“Well, if our perps have their lookout in any of these high rises and they saw this little parade, you can bet he is pulling them out now,” Bosch said.
Rourke and four other men got out of the two unmarked cars. Bosch could tell by the suits that three of them were agents. The fourth man’s suit was a little too worn, its pockets baggy like Bosch’s. He carried a cardboard tube. Harry figured him for the DWP supe Wish had said was coming. Three Beverly Hills uniforms, one with captain’s bars on his collar, got out of the patrol car. The captain was also carrying a rolled tube of paper.
Everybody converged at Bosch’s car and used its hood as the meeting table. Rourke made some quick introductions. The three from BHPD were there because the operation was in their jurisdiction. Interdepartmental courtesy, Rourke said. They were also on hand because Beverly Hills Safe & Lock had filed a design plan with the local police department’s commercial security division. They would only observe the meeting, Rourke said, and be called on later if their department was needed for backup. Two of the FBI agents, Hanlon and Houck, would work the overnight surveillance with Bosch and Wish. Rourke wanted a view of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock from at least two angles. The third agent was the FBI’s SWAT coordinator. And the last man was Ed Gearson, a DWP underground facilities supervisor.
“Okay, let’s set the battle plans,” Rourke announced at the end of the introductions. He took the cardboard tube from Gearson without asking and slid out a rolled blueprint. “This is a DWP schematic print for this area. It has all the utility lines, the tunnels and culverts. It tells us exactly what is down there.”
He unfurled the grayish map with smeared blue lines on it across the hood. The three Beverly Hills cops anchored the other end with their hands. It was getting dark in the garage and the SWAT man, an agent named Heller, held a penlight with a surprisingly wide and bright beam over the drawing. Rourke took a pen out of his shirt pocket, pulled on it until it telescoped into a pointer.
“Okay, we are… right…” Before he could find the spot Gearson reached his arm into the light and put a finger on the map. Rourke brought his pen point over to the spot. “Yes, right here,” he said and gave Gearson a don’t-fuck-with-me look. The DWP man’s shoulders seemed to stoop a little more in his threadbare jacket.
Everyone around the car leaned in closer over the hood to study the location. “Beverly Hills Safe & Lock is here,” Rourke said. “The actual vault is here. Can we see your blueprint, Captain Orozco?”
Orozco, who was built like an inverted pyramid, broad shoulders over thin hips, unrolled his drawing across the top of the DWP print. It was a copy of the drawing Avery III had shown Bosch and Wish earlier.
“Three thousand square feet of vault space,” said Orozco, indicating the vault area with his hand. “Small private boxes along the sides and free-standing closets down the middle. If they are under there, they could come up through the floor anywhere along these two aisles. So we are talking about a range of about sixty feet in which they could come through the floor.”
“Now, Captain,” Rourke said, “if you pick that up and we look back at the DWP chart, we can place that breakthrough zone right here.” With a Day-Glo yellow underliner he outlined the floor of the vault on the utility map. “Using that as a guide, we can see the subterranean structures that offer the closest proximity. What do you think, Mr. Gearson?”
Gearson leaned over the car hood another few inches and studied the utility map. Bosch also leaned in. He saw thick lines he assumed indicated major east-west drainage lines. The kind the tunnelers would seek. He noticed that they corresponded to major surface streets: Wilshire, Olympic, Pico. Gearson pointed out the Wilshire line, saying it ran thirty feet below ground and was large enough to drive a truck through. With his finger, the DWP man traced the Wilshire line east ten blocks to Robertson, a major north-south stormwater line. From that intersection, he said, it was just a mile south to an open drainage culvert that ran alongside the Santa Monica Freeway. The opening at the culvert was as big as a garage door and blocked only by a gate with a padlock on it.
“I’d say that’s where they could’ve come in,” Gearson said. “Like following surface streets. You take the Robertson line up to Wilshire. Take a left and you’re practically here by your yellow line. The vault. But I don’t think they’d dig a tunnel off the Wilshire line.”
“No?” Rourke said. “How so?”
“Too busy is how so,” Gearson said, sensing he was the man with the answers as nine faces peered at him from around the car hood. “We got DWP people underground all the time in these main lines. Checking for cracks, blockages, problems of any sort. And Wilshire’s the main drag down there, east and west. Just like up top. If somebody knocked a hole in the wall it’d get noticed. See?”
“What if they were able to conceal the hole?”
“You’re talking about like they did a year or so ago in that burglary downtown. Yeah, that might work again, maybe somewhere else, but there is a good chance on the Wilshire line that it’d be seen. We look for that sort of thing now. And, like I said, there’s a lot of traffic on the Wilshire line.”
There was silence as they took time to consider this. The engines of the cars ticked away the heat.
“Then where would they dig, Mr. Gearson, to get into this vault?” Rourke finally said.
“We got all manner of linkups down there. Don’t think us guys don’t think of this from time to time when we’re working down there. You know, the perfect crime and all that. I’ve hashed stuff like this around, especially when I read about that last one in the papers. I think if you are saying that’s the vault they want to get into, then they’d still do just like I said: come up Robertson and then over on the Wilshire line. But then I think they’d move down one of the service tunnels to sort of stay out of sight. The service tunnels are three to five feet wide. They’re round. Plenty of room to work and move equipment. They hook up the main artery lines to the street storm drains and the utility systems in the buildings along here.”
He put his hand back into the light and traced the smaller lines he was talking about on the DWP map.
“If they did this right,” he said, “what they did was get in the gate down by the freeway and drive their equipment and all up to Wilshire and then over to your target area. They unload their stuff, hide it in one of these service tunnels, as we call ’em, and then take their vehicle back out. They hike back in on foot and set to work in the service tunnel. Hell, they could be working in there five, six weeks before we might have occasion to go up that particular line.”
Bosch still thought it sounded too simple.
“What about these other storm lines?” he asked, indicating Olympic and Pico on the map. There was a crosshatch pattern of the smaller service tunnels running from these lines north toward the vault. “What about using one of these and coming up behind the vault?”
Gearson scratched his bottom lip with a finger and said, “That’s fine. There’s that too. But the thing is, these lines aren’t going to get you as close to the vault as these Wilshire offshoots. See what I mean? Why would they dig a hundred-yard tunnel when they could dig a hundred-footer here?”
Gearson liked holding court, the idea of knowing more than the silk suits and uniforms around him. Having finished his speech, he rocked back on his heels, a satisfied look on his face. Bosch knew the man was probably correct on every detail.
“What about earth displacement?” Bosch asked him. “These guys are digging a tunnel through dirt and rock, concrete. Where do they get rid of it? How?”
“Bosch, Mr. Gearson is not a detective,” Rourke said. “I doubt that he knows every nuance of-”