The Black Echo

resignation.
    “After we put his body in the Jeep and covered it with the blanket, Rourke went back in to make a last sweep of the place. I stayed outside. There was a tire iron in the back. I took it and hit his fingers with it. Meadows’s fingers. It was so somebody would see it was murder. I remember the sound so clearly. The bone. So loud I thought Rourke might even have heard…”
    “What about Sharkey?” Bosch asked.
    “Sharkey,” she said wistfully, as if she were trying the name out for the first time.
    “After the interview, I told Rourke that Sharkey didn’t see our faces at the dam. He even thought I was a man, sitting in the Jeep. But I made a mistake. I mentioned how we discussed hypnotizing him. Even though I stopped you and trusted that you wouldn’t do it without me, Rourke didn’t trust you. So he did what he did with Sharkey. After we were called out there and I saw him I…”
    She didn’t finish but Bosch wanted to know everything.
    “You what?”
    “Later, I confronted Rourke and told him I was bringing the whole thing down because he was out of control, killing innocent people. He told me there was no way to stop it. Franklin and Delgado were in the tunnel and out of reach. They turned the radios off when they brought the C- 4 in. It’s too unstable. He said there was no stopping it without more spilled blood. Then the next night you and I were almost run down. That was Rourke, I’m sure.”
    She said that the two of them played an unspoken game of mutual distrust and suspicion after that. The burglary of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock continued as planned, and Rourke steered Bosch and everybody else away from going underground to stop it. He had to let Franklin and Delgado go through with it, even though there were no diamonds left in Tran’s box. Rourke could not risk going underground to warn them, either.
    Eleanor finally ended the game when she followed Bosch down into the tunnel and killed Rourke, his eyes staring at her as he slid down into the black water.
    “And that’s the whole story,” she said quietly.
    “My car is over this way,” Bosch said as he stood up from the bench. “I’ll take you back now.”
    They found his car on the driveway, and Bosch noticed her eyes linger on the fresh soil on Meadows’s grave before she got in. He wondered if she had watched from the Federal Building as the casket was put in the ground. As he drove toward the exit, Harry said, “Why couldn’t you let it go? What happened to your brother was another time, another place. Why didn’t you let it go?”
    “You don’t know how many times I’ve asked that and how many times I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t.”
    They were at the light at Wilshire and Bosch was wondering what he was going to do. And once again she read him, she sensed his indecision.
    “Are you going to take me in now, Harry? You might have a hard time proving your case. Everybody’s dead. It could look like you were part of it, too. You going to risk that?”
    He didn’t say anything. The light changed and he drove down to the Federal Building, pulling to the curb near the garden of flags.
    She said, “If it means anything to you at all, what happened between you and me, it wasn’t part of any plan. I know you won’t ever know if that’s the truth, but I wanted to say-”
    “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say a thing about it.”
    A few uneasy moments of silence passed between them.
    “You’re just letting me go here?”
    “I think it would be best for you, Eleanor, if you turned yourself in. Go get a lawyer and then come in. Tell them you didn’t have anything to do with the murders. Tell them the story about your brother. They are reasonable people and they’ll want to keep it low profile, avoid the scandal. The U.S. attorney will probably let you plead to something short of murder. The bureau will go along.”
    “And what if I don’t turn myself in? You will tell them?”
    “No. Like you said, I’m too much a part of it. They’d never go with what I’d tell them.”
    He thought a long moment. He didn’t want to say what he was going to say next unless he was sure he meant it. And could, and would, do it.
    “No, I won’t tell them… But if I don’t hear in a few days that you went in, I will tell Binh. And I’ll tell Tran. I won’t need to prove it to them. I’ll just tell them the story with enough facts that they’ll know it is true. Then, you know what they’ll do?