The Burning Room

24



The drive out took much longer than the Sunday drive Bosch had shared with his daughter. For one thing the freeways were more crowded and Rancho Mirage was almost an hour farther east into the Coachella Valley. He and Soto discussed both cases they were actively working and the moves they planned to make. Bosch’s belief that the rifle used to shoot Orlando Merced might still be in the hands of David Willman’s family was a valid investigative string to follow but it didn’t approach the threshold for a search warrant for the Willman family home. He and Soto would have to knock on the door and hope for cooperation or something that would bolster probable cause.

They stopped in West Covina for an early lunch of chili rice and then conversation tapered off as they made the second half of the drive. Bosch’s thoughts drifted from the case to the dinner he’d had with Virginia Skinner the night before. The conversation had been good and interesting. The door to romance even cracked open—at least from Bosch’s perspective—and it was exciting to think about where it might go. It wasn’t just the prospect of being with someone again. Bosch had to admit that his chances at perhaps a final romance in his life were dwindling as time went by. His hopes that Hannah Stone might be that final romance were dashed the year before. Her son was in prison on a date-rape conviction. When Bosch refused to go to bat for him at a scheduled parole hearing, Hannah abruptly ended the relationship, leaving Bosch to wonder if her motives had been wrapped around her son’s situation all along.

Thinking about Virginia Skinner, Bosch realized that there was a secret thrill in the possibility of a relationship because of her standing in the media. A romance with a reporter would be so fraught with complications that it was obviously ill-advised, and in that risk was the thrill. Whatever they did, it would have to be kept secret. In the Department it would be seen as tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The PAB and the Los Angeles Times were only separated by the four lanes of Spring Street but there was an invisible wall between the two institutions that was twice as tall as City Hall. Bosch would have to be very careful if he proceeded. Virginia Skinner would as well.

“You taught your daughter to shoot?”

Soto had asked the question, pulling Bosch out of his thoughts. She had obviously been ruminating on his report of his Sunday afternoon activities.

“Uh, yeah, I did.”

“That’s a bit unusual, don’t you think?”

“Well, you know, guns in the house and all of that. I wanted her to learn about them as a safety thing. I took her shooting a couple times and she actually was good at it. A natural. She’s got a bunch of ribbons and a few trophies in her room. And now, believe it or not, she says she wants to be a cop.”

Soto nodded. Bosch wondered if she was drawing some connection between his daughter learning to shoot and her own experience during the shoot-out that took her partner’s life.

“I’d like to meet her,” Soto said.

Bosch nodded.

“I’d like her to meet you,” he said.

“Where’s her mother?” she asked.

“She passed a few years back,” he said. “That’s when she came to live with me.”

“And started shooting guns.”

“Yeah.”

That was all that was said until they reached Rancho Mirage.

The house Audrey Willman moved into following her husband’s death was in a gated community called Desert View Estates. Bosch badged his way past the rent-a-cop at the gatehouse and found the home two minutes later. It stood three stories high and sat on a half acre of land in a neighborhood of similar-size homes and properties. There was a turnaround with a rock garden at its center surrounding a Joshua tree. Bosch and Soto approached the door and waited after pressing the bell.

“You know why they’re called Joshua trees?” Soto said.

Bosch glanced back at the centerpiece tree, its multiple branches fanned out like a candelabra.

“Not really,” he said.

“The Mormons named it,” she said. “It reminded them of the scene in the Bible where Joshua raises his hands up to the sky to pray.”

Bosch nodded thoughtfully and the large oak door was answered behind him. He turned to see a uniformed housemaid, who made them stay outside while she closed the door and inquired as to whether Mrs. Willman would speak to them. This annoyed Bosch, since he knew the rent-a-cop had certainly called ahead to the house to warn that the detectives were coming. Mrs. Willman should have already been primed to receive them.

At least they were in the shade. The dry desert heat was getting to Bosch. He felt his lips drying and starting to crack. He studied the workmanship of the front door and then his eyes traveled up to the tongue-and-groove woodwork of the interior of the porte cochere’s roof. He was reminded of the major discrepancy in property values he had seen when he had looked up David Willman’s address at the time of his death and the address where his widow now lived.

“Tell you one thing,” he said. “Either Willman had a hell of an insurance policy or there was a payoff somewhere. This isn’t the kind of place a hunting guide ends up with.”

“She probably sued Broussard,” Soto said. “Wrongful death or something.”

Bosch nodded his agreement as the door was finally reopened, this time by a woman of about fifty who identified herself as Audrey Willman. She was tall and lean and wore a lot of gold jewelry.

“Can I help you, Detectives?” she asked.

Bosch decided on a direct approach.

“We are investigating a murder in Los Angeles that may be connected to your husband’s death. Can we come in?”

“He’s been dead almost ten years. How could it have anything to do with a murder in L.A.?”

“We can explain if we could come in.”

She let them in and they convened in a living room, with Bosch and Soto sitting on a couch directly across from Audrey Willman, who sat in what looked like an antique leather club chair.

“So,” she said. “Explain.”

“When your husband died, he owned several firearms,” Bosch began.

“Of course he did,” Willman said. “He was a licensed dealer. He bought and sold guns.”

“We understand that. What we are trying to determine is the whereabouts of one of the weapons he owned at that time.”

Audrey Willman leaned forward slightly, eyebrows pulled together in suspicion.

“You’re kidding me, right?” she said.

“No, ma’am,” Bosch said, calling on the ghost of Joe Friday for his deadpan delivery. “We’re not kidding. We need to know. What happened to the weapons your husband owned after his death?”

She held her hands out palms up as if to signal that the answer was obvious and not worth the two-and-a-half-hour drive out from L.A.

