The Burning Room

21



Bosch got to the squad room at eight Sunday morning and found Soto already at her desk in the cubicle. Before he could tell her about the theory that had emerged the night before on the Bonnie Brae case, she swiveled around in her chair and started talking excitedly about her own findings on the Merced case.

“Yesterday, after I left Mariachi Plaza, I went up to the Valley to see Alberto Cabral. He let me look at the band’s calendar from ’04, and I found the Broussard booking. It was a fund-raiser—”

“—for Robert Inglin.”

She looked stunned.

“You know?”

“Yes, I know.”

Bosch didn’t know whether to be mad at her for speaking to a potential witness without him or to admire her for her passion and drive on the case—to the point of putting in so much of her own time.

“You should have told me, Lucy. Talking to a witness like that, a lot of things can go wrong. Sometimes witnesses turn out to be suspects, and sometimes they’re friends with the suspects and turn around and spill everything you just told them. You have to be careful and you should have at least told me where you were going so I could have decided if I should go with you or not.”

“It was better it was just me. He opened up without you there. And speaking in Spanish.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, I should have known what you were doing and where you were. Next time shoot me a text, that’s all.”

She nodded, eyes down.

“Roger that,” she said. After a pause, she asked, “So how did you know about Inglin?”

He put the stack of binders he was carrying down on his desk, pulled out his chair, and turned it so he could face her. He sat down.

“Well, I didn’t talk to a potential witness about it. I got it from campaign finance records.”

“On a Saturday?”

“I have a friend with access.”

She looked at him suspiciously but then relented.

“Did you find out anything else?”

“Yeah, I did. In that same election year Broussard went from being all in for Inglin in January to being all in for Zeyas in May. And he stuck with Zeyas in the next election and is a primary backer of his so-called exploratory bid for the Governor’s Office.”

“What made him switch? The Merced shooting was right in the middle of that.”

Bosch pointed at her.

“The million-dollar question.”

Soto sat bolt upright.

“Oh my god, I just thought of something. One of the calls Sarah got on the tip line.”

She swiveled back to her desk and grabbed up the stack of tip reports Holcomb had brought by. Soto looked through the pages until she found what she was looking for.

“Here it is,” she said. “Tip came in Friday morning, 12:09 a.m. ‘Female caller said the mayor knows who shot Orlando Merced.’ That’s it. The call was anonymous but the register recorded the number. Do you want to call it, see who answers?”

“You really think Zeyas called in the hit on a mariachi musician?”

The question gave Soto pause. Bosch’s saying it out loud indeed made it sound crazy.

“I was just going to call, see what she had to say,” she finally said.

“Go ahead. But she’s your crazy, then. Don’t bring her around me.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

She pulled out her cell to call.

“You have your number blocked on that?” Bosch asked quickly.

“Yes, it’s blocked.”

She tapped in the number on the tip sheet and made the call. Bosch watched her as she listened.

“No answer,” she said. “I’ll leave a message.”

“Use the tip number. Don’t give her your number.”

Soto nodded.

“Hello, this is Detective Soto at the Los Angeles Police Department and this message is for the woman who called about the Orlando Merced shooting. Could you please call us back, because we want to follow up on your call.”

Soto gave the tip line number, thanked the anonymous tipster, and disconnected.

“Don’t count on hearing back,” Bosch said. “Cases are made with patience and little steps, Lucy. Not lightning strikes.”

“I know.”

“Let’s switch tracks here for a bit. There’s something I want to show you.”

He leaned back to his desk and pulled a newspaper clip out of the top binder from the Bonnie Brae case. He handed it to her.

“It’s a profile the Times ran of Mrs. Gonzalez. You remember her, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

Bosch could see her eyes holding on the photo of Esther Gonzalez.

“Go to the jump,” he said.

She looked at him, confused.

“The continuation page. Turn it over.”

She did so and he rolled his chair closer and tapped his finger on the brief about the EZBank robbery.

“Read that.”

He gave her time and when she looked up at him, he began.

