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.