The Harry Bosch Novels Vol I Part 17

"You are saying they are vets," Scales cut in. He was filling a pipe with tobacco from a canister on the desk.

"Possibly. We have not identified them yet, so we don't know it for a fact. But if that is the case, there would seem a possibility that the players in the conspiracy may have met here. I stress the word 'may.' Therefore, there are two things we want from you. A look at any records you still have on Meadows and a list of every man that was here during the ten months he was."

Scales was tamping his pipe and seemingly paying no attention to what had just been said. Then he said, "No problem on his records - he's dead. On the other, I suppose I should call my lawyer just to make sure I can do that. We run a good program here. And vegetables and money from the state and the feds don't cover it. I get out the soapbox and make the rounds. We rely on the t.i.things of the community, civic organizations, things like that. Bad publicity will dry that money up faster than a Santa Ana wind. I help you, I risk that. The other risk is the loss in the faith of the men who come here for a new start. See, most of those men that were here back when Meadows was, they've gone on to new lives. They aren't criminals anymore. If I'm handing out their names to every cop that comes around, then that doesn't look too good for my program, does it?"

"Colonel Scales, we don't have time for lawyers to look this over," Bosch said. "We are on a murder case, sir. We need this information. You know we can get it if we go to the state and federal correctional departments, but that might take longer than your lawyer. We can also get it with a subpoena, but we thought mutual cooperation would be best. We are much more inclined to tread lightly if we have your cooperation."

Scales didn't move and again didn't seem to be listening. A curl of blue smoke swirled like a ghost out of his pipe bowl.

"I see," he finally said. "Then I'll just get those files, won't I?" He stood up then and went to a row of beige file cabinets that lined the wall behind his desk. He went to one drawer marked M-N-O and after a short search pulled out a thin manila file. He dropped it on his desk near Bosch. "That's the file on Meadows, there," he said. "Now let's see what else we can find here."

He went to the first drawer, which had no marking in the card slot on front. He looked through files without taking any out. Then he chose one and sat down with it.

"You are free to look through that file and I can copy anything you need from it," Scales said. "This one is my master flow chart of people through here. I can make you a list of any people Meadows could have met here. I a.s.sume you will need DOBs and PINs?"

"That would help, thank you," Wish said.

It took only fifteen minutes to look through Meadows's file. He had started a correspondence with Scales a year before his release from TI. He had the backing of a chaplain and an intake counselor who knew him because he had been a.s.signed to maintenance at the prison's intake and placement office. In one of the letters Meadows had described the tunnels he had been into in Vietnam and how he had been drawn to their darkness.

"Most of the other guys were scared to go down there," he wrote. "I wanted to go. I didn't know why then, but I think now that I was testing my limits. But the fulfillment I received from it was false. I was as hollow as the ground we fought on. The fulfillment I now have is in Jesus Christ and knowing He is with me. If given the chance, and with His guidance, I can make the right choices this time and leave these bars forever behind. I want to go from hollow ground to hallowed ground."

"Tacky but sincere enough, I guess," Wish said.

Scales looked up from the desk, where he was writing names, birth dates and prison identification numbers on a sheet of yellow paper. "He was sincere," he said in a voice that suggested there was no other way about it. "When Billy Meadows left here, I thought, I believed, he was ready for the outside and that he had shed past alliances with drugs and crime. It becomes obvious that he fell back into that temptation. But I doubt you two will find what you are looking for here. I give you these names but they won't help you."

"We'll see," Bosch said. Scales went back to writing, and Bosch watched him. He was too consumed by his faith and loyalty to see he might have been used. Bosch believed Scales was a good man but one who might be too quick to see his beliefs and hopes in someone else, perhaps someone like Meadows.

"Colonel, what do you get out of all this?" Bosch asked.

