the scene was now from inside the thieves' tunnel. It was eerie for Bosch to watch, and brought back memories of the hand-dug tunnels he had crawled through in Vietnam. This tunnel curved to the right. Surreal lighting flickered from candles set every twenty feet or so in notches dug into the wall. After curving for what he judged was about sixty feet, the tunnel turned sharply to the left. It then followed a straight-away for almost a hundred feet, candles still flickering from the walls. The camera finally came to a dead end where there was a pile of concrete rubble, twisted pieces of steel rebar and plating. The camera panned up to a gaping hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. Light poured down from the vault above. Rourke stood up there in his jumpsuit, looking down at the camera. He dragged a finger across his neck and the picture cut again. This time the camera was inside the vault, a wide-angle shot of the entire room. As in the newspaper photo Bosch had seen, hundreds of safe-deposit box doors stood open. The boxes lay empty in piles on the floor. Two crime scene techs were dusting the doors for fingerprints. Eleanor Wish and another agent were looking up at the steel wall of box doors and writing in notebooks. The camera panned down to the floor and the hole to the tunnel below. Then the tape went black. He rewound it, brought it back and put it on her desk.

"Interesting," he said. "I saw a few things I had seen before. In the tunnels over there. But nothing that would have made me start looking at tunnel rats in particular. What was the lead to Meadows, people like me?"

"First off, there was the C-4," she said. "Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent a team out to go through the concrete and steel from the blast hole. There were trace elements of the explosive. The ATF guys ran some tests and came up with C-4. I'm sure you know it. It was used in Vietnam. Tunnel rats used it especially to implode tunnels. The thing is, you can get much better stuff now, with more compressed impact area, easier handling and detonation. It's even cheaper. Also less dangerous to handle and easier to get ahold of. So we figured-I mean the ATF lab guy figured-the reason C-4 was used was because the user was comfortable with it, had used it before. So right off we thought it would be a Vietnam-era vet.

"Another corollary to Vietnam was the b.o.o.by traps. We think that before they went up into the vault to start drilling, they wired the tunnel to protect their rear. We sent an ATF dog through as a precaution, you know, to make sure there wasn't any more live C-4 lying around. The animal got a reading-indicated explosives-in two places in the tunnel. The midway point and at the entrance cut in the wall of the storm line. But there was nothing there anymore. The perps took it with them. But we found peg holes in the floor of the tunnel and snippets of steel wire at both spots-like the leftover stuff when you are cutting lengths with a wire cutter."

"Tripwires," Bosch said.

"Right. We're thinking they had the tunnel wired for intruders. If anybody had come in from behind to take them, the tunnel would have gone up. They'd've been buried under Hill Street. At least, the tunnelers took the explosives out with them when they left. Saved us stumbling across them."

"But an explosion like that probably would've killed the tunnelers along with the intruders," Bosch said.

"We know. These guys just weren't taking chances. They were heavily armed, fortified and ready to go down. Succeed or suicide. . . .

"Anyway, we didn't narrow it down specifically to tunnel rats possibly being involved until somebody caught something when we were going over the tire tracks in the main sewer line. The tracks were here and there, no complete trail. So it took us a couple days to track them from the tunnel back to the entrance at the river wash. It wasn't a straight shot. It's a labyrinth down there. You had to know your way. We figured these guys weren't sitting there on their ATVs with a flashlight and a map every night."

"Hansel and Gretel? They left crumbs along the way?"

"Sort of. The walls down there have a lot of paint on them. You know, DWP marks, so they know where they are, what line is going where, dates of inspection and so forth. With all the paint on them, some look like the side of a 7-Eleven in an East L.A. barrio. So we figured the perps marked the way. We walked the trail and looked for reoccurring marks. There was only one. Kind of a peace sign, without the circle. Just three quick slash marks."

He knew the mark. He'd used it himself in tunnels twenty years ago. Three quick slashes on a tunnel wall with a knife. It was the symbol they'd used to mark their way, so they could find the way out again.

Wish said, "One of the cops there that day-this was before LAPD turned the whole thing over to us-one of the robbery guys said he recognized it from Vietnam. He wasn't a tunnel rat. But he told us about them. That's how we connected it. From there, we went to the Department of Defense and the VA and got names. We got Meadows's. We got yours. Others."

"How many others?"

She pushed a six-inch stack of manila files across her desk.

