The Black Echo

warm and moist from the walk over. She stopped and turned and smoked him with brown eyes so angry and hot they could have burned his name on a tombstone.
    “Let go,” she said, her voice tightly controlled but carrying enough of an edge to suggest she could lose it. He let go.
    “Don’t leave. Please.” She lingered a moment and he worked quickly. He said, “It’s all right. I understand the reasons for the whole thing, the cold reception back there, everything. I have to say it actually was good work, what you did. I can’t hold it against you.”
    “Bosch, listen to me, I don’t know what you are talking about. I think-”
    “I know you already knew about Meadows, the tunnels, the whole thing. You pulled his military files, you pulled mine, you probably pulled files on every rat that made it out of that place alive. There had to have been something in the WestLand job that connected to the tunnels back there.”
    She looked at him for a long moment and was about to speak, when a waitress approached with a pad and pencil.
    “For now, just one coffee, black, and an Evian. Thank you,” Bosch said before Wish or the waitress could speak. The waitress walked away, writing on the pad.
    “I thought you were a cream-and-sugar cop,” Wish said.
    “Only when people try to guess what I am.”
    Her eyes seemed to soften then, but only a bit.
    “Detective Bosch, look, I don’t know how you know what you think you know, but I am not going to discuss the WestLand case. It is exactly as I said at the bureau. I can’t do it. I am sorry. I really am.”
    Bosch said, “I guess maybe I should resent it, but I don’t. It was a logical step in the investigation. I would’ve done the same. You take anybody who fit the profile-tunnel rat-and sift them through the evidence.”
    “You’re not a suspect, Bosch, okay? So drop it.”
    “I know I’m not a suspect.” He gave a short, forced burst of laughter. “I was serving a suspension down in Mexico and can prove it. But you already know that. So for me, fine, I’ll drop it. But I need what you have on Meadows. You pulled his files back in September. You must have done a workup on him. Surveillance, known associates, background. Maybe… I bet you even pulled him in and talked to him. I need it all now-today, not in three, four weeks when some liaison puts a stamp on it.”
    The waitress came back with the coffee and water. Wish pulled her glass close but didn’t drink.
    “Detective Bosch, you are off the case. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. But you’re off. You go back to your office and you’ll find out. We made a call after you left.”
    He was holding his coffee with two hands, elbows on the table. He carefully put the cup down on the saucer, in case his hands began to shake.

    ***

    “What did you do?” Bosch asked.
    “I’m sorry,” Eleanor Wish said. “After you left, Rourke-the guy you shoved the picture in front of?-he called the number on your card and talked to a Lieutenant Pounds. He told him about your visit today and suggested there was a conflict, you investigating a friend’s death. He said some other things and-”
    “What other things?”
    “Look, Bosch, I know about you. I’ll admit we pulled your files, we checked you out. Hell, but to do that, all we had to do was read the newspapers back then. You and that Dollmaker thing. So I know what you have been through with the internal people, and this isn’t going to help, but it was Rourke’s decision. He-”
    “What other things did he tell?”
    “He told the truth. He said both your name and Meadows’s had come up in our investigation. He said you both knew each other. He asked that you be taken off the case. So all of this doesn’t matter.”
    Bosch looked off, out of the booth.
    “I want to hear you answer,” he said. “Am I a suspect?”
    “No. At least you weren’t until you walked in this morning. Now, I don’t know. I’m trying to be honest. I mean, you have to look at this from our standpoint. One guy we looked at last year comes in and says he is investigating the murder of another guy we looked very hard at. This first guy says, ‘Let me see your files.’”
    She didn’t have to tell him as much as she had. He knew this and knew she was probably going out on a limb saying anything at all. For all the shit he had just stepped in or been put in, Harry Bosch was beginning to like cold, hard Eleanor Wish.
    “If you won’t tell me about