Michael Connelly (8 page)

After hanging up the phone, Bosch looked down at the FBI photocopy of the bracelet. There was no doubt it was the piece that
had been pawned by Meadows and was in Obinna’s Polaroid. The bracelet in the FBI photo was in place on a woman’s liver-spotted
wrist. Three small carved fish swimming on a wave of gold. Bosch guessed it was Harriet Beecham’s seventy-one-year-old wrist
and the photo had probably been taken for insurance purposes. He looked over at the duty detective, who was still leafing
through the gun catalog. He coughed loudly like he had seen Nicholson do in a movie once and at the same time tore the BOLO
sheet out of the binder. The kid detective looked over at Bosch and then went back to the guns and bullets.

As he folded the BOLO sheet into his pocket, Bosch’s electronic pager went off. He picked up the phone and called Hollywood
Station, expecting to be told there was another body waiting for him. It was a watch sergeant named Art Crocket, whom everyone
called Davey, who took the call.

“Harry, you still out in the field?” he said. “I’m at Parker Center. Had to check on a few things.”

“Good, then you’re already near the morgue. A tech over there name of Sakai called, said he needs to see you.”

“See me?”

“He said to tell you that something came up and they’re doing your cut today. Right now, matter of fact.”

• • •

It took Bosch five minutes to get over to County-USC Hospital and fifteen minutes to find a parking spot. The medical examiner’s
office was located behind one of the medical center buildings that had been condemned after the ’87 earthquake. It was a two-story
yellow prefab without much architectural style or life. As Bosch was going through the glass doors where the living people
entered and into the front lobby, he passed a sheriff’s detective he had spent some time with while working the Night Stalker
task force in the early eighties.

“Hey, Bernie,” Bosch said and smiled.

“Hey, fuck you, Bosch,” Bernie said. “The rest of us catch ones that count, too.”

Bosch stopped there a moment to watch the detective walk into the parking lot. Then he went in and to the right, down a government-green
corridor, passing through two sets of double doors — the smell getting worse each time. It was the smell of death and industrial-strength
disinfectant. Death had the upper hand. Bosch stepped into the yellow-tiled scrub room. Larry Sakai was in there, putting
a paper gown over his hospital scrubs. He already had on a paper mask and booties. Bosch took a set of the same out of cardboard
boxes on a stainless steel counter and started putting them on.

“What’s with Bernie Slaughter?” Bosch asked. “What happened in here to piss him off?”

“You’re what happened, Bosch,” Sakai said without looking at him. “He got a call out yesterday morning. Some sixteen-year-old
shoots his best friend. Up in Lancaster. Looks like accidental but Bernie’s waiting on us to check the bullet track and powder
stippling. He wants to close it. I told him we’d get to it late today, so he came in. Only we aren’t going to get to it at
all today. ’Cause Sally’s got a bug up his ass about doing yours. Don’t ask me why. He just checked the stiff out when I brought
it in and said we’d do it today. I told him we’d have to bump somebody, and he said bump Bernie. But I couldn’t get him on
the line in time to stop him from coming in. So that’s why Bernie’s pissed. You know he lives all the way down to Diamond
Bar. Long ride in for nothing.”

Bosch had the mask, gown and booties on and followed Sakai down the tiled hall to the autopsy suite. “Then maybe he ought
to be pissed at Sally, not me,” he said.

Sakai didn’t answer. They walked to the first table, where Billy Meadows lay on his back, naked, his neck braced against a
short cut of two-by-four wood. There were six of the stainless steel tables in the room. Each had gutters running alongside
its edges and drain holes in the corners. There was a body on each. Dr. Jesus Salazar was huddled over Meadows’s chest with
his back to Bosch and Sakai.

“Afternoon, Harry, I’ve been waiting,” Salazar said, still not looking. “Larry, I’m going to need slides on this.”

The medical examiner straightened up and turned. In his rubber-gloved hand he held what looked like a square plug of flesh
and pink muscle tissue. He placed it in a steel pan, the kind brownies are cooked in, and handed it to Sakai. “Give me verticals,
one of the puncture track, then two on either side for comparison.”

Sakai took the pan and left the room to go to the lab. Bosch saw that the plug of meat had been cut from Meadows’s chest,
about an inch above the left nipple.

