Michael Connelly (30 page)

Bosch nodded and frowned the required three seconds and then put Jerry Edgar’s troubles aside. He felt Eleanor step down beside
him and he introduced her to Edgar. They shook hands and smiled and Bosch said, “So, what have we got?”

“Well, we got these on the body,” Edgar said, and he held up a clear plastic bag. There was a short stack of Polaroids in
it. More nude shots of Sharkey. He hadn’t wasted any time resupplying. Edgar turned the bag and there was Bosch’s business
card.

“It looks like the kid was a hustler down in Boytown,” Edgar said, “but if you already pulled him in once you already know
that. Anyway, I saw the card and figured he might be the kid from the nine one one call. If you want to come down and take
a look, be my guest. We already processed the scene, so touch whatever you want. You can’t hear yourself think in there, though.
Sombody went through and knocked out every light in the tunnel. Haven’t figured out whether that was the perp or the lights
were knocked out before.

“Anyway, we had to set up our own. And our cables weren’t long enough to put the generator up here. It’s in there screaming
like a five-horsepower baby.”

He turned to head back into the tunnel but Bosch reached out and touched his shoulder.

“Jed, how’d you get the call on this?”

“Anonymous. It wasn’t a nine one one line, so there’s no tape or trace. Came in right to the Hollywood desk. Caller was a
male, that’s all the dip-shit, one of those fat Explorer kids who took it, could tell us.”

Edgar turned back into the subway. Bosch and Wish followed. It was a long hallway that curved to the right. The floor was
dirty concrete, its walls were white stucco with a heavy overlay of graffiti. Nothing like a dose of urban reality as you
are leaving the symphony at the bowl, Bosch thought. The tunnel was dark except for the bright splash of light that bathed
the crime scene about halfway in. There Bosch could see a human form sprawled on its back. Sharkey. He could see men standing
and working in the light. Bosch walked with the fingers of his right hand trailing along the stuccoed wall. It steadied him.
There was an old, damp smell in the tunnel that was mixed with the new odor of gasoline and exhaust from the generator. Bosch
felt beads of sweat start to form on his scalp and under his shirt. His breathing was fast and shallow. They passed the generator
thirty feet in and in another thirty feet or so Sharkey was lying on the tunnel floor under the brutal light of the strobes.

The boy’s head was propped against the tunnel wall at an unnatural angle. He seemed smaller and younger than Bosch remembered
him. His eyes were half open and had the familiar glaze of the unseeing on them. He wore a black T-shirt that said Guns N
Roses on it, and it was matted with his blood. The pockets of his faded jeans were pulled out and empty. At his side stood
a can of spray paint in a plastic evidence bag. On the wall above his head a painted inscription read RIP Sharkey. The paint
had been applied with an inexperienced hand and too much had been used. Black paint had run down the wall in thin lines, some
of them into Sharkey’s hair.

When Edgar yelled, “You want to see it?” above the din of the generator Bosch knew that he meant the wound. Because Sharkey’s
head was angled forward, the throat wound was not visible. Only the blood. Bosch shook his head no.

Bosch noticed the blood splatter on the wall and floor about three feet from the body. Porter the lush was comparing the shapes
of the drops with those on splatter cards on a steel ring. A crime scene tech named Roberge was also photographing the spots.
The blood on the floor was in round spots. The wall splatter drops were elliptical. You didn’t need splatter cards to know
the kid had been killed right here in the tunnel.

“The way it’s looking,” Porter said loudly to no one in particular, “somebody comes up behind him here, cuts him and pushes
him down against the wall there.”

“You only got it half right, Porter,” Edgar said. “How’s somebody come up behind somebody in a tunnel like this? He was with
somebody and they did him. It was no sneak job, Porter.”

Porter put the splatter cards in his pocket and said, “Sorry, partner.”

He didn’t say anything else. He was fat and broken down the way many cops get when they stay on longer than they should. Porter
could still wear a size 34 belt, but above it a tremendous gut bloomed outward like an awning. He wore a tweed sport coat
with a frayed elbow. His face was gaunt and as pallid as a flour tortilla, behind a drinker’s nose that was large, misshapen
and painfully red.

Bosch lit a cigarette and put the burnt match in his pocket. He crouched down like a baseball catcher next to the body and
lifted the bag containing the paint can and hefted it. It was almost full, and that confirmed what he already knew, already
feared. It was he who had killed Sharkey. In a way, at least. Bosch had tracked him down and made him valuable, or potentially
valuable, to the case. Someone could not allow this. Bosch squatted there, elbows on knees, holding cigarette to mouth, smoking
and studying the body, making sure he would not forget it.

Meadows had been part of this thing — the circle of connected events that had gotten him killed. But not Sharkey. He was street
trash and his death here probably saved someone else’s life down the line. But he did not deserve this. In this circle he
was an innocent. And that meant things were out of control and there were new rules — for both sides. Bosch signaled with
his hand to Sharkey’s neck and a coroner’s investigator pulled the body away from the wall. Bosch put one hand down on the
ground to balance himself and stared for a long time at the ravaged neck and throat. He did not want to forget a single detail.
Sharkey’s head lolled back, exposing the gaping neck wound. Bosch’s eyes never wavered.

