The Black Echo

know it’s Sunday and, uh, thanks for going back in.”
    “No problem. It’s straight OT for me.”
    The shirtless man and a coroner’s technician were sitting on their haunches, huddled over the body. They both wore white rubber gloves. The technician was Larry Sakai, a guy Bosch had known for years but had never liked. He had a plastic fishing-tackle box open on the ground next to him. He took a scalpel from the box and made a one-inch-long cut into the side of the body, just above the left hip. No blood came from the slice. From the box he then removed a thermometer and attached it to the end of a curved probe. He stuck it into the incision, expertly though roughly turning it and driving it up into the liver.
    The shirtless man grimaced, and Bosch noticed he had a blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of his right eye. It somehow seemed appropriate to Bosch. It was the most sympathy the dead man would get here.
    “Time of death is going to be a pisser,” Sakai said. He did not look up from his work. “That pipe, you know, with the heat rising, it’s going to skew the temperature loss in the liver. Osito took a reading in there and it was eighty-one. Ten minutes later it was eighty-three. We don’t have a fixed temp in the body or the pipe.”
    “So?” Bosch said.
    “So I am not giving you anything here. I gotta take it back and do some calculating.”
    “You mean give it to somebody else who knows how to figure it?” Bosch asked.
    “You’ll get it when you come in for the autopsy, don’t worry, man.”
    “Speaking of which, who’s doing the cutting today?”
    Sakai didn’t answer. He was busy with the dead man’s legs. He grabbed each shoe and manipulated the ankles. He moved his hands up the legs and reached beneath the thighs, lifting each leg and watching as it bent at the knee. He then pressed his hands down on the abdomen as if feeling for contraband. Lastly, he reached inside the shirt and tried to turn the dead man’s head. It didn’t move. Bosch knew rigor mortis worked its way from the head through the body and then into the extremities.
    “This guy’s neck is locked but good,” Sakai said. “Stomach’s getting there. But the extremities still have good movement.”
    He took a pencil from behind his ear and pressed the eraser end against the skin on the side of the torso. There was purplish blotching on the half of the body closest to the ground, as if the body were half full of red wine. It was post-mortem lividity. When the heart stops pumping, the blood seeks the low ground. When Sakai pressed the pencil against the dark skin, it did not blanch white, a sign the blood had fully clotted. The man had been dead for hours.
    “The po-mo lividity is steady,” Sakai said. “That and the rig makes me estimate that this dude’s been dead maybe six to eight hours. That’s going to have to hold you, Bosch, until we can work with the temps.”
    Sakai didn’t look up as he said this. He and the one called Osito began pulling the pockets on the dead man’s green fatigue pants inside out. They were empty, as were the large baggy pockets on the thighs. They rolled the body to one side to check the back pockets. As they did this, Bosch leaned down to look closely at the exposed back of the dead man. The skin was purplish with lividity and dirty. But he saw no scratches or marks that allowed him to conclude that the body had been dragged.
    “Nothing in the pants, Bosch, no ID,” Sakai said, still not looking up.
    Then they began to gently pull the black shirt back over the head and onto the torso. The dead man had straggly hair that had more gray in it than the original black. His beard was unkempt and he looked to be about fifty, which made Bosch figure him at about forty. There was something in the breast pocket of the shirt and Sakai fished it out, looked at it a moment and then put it into a plastic bag held open by his partner.
    “Bingo,” Sakai said and handed the bag up to Bosch. “One set of works. Makes our jobs all a lot easier.”
    Sakai next peeled the dead man’s cracked eyelids all the way open. The eyes were blue with a milky caul over them. Each pupil was constricted to about the size of a pencil lead. They stared vacantly up at Bosch, each pupil a small black void.
    Sakai made some notes on a clipboard. He’d made his decision on this one. Then he pulled an ink pad and a print card from the tackle box by his side. He inked the fingers of the left hand and