The Black Echo

“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.”