The Black Echo

Bosch arrives at the veterans cemetery in the middle of the night. He believes that Wish was driving the jeep when Rourke dropped off Meadows’s body, which is why she asked Sharkey if he recognized her. He wonders if Vietnam is the connection for her too, through her brother, and remembers Wish saying that visiting the Vietnam Memorial in Washington changed her. On the replica of the memorial, after reading all 58,132 names, Bosch finds three dozen names he recognizes, but he doesn’t find Wish’s brother.

That day, Bosch watches Meadows’s funeral from afar to avoid the media. At one point, Bosch intercepts the reporter Bremmer, who asks if Bosch can shed light on what happened. Bosch agrees to steer him in the right direction off the record: Bremmer should find out what Lewis and Clarke were doing at the vault, see what kind of funeral Rourke receives, and look up the military records of everyone involved. Then, in a moment of anger, Bosch tells Bremmer about Sharkey too. Bremmer is excited about the story and declares that “heads are going to bounce” (387), but Bosch knows they won’t.

Bosch visits Wish. She tells him they found the diamonds in Rourke’s public storage locker. On a walk, he asks about her brother. She avoids answering and becomes suspicious, but Bosch presses, asking how her brother died. She claims she doesn’t know, just that he wrote to her saying he would be coming home the next week and then was killed. Then she realizes that Bosch knows her secret and admits that her brother’s name is not on the memorial because he wasn’t killed in Vietnam; he was killed in Los Angeles on his way home from the war. It looked like an overdose, but she knew it was murder.

Wish denies that this has anything to do with Meadows, but Bosch notes that Wish only knew about the daisies under his house because she must have been there during the daytime, when she planted the bug on his phone. Finally, she confesses. She grew up thinking her brother died in the war. When she couldn’t find his name at the memorial, she looked into what actually happened. Then she wanted justice. She reads aloud her brother’s final letter, which she carries around in her purse. The letter explains that he was to deliver a diplomatic package to Los Angeles on his way home and thought there might be “a way to do something better with it” (393). Wish learned that the three Saigon police captains trafficked heroin to the United States by turning soldiers like her brother into temporary diplomatic couriers. When her brother tried to sell the heroin instead, they killed him.

To get justice, Wish found the captains’ collaborator in the FBI—Rourke—and transferred to his crew. She tricked Rourke into devising a plan to rob the diamonds. She was going to disappear with the diamonds, but everything was ruined by Meadows pawning the bracelet. After Franklin and Delgado killed Meadows, Rourke asked for help getting rid of the body. Horrified that Rourke was getting out of control and seeing that Meadows was like her brother all over again, Wish came up with the idea to hide the body at the Mulholland Dam. She knew the Hollywood Division would get called to the case, and she thought Bosch would stop Rourke from getting away with it this time. She even broke Meadows’s fingers to make it look like murder. After Rourke killed Sharkey, she tried to call it all off, but it was too late: Franklin and Delgado were in the tunnels with the radios off. It was Rourke who tried to kill Bosch and Wish with his car.

Wish claims that her feelings for Bosch were real. Bosch asks her to turn herself in, threatening to tell Binh and Tran in two days if she doesn’t. When she asks how he could be so harsh, he explains that “[s]omebody has to answer for Sharkey” (399). She was wrong about the Dollmaker case: It wasn’t an execution.

The next day, Bosch returns to the hospital. On the second day of his recovery, he reads Bremmer’s story in the Los Angeles Times. It describes Rourke’s involvement in the crime, but not Wish’s. On the third day, Lieutenant Pounds visits and tells Bosch to report back to Hollywood homicide when he recovers. On the fourth day, a prosecutor from the US Attorney’s office asks for Bosch’s statement on Sharkey’s murder. Off the record, she tells Bosch that Wish will probably get two to three years in prison. Six weeks later, Bosch recovers and returns to work. When he gets into the Hollywood office, he finds a package waiting for him from Wish—a print of Hopper’s Nighthawks.