This time he put his pen down, adjusted his pipe in his set jaw and folded his hands together on the desk. "It's not what I get. It's what the Lord gets." He picked up the pen again, but then another thought came to him. "You know, these boys were destroyed in many ways when they got back. I know, it's an old story and everybody's heard it, everybody's seen the movies. But these guys have had to live it. Thousands came back here and literally marched off to the prisons. One day I was reading about that and I wondered what if there hadn't been any war and these boys never went anywhere. They just stayed in Omaha and Los Angeles and Jacksonville and New Iberia and wherever. Would they still have ended up in prison? Would they be homeless, wandering mental cases? Drug addicts?

"For most of them, I doubt that. It was the war that did it to them, that sent them the wrong way." He took a long drag on the dead pipe. "So all I do, with the help of the earth and a few prayer books, is try to put back inside what the Vietnam experience took out. And I'm pretty good at it. So I'm giving you this list, letting you take a look at that file there. But don't hurt what we've got here. You two have a natural suspicion of what goes on here, and that's fine. It's healthy for people in your position. But be careful with what is good here. Detective Bosch, you look the right age, were you over there?"

Bosch nodded and Scales said, "Then you know." He went back to finishing the list. Without looking up he said, "You two join us for lunch? Freshest vegetables in the county on our table."

They declined and stood up to go after Scales handed Bosch the list with the twenty-four names he had come up with. As Bosch turned to the office door he hesitated and said, "Colonel, do you mind me asking what other vehicles you have on the farm? I saw the pickup."

"We don't mind you asking, because we have nothing to hide. We got two more pickups like that, two John Deeres and a four-wheel-drive vehicle."

"What kind of four-wheel-drive vehicle?"

"It's a Jeep."

"And what color?"

"It's white. What's going on?"

"Just trying to clear up something. But I guess the Jeep would have the Charlie Company seal on the side, like the pickup?"

"That's right. All our vehicles are marked. When we go into Ventura we're proud of what we've accomplished. We want people to know where the vegetables are coming from."

Bosch didn't look at the names on the list until he was in the car. He didn't recognize any, but he noticed that Scales had written the letters PH after eight of the twenty-four names.

"What's that mean?" Wish asked as she leaned over and looked at the list also.

"Purple Heart," Bosch said. "One more way to say be careful, I guess."

"What about the Jeep?" she said. "He said it was white. It has a seal on the side."

"You saw how dirty the pickup was. A dirty white Jeep, it could have looked beige. If it's the right Jeep."

"He just doesn't seem right. Scales. He seems legit."

"Maybe he is. Maybe it's the people he lends his Jeep to. I didn't want to press it with him until we know more."

He started the car and they headed down the gravel road to the gate. Bosch rolled his window down. The sky was the color of bleached jeans and the air was invisible and clean and smelled like fresh green peppers. But not for long, Bosch thought. We go back into the nastiness now.

On the way back to the city Bosch cut off the Ventura Freeway and headed south through Malibu Canyon to the Pacific. It would take longer to get back, but the clean air was addictive. He wanted it for as long as possible.

"I want to see the list of the victims," he said after they had made their way through the winding canyon and the hazy blue surface of the ocean could be seen ahead. "This pedophile you mentioned earlier. Something about that story bothered me. Why would they take the guy's collection of kiddie p.o.r.no?"

"Harry, come on, you are not going to suggest that was a reason, that these guys tunneled for weeks and then blasted into a bank vault to steal a collection of kiddie p.o.r.n?"

"Of course not. But that's why it raises the question. Why'd they take the stuff?"

"Well, maybe they wanted it. Maybe one was a pedophile and he liked it. Who knows?"

"Or maybe it was all part of a cover. Take everything from every box they drilled to hide the fact that what they were really after was one box. You know, sort of blur the picture by hitting dozens of boxes. But all along the target was something in only one of the boxes. Same principle with the p.a.w.nshop break-in: take a lot of jewelry to cover they only wanted the bracelet.

"But with the vault, they wanted something that wouldn't be reported stolen afterward. Something that couldn't be reported stolen because it would get the owner into some kind of jam. Like with the pedophile. When his stuff got stolen what could he say? That's the sort of thing the tunnelers were after, but something more valuable. Something that would make hitting the safe-deposit vault more attractive than hitting the main vault.

"Something that would make killing Meadows a necessity when he endangered the whole caper by p.a.w.ning the bracelet."

