The Concrete Blonde (1994)

by Michael Connelly

  “We figure that was the detonation time,” Wish said. “Patrol was sent out, looked around and didn’t find anything, decided the alarms were probably triggered by an earthquake tremor and left. Nobody bothered to check WestLand National. Its alarm hadn’t made a peep. They didn’t know that it had been turned off.”

  Once into the vault, they didn’t leave, she said. They worked right through the three-day weekend, drilling the locks on the deposit boxes, pulling the drawers and emptying them.

  “We found empty food cans, potato chip bags, freeze-dried food packets, you know, survival store stuff,” Wish said. “It looks like they stayed there, maybe slept in shifts. In the tunnel there was a wide part, it was like a small room. Like a sleeping room, we think. We found the pattern from a sleeping bag impressed on the dirt floor. We also found impressions in the sand left by the stocks of M-16s—they brought automatic weapons with them. They weren’t planning on surrendering if things went wrong.”

  She let him think about that a few moments and then continued. “We estimate they were in the vault sixty hours, maybe a few more. They drilled four hundred and sixty-four of the boxes. Out of seven fifty. If there were three of them, then that’s about a hundred and fifty-five boxes each. Subtract about fifteen hours for rest and eating over the three days they were in there, and you’ve got each man drilling three, four boxes an hour.”

  They must have had a time limit, she said. Maybe three o’clock or thereabouts Tuesday morning. If they quit drilling by then, it gave them plenty of time to pack up and get out. They took the loot and their tools and backed out. The bank manager, with a fresh Palm Springs tan on his face, discovered the heist when he opened the vault for business Tuesday morning.

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” she said. “Best thing I’ve seen or heard of since I’ve been in the job. Only a few mistakes. We’ve found out a lot about how they did it but not much about who did it. Meadows was as close as we ever got, and now he’s dead. That photograph you showed me yesterday. Of the bracelet? You were right, it’s the first thing that’s ever turned up from one of those boxes that we know of.”

  “But now it’s gone.”

  Bosch waited for her to say something but she was done.

  “How’d they pick the boxes to drill?” he asked.

  “It looks random. I have a video at the office I’ll show you. But it looks like they said, ‘You take that wall, I’ll take this one, you take that one,’ and so on. Some boxes right next to others that were drilled were left untouched. Why, I don’t know. Didn’t look like a pattern. Still, we had losses reported in ninety percent of the boxes they drilled. Mostly untraceable stuff. They chose well.”

  “How did you come up with three of them?”

  “We figured it would take at least that many to drill that many boxes. Plus, that’s how many ATVs there were.”

  She smiled and he bit. “Okay, how’d you know about the ATVs?”

  “Well, there were tracks in the mud in the drainage line and we identified them from tires. We also found paint, blue paint, on the wall on one of the curves of the drainage line. One of them had slid on the mud and hit the wall. The paint lab in Quantico came up with the model year and make. We hit all the Honda dealers in Southern California until we came up with a purchase of three blue ATVs at a dealership in Tustin, four weeks before Labor Day. Guy paid cash and loaded them on a trailer. Gave a phony name and address.”

  “What was it?”

  “The name? Frederic B. Isley, as in FBI. It would come up again. We once showed the salesman some six-packs that included Meadows’s, yours and a few other people’s photos but he couldn’t make anybody as Isley.”

  She wiped her mouth on a napkin and dropped it on the table. He could see no lipstick on it.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve had enough water for a week. Meet me back at the bureau and we’ll go over what we’ve got and what you’ve got on the Meadows thing. Rourke and I think that is the way to go. We’ve exhausted all leads on the bank job, been banging against the wall. Maybe the Meadows case will bring us the break we need.”

  Wish picked up the tab, Bosch put down the tip.

  They took their separate cars to the Federal Building. Bosch thought about her as he drove and not the case. He wanted to ask her about that little scar on her chin and not how she connected the WestLand tunnelers to Vietnam tunnel rats. He wanted to know what gave the sweet sad look to her face. He followed her car through a neighborhood of student apartments near UCLA and then across Wilshire Boulevard

  . They met at the elevator in the parking garage of the Federal Building.

  “I think this will be best if you basically just deal with me,” she said as they rode up alone. “Rourke—You and Rourke did not start off well and—”

  “We didn’t even start off,” Bosch said.

  “Well, if you would give him the chance you would see he is a good man. He did what he thought was right for the case.”

  The elevator doors spread apart on the seventeenth floor, and there was Rourke.

  “There you two are,” he said. He put his hand out to Bosch, who took it without much conviction. Rourke introduced himself.

  “I was just going down for coffee and a roll,” he said. “Care to join me?”

  “Uh, John, we just came from a coffee shop,” Wish said. “We’ll meet you back up here.”

  Bosch and Wish were now outside the elevator and Rourke was inside. The assistant special agent in charge just nodded his head, and the door closed. Bosch and Wish headed into the office.

  “He’s a lot like you in a way—been through the war and all,” she said. “Give him a try. You’re not going to help things if you don’t thaw out.”