• • •

When Bosch finally looked up from the body, he noticed that Eleanor was no longer in the tunnel. He stood up and signaled
Edgar to come outside to talk. Harry didn’t want to have to shout over the sound of the generator. When they got out of the
tunnel, he saw that Eleanor was sitting alone on the top step. They walked up past her, and Harry put his hand on her shoulder
as he went by. He felt it go rigid at his touch.

When he and his old partner were reasonably away from the noise, Harry said, “So what do the techs have?”

“Not a damned thing,” Edgar said. “If it was a gang thing, it’s one of the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Not a single print or
partial. The spray can is clean. No weapon. No wits.”

“Sharkey had a crew, used to stay at a motel near the Boulevard until today, but he wasn’t into gangs,” Bosch said. “It’s
in the files. He was a scammer. You know, with the Polaroids, rolling homosexuals, stuff like that.”

“You’re saying he’s in the gang files but he isn’t in a gang?”

“Right.”

Edgar nodded and said, “He still could’ve been taken down by somebody who thought he was a gangbanger.”

Wish walked over to them then but said nothing.

“You know this isn’t a gang thing, Jed,” Bosch said.

“I do?”

“Yeah, you do. If it was, there wouldn’t be a full can of paint in there. No gangbanger’s going to leave something like that
behind. Also, whoever painted the wall in there didn’t have the touch. The paint ran. Whoever did it, didn’t know about spraying
a wall.”

“Come here a sec,” Edgar said.

Bosch looked at Eleanor and nodded that it was okay. He and Edgar walked away a few steps and stood near the crime scene tape.

“What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he’s part of the case?” he asked.

Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn’t know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently
did or couldn’t risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining
the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn’t looking at the sky.
His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.

“Harry, you know what this weekend is?” he said. “It’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s the biggest three-day showing weekend of
the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year
as a cop.”

Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. “What are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is … I’m not going to be busting my ass on this case. It isn’t going to fuck up my weekend like the
last one. So, what I’m saying is if you want it, I’ll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it ’cause it
goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I’m going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five.”

“You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It’s not my call.”

Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, “Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?”

Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, “We took him off the street. We interviewed him over
on Wilcox. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?”

“Nothing,” Edgar said. “But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe
saved me some time and that boy some life.”

Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, “Who knew?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?”

She thought for a moment. Then said, “On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The
summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked
in my desk. Nobody’s heard that. It hasn’t been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don’t even
think about that, Harry. Nobody …It can’t be.”

“Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What’s that tell you? They’ve got to have somebody on the inside.”

“Harry, that’s speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody
could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey.”

Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made
sense.

“Sharkey was a tough little bastard,” he said. “You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he
didn’t have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge.”

“Or maybe somebody with money. You know he’d go with somebody if there was money in it.”

She didn’t start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, “Sharkey was a message.”

“What?”

“A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They
want us to know they did it. They want us to know they’ve got somebody inside. They’re laughing at us.”

She started the car. “Where to?”

“The bureau.”

“Harry, be careful with that stuff about an inside man. If you go trying to sell that and it’s not true, you could give your
enemies all they need to bury you.”

Enemies, Bosch thought. Who are my enemies this time?

“I got that kid killed,” he said. “The least I am going to do is find who did it.”

• • •

Bosch looked through the cotton curtains in the waiting room, down at the veterans cemetery, while Eleanor Wish unlocked the
door to the bureau offices. The ground fog had not burned off the field of stones yet, and from above it looked like a thousand
ghosts rising from their boxes at once. Bosch could see the dark gash dug into the crest of the hill at the north side of
the cemetery but still could not make out what it was. It looked almost like a mass grave, a long gouge into the hill, a huge
wound. The exposed soil was covered with black plastic sheets.

“You want coffee?” Wish said from behind him.

“Of course,” he said. He pulled himself away from the curtains and followed her in. The bureau was empty. They went into the
office kitchen and he watched as she dumped a packet of ground coffee into a filter basket and turned the machine on. They
stood there silently, watching the coffee slowly drip into a round glass pot on the heating pad. Bosch lit a cigarette and
tried only to think about the coffee that was coming. She waved the smoke away with a hand but didn’t tell him to put it out.

When the coffee was ready, Bosch took it black and it hit his system like a shot. He filled up a second cup and carried both
into the squad room. He lit a cigarette off the butt of the first when he got to his temporary desk.

“My last one,” he promised when he saw her looking.

Eleanor poured herself a cup of water from a bottle she took from her file drawer.

“You ever run out of that stuff?” he asked.

She ignored the question. “Harry, we can’t blame ourselves for Sharkey. If we’re to blame, then we might as well offer every
person we talk to protection. Should we go up and grab his mother and put her in witness protection? What about the girl in
the motel room that knew him? See, it gets crazy. Sharkey was Sharkey. You live by the street, you die by the street.”

Bosch didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Let me see the names.”

Wish pulled out the files on the WestLand case. She rifled through them and pulled out a computer printout several pages long
and folded accordion-style. She tossed it on the desk in front of him.

“That’s the master there,” she said. “Everybody who had a box. There are notes written after some of the names, but they probably
are not germane. Most of that was if we thought they were scamming insurance or not.”

Bosch started unfolding the printout and realized it was one long list and five shorter lists marked A through E. He asked
what they were, and she came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. He smelled the apple in her hair.