The Burning Room

15



It was part of the Open-Unsolved Unit’s travel protocol for detectives to check in with the locals and explain what they were in town for and where they planned to go. Usually it was just a simple courtesy and the Los Angeles detectives were allowed to go about their work. Often the locals preferred or required that one of their own tag along. And sometimes the visitors from L.A. needed local help finding someone or facilitating an arrest. As Bosch had explained to Soto, he had learned from experience that calling ahead about his impending arrival could lead to problems.

Sometimes locals would jump the gun and pre-scout the targets, which inadvertently tipped or spooked them. There’d also been cases where the locals had simply gone out and grabbed the suspect before Bosch got there, thereby robbing him of the ability to question the suspect before he was officially arrested and he lawyered up. There was also always the long-shot possibility that the target that Bosch was coming for was actually associated with the officer on the other end of the phone line. Bosch once called a detective in St. Louis in preparation for a trip there to make an arrest for murder. Little did he know that he was talking to a man who happened to be related by marriage to the person Bosch was coming to arrest. Bosch didn’t learn of this connection until after he got there and found that the suspect had fled the night before.

“Never again after that,” Bosch told Soto. “Now I always go in cold.”

They got to the downtown headquarters of the Tulsa Police Department shortly before 8 p.m. They had first checked into a nearby hotel because it was unclear what the night ahead would bring and Bosch didn’t want to lose the reservation should they not get to the hotel until after midnight.

A uniformed officer at the front desk seemed unimpressed by their LAPD badges but agreed to call upstairs to the detective bureau and ask if Detective Childers was available.

They were in luck. Childers was in and he told the officer to send Bosch and Soto up.

They took the elevator the one flight up, and on the second floor in front of the entrance to the detective bureau was another counter. Nobody was there and they waited a minute until a man came through the door behind the counter.

“How’s Rick Jackson?” he said.

“Just retired,” Bosch said. “And wherever he’s at, he’s probably golfing.”

“I hope so.”

The detective reached his hand across the counter.

“Ricky Childers. They put me in charge of this place at night.”

They shook hands all around and Bosch handed Childers his badge rather than just flash it as he had done downstairs. Soto did the same. It was a show of respect.

“Did you guys call ahead?” Childers asked. “The captain didn’t leave me anything on it.”

“No, we just showed up,” Bosch said. “This morning we caught a line on a guy we need to talk to and jumped on a plane. We didn’t get the chance to call ahead.”

Childers nodded but Bosch wasn’t sure he believed the story. Childers looked like a capable and experienced man. He was midforties and in good shape. He had a drawl and a long mustache that drooped down the sides of his mouth. It all gave him the aura of a gunslinger from the Old West, which Bosch guessed he was well aware of and fostered. He wore no jacket and carried his weapon in a shoulder harness. That helped paint that picture, too.

“Who are we talking about here?” he asked.

“A witness on a case we’re working,” Bosch said. “A murder case. We need to talk to him again because we’ve come to believe he might not have told us everything he knew.”

“Holding back on you, huh?” Childers said. “That ain’t good. This fellow have a name?”

“Angel Ojeda,” Soto said. “He’s thirty-nine and we think he’s been out here nine or ten years.”

She handed Childers a sheet with a copy of Ojeda’s last California driver’s license.

“Nine or ten years?” Childers said. “Then you’re working a cold case, huh?”

“Something like that,” Bosch said. “The line we have on this guy is that he came out here to work at a bar called El Chihuahua. You know of the place?”

“Oh, sure, we know of it. On Garnet in East Tulsa. That’s Little Mexico.”

“What kind of place is it?”

“It’s a dump with a pool table. Patrol goes in there a few times a week to break things up. You said this guy works there?”

“That info is almost ten years old. It’s just a starting point.”

“I’ll take you out there if you want. But let’s go on back to the squad first and see if we have anything on this Mr. Ojeda. Am I saying that right, Detective Soto? The J like an H?”

“You got it right,” Soto said.

Childers pointed toward a half door at the end of the counter and waved them around. Working cold cases had brought Bosch into detective bureaus all over the country. There was a sameness to them all. The Tulsa squad room could have been in Seattle or Baltimore or Tampa. Cluttered desks, walls of file cabinets, wanted posters on every wall and door. The room was largely deserted because of the hour. Bosch saw a uniformed cop at one desk and a detective at another. Childers led them to his own cubicle.

“Grab a chair,” he said.

Bosch and Soto pulled chairs away from empty desks and rolled them over. They all sat and Childers turned off a clock radio on his desk that was quietly playing country music. It sounded like Hank Williams Jr.

“Let’s see what we got on this fellow,” Childers said.

Looking at the sheet with the driver’s license, he typed information into his desktop computer. Bosch assumed he was searching an internal data bank that would tell him if Ojeda had ever intersected in some way with the Tulsa police. Soto had already checked the national computers before they’d left L.A. and there were no hits.

Childers hit the enter button and held his hands up like he had just performed a magic trick. A few seconds later three words appeared at the top of the screen.

No Match Found



“Dammit,” Childers said. “If he’s been working at the Chihuahua, he would’ve come up as a witness, victim, reporting party, something. You sure your info is good?”

“It was good—about ten years ago,” Bosch said. “Maybe he changed his name. What comes up if you just plug in El Chihuahua.”

“You got all night?”

Childers typed the name of the bar in and this time the screen said there were 972 matches.

“And this thing only goes back seven years,” he said. “We were on paper before that. You two want to sit here and look through all this? I’ll let you have at it.”

Bosch thought for a moment about what would be the best use of their time and how they could narrow the focus of the computer search. Soto beat him to it.

“I say we just go scope it,” she said. “See if he’s there. That’s why we came.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Childers said.

Bosch nodded.