“What’d you find?” Bosch asked.

“Not sure yet. We’ll see. The question is, what did you find, Harry? My field tech told me you were demanding an autopsy on
this case today. Why is that?”

“I told him I needed it today because I wanted to get it done tomorrow. I thought that was what we had agreed on, too.”

“Yes, he told me so, but I got curious about it. I love a good mystery, Harry. What made you think this was hinky, as you
detectives say?”

We don’t say it anymore, Bosch thought. Once it’s said in the movies and people like Salazar pick it up, it’s ancient.

“Just some things didn’t fit at the time,” Bosch said. “There are more things now. From my end, it looks like a murder. No
mystery.”

“What things?”

Bosch got out his notebook and started flipping through the pages as he talked. He listed the things he had noticed wrong
at the death scene: the broken finger, the lack of distinct tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head.

“He had a hype kit in his pocket and we found a stove in the pipe, but it doesn’t look right. Looks like a plant to me. Looks
to me like the pop that killed him is in the arm there. Those other scars on his arms are old. He hasn’t been using his arms
in years.”

“You’re right about that. Aside from the one recent puncture in the arm, the groin area is the only area where punctures are
fresh. The inside thighs. An area usually used by people going to great lengths to hide their addiction. But then again, this
could have just been his first time back on the arms. What else you got, Harry?”

“He smoked, I’m pretty sure. There was no pack of cigarettes with the body.”

“Couldn’t somebody have taken them off the body? Before it was discovered. A scavenger?”

“True. But why take the smokes and not the kit? There’s also his apartment. Somebody searched the place.”

“Could have been someone who knew him. Someone looking for his stash.”

“True again.” Bosch flipped through a few more pages in the notebook. “The kit on the body had whitish-brown crystals in the
cotton. I’ve seen enough tar heroin to know it turns the straining cotton dark brown, sometimes black. So it looks like it
was some fine stuff, probably overseas, that was put in his arm. That doesn’t go with the way he was living. That’s uptown
stuff.”

Salazar thought a moment before saying, “It’s all a lot of supposition, Harry.”

“The last thing, though, is — and I am just starting to work on this — he was involved in some kind of caper.”

Bosch gave him a brief synopsis of what he knew about the bracelet, its theft from the bank vault and then from the pawnshop.
Salazar’s domain was the forensic detail of the case. But Bosch had always trusted Sally and found that it sometimes helped
to bounce other details of a case off him. The two had met in 1974, when Bosch was a patrolman and Sally was a new assistant
coroner. Bosch was assigned guard duty and crowd control on East Fifty-fourth in South-Central where a firefight with the
Symbionese Liberation Army had left a house burned to the ground and five bodies in the smoking rubble. Sally was assigned
to see if there was a sixth — Patty Hearst — somewhere in the char. The two of them spent three days there, and when Sally
finally gave up, Bosch had won a bet that she was still alive. Somewhere.

When Bosch was finished with the story about the bracelet, it seemed to have mollified Sally’s worries about the death of
Billy Meadows not being a mystery. He seemed energized. He turned to a cart on which his cutting tools were piled and rolled
it next to the autopsy table. He switched on a sound-activated tape recorder and picked up a scalpel and a pair of regular
gardening shears. He said, “Well, let’s get to work.”

Bosch moved back a few steps to avoid any spatter and leaned against a counter on which there was a tray full of knives and
saws and scalpels. He noticed that a sign taped to the side of the tray said: To Be Sharpened.

• • •

Salazar looked down at the body of Billy Meadows and began: “The body is that of a well-developed Caucasian male measuring
sixty-nine inches in length, weighing one hundred sixty-five pounds and appearing generally consistent with the stated age
of forty years. The body is cold and unembalmed with full rigor and posterior dependent fixed lividity.”

Bosch watched him start but then noticed the plastic bag containing Mead-ows’s clothes on the counter next to the tool pan.
He pulled it over and opened it up. The smell of urine immediately assaulted his nostrils, and he thought for a moment of
the living room at Meadows’s apartment. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves as Salazar continued to describe the body.

“The left index finger shows a palpable fracture without laceration or petechial contusion or hemorrhage.”

