Читаем The Black Echo полностью

This time he put his pen down, adjusted his pipe in his set jaw and folded his hands together on the desk. “It’s not what I get. It’s what the Lord gets.” He picked up the pen again, but then another thought came to him. “You know, these boys were destroyed in many ways when they got back. I know, it’s an old story and everybody’s heard it, everybody’s seen the movies. But these guys have had to live it. Thousands came back here and literally marched off to the prisons. One day I was reading about that and I wondered what if there hadn’t been any war and these boys never went anywhere. They just stayed in Omaha and Los Angeles and Jacksonville and New Iberia and wherever. Would they still have ended up in prison? Would they be homeless, wandering mental cases? Drug addicts?

“For most of them, I doubt that. It was the war that did it to them, that sent them the wrong way.” He took a long drag on the dead pipe. “So all I do, with the help of the earth and a few prayer books, is try to put back inside what the Vietnam experience took out. And I’m pretty good at it. So I’m giving you this list, letting you take a look at that file there. But don’t hurt what we’ve got here. You two have a natural suspicion of what goes on here, and that’s fine. It’s healthy for people in your position. But be careful with what is good here. Detective Bosch, you look the right age, were you over there?”

Bosch nodded and Scales said, “Then you know.” He went back to finishing the list. Without looking up he said, “You two join us for lunch? Freshest vegetables in the county on our table.”

They declined and stood up to go after Scales handed Bosch the list with the twenty-four names he had come up with. As Bosch turned to the office door he hesitated and said, “Colonel, do you mind me asking what other vehicles you have on the farm? I saw the pickup.”

“We don’t mind you asking, because we have nothing to hide. We got two more pickups like that, two John Deeres and a four-wheel-drive vehicle.”

“What kind of four-wheel-drive vehicle?”

“It’s a Jeep.”

“And what color?”

“It’s white. What’s going on?”

“Just trying to clear up something. But I guess the Jeep would have the Charlie Company seal on the side, like the pickup?”

“That’s right. All our vehicles are marked. When we go into Ventura we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. We want people to know where the vegetables are coming from.”

Bosch didn’t look at the names on the list until he was in the car. He didn’t recognize any, but he noticed that Scales had written the letters PH after eight of the twenty-four names.

“What’s that mean?” Wish asked as she leaned over and looked at the list also.

“Purple Heart,” Bosch said. “One more way to say be careful, I guess.”

“What about the Jeep?” she said. “He said it was white. It has a seal on the side.”

“You saw how dirty the pickup was. A dirty white Jeep, it could have looked beige. If it’s the right Jeep.”

“He just doesn’t seem right. Scales. He seems legit.”

“Maybe he is. Maybe it’s the people he lends his Jeep to. I didn’t want to press it with him until we know more.”

He started the car and they headed down the gravel road to the gate. Bosch rolled his window down. The sky was the color of bleached jeans and the air was invisible and clean and smelled like fresh green peppers. But not for long, Bosch thought. We go back into the nastiness now.

***

On the way back to the city Bosch cut off the Ventura Freeway and headed south through Malibu Canyon to the Pacific. It would take longer to get back, but the clean air was addictive. He wanted it for as long as possible.

“I want to see the list of the victims,” he said after they had made their way through the winding canyon and the hazy blue surface of the ocean could be seen ahead. “This pedophile you mentioned earlier. Something about that story bothered me. Why would they take the guy’s collection of kiddie porno?”

“Harry, come on, you are not going to suggest that was a reason, that these guys tunneled for weeks and then blasted into a bank vault to steal a collection of kiddie porn?”

“Of course not. But that’s why it raises the question. Why’d they take the stuff?”

“Well, maybe they wanted it. Maybe one was a pedophile and he liked it. Who knows?”

“Or maybe it was all part of a cover. Take everything from every box they drilled to hide the fact that what they were really after was one box. You know, sort of blur the picture by hitting dozens of boxes. But all along the target was something in only one of the boxes. Same principle with the pawnshop break-in: take a lot of jewelry to cover they only wanted the bracelet.