The Black Echo

  “You stay away from the case, Bosch!”

  Avoiding the eyes that followed him, Bosch walked through the squad room and dropped into his seat at the homicide table. He looked across at Edgar, who was seated at his own space.

  “You did good,” Bosch said. “You should come out all right.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m off the case and those two assholes are going to put paper in on me. I’ve got the afternoon and that’s about it before I get the ROD.”

  “God damn.”

  The deputy chief in charge of IAD had to sign off on all Relieved of Duty orders and temporary suspensions. Stiffer penalties had to be recommended to a police commission subcommittee for approval. Lewis and Clarke would go for a temporary ROD for conduct unbecoming an officer, or CUBO, as it was known. Then they’d work on something stiffer to take to the commission. If the deputy chief signed an ROD on Bosch, he would have to be notified according to union regs. That meant in person or in a tape-recorded phone conversation. Once notification was made, Bosch could be assigned to a desk at IAD in Parker Center or to his home until the conclusion of the investigation. But as they had just promised, Lewis and Clarke would go for assignment to IAD. That way they could put him on display like a trophy.

  “You need anything from me on Spivey?” he asked Edgar.

  “No. I’m set. I’m gonna start typing it up if I can get a machine.”

  “Did you happen to check like I asked on Meadows’s job on the subway project?”

  “Harry, you. . .” Edgar must have thought better of saying what he wanted to say. “Yeah, I checked it out. For what it’s worth, they said they haven’t had anyone named Meadows on the job. There is a Fields, but he’s black and he was at work today. And Meadows probly wasn’t working under any other name because they aren’t running a midnight shift. The project is ahead of schedule, if you can believe that shit.” Edgar then called out, “I got dibs on the Selectric.”

  “No way,” called back an autos detective named Minkly. “I’m on deck with that one.”

  Edgar started looking around for another candidate. Late in the day, the typewriters in the office were like gold. There were a dozen machines for thirty-two detectives: that was if you included the manual jobs and the electrics with nervous tics like moving borders or jumpy space bars.

  “Okay then,” Edgar called out. “I got dibs after you, Mink.” Then Edgar lowered his voice and turned to Bosch. “Who you think he’ll put me with?”

  “Pounds? I don’t know.” It was like guessing who your wife would marry after you punched the time clock for the last time. Bosch wasn’t all that interested in speculating who would be partnered with Edgar. He said, “Listen, I have to do some things.”

  “Sure, Harry. You need any help, anything from me?”

  Bosch shook his head and picked up the phone. He called his lawyer and left a message. It usually took three messages before the guy would call back, and Bosch made a note to call again. Then he turned his Rolodex, got a number and called the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He asked for a law enforcement clerk and got a woman named Jessie St. John. He put in a priority request for copies of all of Billy Meadows’s military records. Three days, St. John said. He hung up thinking that he would never see the records. They’d come but he wouldn’t be in this office, at this table, on this case. Next he called Donovan at SID and learned there had been no latent prints on the needle kit found in Meadows’s shirt pocket and only smears on the can of spray paint. The light-brown crystals found in the straining cotton in the kit came back as 55 percent pure heroin, Asian blend. Bosch knew that most heroin dealt on the street and shot into the vein was about 15 percent pure. Most of it was tar heroin made by Mexicans. Somebody had given Meadows a very hot shot. In Harry’s mind, that made the tox tests he was waiting for a formality. Meadows had been murdered.

  Nothing else from the crime scene was of much use, except Donovan mentioned that the freshly burned match found in the pipe was not torn from the matchbook in Meadows’s kit. Bosch gave Donovan the address of Meadows’s apartment and asked him to send a team out to process it. He said to check the matches in an ashtray on the coffee table against the book in the kit. Then he hung up, wondering if Donovan would send somebody before word spread that Bosch was off the case or suspended.

  The last call he made was to the coroner’s office. Sakai said he had made next-of-kin notification. Meadows’s mother was still alive and was reached in New Iberia, Louisiana. She had no money to send for him or bury him. She hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Billy Meadows would not be going home. L.A. County would have to bury him.