She was quiet. Bosch looked over at her, but behind her sungla.s.ses she was unreadable.

"Sounds to me like you are talking about drugs again," she said after a while. "And the dog said no drugs. The DEA found no connections on our list of customers."

"Maybe drugs, maybe not. But that's why we should look at the box-holders again. I want to look at the list for myself. Want to see if anything rings a bell with it. The people who reported no losses, they are the ones that I want to start with."

"I'll get the list. We've got nothing else going anyway."

"Well, we've got these names from Scales to run down," Bosch said. "I was thinking that we'd pull mugs and take 'em to Sharkey."

"Worth a try, I guess. More like just going through the motions."

"I don't know. I think the kid is holding something. I think he maybe saw a face that night."

"I left a memo with Rourke about the hypnosis. He'll probably get back to us on that today or tomorrow."

They took the Pacific Coast Highway around the bay. The smog had been blown inland and it was clear enough to see Catalina Island out past the whitecaps. They stopped at Alice's Restaurant for lunch, and since it was late there was an open table by a window. Wish ordered an ice tea and Bosch had a beer.

"I used to come out to this pier when I was a kid," Bosch told her. "They'd take a busload of us out. Back then, they had a bait shop out on the end. I'd fish for yellowtail."

"Kids from DYS?"

"Yeah. Er, no. Back then it was called DPS. Department of Public Services. Few years back they finally realized they needed a whole department for the kids, so they came up with DYS."

She looked out the restaurant window and down along the pier. She smiled at his memories and he asked where hers were.

"All over," she said. "My father was in the military. Most I ever spent in one place was a couple years. So my memories aren't really of places. They're people."

"You and your brother were close?" Bosch said.

"Yes, with my father gone a lot. He was always there. Until he enlisted and went away for good."

Salads were put down on the table and they ate a little bit and small-talked a little bit and then sometime between when the waitress picked up the salad plates and put down the lunch plates she told her brother's story.

"Every week he'd write me from over there and every week he said he was scared, wanted to come home," she said. "It wasn't something he could say to our father or mother. But Michael wasn't the type. He should never have gone. He went because of our father. He couldn't let him down. He wasn't brave enough to say no to him, but he was brave enough to go over there. It doesn't make sense. Have you ever heard anything so dumb?"

Bosch didn't answer because he had heard similar stories, his own included. And she seemed to stop there. She either didn't know what had happened to her brother over there or didn't want to recount the details.

After a while she said, "Why'd you go?"

He knew the question was coming but in his whole life he had never been able to truthfully answer it, even to himself.

"I don't know. No choice, I guess. The inst.i.tutional life, like you said before. I wasn't going to college. Never really thought about Canada. I think it would have been harder to go there than to just get drafted and go to Vietnam. Then in sixty-eight I sort of won the draft lottery. My number came up so low I knew I was going to go. So I thought I'd outsmart 'em by joining, thought I'd write my own ticket."

"And so?"

Bosch laughed a little in the same phony way she had laughed before. "I got in, went through basic and all the bulls.h.i.t and when it came time to choose something, I picked the infantry. I still have never figured out why. They get you at that age, you know? You're invincible. Once I got over there I volunteered for a tunnel squad. It was kind of like that letter Meadows wrote to Scales. You want to see what you've got. You do things you'll never understand. You know what I mean?"

"I think so," she said. "What about Meadows? He had chances to leave and he never did, not till the very end. Why would anybody want to stay if they didn't have to?"

"There were a lot like that," Bosch said. "I guess it wasn't usual or unusual. Some just didn't want to leave that place. Meadows was one of them. It might have been a business decision, too."

"You mean drugs?"

"Well, I know he was using heroin while he was there. We know he was using and selling afterward when he got back here. So maybe when he was over there he got involved in moving it and he didn't want to leave a good thing. There is a lot that points to it. He was moved to Saigon after they took him out of the tunnels. Saigon would have been the place to be, especially with emba.s.sy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Wh.o.r.es, hash, heroin, it was a free market. A lot of people jumped into it. Heroin would have made him some nice money, especially if he had a plan, a way to move some of the stuff back here."

