The Black Echo

“What do I want?” the duty detective said. “I want to know what the fuck you are doing, Bosch. This isn’t your place anymore. You can’t just come in here like you’re running the crew. Put that shit back on the shelf, and if you want to look through it come back down here tomorrow and ask, goddammit. And don’t give me any bullshit about an autopsy. You’ve already been here a half hour.”

Bosch looked up at him. He put his age at twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, even younger than Bosch had been when he had made it to Robbery-Homicide. Either standards had dropped or RHD wasn’t what it was. Bosch knew it was actually both. He looked back down at the bulletin binder.

“I’m talking to you, asshole!” the detective boomed.

Bosch reached his foot up under the table and kicked the chair that was across from him. The chair shot out from the table and its backrest hit the detective in the crotch. He doubled over and made anoomph sound, grabbing the chair for support. Bosch knew he had his reputation going for him now. Harry Bosch: a loner, a fighter, a killer. C’mon kid, he was saying, do something.

But the young detective just stared at Bosch, his anger and humiliation in check. He was a cop who could pull the gun but maybe not the trigger. And once Bosch knew that, he knew the kid would walk away.

The young cop shook his head, waved his hands like he was saying Enough of this, and walked back to the duty desk.

“Go ahead, write me up, kid,” Bosch said to his back.

“Fuck you,” the kid feebly returned.

Bosch knew he had nothing to worry about. IAD wouldn’t even look at an officer-on-officer beef without a corroborating witness or tape recording. One cop’s word against another’s was something they wouldn’t touch in this department. Deep down, they knew a cop’s word by itself was worthless. That was why Internal Affairs cops always worked in pairs.

An hour and seven cigarettes later, Bosch found it. A photocopy of another Polaroid of the gold-and-jade bracelet was part of a fifty-page packet of descriptions and photos of property lost in a burglary at WestLand National Bank at Sixth and Hill. Now Bosch was able to place the address in his mind, and he remembered the dark smoked glass of the building. He had never been inside the bank. A bank heist with jewelry taken, he thought. It didn’t make much sense. He studied the list. Almost every item was a piece of jewelry and there was too much there for a walk-in robbery. Harriet Beecham alone was listed as having lost eight antique rings, four bracelets, four earrings. Besides that, these were listed as burglary losses, not robbery losses. He looked through the Be on Lookout package for any kind of crime summary, but didn’t find any. Just a bureau contact: Special Agent E. D. Wish.

Then he noticed in a block on the BOLO sheet that there were three dates noted for the date of the crime. A burglary over a three-day span during the first week of September. Labor Day weekend, he realized. Downtown banks are closed three days. It had to have been a safe-deposit caper. A tunnel job? Bosch leaned back and thought about that. Why hadn’t he remembered it? A heist like that would have played in the media for days. It would have been talked about in the department even longer. Then he realized he had been in Mexico on Labor Day, and for the next three weeks. The bank heist had occurred while he was serving the one-month suspension for the Dollmaker case. He leaned forward, picked up a phone and dialed.

“Times,Bremmer.”

“It’s Bosch. Still got you working Sundays, huh?”

“Two to ten, every Sunday, no parole. So, what’s up? I haven’t talked to you since, uh, your problem with the Dollmaker case. How you liking Hollywood Division?”

“It’ll do. For a while, at least.” He was speaking low so the duty detective would not overhear.

Bremmer said, “Like that, huh? Well, I heard you caught the stiff up at the dam this morning.”

Joel Bremmer had covered the cop shop for theTimes longer than most cops had been on the force, including Bosch. There was not much he didn’t hear about the department, or couldn’t find out with a phone call. A year ago he called Bosch for comment on his twenty-two-day suspension, no pay. Bremmer had heard about it before Bosch. Generally, the police department hated theTimes,

and theTimes was never short in its criticism of the department. But in the middle of that was Bremmer, whom any cop could trust and many, like Bosch, did.

“Yeah, that’s my case,” Bosch said. “Right now, it’s nothing much. But I need a favor. If it works out the way it’s looking, then it will be something you’d want to know about.”

Bosch knew he didn’t have to bait him, but he wanted the reporter to know there might be something later.

“What do you need?” Bremmer said.

“As you know, I was out of town last Labor Day on my extended vacation, courtesy of IAD. So I missed this one. But there was-”