  “What about the VA?” Bosch asked. “He was a veteran.”

  “Right. I’ll check it out,” Sakai said and hung up.

  Bosch got up and took a small portable tape recorder from one of his drawers in the file cabinets. The bank of files ran along the wall behind the homicide table. He slipped the recorder into his coat pocket with the 911 tape and walked out of the squad room through the rear hallway. He went past the lockup benches and the jail, down to the CRASH office. The tiny office was more crowded than the detective bureau. Desks and files for five men and a woman were crammed into a room no bigger than a second bedroom in a Venice apartment. Down one wall of the room was a row of four-drawer file cabinets. On the opposite wall was the computer and teletype. In between were three sets of two desks pushed side by side. The back wall had the usual map of the city with black lines detailing the eighteen police divisions. Above the map were the Top 10: color eight-by-tens of the ten top assholes of the moment in Hollywood Division. Bosch noticed one was a morgue shot. The kid was dead but still made the list. Now that’s an asshole, he thought. And above the photos, black plastic letters spelled out Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.

  Only Thelia King was in, sitting in front of the computer. That was what Bosch wanted. Also known as The King, which she hated, and Elvis, which she didn’t mind, Thelia King was the CRASH computer jockey. If you wanted to trace a gang lineage or were just looking for a juvie floating somewhere around Hollywood, Elvis was the one to see. But Bosch was surprised she was alone. He looked at his watch. Just after two, too early for the gang troops to be on the street.

  “Where’s everybody at?”

  “Hey, Bosch,” she said, looking away from the screen. “Funerals. We got two different gangs, and I mean warring tribes, planting homeboys in the same cemetery today up in the Valley. They got all hands up there to make sure things stay cool.”

  “And so why aren’t you out there with the boys?”

  “Just got back from court. So, before you tell me why you are here, Harry, why don’t you tell me what happened in Ninety-eight Pounds’s office today?”

  Bosch smiled. Word traveled faster through a police station than it did on the street. He gave her an abbreviated account of his time in the barrel and the expected battle with IAD.

  “Bosch, you take things too seriously,” she said. “Why don’t you get yourself an outside gig? Something to keep yourself sane, moving in the flow. Like your partner. Too bad that sucker’s married. He’s making three times selling houses on the side what we make bustin’ heads full-time. I need a gig like that.”

  Bosch nodded. But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer, he thought but didn’t say. Sometimes he believed that he took things just right and everybody else didn’t take them seriously enough. That was the problem. Everybody had an outside gig.

  “What do you need?” she said. “I better do it now before they put your paper through. After that, you’ll be a leper ’round here.”

  “Stay where you are,” he said, and then he pulled over a chair and told her what he needed from the computer.

  The CRASH computer had a program called GRIT, an acronym within an acronym, this one for Gang-Related Information Tracking. The program files contained the vitals on the 55,000 identified gang members and juvenile offen
ders in the city. The computer also tied in with the gang computer at the sheriff’s department, which had about 30,000 of its own gangbangers on file. One part of the GRIT program was the moniker file. This stored references to offenders by their street names and could match them with real names, DOBs, addresses, and so on. All monikers that came to police attention through arrests or shake cards — field interrogation reports — were fed into the computer program. It was said the GRIT file had more than 90,000 monikers in it. You just needed to know which keys to push. And Elvis did.

  Bosch gave her the three letters he had. “I don’t know if that’s the whole thing or a partial,” he said. “I think it’s a partial.”

  She typed in the commands to open the GRIT files, put in the letters S-H-A and hit the prompt key. It took about thirteen seconds. A frown creased Thelia King’s ebony face. “Three hundred forty-three hits,” she announced. “You might be hidin’ out here a while, Hon.”

  He told her to eliminate the blacks and Latinos. The 911 tape sounded white to him. She pressed more keys, then the computer screen’s amber letters recomposed the list.

  “That’s better, nineteen hits,” King said.

  There was no moniker that was just the three letters, Sha. There were five Shadows, four Shahs, two Sharkeys, two Sharkies and one each of Shark, Shabby, Shallow, Shank, Shabot and Shame. Bosch thought quickly about the graffiti he had seen on the pipe up at the dam. The jagged S, almost like a gaping mouth. The mouth of a shark?