“I talked to Gus Braley last night and got what he could remember about the case. He—”

“We can pull the file. But what are we looking for?”

“There won’t be any file. This case would have been shredded in the digital purge. Statute of limitations. They never made a case against anybody. But the old robbery journals from Major Crimes are now in the captain’s office in Robbery Special. We’ll look there. Usually the names of victims are in the entries. That’s where we need to start.”

“Start what?”

“Braley said they thought at the time that it was an inside job, but they could never prove it. That means one of the names of the victims listed in the robbery journal could be the insider. We track him down and we talk about Bonnie Brae. No statute of limitations on murder.”

“Wait a minute. Bonnie Brae? How is—you’re losing me.”

Bosch nodded. He understood that he was moving too quickly and with information Soto didn’t have.

“The robbery took place fifteen minutes after the fire was reported,” he said. “It was three and a half blocks away. It was very carefully planned and involved first getting behind a bulletproof enclosure and then forcing employees to open a safe and three cash drawers. It took time. And I’m thinking they may have bought that time with something that diverted the attention of the police.”

“The fire.”

“Exactly. And right now I don’t have a leg to stand on—Braley said they even considered it back then and discarded the idea. But that was when they first thought the fire was accidental and then later attributed it to gangs and drugs. And the robbery suspects were white and they didn’t see the connection to a Pico-Union firetrap where only Hispanics lived. They dropped the idea back then, but I think we want to pick it up now.”

Soto sat silently, nodding her head slightly as she apparently ran the scenario through her mind. She saw what Bosch saw and looked up at him.

“So what do we do?”

Bosch stood up.

“Well, first we go look at the journals in Robbery.”

They moved through the squad room and through a door into the adjoining squad room for the Robbery Special section. It was deserted and the captain’s office was locked. Bosch looked into the darkened office through the glass panel next to the door. He could see the shelves containing the robbery journals, their leather bindings cracked and worn.

“Should we call maintenance, see if they’ll open the door?” Soto asked.

“They won’t,” Bosch said.

He looked at the doorknob. He knew it would be easy to pick. Not much emphasis was put on security inside a police headquarters.

“Go out to the hallway,” he said. “If anybody gets off the elevator, let me know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just go.”

As she headed toward the door to the hallway, Bosch moved down the aisle between the detective modules, checking the desks. He saw one with a magnet holding a variety of paperclips. He took two and headed back to the captain’s office, straightening one of the clips out completely and putting a slight bend at the end of the other. He did not have his lock picks with him because they were in his suit jacket and he was dressed informally for what he thought would be a Sunday morning of sifting through files.

Bosch crouched in front of the knob and went to work. It took him only a minute to open the door. He moved in, dropped the paperclips in the trash can next to the desk, and moved to the journal shelves. The bindings of the journals were marked by the years each contained. For the past forty years or so, each year required its own book. Bosch quickly found the journal marked 1993 and pulled it. He walked out into the Robbery squad room and over to the alcove where there was a copy machine. He flipped through the journal to the date of the EZBank robbery and found its entry—just one-third of a page.

After making a copy, he retraced his steps, put the journal back in its spot, and relocked the door as he left the captain’s office. He read the entry on the journal page as he walked to the hallway door. It was basic but it did include the names and DOBs of three victims, including a security guard named Rodney Burrows.

It was all Bosch needed.

Soto was standing at the glass wall, looking out into the Civic Center. It was quiet on a Sunday morning. City Hall stood in silhouette with the sun climbing the sky behind it. Monolithic, it was still the most recognizable building in the city—and the one with the most secrets.

“Got it,” Bosch said.

He handed the photocopy to her as he walked past, heading back to the Open-Unsolved Unit. She followed, reading the short entry on the way.

When they got back to their module she already had an idea, but it was the wrong one.

“I’ll run these names down and we can start making visits,” she said. “Who do you want to start with, the security guard? Says he is Rodney Burrows.”

Bosch shook his head as he sat down.