She pushed pieces of red snapper she wasn't going to eat around on her plate with a fork.

"It's unfair," she said. "He didn't want to come back. Some boys wanted to come home but never got the chance."

"Yes. There was nothing fair about that place."

Bosch turned and looked out the window at the ocean. There were four surfers in bright wet suits riding on the swells.

"And after the war you joined the cops."

"Well, I kicked around a little and then joined the department. It seemed most of the vets I knew, like what Scales said today, were going into the police departments or the penitentiaries."

"I don't know, Harry. You seem like the loner type. A private eye, not a man who has to take orders from men he doesn't respect."

"There are no more private operators. Everybody takes orders.... But all this stuff about me is in the file. You know it all."

"Not everything about somebody can be put down on paper. Isn't that what you said?"

He smiled as a waitress cleared the table. He said, "What about you? What's your story with the bureau?"

"Pretty simple, really. Criminal justice major, accounting minor, recruited out of Penn State. Good pay, good benefits, women highly sought and valued. Nothing original."

"Why the bank detail? I thought the fast track was ant.i.terrorism, white-collar stuff, maybe even drugs. But not the heavy squad."

"I did the white-collar stuff for five years. I was in D.C., too, the right place to be. The thing is, the emperor had no clothes. It was all deadly, deadly boring stuff." She smiled and shook her head. "I realized I just wanted to be a cop. So, that's what I became. I transferred to the first good street unit that had an opening. L.A. is the bank robbery capital of the country. When an opening came up here, I called in my markers and got the transfer. Call me a dinosaur, if you want."

"You are too beautiful for that."

Despite her dark tan, Bosch could tell the remark embarra.s.sed her. It embarra.s.sed him, too, just sort of slipping out like that.

"Sorry," he said.

"No. No, that was nice. Thank you."

"So, are you married, Eleanor?" he said and then he turned red, immediately regretting his lack of subtlety. She smiled at his embarra.s.sment.

"I was. But it was a long time ago."

Bosch nodded. "You don't have anything ... what about Rourke? You two seemed..."

"What? Are you kidding?"

"Sorry."

They laughed together then, and followed it with smiles and a long, comfortable silence.

After lunch they walked out on the pier to the spot where Bosch had once stood with rod and reel. There was no one fishing. Several of the buildings at the end of the pier were abandoned. There was a rainbow sheen on top of the water near one of the pylons. Bosch also noticed the surfers were gone. Maybe all the kids are in school, Bosch thought. Or maybe they don't fish here anymore. Maybe no fish make it this far into the poisoned bay.

"I haven't been here in a long time," he said to Eleanor. He leaned on the pier railing, his elbows on wood scarred by a thousand bait knives. "Things change."

It was midafternoon by the time they got back to the Federal Building. Wish ran the names and prisoner identification numbers Scales had given them through the NCIC and state department of justice computers and ordered mug shots photo-faxed from various prisons in the state. Bosch took the list of names and called U.S. military archives in St. Louis and asked for Jessie St. John, the same clerk he had dealt with on Monday. She said the file on William Meadows that Bosch had asked for was already on the way. Bosch didn't tell her he already had seen the FBI's copy of it. Instead, he talked her into calling up the new names he had on her computer and giving him the basic service biography of each man. He kept her past the end of shift at five o'clock in St. Louis, but she said she wanted to help.

By five o'clock L.A. time Bosch and Wish had twenty-four mug shots and brief criminal and military service sketches of the men to go with them. Nothing jumped off Wish's desk and hit either of them over the head. Fifteen of the men had served in Vietnam at some point during the period Meadows was there. Eleven of these were U.S. Army. None were tunnel rats, though four were First Infantry along with Meadows on his first tour. There were two others who were MPOs in Saigon.

They focused on the NCIC records of the six soldiers who were First Infantry or military police. Only the MPOs had bank robbery records. Bosch shuffled through the mug shots and pulled those two out. He stared at the faces, half expecting to get confirmation from the hardened, disinterested looks they gave the camera. "I like these two," he said.