The Black Echo by Michael Connelly

beneath the pathologist’s breathing mask.
    “Burned?”
    “A stun gun,” the pathologist said. “Look for one that fires its electrode dart deep into the skin tissue. About three to four centimeters deep. Though in this case, it is likely the electrode was manually pressed deeper into the chest.”
    Bosch thought a moment. A stun gun would be virtually impossible to trace. Sakai came back into the room and leaned on the counter by the door, watching. Salazar collected three glass vials of blood and two containing yellowish liquid from the tool cart. There was also a small steel pan containing a brown lump of material that Bosch recognized from experience in this room as liver.
    “Larry, here are the tox samples,” Salazar said. Sakai took them and disappeared from the room again.
    “You’re talking about torture, electric shock,” Bosch said.
    “I would say it looks so,” Salazar said. “Not enough to kill him, the trauma is too small. But possibly enough to get information from him. An electric charge can be very persuasive. I think there is ample history on that. With the electrode positioned in the subject’s chest, he could probably feel the juice going right into his heart. He would have been paralyzed. He’d tell them what they wanted and then could only watch while they put a fatal dosage of heroin into his arm.”
    “Can we prove any of this?”
    Salazar looked down at the tile floor and put his finger on his mask, and scratched his lip beneath it. Bosch was dying for a cigarette. He had been in the autopsy room nearly two hours.
    “Prove any of it?” Salazar said. “Not medically. Tox tests will be done in a week. For the sake of argument, say they come back heroin overdose. How do we prove that someone else put it in his arm, not himself? Medically, we can’t. But we can show that at the time of death or shortly before, there was a traumatic assault on the body in the form of electric shock. He was being tortured. After death there is the unexplained damage to the first digit of the left hand.”
    He rubbed the finger over his mask again and then concluded, “I could testify that this was a homicide. The totality of the medical evidence indicates death at the hands of others. But, for the moment, there is no cause. We wait for the tox studies to be completed and then we’ll put our heads together again.”
    Bosch wrote a paraphrase of what Salazar had just said into his notebook. He would have to type it into his own reports.
    “Of course,” Salazar said, “proving any of this beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is another matter. I would guess that, Harry, you have to find that bracelet and find out why it was worth torturing and killing a man for.”
    Bosch closed his notebook and started to pull off the paper gown.
     
    ***
     
    The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.
    The sun hung like a ball of copper in the driver’s-side window. He had the car radio tuned to a jazz station and Coltrane was playing “Soul Eyes.” On the seat next to him was a file containing the newspaper clippings from Bremmer. The file was weighted down by a six-pack of Henry’s. Bosch got off at Barham and then took Woodrow Wilson up into the hills above Studio City. His home was a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage. It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its midpoint. It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled. But the view was the trade-off. From the back porch Bosch could look northeast across Burbank and Glendale. He could see