The Black Echo

“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 embassy clearance like he had as an MP. Saigon was sin city. Whores, 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 antiterrorism, 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 embarrassed her. It embarrassed 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 embarrassment.

“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.