“We don’t visit any of them until we know more about this and them,” he said. “Burrows didn’t break story when they put pressure on him in ’93, so there is no reason to believe he would now. We have to find something that the Robbery guys didn’t have last time. Something that gives us some leverage. We don’t approach any of them until we have that.”

“Okay,” Soto said. “I’ll start backgrounding them. What else?”

“Burrows supposedly washed out of the academy sometime before getting the job as a rent-a-cop. They might still have a file on him—if we get lucky.”

“Okay, I’ll check.”

Bosch looked at the binders on his desk and chose one. He handed it to Soto.

“One other thing,” he began. “That book has the residents list for the Bonnie Brae. Every single one of them was interviewed. You take that list and you work the names. You take those three people who were inside EZBank when the robbery went down and you find a connection to Bonnie Brae.”

Soto’s eyebrows showed her confusion.

“If the fire was set as a diversion, then they picked that place for a reason,” Bosch explained. “Because they knew about access, they knew about the trash chute. They knew they could drop a firebomb down that chute, start the fire in the basement, and get a distraction. I don’t think there was anything random about it. They knew. One of them knew. One of them had been in there. There is a connection and you need to find it or we have nothing to go at any of them with.”

Now she nodded.

“Got it,” she said. “Do you think they knew there was a day care down in the basement?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll find out.”

He was about to turn back to his desk but then remembered something else to share.

“You were still a kid, but do you remember the North Hollywood shoot-out in ’97?” he asked.

“I don’t really remember it from when I was a kid but we studied it in the academy,” she said. “Everybody knows about it. Why?”

“Well, Gus Braley said that at one point they looked at those two guys for EZBank but couldn’t make the connection.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

Bosch saw a momentary flash of what he knew was disappointment on Soto’s face. The North Hollywood bank robbers were dead and she suddenly had to consider that her search for the Bonnie Brae arsonist could lead to such a conclusion: no trial or punishment, just the knowledge that those responsible were already deceased and away from the reach of law.

“Do you think you could handle it if it comes to that?” he asked.

“Well, I really wouldn’t have a choice, would I?” she said.

Bosch nodded and Soto seemed to shake off the disappointment.

“Were you there that day? At the shoot-out? I heard everybody who wasn’t nailed down went.”

Bosch nodded.

“I went up there from Hollywood. But I got there just when the shooting was ending. I like to say I got there just in time to be sued.”

“What does that mean?”

“The family of one of those guys sued the Department and a bunch of us, saying we let him bleed to death on the street. The suit claimed the detectives refused for more than an hour to allow paramedics to treat him and that he died from his wounds because of the delay.”

“Did they win?”

“No, ended in a mistrial and then it just went away. It was never retried.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“Did they keep the paramedics back? That part never came up at the academy.”

“It was still a confused and hostile environment. We didn’t know if there were other possible shooters. We held the paramedics back until we were sure it was safe for them. In the meantime, a few of us might’ve mentioned to the guy while he was lying there on the street that it might be best for all concerned if he went ahead and bled out. I mean, we had cops shot all over the place. I don’t think anybody was too sympathetic to this guy on the ground. They were going to make sure every last cop got treated before a paramedic got near him.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. She understood.

“You know nobody died on our side, but four of the cops that got shot that day never made it back to duty,” Bosch said. “They were messed up pretty bad—either physically or mentally.”

“I know. They told us that at the academy.”

She seemed to be thinking about something and Bosch assumed it was the memory of the shooting that took her partner’s life. He realized the comparison was inevitable. She had been under fire. It would call up a connection to the North Hollywood shoot-out even though it was before her time.

“Anyway,” he said, “why don’t you work on EZBank and I’ll work on Merced. We work both at the same time. That way the captain doesn’t get antsy, and nobody else knows.”

Soto nodded.

“Thank you, Harry.”

“Don’t thank me yet. We’re still working long odds—on both of these cases.”

“Either way, you didn’t need to do this.”

“But you did. And I know what that’s like.”

“Someday you’ll have to tell me about that.”

“I will.”

They turned back to their desks and went to work.