The Black Echo

truth.”
    She nodded. “I grew up thinking he was the hero my mother and father told me he was. They shielded me. They lied. But how could they know that one day a monument would be made and they would put every name on it… Every name but my brother’s.”
    She stopped, but this time he waited her out.
    “One day a few years ago I went to the memorial. And I thought there was some kind of mistake. There was a book there, an index of the names, and I looked and he wasn’t listed. No Michael Scarletti. I yelled at the parks people. ‘How could you just leave someone’s name out of the book?’ And so I spent the rest of the day reading the names on the wall. All of them. I was going to show them how wrong they were. But… he wasn’t there, either. I couldn’t-Do you know what it’s like to spend almost fifteen years of your life believing something, to build your beliefs around one single, shining fact, and have… to find that all that time it actually was like cancer growing inside?”
    Bosch smeared the tears on her cheeks with his hand. He leaned his face close to hers.
    “So what did you do, Eleanor?”
    The fist against her lips squeezed tighter, her knuckles as bloodless as a corpse’s. Bosch noticed a park bench farther down the walkway and he took her by the shoulder and directed her there.
    “This whole thing,” he said after they were sitting. “I don’t understand, Eleanor. This whole thing. You were the-You wanted some kind of revenge against-”
    “Justice. Not revenge, not vengeance.”
    “Is there a difference?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Tell me what you did.”
    “I confronted my parents. And they finally told me about L.A. I went through all my things from him and I found a letter, his last letter. I still had it in my things at my parents’ house but I’d forgotten it. It’s here.”
    She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. Bosch could see the rubber grips and the handle of her gun in the purse. She opened her wallet and pulled out a twice-folded piece of lined notebook paper. She delicately unfolded it and held it open for him to read. He didn’t touch it.
    Ellie, I’m getting so short here I can practically taste the soft-shell crabs. I should be home in two weeks or so. First I have to stop off in Los Angeles to make some money. Ha Ha! I have a plan (but don’t tell the OM). I’m supposed to drop off a “diplomatic” package in L.A. But there might be a way to do something better with it. When I get back, maybe we can go up to the Poconos again before I have to go back to work for the “war machine.” I know what you think about what I’m doing but I can’t tell the OM no. We’ll see how it goes. One thing’s for sure, I’m glad to be leaving this place. I’ve been In Country for six weeks before getting some R & R here in Saigon. I don’t want to go back, so I’m having them treat me for dysentery. (Ask the OM what that is! Ha Ha.) All I had to do was eat some of the restaurant food in this town and got the symptoms. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m safe and I’ll be home soon. So get those crab traps out of the shed. Love, Michael
    She folded the letter carefully and put it away.
    “The OM?” Bosch asked.
    “The Old Man.”
    “Right.”
    Her composure was coming back. Her face was taking on the hard look Bosch had seen the first day he met her. Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest and his arm in the blue sling.
    “I’m not wired, Eleanor,” he said. “I’m here for myself. I want to know for myself.”
    “That’s not what I was looking at,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t be wired. I was thinking of your arm. Harry, if there is anything that you believe about me now, that you can believe, believe me when I say no one was supposed to get hurt.
    “No one… Everybody was to lose. But that was all. After that day-at the memorial, I looked and I searched and I found out what happened to my brother. I used Ernst at State, I used the Pentagon, my father, I used whatever I could and I found out about my brother.”
    She searched his eyes but he tried not to reveal the thoughts behind them.
    “And?”
    “And it was like Ernst told us. Toward the end of the war, the three captains, the triad, were taking an active part in the transport of heroin to the States. One conduit was Rourke and his crew at the embassy, the military police. That included Meadows, Delgado and Franklin. They would find short-timers in the bars in