"They're all here. Have a look if you want."

Rourke walked up then.

"Agent Wish has told me about the letter you requested," he said. "I have no problem with it. I roughed out something and we'll try to get Senior Special Agent Whitcomb to sign it sometime today."

When Bosch didn't say anything Rourke went on.

"We may have overreacted yesterday, but I hope I've set everything straight with your lieutenant and your Internal Affairs people." He gave a smile a politician would envy. "And by the way, I wanted to tell you I admire your record. Your military record. Myself, I served three tours. But I never went down into any of those ghastly tunnels. I was over there, though, till the very end. What a shame."

"What was the shame, that it ended?"

Rourke eyed him a long moment, and Bosch saw red spread across his face from the point where his dark eyebrows knitted together. Rourke was a very pale man with a sallow face that gave the impression he was sucking on a sourball. He was a few years older than Bosch. They were the same height but Rourke had more weight on his frame. To the bureau's traditional uniform of blue blazer and light-blue b.u.t.ton-down shift, he had added a red power tie.

"Look, detective, you don't have to like me, that's fine," Rourke said. "But, please, work with me on this. We want the same thing."

Bosch gave in for the time being.

"What is it that you want me to do? Tell me exactly. Am I just along for the ride or do you really want my work?"

"Bosch, you are supposedly a top-notch detective. Show us. Just follow your case. Like you said yesterday, you find who killed Meadows and we find who ripped off WestLand. So, yes, we want your best work. Proceed as you normally would but with Special Agent Wish as your partner."

Rourke walked away and out of the squad. Bosch figured he must have his own office somewhere off the quiet hallway. He turned to Wish's desk and picked up the stack of files. He said, "Okay then, let's go."

Wish signed out a bureau car and drove while Bosch looked through the stack of military files on his lap. He noticed his own was on top. He glanced at some of the others and recognized only Meadows's name.

"Where to?" Wish asked as she pulled out of the garage and took Veteran Avenue up to Wilshire.

"Hollywood," he said. "Is Rourke always such a stiff?"

She turned east and smiled one of those smiles that made Bosch wonder whether she and Rourke had something going on.

"When he wants," she said. "He's a good administrator, though. He runs the squad well. Always has been the leader type, I guess. I think he said he was in charge of a whole outfit or something when he was with the army. Over there in Saigon."

No way there was anything between them, he thought then. You don't defend your lover by calling him a good administrator. There was nothing there.

"He's in the wrong business for administrating," Bosch said. "Go up to Hollywood Boulevard, the neighborhood south of the Chinese theater."

It would take fifteen minutes to get there. He opened the top file-it was his own-and began looking through the papers. Between a set of psychiatric evaluation reports he found a black-and-white photo, almost like a mug shot, of a young man in uniform, his face unlined by age or experience.

"You looked good in a crew cut," Wish said, interrupting his thoughts. "Reminded me of my brother when I saw that."

Bosch looked at her but didn't say anything. He put the photo down and went back to roaming through the doc.u.ments in the file, reading s.n.a.t.c.hes of information about a stranger who was himself.

Wish said, "We were able to find nine men with Vietnam tunnel experience living in Southern California. We checked them all out. Meadows was the only one we really moved up to the level of suspect. He was a hype, had the criminal record. He also had a history of working in tunnels even after he came back from the war." She drove in silence for a few minutes while Bosch read. Then she said, "We watched him a whole month. After the burglary."

"What was he doing?"

"Nothing that we could tell. He might have been doing some dealing. We were never sure. He'd go down to Venice to buy balloons of tar about every three days. But it looked like it was for personal consumption. If he was selling, no customers ever came. No other visitors the whole month we watched. h.e.l.l, if we could prove he was selling, we would have popped him and then had something decent to scam him with when we talked about the bank job."

She was quiet again for a moment, then in a tone that Bosch thought was meant more to convince herself than him said, "He wasn't selling."

"I believe you," he said.

"You going to tell me what we're looking for in Hollywood?"

"We're looking for a wit. A possible witness. How was Meadows living during the month you watched? I mean, moneywise. How'd he get money to go down to Venice?"

"Near as we could tell, he was on welfare and had a VA disability check. That's it."

"Why did you call it off after a month?"

"We didn't have anything, and we weren't even sure he had anything to do with it. We-"

"Who pulled the plug?"

