The Black Echo

They shook hands, but Wish made no movement toward the door she had come through. It had closed and the lock had snapped home. Bosch hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, I’ve been waiting all morning to see you. It’s about the bank squad… One of your cases.”

“Yes, that’s what you told the receptionist. Sorry to have kept you, but we had no appointment and I had another pressing matter. I wish you had called first.”

Bosch nodded his understanding, but again there was no movement toward inviting him in. This isn’t working right, he thought.

“Do you have any coffee back there?” he said.

“Uh… yes, I believe we do. But can we make this quick? I’m really in the middle of something at the moment.”

Who isn’t, Bosch thought. She used a card key to open the door and then pulled it open and held it for him. Inside, she led him down a corridor where there were plastic signs on the walls next to the doors. The bureau didn’t have the same affinity for acronyms as the police department. The signs were numbered-Group 1, Group 2 and so on. As they went along, he tried to place her accent. It had been slightly nasal but not like New York. Philadelphia, he decided, maybe New Jersey. Definitely not Southern California, never mind the tan that went with it.

“Black?” she said.

“Cream and sugar, please.”

She turned and entered a room that was furnished as a small kitchen. There was a counter and cabinets, a four-cup coffeemaker, a microwave and a refrigerator. The place reminded Bosch of law offices he had been to to give depositions. Nice, neat, expensive. She handed him a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and signaled for him to put in his own cream and sugar. She wasn’t having any. If it was an attempt to make him uncomfortable, it worked. Bosch felt like an imposition, not someone who brought good news, a break in a big case. He followed her back into the hallway and they went through the next doorway, which was marked Group 3. It was the bank robbery-kidnap unit. The room was about the size of a convenience store. It was the first federal squad room Bosch had been in, and the comparison to his own office was depressing. The furniture here was newer than anything he had ever seen in any LAPD squad. There was actually carpet on the floor and a typewriter or computer at almost every desk. There were three rows of five desks and all of them but one were empty. A man in a gray suit sat at the first desk in the middle row, holding a phone to his ear. He didn’t look up as Bosch and Wish walked in. Except for the background noise of a tactical channel coming from a scanner on a file cabinet in the back, the place could have passed for a real estate office.

Wish took a seat behind the first desk in the first row and gestured for Bosch to take the seat alongside it. This put him directly between Wish and Gray Suit on the phone. Bosch put his coffee down on her desk and began to figure right away that Gray Suit wasn’t really on the phone, even though the guy kept saying “Uh huh, uh huh” or “Uh uh” every few moments or so. Wish opened a file drawer in her desk and pulled out a plastic bottle of water, some of which she poured into a paper cup.

“We had a two eleven at a savings and loan in Santa Monica, just about everybody’s out on it,” she explained as he scanned the almost empty room. “I was coordinating from here. That’s why you had to wait out there. Sorry.”

“No problem. Get him?”

“What makes you say it was a him?”

Bosch shrugged his shoulders. “Percentages.”

“Well, it was two of them. One of each. And yes, we got them. They were in a stolen from Reseda reported yesterday. Female went in and took care of business. Male was the wheel. They took the 10 to the 405, then into LAX, where they left the car in front of a skycap at United. Then they took the escalator to the arrivals level, got on a shuttle bus to the Flyaway station in Van Nuys and then took a cab all the way back down to Venice. To a bank. We had an LAPD copter over them the whole time. They never looked up. When she went into the second bank we thought we were going to see another two eleven so we rushed her while she was waiting in line for a teller. Got him in the parking lot. Turns out she was just going to deposit the take from the first bank. An interbank transfer, the hard way. See some dumb people in this business, Detective Bosch. What can I do for you?”

“You can call me Harry.”

“As I am doing what for you?”

“Interdepartmental cooperation,” he said. “Kinda like you and our helicopter this morning.”

***

Bosch drank some of his coffee and said, “Your name is on a BOLO I came across yesterday. Year-old case out of downtown. I’m interested in it. I work homicide out of Hollywood Div-”

“Yes, I know,” Agent Wish interrupted.

“-ision.”

“The receptionist showed me the card you gave. By the way, do you need it back?”