The Black Echo

showed me?”
    “I don’t know. Rourke got it. Why?”
    He found the letter and handed it to her without saying anything.
    “What is this? Nineteen seventy-three?”
    “Read it. This is Meadows’s file, the one I had copied and sent from St. Louis. There is no letter like this one in the file Rourke gave you to give me. He sanitized it. Read, you’ll see why.”
    He glanced over at the vault door. Nothing was happening and he didn’t expect anything to be. Then he watched her as she read. She raised an eyebrow as she scanned both pages, not seeing the name.
    “Yes, so he was some kind of a hero, it says. I don’t-” Her eyes widened as she got to the bottom. “Copied to Lieutenant John Rourke.”
    “Uh huh. You also missed the first reference.”
    He pointed to the sentence that named Rourke as Meadows’s CO.
    “The inside man. What do you think we should do?”
    “I don’t know. Are you sure? This doesn’t prove anything.”
    “If it was a coincidence, he should have said he knew the guy, cleared it up. Like me. I came in. He didn’t because he didn’t want the connection known. I called him on it when we were on the phone. He lied. He didn’t know we had this.”
    “Now he knows you know?”
    “Yeah. I don’t know what he thinks I know. I hung up on him. The question is, what do we do about it? We’re probably spinning our wheels here. The whole thing’s a charade. Nobody’s going into that vault. They probably took Tran down after he checked his diamonds out and left. We led him right to slaughter.”
    Then he realized that maybe the white LTD belonged to the robbers, not Lewis and Clarke. They had followed Bosch and Wish to Tran.
    “Wait a minute,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know. What about the alarms all week? The fire hydrant and the arson? It has to be happening like we thought.”
    “I don’t know. Nothing is making sense right now. Maybe Rourke is leading his people into a trap. Or a slaughter.”
    They both stared ahead at the vault. The rain had slacked off, the sun was completely up now and it set the steel door aglow. Eleanor finally spoke.
    “I think we have to get some help. We have Hanlon and Houck sitting on the other side of the bank, and SWAT, unless that was part of Rourke’s charade.”
    Bosch told her he had checked on the SWAT surveillance and learned that it actually was in place.
    “Then what is Rourke doing?” she said.
    “Pushing all the buttons.”
    They kicked it around for a few minutes and decided to call Orozco at Beverly Hills police. First, Eleanor checked in with Hanlon and Houck. Bosch wanted to keep them in place.
    “You guys awake over there?” she said into the Motorola.
    “That’s a ten-four, barely. I feel like that guy stuck in his car in the overpass after the earthquake up in Oakland. What’s up, anything?”
    “No, just checking. How’s the front door?”
    “Not a knock all night.”
    She signed off and there was a moment of silence before Bosch turned to get out of the car, to call Orozco. He stopped and looked back at her.
    “You know, he died,” he said.
    “Who died?”
    “The guy that was in that overpass.”
    Just then there was a thump that slightly shook the car. Not as much a sound as a vibration, an impact, not unlike the first jolt of an earthquake. There was no following vibration. But after one or two seconds an alarm sounded. The ringing came loud and clear from the Beverly Hills Safe & Lock Company. Bosch sat bolt upright, staring into the vault room. There was no visible sign of intrusion. Almost immediately, the radio crackled with Hanlon’s voice.
    “We’ve got a bell. What’s our plan of action?”
    Neither Bosch nor Wish answered the radio call at first. They just sat staring at the vault, dumbfounded. Rourke had let his people walk right into a trap. Or so it seemed.
    “Son of a bitch,” Bosch said. “They’re in.”

    ***

    Bosch said, “Tell Hanlon and Houck to stay cool until we get orders.”
    “And who is going to give the orders?” Eleanor asked.
    Bosch didn’t answer. He was thinking of what was going on in the vault. Why would Rourke lead his people into a setup?
    “He must not have been able to warn them, tell them that the diamonds aren’t there and that we’re up here,” he said. “I mean, twenty-four hours ago we didn’t know about this place or what was going on. Maybe by the time we got onto it, it was too late. They were too far in.”
    “So they are just proceeding as