  He let it go by. They walked down the hall to the Group 3 squad and Wish pointed to a desk behind hers. She said it was empty since the agent who used it had been transferred to Group 2, the porno squad. Bosch put his briefcase on the desk and sat down. He looked around the room. It was much more crowded than the day before. About a half-dozen agents were at desks and three more were in the back standing around a file cabinet where there was a box of donuts. He noticed a television and VCR on a rack in the back of the office. It hadn’t been there the day before.

  “You said something about a video,” he said to Wish.

  “Oh, yes. I’ll get that set up and you can watch while I answer a few phone messages on other things.”

  She took a videotape out of a drawer in her desk and they walked to the back of the squad. The gang of three quietly moved away with their donuts, alarmed by the presence of an outsider. She set the tape up and left him there to watch alone.

  The video, obviously shot with a hand-held camera, was a bouncy, unprofessional walk-through of the thieves’ trail. It began in what Bosch surmised was the storm sewer, a square tunnel that curved away into a darkness the camera’s strobe couldn’t reach. Wish had been right, it was large. A truck could have driven down it. A small stream of water moved slowly down the center of the concrete floor. There was mold and algae on the floor and the lower part of the walls, and Bosch could almost smell the dampness. The camera panned down to the grayish-green floor. There were tire tracks in the slime. The next video scene was the entrance to the thieves’ tunnel, a cleanly cut hole in the sewer wall. A pair of hands moved into the picture holding the plywood circle Wish said had been used to cover the hole during the day. The hands moved further into the screen, then a head of dark hair. It was Rourke. He was wearing a dark jumpsuit with white letters across the back. FBI. He held the plywood up to the hole. It was a perfect fit.

  The video jumped then, and the scene was now from inside the thieves’ tunnel. It was eerie for Bosch to watch, and brought back memories of the hand-dug tunnels he had crawled through in Vietnam. This tunnel curved to the right. Surreal lighting flickered from candles set every twenty feet or so in notches dug into the wall. After curving for what he judged was about sixty feet, the tunnel turned sharply to the left.
It then followed a straightaway for almost a hundred feet, candles still flickering from the walls. The camera finally came to a dead end where there was a pile of concrete rubble, twisted pieces of steel rebar and plating. The camera panned up to a gaping hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. Light poured down from the vault above. Rourke stood up there in his jumpsuit, looking down at the camera. He dragged a finger across his neck and the picture cut again. This time the camera was inside the vault, a wide-angle shot of the entire room. As in the newspaper photo Bosch had seen, hundreds of safe-deposit box doors stood open. The boxes lay empty in piles on the floor. Two crime scene techs were dusting the doors for fingerprints. Eleanor Wish and another agent were looking up at the steel wall of box doors and writing in notebooks. The camera panned down to the floor and the hole to the tunnel below. Then the tape went black. He rewound it, brought it back and put it on her desk.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I saw a few things I had seen before. In the tunnels over there. But nothing that would have made me start looking at tunnel rats in particular. What was the lead to Meadows, people like me?”

  “First off, there was the C-4,” she said. “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sent a team out to go through the concrete and steel from the blast hole. There were trace elements of the explosive. The ATF guys ran some tests and came up with C-4. I’m sure you know it. It was used in Vietnam. Tunnel rats used it especially to implode tunnels. The thing is, you can get much better stuff now, with more compressed impact area, easier handling and detonation. It’s even cheaper. Also less dangerous to handle and easier to get ahold of. So we figured—I mean the ATF lab guy figured—the reason C-4 was used was because the user was comfortable with it, had used it before. So right off we thought it would be a Vietnam-era vet.

  “Another corollary to Vietnam was the booby traps. We think that before they went up into the vault to start drilling, they wired the tunnel to protect their rear. We sent an ATF dog through as a precaution, you know, to make sure there wasn’t any more live C-4 lying around. The animal got a reading—indicated explosives—in two places in the tunnel. The midway point and at the entrance cut in the wall of the storm line. But there was nothing there anymore. The perps took it with them. But we found peg holes in the floor of the tunnel and snippets of steel wire at both spots—like the leftover stuff when you are cutting lengths with a wire cutter.”

  “Tripwires,” Bosch said.

  “Right. We’re thinking they had the tunnel wired for intruders. If anybody had come in from behind to take them, the tunnel would have gone up. They’d’ve been buried under Hill Street

  . At least, the tunnelers took the explosives out with them when they left. Saved us stumbling across them.”

  “But an explosion like that probably would’ve killed the tunnelers along with the intruders,” Bosch said.

  “We know. These guys just weren’t taking chances. They were heavily armed, fortified and ready to go down. Succeed or suicide. . . .

  “Anyway, we didn’t narrow it down specifically to tunnel rats possibly being involved until somebody caught something when we were going over the tire tracks in the main sewer line. The tracks were here and there, no complete trail. So it took us a couple days to track them from the tunnel back to the entrance at the river wash. It wasn’t a straight shot. It’s a labyrinth down there. You had to know your way. We figured these guys weren’t sitting there on their ATVs with a flashlight and a map every night.”

