The Black Echo

began pressing them on the card. Bosch admired how quickly and expertly he did this. But then Sakai stopped.
    “Hey. Check it out.”
    Sakai gently moved the index finger. It was easily manipulated in any direction. The joint was cleanly broken, but there was no sign of swelling or hemorrhage.
    “It looks post to me,” Sakai said.
    Bosch stooped to look closer. He took the dead man’s hand away from Sakai and felt it with both his own, ungloved hands. He looked at Sakai and then at Osito.
    “Bosch, don’t start in,” Sakai barked. “Don’t be looking at him. He knows better. I trained him myself.”
    Bosch didn’t remind Sakai that it was he who had been driving the ME wagon that dumped a body strapped to a wheeled stretcher onto the Ventura Freeway a few months back. During rush hour. The stretcher rolled down the Lankershim Boulevard exit and hit the back end of a car at a gas station. Because of the fiberglass partition in the cab, Sakai didn’t know he had lost the body until he arrived at the morgue.
    Bosch handed the dead man’s hand back to the coroner’s tech. Sakai turned to Osito and spoke a question in Spanish. Osito’s small brown face became very serious and he shook his head no.
    “He didn’t even touch the guy’s hands in there. So you better wait until the cut before you go saying something you aren’t sure about.”
    Sakai finished transferring the fingerprints and then handed the card to Bosch.
    “Bag the hands,” Bosch said to him, though he didn’t need to. “And the feet.”
    He stood back up and began waving the card to get the ink to dry. With his other hand he held up the plastic evidence bag Sakai had given him. In it a rubber band held together a hypodermic needle, a small vial that was half filled with what looked like dirty water, a wad of cotton and a pack of matches. It was a shooter’s kit and it looked fairly new. The spike was clean, with no sign of corrosion. The cotton, Bosch guessed, had only been used as a strainer once or twice. There were tiny whitish-brown crystals in the fibers. By turning the bag he could look inside each side of the matchbook and see only two matches missing.
    Donovan crawled out of the pipe at that moment. He was wearing a miner’s helmet equipped with a flashlight. In one hand he carried several plastic bags, each containing a yellowed newspaper, or a food wrapper or a crushed beer can. In the other he carried a clipboard on which he had diagramed where each item had been found in the pipe. Spiderwebs hung off the sides of the helmet. Sweat was running down his face and staining the painter’s breathing mask he wore over his mouth and nose. Bosch held up the bag containing the shooter’s kit. Donovan stopped in his tracks.
    “You find a stove in there?” Bosch asked.
    “Shit, he’s a hype?” Donovan said. “I knew it. What the fuck are we doin’ all this for?”
    Bosch didn’t answer. He waited him out.
    “Answer is yes, I found a Coke can,” Donovan said.
    The crime scene tech looked through the plastic bags in his hands and held one up to Bosch. It contained two halves of a Coke can. The can looked reasonably new and had been cut in half with a knife. The bottom half had been inverted and its concave surface used as a pan to cook heroin and water. A stove. Most hypes no longer used spoons. Carrying a spoon was probable cause for arrest. Cans were easy to come by, easy to handle and disposable.
    “We need the kit and the stove printed as soon as we can,” Bosch said. Donovan nodded and carried his burden of plastic bags toward the police van. Bosch turned his attention back to the ME’s men.
    “No knife on him, right?” Bosch said.
    “Right,” Sakai said. “Why?”
    “I need a knife. Incomplete scene without a knife.”
    “So what. Guy’s a hype. Hypes steal from hypes. His pals probably took it.”
    Sakai’s gloved hands rolled up the sleeves of the dead man’s shirt. This revealed a network of scar tissue on both arms. Old needle marks, craters left by abscesses and infections. In the crook of the left elbow was a fresh spike mark and a large yellow-and-purplish hemorrhage under the skin.
    “Bingo,” Sakai said. “I’d say this guy took a hot load in the arm and, phssst, that was it. Like I said, you got a hype case, Bosch. You’ll have an early day. Go get a Dodger dog.”
    Bosch crouched down again to look closer.
    “That’s what everybody keeps telling me,” he said.
    And Sakai was probably