“I sold them. I sold everything—all legally. After what happened, do you think I’d want guns around anymore?”

That was the opening Bosch was looking for.

“What exactly did happen?” he asked. “I only got the shorthand from the Riverside Sheriff’s Office. How did your husband end up being killed by his best friend?”

Willman made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“The Riverside Sheriff’s would be the last place I would look to find out what happened,” she said.

Bosch waited but she said nothing else.

“Well, can you tell us your version of what happened?” he asked.

“I’d love to but I can’t,” Willman said. “There was litigation. I sued him but I can’t talk about it.”

She used her hands again to gesture toward the ceiling and her opulent surroundings. The indication was clear. She had taken a sizable settlement in the matter but part of the deal was her silence.

“You’re saying there was a confidentiality clause in the settlement?”

“That’s correct.”

“Okay, I understand. Can you tell me what it was you alleged in the lawsuit before there was a settlement and a confidentiality agreement?”

She shook her head.

“I can’t say a word about anything.”

She sliced a hand through the air, signifying the finality of her stand on the subject.

Bosch nodded. There didn’t appear to be any way into the lawsuit with her, so he returned to the guns.

“Okay, that’s understood. Let’s go back to the guns you said you sold. The gun in question was never reregistered following a sale. It still is in your husband’s name in the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms registration computer.”

“That can’t be. I had everything sold perfectly legit. Ted Sampson did it. He bought the ranch and used his own dealer’s license to sell everything.”

Bosch assumed that Ted Sampson was the man he had spoken to the day before in the office at White Tail.

“Well, with this particular gun, there is no record of it being sold by anyone. It was a Kimber hunting rifle. The Montana model. Does that sound familiar to you?”

“No gun sounds familiar to me. I hate guns. I have no guns in this house. When I moved here I left all of that behind. But I kept careful inventory records because before all of this—”

She waved her hand again, indicating what the lawsuit settlement had brought.

“—I thought the money from those guns might be all I’d be left with. That and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance policy.”

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Then if Ted didn’t sell this gun in particular, where would it be?”

She shook her head as if she was baffled.

“I have no idea! The garage at the old house was his gun room but we cleared it out. I’m sure of that. There was nothing left in there when Ted was finished, and I inventoried every gun we pulled out.”

“Do you still have that inventory?”

She thought for a moment.

“As a matter of fact, I think I do.”

“Can we see it, Mrs. Willman? It might be important.”

“Wait here. It’s in my tax files. I’m sure of it.”

She got up and walked across the room to a set of French doors with curtains. They opened into a study, where Bosch could see a desk, bookshelves, and a stationary bike positioned in front of a flat-screen television. Willman closed the doors behind her.

She was gone five minutes. Bosch and Soto made eye contact but never spoke. They both knew that the inventory, if Willman’s widow still had it, could be a solid piece of connecting evidence should the investigation ever move toward a prosecution without the murder weapon.

When Willman emerged from the study, she was carrying a yellow legal pad with several pages folded back and a rubber band around it.

“Found it.”

As she approached, she pulled off the rubber band, but it had become brittle over time and snapped in her hand. She sat down and started pulling the pages back over and studying each one. Four pages into this process she stopped.

“Here are the guns.”

She handed the pad to Bosch. He took out his own notebook, where he had written down the serial number of the Kimber Model 84 that David Willman had owned, according to ATF records. Soto leaned over to look at the pad and they studied the list. There were eighteen rifles and handguns listed, along with the amounts received in their sales. None were described as a Kimber make and none of the serial numbers matched the number Bosch had in his notes. Willman’s Kimber had never been sold. Bosch noticed that the list also contained two ammunition bandoliers but they didn’t go with any of the guns on the list.

“Can we borrow this, Mrs. Willman?” Bosch asked.

“I’d rather you not take it,” she answered. “I can copy it for you. I have a copier.”

“It would be better if we had the original document. We can give you a receipt for it and will return it when it’s no longer needed.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you want it?”

“It could be an important part of the investigation. If the gun was used in the homicide we are investigating, we need to document its origin. This inventory helps us prove that the gun went missing at least nine years ago when you documented what weapons your husband had in his possession at the time of his death.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “You can take it but I want to make a copy and I want the original back.”

“You’ll get it back,” Bosch said. “I promise.”

“I’ll write a receipt,” Soto said.

While Soto went to work on the receipt Bosch asked Willman a question he had been holding back on until the end of the interview.

“What weapon was your husband carrying on the day of the accident?”

Willman made a sound of disbelief before answering. It did not seem to be directed at Bosch, but rather carried some emotion about the content of the question. It was a small confirmation of Bosch’s suspicion that the lawsuit she filed and was now sworn to secrecy about had not been a routine wrongful-death claim. He guessed that Audrey Willman had alleged that David Willman’s death was anything but an accident.

“He was carrying his twenty-gauge shotgun, like he always did,” she said.

“A shotgun while hunting wild boar? Was that normal?”

“He wasn’t hunting wild boar. The other man was. Dave was the guide. The other man had asked him to guide. So he carried a shotgun in case a boar came out of the brush and charged. He would use it to put the animal down.”

She didn’t say the name Broussard. Bosch wondered if that was part of the lawsuit settlement or if she just couldn’t bring herself to mention the name of the man who had killed her husband. He tried one more time to get behind the lock on the legal action.

“If you know something about your husband and Charles Broussard that was not in the lawsuit, we’d be happy to listen.”

Audrey Willman looked at Bosch for a long moment and then shook her head.

“I can’t discuss him in any regard,” she said. “I can’t even say his name. Would you please just give me the receipt and go? I have things to do.”

Almost, Bosch thought. She had almost opened up.