The Black Echo

Bosch watched him start but then noticed the plastic bag containing Meadows’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 pathologist 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?”