Bosch glanced over his shoulder and saw that Salazar was wiggling the broken digit with the blunt end of the scalpel as he
spoke to the tape recorder. He concluded his external description of the body by mentioning the skin punctures.

“There are hemorrhagic puncture wounds, hypodermic type, on the upper inside thighs and interior side of the left arm. The
arm puncture exudes a bloody fluid and appears to be most recent. No scabbing. There is another puncture, in the upper left
chest, which exudes a small amount of bloody fluid and appears to be slightly larger than that caused by hypodermic puncture.”

Salazar put his hand over the tape recorder’s mike and said to Bosch, “I’m having Sakai get slides of this chest puncture.
It looks very interesting.”

Bosch nodded and turned back to the counter and began spreading out Meadows’s clothes. Behind him he heard Salazar using the
shears to open up the dead man’s chest.

The detective pulled each pocket out and looked at the lint. He turned the socks inside out and checked the inside lining
of the pants and shirt. Nothing. He took a scalpel out of the To Be Sharpened pan and cut the stitches out of Meadows’s leather
belt and pulled it apart. Again nothing. Over his shoulder he heard Salazar saying, “The spleen weighs one hundred ninety
grams. The capsule is intact and slightly wrinkled, and the parenchyma is pale purple and trabecular.”

Bosch had heard it all hundreds of times before. Most of what a patholo-gist said into his tape recorder meant nothing to
the detective who stood by. It was the bottom line the detective waited for. What killed the person on the cold steel table?
How? Who?

“The gallbladder is thin walled,” Salazar was saying. “It contains a few cc’s of greenish bile with no stones.”

Bosch shoved the clothes back into the plastic bag and sealed it. Then he dumped the leather work shoes Meadows had been wearing
out of a second plastic bag. He noticed reddish-orange dust fall from inside the shoes. Another indication the body had been
dragged into the pipe. The heels had scraped on the dried mud at the bottom of the pipe, drawing the dust inside the shoes.

Salazar said, “The bladder mucosa is intact, and there are only two ounces of pale yellow urine. The external genitalia and
vagina are unremarkable.”

Bosch turned around. Salazar had his hand on the tape recorder speaker. He said, “Coroner’s humor. Just wanted to see if you
were listening, Harry. You might have to testify to this one day. To back me up.”

“I doubt it,” Bosch said. “They don’t like boring juries to death.”

Salazar started the small circular saw that was used to open the skull. It sounded like a dentist’s drill. Bosch turned back
to the shoes. They were well oiled and cared for. The rubber soles showed only modest wear. Stuck in one of the deep grooves
of the tread of the right shoe was a white stone. Bosch pried it out with the scalpel. It was a small chunk of cement. He
thought of the white dust in the rug in Meadows’s closet. He wondered if the dust or the chunk from the shoe tread could be
matched to the concrete that had guarded the WestLand Bank’s vault. But if the shoes were so well cared for, could the chunk
have been in the tread for nine months since the vault break-in? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was from his work on the subway
project. If he actually had such a job. Bosch slipped the chunk of cement into a small plastic envelope and put it in his
pocket with the others he had collected throughout the day.

Salazar said, “Examination of the head and cranial contents reveals no trauma or underlying pathological disease conditions
or congenital anomalies. Harry, I’m going to do the finger now.”

Bosch put the shoes back in their plastic bag and returned to the autopsy table as Salazar placed an X ray of Meadows’s left
hand on a light window on the wall.

“See here, these fragments?” he said as he traced small, sharp white spots on the negative. There were three of them near
the fractured joint. “If this was an old break, these would, over time, have moved into the joint. There is no scarring discernible
on the X ray but I am going to take a look.”

He went to the body and used a scalpel to make a T-incision in the skin on the top of the finger joint. He then folded the
skin back and dug around with the scalpel in the pink meat, saying, “No …no…nothing. This was post, Harry. You think it could
have been one of my people?”

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Doesn’t look like it. Sakai said he and his sidekick were careful. I know I didn’t do it. How
come there’s no damage to the skin?”

“That is an interesting point. I don’t know. Somehow the finger was broken without the exterior being damaged. I can’t answer
that one. But it shouldn’t have been too hard to do. Just grab the finger and yank down. Provided you have the stomach for
it. Like so.”