"Rourke did. He couldn't-"

"The administrator."

"Let me finish. He couldn't justify the cost of continued surveillance without any results. We were going on a hunch, nothing more. You're just looking at it from hindsight. But it had been almost two months since the robbery. There was nothing there that pointed to him. In fact, we were just going through the motions after a while. We thought whoever it really was, they were in Monaco or Argentina. Not scoring balloon hits of tar heroin on Venice beach and living in a tramp apartment in the Valley. At the time, Meadows didn't make sense. Rourke called the watch. But I concurred. I guess now we know we f.u.c.ked up. Satisfied?"

Bosch didn't answer. He knew Rourke had been correct in calling the watch. Nowhere is hindsight better than in cop work. He changed the subject.

"Why that bank, did you ever think about that? Why WestLand National? Why not a Wells Fargo or a vault in a Beverly Hills bank? Probably more money in the banks over in the Hills anyway. You said these underground tunnels go all over the place."

"They do. I don't know the answer to that one. Maybe they picked a downtown bank because they wanted a full three days to open the boxes and they knew downtown banks aren't open Sat.u.r.days. Maybe only Meadows and his friends know the answer. What are we looking for in this neighborhood? There was nothing in your reports about a possible witness. Witness to what?"

They were in the neighborhood. The street was lined with run-down motels that had looked depressing the day they were finished being built. Bosch pointed out one of these, the Blue Chateau, and told her to park. It was as depressing as all the others on the street. Concrete block, early fifties design. Painted light blue with darker blue trim that was peeling. It was a two-story courtyard building with towels and clothes hanging out of almost every open window. It was a place where the interior would rival the exterior as an eyesore, Bosch knew. Where runaways crowded eight or ten to a room, the strongest getting the bed, the others the floor or the bathtub. There were places like this on many of the blocks near the Boulevard. There always had been and always would be.

As they sat in the fed car looking at the motel Bosch told her about the half-finished paint scrawl he had found on the pipe at the reservoir and the anonymous 911 caller. He told her he believed the voice went with the paint. Edward Niese, AKA Sharkey.

"These kids, the runaways, they form street cliques," Bosch said as he got out of the car. "Not exactly like gangs. It's not a turf thing. It's for protection and business. According to the CRASH files, Sharkey's crew has been hanging out at the Chateau here for the last couple of months."

As Bosch closed the car door, he noticed a car pull to the curb a half-block up the street. He took a quick glance at it but didn't recognize the car. He thought he could see two figures in it, but it was too far away for him to be sure, or to tell if it was Lewis and Clarke. He headed up a flagstone walkway to an entrance hallway below a broken neon sign for the motel office.

In the office Bosch could see an old man sitting behind a gla.s.s window with a slide tray at its base. The man was reading the day's green sheet from Santa Anita. He didn't pull his eyes away until Bosch and Wish were at the window.

"Yes, officers, what can I do for you?"

He was a worn-out old man whose eyes had quit caring about anything but the odds on three-year-olds. He knew cops before they flipped their buzzers. And he knew to give them what they wanted without much fuss.

"Kid named Sharkey," Bosch said. "What's the room?"

"Seven, but he's gone. I think. His motorbike usually sets there in the hall when he's around. There's no bike there. He's gone. Most probably."

"Most probably. Anybody else in seven?"

"Sure. Somebody's always around."

"First floor?"

"Yup."

"Back door or window?"

"Both. Sliding door on the back. Very expensive to replace."

The old man reached over to the key rack and took a key off a hook marked 7. He slid it into the tray beneath the window between him and Bosch.

Detective Pierce Lewis found a receipt from an automatic teller machine in his wallet and used it to pick his teeth. His mouth tasted as though there was still a piece of breakfast sausage in there somewhere. He slid the paper card in and out between his teeth until they felt clean. He made a smacking, unsatisfied sound with his mouth.

"What?" Detective Don Clarke said. He knew his partner's behavioral nuances. The teeth picking and lip smacking meant something was bothering him.

"I think he made us, is all," Lewis said after flipping the card out the window into the street. "That little look he threw down the street when they got out of the car. He was very quick, but I think he made us."

"He didn't make us. If he did, he woulda come charging down here to start up a commotion or something. That's how they do it. Make a commotion, file a lawsuit. He'd've had the Police Protective League up our a.s.s by now. I'm telling you, cops are the last to notice a tail."