“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.”