The Black Echo

near the crime scene tape.
    “What did this kid tell you, and how come he was running around loose if he’s part of the case?” he asked.
    Bosch told him the basics of the story, that they didn’t know if Sharkey was important to the case. But somebody apparently did or couldn’t risk waiting to find out. As Bosch spoke he looked up over the hills and saw the first light of dawn outlining the tall palms at the top. Edgar took a step away and tilted his head up that way, too. But he wasn’t looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He eventually turned back to Bosch.
    “Harry, you know what this weekend is?” he said. “It’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s the biggest three-day showing weekend of the year. Start of the summer season. Last year I sold four houses on this weekend, made almost as much as I made all year as a cop.”
    Bosch was confused by the sudden departure in the conversation. “What are you talking about?”
    “What I’m talking about is… I’m not going to be busting my ass on this case. It isn’t going to fuck up my weekend like the last one. So, what I’m saying is if you want it, I’ll go to Pounds and tell him you and the FBI want to take it ’cause it goes with the one you are already working. Otherwise, I’m going to work it strictly as a nine-to-five.”
    “You tell Pounds whatever you want, Jed. It’s not my call.”
    Bosch started back toward Eleanor, and Edgar said, “Just one thing. Who knew you had found the kid?”
    Bosch stopped and looked at Eleanor. Without turning around, he said, “We took him off the street. We interviewed him over on Wilcox. The reports went to the bureau. What do you want me to say, Jed?”
    “Nothing,” Edgar said. “But, Harry, maybe you and the FBI there should have looked out for your witness a little better. Maybe saved me some time and that boy some life.”
    Bosch and Wish walked silently back to the car. Once inside Bosch said, “Who knew?”
    “What do you mean?” she said.
    “What he asked back there, who knew about Sharkey?”
    She thought for a moment. Then said, “On my end, Rourke gets the daily summary reports, and he got the memo on hypnosis. The summaries go to records and are copied to the senior special agent. The tape from the interview that you gave me is locked in my desk. Nobody’s heard that. It hasn’t been transcribed. So, I guess anyone could have seen the summaries. But don’t even think about that, Harry. Nobody… It can’t be.”
    “Well, they knew we found the kid and he might be important. What’s that tell you? They’ve got to have somebody on the inside.”
    “Harry, that’s speculation. It could have been a lot of things. Like you told him, we picked him up on the street. Anybody could have been watching. His own friends, that girl, anybody could have put out the word that we were looking for Sharkey.”
    Bosch thought about Lewis and Clarke. They must have seen them pick up Sharkey. What part were they playing? Nothing made sense.
    “Sharkey was a tough little bastard,” he said. “You think he just went walking with somebody into that tunnel? I think he didn’t have a choice. And to do that, it maybe took somebody with a badge.”
    “Or maybe somebody with money. You know he’d go with somebody if there was money in it.”
    She didn’t start the car and they sat in it thinking. Bosch finally said, “Sharkey was a message.”
    “What?”
    “A message to us. See? They leave my card with him. They call it in on a no-trace line. And they do him in a tunnel. They want us to know they did it. They want us to know they’ve got somebody inside. They’re laughing at us.”
    She started the car. “Where to?”
    “The bureau.”
    “Harry, be careful with that stuff about an inside man. If you go trying to sell that and it’s not true, you could give your enemies all they need to bury you.”
    Enemies, Bosch thought. Who are my enemies this time?
    “I got that kid killed,” he said. “The least I am going to do is find who did it.”

    ***

    Bosch looked through the cotton curtains in the waiting room, down at the veterans cemetery, while Eleanor Wish unlocked the door to the bureau offices. The ground fog had not burned off the field of stones yet, and from above it looked like a thousand ghosts rising from their boxes at once. Bosch could see the dark gash dug into the crest of the hill at the north side of the cemetery but still could not make out what it was. It looked almost