The Black Echo

“Where’s everybody at?”

“Hey, Bosch,” she said, looking away from the screen. “Funerals. We got two different gangs, and I mean warring tribes, planting homeboys in the same cemetery today up in the Valley. They got all hands up there to make sure things stay cool.”

“And so why aren’t you out there with the boys?”

“Just got back from court. So, before you tell me why you are here, Harry, why don’t you tell me what happened in Ninety-eight Pounds’s office today?”

Bosch smiled. Word traveled faster through a police station than it did on the street. He gave her an abbreviated account of his time in the barrel and the expected battle with IAD.

“Bosch, you take things too seriously,” she said. “Why don’t you get yourself an outside gig? Something to keep yourself sane, moving in the flow. Like your partner. Too bad that sucker’s married. He’s making three times selling houses on the side what we make bustin’ heads full-time. I need a gig like that.”

Bosch nodded. But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer, he thought but didn’t say. Sometimes he believed that he took things just right and everybody else didn’t take them seriously enough. That was the problem. Everybody had an outside gig.

“What do you need?” she said. “I better do it now before they put your paper through. After that, you’ll be a leper ’round here.”

“Stay where you are,” he said, and then he pulled over a chair and told her what he needed from the computer.

The CRASH computer had a program called GRIT, an acronym within an acronym, this one for Gang-Related Information Tracking. The program files contained the vitals on the 55,000 identified gang members and juvenile offenders in the city. The computer also tied in with the gang computer at the sheriff’s department, which had about 30,000 of its own gangbangers on file. One part of the GRIT program was the moniker file. This stored references to offenders by their street names and could match them with real names, DOBs, addresses, and so on. All monikers that came to police attention through arrests or shake cards-field interrogation reports-were fed into the computer program. It was said the GRIT file had more than 90,000 monikers in it. You just needed to know which keys to push. And Elvis did.

Bosch gave her the three letters he had. “I don’t know if that’s the whole thing or a partial,” he said. “I think it’s a partial.”

She typed in the commands to open the GRIT files, put in the letters S-H-A and hit the prompt key. It took about thirteen seconds. A frown creased Thelia King’s ebony face. “Three hundred forty-three hits,” she announced. “You might be hidin’ out here a while, Hon.”

He told her to eliminate the blacks and Latinos. The 911 tape sounded white to him. She pressed more keys, then the computer screen’s amber letters recomposed the list.

“That’s better, nineteen hits,” King said.

There was no moniker that was just the three letters, Sha. There were five Shadows, four Shahs, two Sharkeys, two Sharkies and one each of Shark, Shabby, Shallow, Shank, Shabot and Shame. Bosch thought quickly about the graffiti he had seen on the pipe up at the dam. The jagged S, almost like a gaping mouth. The mouth of a shark?

“Pull up the variations on Shark,” he said.

King hit a couple of keys and the top third of the screen filled with new amber letters. Shark was a Valley boy. Limited contact with police; he had gotten probation and graffiti clean-up after he was caught tagging bus benches along Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. He was fifteen. It wasn’t likely he would have been up at the dam at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, Bosch guessed. King pulled the first Sharkie up on the screen. He was currently in a Malibu fire camp for juvenile offenders. The second Sharkie was dead, killed in a gang war between the KGB-Kids Gone Bad-and the Vineland Boyz in 1989. His name had not yet been purged from the computer records.

When King called up the first Sharkey the screen filled with information and a blinking word at the bottom said “More.” “Here’s a regular troublemaker,” she said.

The computer report described Edward Niese, a male white, seventeen years of age, known to ride a yellow motorbike, tag number JVN138, and who had no known gang affiliation but used Sharkey as a graffiti tag. A frequent runaway from his mother’s home in Chatsworth. Two screens of police contacts with Sharkey followed. Bosch could tell by the location of each arrest or questioning that this Sharkey was partial to Hollywood and West Hollywood when he ran away. He scanned to the bottom of the second screen, where he saw a loitering arrest three months earlier at the Hollywood reservoir.

“This is him,” he said. “Forget the last kid. Hard copy?”