The Black Echo

He stood back up and began waving the card to get the ink to dry. With his other hand he held up the plastic evidence bag Sakai had given him. In it a rubber band held together a hypodermic needle, a small vial that was half filled with what looked like dirty water, a wad of cotton and a pack of matches. It was a shooter’s kit and it looked fairly new. The spike was clean, with no sign of corrosion. The cotton, Bosch guessed, had only been used as a strainer once or twice. There were tiny whitish-brown crystals in the fibers. By turning the bag he could look inside each side of the matchbook and see only two matches missing.

Donovan crawled out of the pipe at that moment. He was wearing a miner’s helmet equipped with a flashlight. In one hand he carried several plastic bags, each containing a yellowed newspaper, or a food wrapper or a crushed beer can. In the other he carried a clipboard on which he had diagramed where each item had been found in the pipe. Spiderwebs hung off the sides of the helmet. Sweat was running down his face and staining the painter’s breathing mask he wore over his mouth and nose. Bosch held up the bag containing the shooter’s kit. Donovan stopped in his tracks.

“You find a stove in there?” Bosch asked.

“Shit, he’s a hype?” Donovan said. “I knew it. What the fuck are we doin’ all this for?”

Bosch didn’t answer. He waited him out.

“Answer is yes, I found a Coke can,” Donovan said.

The crime scene tech looked through the plastic bags in his hands and held one up to Bosch. It contained two halves of a Coke can. The can looked reasonably new and had been cut in half with a knife. The bottom half had been inverted and its concave surface used as a pan to cook heroin and water. A stove. Most hypes no longer used spoons. Carrying a spoon was probable cause for arrest. Cans were easy to come by, easy to handle and disposable.

“We need the kit and the stove printed as soon as we can,” Bosch said. Donovan nodded and carried his burden of plastic bags toward the police van. Bosch turned his attention back to the ME’s men.

“No knife on him, right?” Bosch said.

“Right,” Sakai said. “Why?”

“I need a knife. Incomplete scene without a knife.”

“So what. Guy’s a hype. Hypes steal from hypes. His pals probably took it.”

Sakai’s gloved hands rolled up the sleeves of the dead man’s shirt. This revealed a network of scar tissue on both arms. Old needle marks, craters left by abscesses and infections. In the crook of the left elbow was a fresh spike mark and a large yellow-and-purplish hemorrhage under the skin.

“Bingo,” Sakai said. “I’d say this guy took a hot load in the arm and, phssst, that was it. Like I said, you got a hype case, Bosch. You’ll have an early day. Go get a Dodger dog.”

Bosch crouched down again to look closer.

“That’s what everybody keeps telling me,” he said.

And Sakai was probably right, he thought. But he didn’t want to fold this one away yet. Too many things didn’t fit. The missing tracks in the pipe. The shirt pulled over the head. The broken finger. No knife.

“How come all the tracks are old except the one?” he asked, more of himself than Sakai.

“Who knows?” Sakai answered anyway. “Maybe he’d been off it awhile and decided to jump back in. A hype’s a hype. There aren’t any reasons.”

Staring at the tracks on the dead man’s arms, Bosch noticed blue ink on the skin just below the sleeve that was bunched up on the left bicep. He couldn’t see enough to make out what it said.

“Pull that up,” he said and pointed.

Sakai worked the sleeve up to the shoulder, revealing a tattoo of blue and red ink. It was a cartoonish rat standing on hind legs with a rabid, toothy and vulgar grin. In one hand the rat held a pistol, in the other a booze bottle marked XXX. The blue writing above and below the cartoon was smeared by age and the spread of skin. Sakai tried to read it.

“Says ‘Force’-no, ‘First.’ Says ‘First Infantry.’ This guy was army. The bottom part doesn’t make-it’s another language. ‘Non… Gratum… Anum… Ro-’ I can’t make that out.”

“Rodentum,” Bosch said.

Sakai looked at him.

“Dog Latin,” Bosch told him. “Not worth a rat’s ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.”

“Whatever,” Sakai said. He took an appraising look at the body and the pipe. He said, “Well, he ended up in a tunnel, didn’t he? Sort of.”

Bosch reached his bare hand to the dead man’s face and pushed the straggly black and gray hairs off the forehead and away from the vacant eyes. His doing this without gloves made the others stop what they were doing and watch this unusual, if not unsanitary, behavior. Bosch paid no notice. He stared at the face for a long moment, not saying anything, not hearing if anything was said. In the moment that he realized that he knew the face, just as he knew the tattoo, the vision of a young man flashed in his mind. Rawboned and tan, hair buzzed short. Alive, not dead. He stood up and turned quickly away from the body.