The Black Echo

the jungle cleared and the Hendrix tape was done, the four of them had gone into the tunnel while the rest of the company sat on backpacks and chowed and waited. An hour later, only Bosch and Meadows had come back. Meadows carried with him three NVA scalps. He held them up for the troops above ground and yelled, “You’re looking at the baddest blood brother in the black echo.” And so came the name. Later, they found Jarvis and Hanrahan in the tunnels. They had fallen into punji traps. They were dead.
    Eleanor said, “I visited it when I was living in D.C. I couldn’t make myself go to the dedication in eighty-two. But a lot of years later I finally got the courage. I wanted to see my brother’s name. I thought maybe it would help me sort things out, you know, about what happened with him.”
    “And did it?”
    “No. Made it worse. It made me angry. It left me with this need for justice, if that makes sense. I wanted justice for my brother.”
    The silence filled the car again and Bosch poured more coffee into his cup. He was beginning to feel the onset of caffeine jitters but couldn’t stop. He was addicted. He watched a couple of drunks who were stumbling down the street stop in front of the window before the vault. One of the men threw his hands up as if trying to gain a measure of the vault’s huge door. After a while they moved on. He thought of the rage Eleanor must have felt because of her brother. The helplessness. He thought of his own rage. He knew the same feelings, maybe not to the same degree but from a different perspective. Anybody who was touched by the war knew some part of those feelings. He had never worked it out completely and wasn’t sure he wanted to. The anger and sadness gave him something that was better than complete emptiness. Is that what Meadows felt? He wondered. The emptiness. Is that what bounced him from job to job and needle to needle until he was finally and fatally used up on this last mission? Bosch decided that he would go to Meadows’s funeral, that he owed him that much.
    “You know what you were telling me the other day about that guy, the Dollmaker killer?” Eleanor asked.
    “What about it?”
    “IAD, they tried to make a case that you executed him?”
    “Yes, I told you. They tried. But it wasn’t there. All they got me on was suspension for procedure violations.”
    “Well, I just wanted to say that even if they were right, they were wrong. That would have been justice in my book. You knew what would happen with a guy like that. Look at the Night Stalker. He’ll never get the gas. Or it’ll take twenty years.”
    Bosch felt uncomfortable. He had only thought of his motives and actions in the Dollmaker case when alone. He never spoke aloud about it. He didn’t know where she was going with this.
    She said, “I know if it was true you could never admit it, but I think you either consciously or subconsciously made a decision. You went for justice for all those women, his victims. Maybe even for your mother.”
    Shocked, Bosch turned to her and was about to ask how she knew about his mother and how she had come to think of her relation to the Dollmaker. Then he remembered the files again. It was probably in there somewhere. When he had applied to the department, he had to say on the forms if he or any close relatives had ever been the victim of a crime. He had been orphaned at eleven, he wrote, when his mother was found strangled in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard. He didn’t need to write what she did for a living. The location and crime said enough.
    When he recovered his cool, Bosch asked Eleanor what her point was.
    “No point,” she said. “I just… respect that. If it were me, I would have liked to have done the same thing, I think. I hope I would have been brave enough.”
    He looked over at her, the darkness shielding both their faces. It was late now and no car lights drifted by to show them to each other.
    “You go ahead and take the first shift sleeping,” he said. “I drank too much coffee.”
    She didn’t answer. He offered to get out a blanket he had put in the trunk, but she declined.
    “Did you ever hear what J. Edgar Hoover said about justice?” she asked.
    “He probably said a lot, but I don’t recall any of it offhand.”
    “He said that justice is incidental to law and order. I think he was right.”
    She said nothing else and after a while he could hear her breathing turn deeper and longer. When the rare car drove by