Читаем The Black Echo полностью

There was an opening in the hedge and a brick walkway. Bosch followed it and they stood looking at the expanse of the cemetery, the rows of carved stones a weather-polished white against the sea of grass. The tall hedge buffered the sound from the street. It was suddenly very peaceful.

“It’s like a park,” Bosch said.

“It’s a graveyard,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

“You don’t have to whisper. Let’s walk around. It’s quiet.”

Eleanor hesitated but then trailed him as he followed the bricks beneath an oak tree that shaded the graves of a grouping of World War I veterans. She caught up and continued the dialogue.

“So we have Meadows in TI. Somehow, he hears about this place Charlie Company. He gets the ear of the ex-soldier-slash-minister who operates the place, gets his backing and gets early release from TI. Now, at Charlie Company, he connects with two old war buddies. Or so we assume. Delgado and Franklin. Except there is only one day that all three of them are at Charlie Company at the same time. Just one day. Are you telling me they hatched this whole thing on that one day?”

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Could’ve been, but I doubt it. It might have been planned later, after they made that recontact at the farm. The important thing is that we have them together, or in close proximity, in Saigon, 1975. Now we have them together again at Charlie Company. After that, Meadows graduates, takes a few cover jobs until he finishes parole. Then he quits and disappears from view.”

“Until?”

“Until the WestLand burglary. They go in, they hit the boxes until they find Binh’s box. Or maybe they already knew which one was his. They must have followed him to plan the job and find out where he kept whatever was left of his share of the diamonds. We need to go back to the vault records and see if this Frederic B. Isley ever visited at the same time as Binh. I bet we find that he did. He saw which box was Binh’s because he was in the vault with him at the same time.

“Then during the vault break-in, they hit his box and then all the others, taking everything as camouflage. The genius of it was that they knew Binh couldn’t report what was taken from him because it did not exist, legally. They knew this. It was perfect. And what made it that way is them taking all the other stuff, to cover for the real target. The diamonds.”

“The perfect crime,” she said, “until Meadows pawned the bracelet with the jade dolphins on it. That gets him killed. Which brings us back to the question we had a few days ago. Why? And another thing that makes no sense: why, if he had helped loot the vault, was Meadows living in that dump? He was a rich man not acting like a rich man.”

Bosch walked in silence for a while. It was the question he had been formulating an answer to since halfway through the meeting with Ernst. He thought about Meadows’s eleven-month lease, paid in advance. If he were alive, he would be moving out next week. As they walked through the garden of white stone, it all seemed to fit together. There was no sand left in the top of the hourglass. He finally spoke.

“Because the perfect crime was only half over. By pawning the bracelet, he was giving it away too soon. So he had to go, and they had to get that bracelet back.”

She stopped and looked at him. They were standing on the access road next to the World War II section. Bosch saw that the roots of another old oak had pushed some of the weathered stones out of alignment. They looked like teeth waiting for an orthodontist’s hands.

“Explain that to me, what you just said,” Eleanor said.

“They hit several of the boxes to cover that all they really wanted was what was in Binh’s box. Okay?”

She nodded. They still weren’t walking.

“Okay. So in order to keep that cover, what would be the thing to do? Get rid of the stuff from all the other boxes so it would never turn up again. And I don’t mean fence it. I mean get rid of it, destroy it, sink it, bury it for good, somewhere it would never be found. Because the minute the first piece of jewelry or old coin or stock certificate turns up and the police find out about it, then they’ve got a lead and they’ll come looking.”

“So you think Meadows was killed because he pawned the bracelet?” she said.

“Not quite because of that. There is some other current moving through all of this. Why, if Meadows had a share of Binh’s diamonds, would he even bother with a bracelet worth a few thousand bucks? Why would he live the way he lived? Doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re losing me, Harry.”

“I’m losing myself. But look at it this way for a minute. Say they-Meadows and the others-knew where both Binh and the other police captain, Nguyen Tran, were, and where each of them had stashed what was left of the diamonds they had brought over here. Say there were two banks and the diamonds were in two safe-deposit boxes. And say they were going to hit them both. So first they rip off Binh’s bank. And now they are going for Tran’s.”