"Not really. About as well as anybody got to know somebody there. You learned to trust people with your life, then when it's over you realize you didn't really even know most of them. I never saw him once I got back here. Talked to him once on the phone last year, that's all." "How'd you make him?"
"I didn't, at first. Then I saw the tattoo on his arm. That brought the face back. I guess you remember guys like him. I do, at least."
"I guess . . ."
They let the silence sit there awhile. Bosch was trying to decide what to do, but could only wonder about the coincidence of being called to a death scene to find Meadows. Edgar broke the reverie.
"So you want to tell me what you've got that looks hinky here? Donovan over there looks like he's getting ready to shit his pants, all the work you're putting him through."
Bosch told Edgar about the problems, the absence of distinguishable tracks in the pipe, the shirt pulled over the head, the broken finger and that there was no knife.
"No knife?" his partner said.
"Needed something to cut the can in half to make a stove—if the stove was his."
"Could've brought the stove with him. Could have been that somebody went in there and took the knife after the guy was dead. If there was a knife."
"Yeah, could have been. No tracks to tell us anything."
"Well, we know from his sheet he was a blown-out junkie. Was he like that when you knew him?"
"To a degree. A user and seller."
"Well, there you go, longtime addict, you can't predict what they're going to do, when they're going to get off the shit or on it. They're lost people, Harry."
"He was off it, though—at least I thought he was. He's only got one fresh pop in his arm."
"Harry, you said you hadn't seen the guy since Saigon. How do you know whether he was off or on?"
"I hadn't seen him, but I talked to him. He called me once, last year sometime. July or August, I think. He'd been pulled in on another track marks beef by the hype car up in Van Nuys. Somehow, maybe reading newspapers or something—it was about the same time as the Dollmaker thing—he knew I was a cop, and he calls me up at Robbery-Homicide. He calls me from Van Nuys jail and asks if I could help him out. He would've only done, what, thirty days in county, but he was bottomed out, he said. And he, uh, just said he couldn't do the time this time, couldn't kick alone like that. . . ."
Bosch trailed off without finishing the story. After a long moment Edgar prompted him.
"And? . . . Come on, Harry, what'd you do?"
"And I believed him. I talked to the cop. I remember his name was Nuckles. Good name for a street cop, I thought. And then I called the VA up there in Sepulveda and I got him into a program. Nuckles went along with it. He's a vet, too. He got the city attorney to ask the judge for diversion. So anyway, the VA outpatient clinic took Meadows in. I checked about six weeks later and they said he'd completed, had kicked and was doing okay. I mean, that's what they told me. Said he was in the second level of maintenance. Talking to a shrink, group counseling. . . . I never talked to Meadows after that first call. He never called again, and I didn't try to look him up."
Edgar referred to his pad. Bosch could see the page he was looking at was blank.
"Look, Harry," Edgar said, "that was still almost a year ago. A long time for a hype, right? Who knows? He could have fallen off the wagon and kicked three times since then. That's not our worry here. The question is, what do you want to do with what we have here? What do you want to do about today?"
"Do you believe in coincidence?" Bosch asked.
"I don't know. I—"
"There are no coincidences."
"Harry, I don't know what you're talking about. But you know what I think? I don't see anything here that's screaming in my face. Guy crawls into the pipe, in the dark maybe he can't see what he's doing, he puts too much juice in his arm and croaks. That's it. Maybe somebody else was with him and smeared the tracks going out. Took his knife, too. Could