  “Pull up the variations on Shark,” he said.

  King hit a couple of keys and the top third of the screen filled with new amber letters. Shark was a Valley boy. Limited contact with police; he had gotten probation and graffiti clean-up after he was caught tagging bus benches along Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. He was fifteen. It wasn’t likely he would have been up at the dam at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, Bosch guessed. King pulled the first Sharkie up on the screen. He was currently in a Malibu fire camp for juvenile offenders. The second Sharkie was dead, killed in a gang war between the KGB — Kids Gone Bad — and the Vineland Boyz in 1989. His name had not yet been purged from the computer records.

  When King called up the first Sharkey the screen filled with information and a blinking word at the bottom said “More.” “Here’s a regular troublemaker,” she said.

  The computer report described Edward Niese, a male white, seventeen years of age, known to ride a yellow motorbike, tag number JVN138, and who had no known gang affiliation but used Sharkey as a graffiti tag. A frequent runaway from his mother’s home in Chatsworth. Two screens of police contacts with Sharkey followed. Bosch could tell by the location of each arrest or questioning that this Sharkey was partial to Hollywood and West Hollywood when he ran away. He scanned to the bottom of the second screen, where he saw a loitering arrest three months earlier at the Hollywood reservoir.

  “This is him,” he said. “Forget the last kid. Hard copy?”

  She pushed keys to print the computer file and then pointed to the wall of file cabinets. He went over and opened the N drawer. He found a file on Edward Niese and pulled it. Inside was a color booking photo. Sharkey was blond and seemed small in the picture. He had the look of hurt and defiance that was as common as acne on teenagers’ faces these days. But Bosch was struck by a familiarity about the face. He couldn’t place it. He turned the photo over. It was dated two years earlier. King handed him the computer printout and he sat down at one of the empty desks to study it and the contents of the file.

  The most serious offenses the boy who called himself Sharkey had committed — and been caught at — were shoplifting, vandalism, loitering and possession of marijuana and speed. He had been held once — twenty days — at Sylmar Juvenile Hall after one of the drug arrests but later released on home probation. All the other times he was popped he was immediately released to his mother. He was a chronic runaway from home and a throwaway from the system.

  There was not much more in the file than was on the computer. A little elaboration on the arrests was all. Bosch shuffled through the papers until he found the report on the loitering charge. It went to pretrial intervention and was dismissed when Sharkey agreed to go home to his mother and stay there. That apparently didn’t last long. There was a report that the mother had reported him missing to his probation officer two weeks later. According to these records, he had not been picked up yet.

  Bosch read the investigating officer’s summary on the loitering arrest. It said:

  I/O interviewed Donald Smiley, a caretaker at the Mulholland Dam, who said at 7 A.M. this date he went into the pipe situated alongside the reservoir access road to clear it of debris. Smiley found the boy asleep on a bed made of newspapers. The boy was dirty and incoherent when roused. Subject appeared to be under the influence of narcotics. Police were called and I/O responded. The arrestee stated to I/O that he had been sleeping there regularly because his mother did not want him at home. I/O determined the subject was a reported runaway and took him into custody this date, suspicion of loitering.

  Sharkey was a creature of habit, Bosch thought. He was arrested at the dam two months ago, but had gone back there to sleep Sunday morning. He looked through the rest of the papers in the file for indications of other habits that would help Bosch find him. From a three-by-five shake card, Bosch learned that Sharkey had been stopped and questioned but not arrested on Santa Monica Boulevard near West Hollywood in January. Sharkey was lacing up new Reeboks and the officer, believing he might have just lifted them, asked Sharkey to produce a receipt. He did and that would have been that. But when the boy pulled the receipt out of a leather pouch on his motorbike, the officer noticed a plastic bag in there and asked to see that as well. The bag contained ten photographs of Sharkey. He was naked in each and stood in different poses, fondling himself in some, his penis erect in others. The officer took the photos and destroyed them, but noted on the shake card that he would alert the sheriff’s station in West Hollywood that Sharkey was hustling photos to homosexuals on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  That was it. Bosch closed the file but kept the photo of Sharkey. He thanked Thelia King and left the small office. He was walking through the station’s rear hallway, past the lockup benches, when he placed the familiarity in the photo. The hair was longer now and in dreadlocks, the defiance crowding out the hurt in the face, but Sharkey had been the kid who was cuffed to the juvie bench early that morning. Bosch felt sure of it. Thelia had missed it on the computer search because the arrest had not yet been logged in. Bosch cut into the watch commander’s office, told the lieutenant what he was looking for and was led to a box labeled A.M. Watch. Bosch looked through the reports stacked in the box until he found the paperwork on Edward Niese.

