The Black Echo

like a mass grave, a long gouge into the hill, a huge wound. The exposed soil was covered with black plastic sheets.
    “You want coffee?” Wish said from behind him.
    “Of course,” he said. He pulled himself away from the curtains and followed her in. The bureau was empty. They went into the office kitchen and he watched as she dumped a packet of ground coffee into a filter basket and turned the machine on. They stood there silently, watching the coffee slowly drip into a round glass pot on the heating pad. Bosch lit a cigarette and tried only to think about the coffee that was coming. She waved the smoke away with a hand but didn’t tell him to put it out.
    When the coffee was ready, Bosch took it black and it hit his system like a shot. He filled up a second cup and carried both into the squad room. He lit a cigarette off the butt of the first when he got to his temporary desk.
    “My last one,” he promised when he saw her looking.
    Eleanor poured herself a cup of water from a bottle she took from her file drawer.
    “You ever run out of that stuff?” he asked.
    She ignored the question. “Harry, we can’t blame ourselves for Sharkey. If we’re to blame, then we might as well offer every person we talk to protection. Should we go up and grab his mother and put her in witness protection? What about the girl in the motel room that knew him? See, it gets crazy. Sharkey was Sharkey. You live by the street, you die by the street.”
    Bosch didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Let me see the names.”
    Wish pulled out the files on the WestLand case. She rifled through them and pulled out a computer printout several pages long and folded accordion-style. She tossed it on the desk in front of him.
    “That’s the master there,” she said. “Everybody who had a box. There are notes written after some of the names, but they probably are not germane. Most of that was if we thought they were scamming insurance or not.”
    Bosch started unfolding the printout and realized it was one long list and five shorter lists marked A through E. He asked what they were, and she came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. He smelled the apple in her hair.
    “Okay, the long list is like I said, everybody who had a box. It’s an all-inclusive list. Then we did five breakouts, A through E. The first-that’s A-is a breakout on boxes rented within the three months prior to the burglary. Then B, we did a breakout on boxholders who reported no loss at all in the burglary. Then C is the list of dead ends; boxholders who were actually dead or we couldn’t find because of changes in addresses or they had given phony information to rent them.
    “Then the fourth and fifth breakouts are matching lists from the first three. D is anybody who rented a box in the previous three months and also reported no loss. E is anybody on the dead-end list who was also on the three-month list. Understand?”
    He did. The FBI’s thinking had been that the vault had to have been cased by the thieves before the break-in and that was most likely accomplished by simply going into the bank and renting a box. That way they had legitimate access; the guy who rented the box could go inside the vault anytime he wanted during business hours and have a look around. So the list including anybody who rented a box within three months of the robbery stood a good chance of also including the scout.
    Second, it was likely that this scout would not want to draw attention to himself after the robbery, so he might report nothing stolen from his box. So that would put him on the D list. But if he made no report at all or had given untraceable information on his box rental card, then his name would be on the E list.
    There were only seven names on the D list and five on the E list. One of the E names was circled. Frederic B. Isley of Park La Brea, the name of the man who had bought three Honda ATVs in Tustin. The other names had check marks next to them.
    “Remember?” Eleanor said. “I said that name would come up again.”
    Harry nodded.
    “Isley,” she said. “We think he was the scout. Rented the box nine weeks before the burglary. The bank records show he made a total of four visits to the vault during the next seven weeks. But after the break-in, he never came back, whoever he was. Never filed a report. And when we tried to contact him we found the address was phony.”
    “Get a description?”
    “Not one that would do us any good.