The Black Echo

promised, Lewis and Clarke would go for assignment to IAD. That way they could put him on display like a trophy.
    “You need anything from me on Spivey?” he asked Edgar.
    “No. I’m set. I’m gonna start typing it up if I can get a machine.”
    “Did you happen to check like I asked on Meadows’s job on the subway project?”
    “Harry, you…” Edgar must have thought better of saying what he wanted to say. “Yeah, I checked it out. For what it’s worth, they said they haven’t had anyone named Meadows on the job. There is a Fields, but he’s black and he was at work today. And Meadows probly wasn’t working under any other name because they aren’t running a midnight shift. The project is ahead of schedule, if you can believe that shit.” Edgar then called out, “I got dibs on the Selectric.”
    “No way,” called back an autos detective named Minkly. “I’m on deck with that one.”
    Edgar started looking around for another candidate. Late in the day, the typewriters in the office were like gold. There were a dozen machines for thirty-two detectives: that was if you included the manual jobs and the electrics with nervous tics like moving borders or jumpy space bars.
    “Okay then,” Edgar called out. “I got dibs after you, Mink.” Then Edgar lowered his voice and turned to Bosch. “Who you think he’ll put me with?”
    “Pounds? I don’t know.” It was like guessing who your wife would marry after you punched the time clock for the last time. Bosch wasn’t all that interested in speculating who would be partnered with Edgar. He said, “Listen, I have to do some things.”
    “Sure, Harry. You need any help, anything from me?”
    Bosch shook his head and picked up the phone. He called his lawyer and left a message. It usually took three messages before the guy would call back, and Bosch made a note to call again. Then he turned his Rolodex, got a number and called the U.S. Armed Services Records Archive in St. Louis. He asked for a law enforcement clerk and got a woman named Jessie St. John. He put in a priority request for copies of all of Billy Meadows’s military records. Three days, St. John said. He hung up thinking that he would never see the records. They’d come but he wouldn’t be in this office, at this table, on this case. Next he called Donovan at SID and learned there had been no latent prints on the needle kit found in Meadows’s shirt pocket and only smears on the can of spray paint. The light-brown crystals found in the straining cotton in the kit came back as 55 percent pure heroin, Asian blend. Bosch knew that most heroin dealt on the street and shot into the vein was about 15 percent pure. Most of it was tar heroin made by Mexicans. Somebody had given Meadows a very hot shot. In Harry’s mind, that made the tox tests he was waiting for a formality. Meadows had been murdered.
    Nothing else from the crime scene was of much use, except Donovan mentioned that the freshly burned match found in the pipe was not torn from the matchbook in Meadows’s kit. Bosch gave Donovan the address of Meadows’s apartment and asked him to send a team out to process it. He said to check the matches in an ashtray on the coffee table against the book in the kit. Then he hung up, wondering if Donovan would send somebody before word spread that Bosch was off the case or suspended.
    The last call he made was to the coroner’s office. Sakai said he had made next-of-kin notification. Meadows’s mother was still alive and was reached in New Iberia, Louisiana. She had no money to send for him or bury him. She hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Billy Meadows would not be going home. L.A. County would have to bury him.
    “What about the VA?” Bosch asked. “He was a veteran.”
    “Right. I’ll check it out,” Sakai said and hung up.
    Bosch got up and took a small portable tape recorder from one of his drawers in the file cabinets. The bank of files ran along the wall behind the homicide table. He slipped the recorder into his coat pocket with the 911 tape and walked out of the squad room through the rear hallway. He went past the lockup benches and the jail, down to the CRASH office. The tiny office was more crowded than the detective bureau. Desks and files for five men and a woman were crammed into a room no bigger than a second bedroom in a Venice apartment. Down one wall of the room was a row of four-drawer file cabinets. On the opposite wall was the computer and teletype. In