  “Hansel and Gretel? They left crumbs along the way?”

  “Sort of. The walls down there have a lot of paint on them. You know, DWP marks, so they know where they are, what line is going where, dates of inspection and so forth. With all the paint on them, some look like the side of a 7-Eleven in an East L.A. barrio. So we figured the perps marked the way. We walked the trail and looked for reoccurring marks. There was only one. Kind of a peace sign, without the circle. Just three quick slash marks.”

  He knew the mark. He’d used it himself in tunnels twenty years ago. Three quick slashes on a tunnel wall with a knife. It was the symbol they’d used to mark their way, so they could find the way out again.

  Wish said, “One of the cops there that day—this was before LAPD turned the whole thing over to us—one of the robbery guys said he recognized it from Vietnam. He wasn’t a tunnel rat. But he told us about them. That’s how we connected it. From there, we went to the Department of Defense and the VA and got names. We got Meadows’s. We got yours. Others.”

  “How many others?”

  She pushed a six-inch stack of manila files across her desk.

  “They’re all here. Have a look if you want.”

  Rourke walked up then.

  “Agent Wish has told me about the letter you requested,” he said. “I have no problem with it. I roughed out something and we’ll try to get Senior Special Agent Whitcomb to sign it sometime today.”

  When Bosch didn’t say anything Rourke went on.

  “We may have overreacted yesterday, but I hope I’ve set everything straight with your lieutenant and your Internal Affairs people.” He gave a smile a politician would envy. “And by the way, I wanted to tell you I admire your record. Your military record. Myself, I served three tours. But I never went down into any of those ghastly tunnels. I was over there, though, till the very end. What a shame.”

  “What was the shame, that it ended?”

  Rourke eyed him a long moment, and Bosch saw red spread across his face from the point where his dark eyebrows knitted together. Rourke was a very pale man with a sallow face that gave the impression he was sucking on a sourball. He was a few years older than Bosch. They were the same height but Rourke had more weight on his frame. To the bureau’s traditional uniform of blue blazer and light-blue button-down shirt, he had added a red power tie.

  “Look, detective, you don’t have to like me, that’s fine,” Rourke said. “But, please, work with me on this. We want the same thing.”

  Bosch gave in for the time being.

  “What is it that you want me to do? Tell me exactly. Am I just along for the ride or do you really want my work?”

  “Bosch, you are supposedly a top-notch detective. Show us. Just follow your case. Like you said yesterday, you find who killed Meadows and we find who ripped off WestLand. So, yes, we want your best work. Proceed as you normally would but with Special Agent Wish as your partner.”

  Rourke walked away and out of the squad. Bosch figured he must have his own office somewhere off the quiet hallway. He turned to Wish’s desk and picked up the stack of files. He said, “Okay then, let’s go.”

  Wish signed out a bureau car and drove while Bosch looked through the stack of military files on his lap. He noticed his own was on top. He glanced at some of the others and recognized only Meadows’s name.

  “Where to?” Wish asked as she pulled out of the garage and took Veteran Avenue

  up to Wilshire.

  “Hollywood,” he said. “Is Rourke always such a stiff?”

  She turned east and smiled one of those smiles that made Bosch wonder whether she and Rourke had something going on.

  “When he wants,” she said. “He’s a good administrator, though. He runs the squad well. Always has been the leader type, I guess. I think he said he was in charge of a whole outfit or something when he was with the army. Over there in Saigon.”

  No way there was anything between them, he thought then. You don’t defend your lover by calling him a good administrator. There was nothing there.

  “He’s in the wrong business for administrating,” Bosch said. “Go up to Hollywood Boulevard

  , the neighborhood south of the Chinese theater.”

  It would take fifteen minutes to get there. He opened the top file—it was his own—and began looking through the papers. Between a set of psychiatric evaluation reports he found a black-and-white photo, almost like a mug shot, of a young man in uniform, his face unlined by age or experience.

  “You looked goo
d in a crew cut,” Wish said, interrupting his thoughts. “Reminded me of my brother when I saw that.”

  Bosch looked at her but didn’t say anything. He put the photo down and went back to roaming through the documents in the file, reading snatches of information about a stranger who was himself.

  Wish said, “We were able to find nine men with Vietnam tunnel experience living in Southern California. We checked them all out. Meadows was the only one we really moved up to the level of suspect. He was a hype, had the criminal record. He also had a history of working in tunnels even after he came back from the war.” She drove in silence for a few minutes while Bosch read. Then she said, “We watched him a whole month. After the burglary.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Nothing that we could tell. He might have been doing some dealing. We were never sure. He’d go down to Venice to buy balloons of tar about every three days. But it looked like it was for personal consumption. If he was selling, no customers ever came. No other visitors the whole month we watched. Hell, if we could prove he was selling, we would have popped him and then had something decent to scam him with when we talked about the bank job.”