  Sharkey had been picked up at 4 A.M. loitering near a newsstand on Vine. A patrol officer thought he was hustling. After he grabbed him he ran a computer check and learned he was a runaway. Bosch checked the day’s arrest sheet and learned the kid had been held until 9 A.M., when his probation officer came and got him. Bosch called the PO at Sylmar Juvenile Hall but learned that Sharkey had already been arraigned before a juvenile court referee and was released to the custody of his mother.

  “And that’s his biggest problem,” the PO said. “He’ll be gone by tonight, back on the street. I guarantee it. And I told the ref that, but he wasn’t going to book the kid into the monkey house just ’cause he was caught loitering and his mother happens to be a telephone whore.”

  “A what?” Bosch asked.

  “It should be in the file. Yeah, while Sharkey’s on the street, dear old mom is at home telling guys on the phone how she’s gonna piss in their mouths and put rubber bands on their dicks. Advertises in skin mags. She gets forty bucks for fifteen minutes. Takes MasterCard, Visa, puts ’em on hold while she checks on another line to make sure the number is valid and they got credit. Anyway, she’s been doing it, near as I can tell, five years now. Edward’s formative years were listening to this shit. I mean, no
wonder the kid’s a scammer and runner. What do you expect?”

  “How long ago did he leave with her?”

  “ ’Bout noon. You want to catch him there, you better go. You got the address?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Bosch, one thing: Don’t be expecting no whore when you get there. His mom, she doesn’t look like the part she plays on the phone, if you know what I mean. Her voice might do the job but her looks would scare a blind man.”

  Bosch thanked him for the warning and hung up. He took the 101 out to the Valley and then the 405 north to the 118 and west. He got off in Chatsworth and drove into the rocky bluffs at the top corner of the Valley. There was a condominium community built on what he knew was once a movie ranch. It had been one of the places Charlie Manson and his crew used to hide out. Parts of one member of that crew’s body were supposedly still missing and buried around there someplace. It was near dusk when Bosch got there. People were off work and getting home. A lot of traffic on the development’s thin roads. A lot of closing doors. A lot of calls to Sharkey’s mother. Bosch was too late.

  “I have no time to talk to more police,” Veronica Niese said when she answered the door and looked at the badge. “As soon as I get him home he is out the door again. I don’t know where he goes. You tell me. That’s your job. I have three calls waiting, one long distance. I gotta go.”

  She was in her late forties, fat and wrinkled. She obviously wore a wig and the dilation of her eyes did not match. She had the dirty-socks smell of a speed addict. Her callers were better off with their fantasies, with just a voice with which to construct a body and face.

  “Mrs. Niese, I’m not looking for your son for something he did. I need to talk to him because of something he saw. He could possibly be in danger.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I’ve heard that line before.”

  She closed the door and he just stood there. After a few moments he could hear her on the phone, and he thought it was a French accent but couldn’t be sure. He could only make out a few of the sentences but they made him blush. He thought about Sharkey and realized he wasn’t really a runaway, because there was nothing here to run away from. He left the doorstep and went back to the car. That would be it for the day. And he was out of time. Lewis and Clarke must have paper out on him by now. He’d be assigned to a desk at IAD by morning. He drove back to the station and signed out. Everyone was already gone and there were no messages on his desk, not even from his lawyer. On the way home he stopped by the Lucky and bought four bottles of beer, a couple from Mexico, a lager from England called Old Nick and a Henry’s.