The Burning Room

3



Bosch never liked being on either end of a takeaway case. When he worked Hollywood Homicide, the big cases were often grabbed by the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. Then when he worked RHD himself, he was on the other end of it, often taking cases away from the smaller regional squads. In Open-Unsolved that rarely happened because the cases were old and dusty. But the Merced case, though ten years old, was not housed in the Department’s archives. It still belonged to the original two investigators who caught it on the day of the shooting. Until now.

Bosch and Soto entered the station through the work door, as the entrance off the black-and-white lot was called. They followed a rear hallway into the detective bureau and Bosch knocked on the open door of the lieutenant’s office.

“Lieutenant Garcia?”

“That’s me.”

Bosch stepped into the tiny office and Soto followed.

“I’m Bosch and this is Soto. We’re from Open-Unsolved, here to pick up the stuff on Merced. We’re looking for Rodriguez and Rojas.”

Garcia nodded. He looked like a classic LAPD administrator. White shirt, bland tie, jacket hooked over the back of his seat. He had on cuff links that were tiny little police badges. No cop would wear cuff links out on the street. Too gaudy, too easy to lose in a scuffle.

“Yes, we were alerted by command. They’re ready for you. CAPs is back around the corner past the milking room.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

Bosch turned to go and almost banged into Soto, who didn’t realize they were finished with the lieutenant. She awkwardly stepped back and turned to leave.

“Uh, Detectives?” Garcia said.

Bosch turned back to him.

“Do me one favor. If you clear it, don’t forget about my guys.”

He was talking about the credit that would go along with solving a high-profile case. The trouble with a takeaway was that often the divisional detectives did a lot of the groundwork and then the big shots from downtown came in and scooped the case and with it all the glory that followed an arrest. Having been on both sides of takeaway cases, Bosch understood what Garcia was asking.

“We won’t,” he said. “In fact, if you can spare them, we’ll use them when the time is right.”

Bosch was talking about making an arrest. If they reached the point that they had a suspect and Bosch was putting together a warrant or an arrest team he would circle back for Rodriguez and Rojas.

“Good deal,” Garcia said.

They left the office and found the CAPs table in an alcove past the station’s lactation room. The city had recently mandated that all public facilities have a “family” room where employees or citizen visitors could have privacy while breast-feeding their babies. None of the nineteen police stations in the city were designed to include a lactation room, so the edict went out that one of the interview rooms in each detective bureau be transformed into a space that met city requirements. The rooms were repainted in soothing pastel tones, and cartoon stickers were added as well. Sometimes in overcrowded situations, the rooms were used during investigations, the unwitting suspects being interrogated in front of the likes of SpongeBob SquarePants and Kermit the Frog.

The Hollenbeck CAPs squad consisted of five desks pushed together in such a way that two pairs of detectives faced each other, and the squad leader’s desk was located at one end of the desks. There were only two men sitting at this configuration under the “Crimes Against Persons” sign, and Bosch assumed they were Oscar Rodriguez and Benito Rojas.

There was a stack of three blue binders on the desk in front of one of the men. Bosch could read the name MERCED on the spine of two of them. The third just said TIPS. Also on the desk was a cardboard box sealed with red evidence tape. Leaning next to the desk was a black carrying case for what Bosch assumed was Orlando Merced’s instrument. There were bumper stickers festooning the case, announcing its travel to many towns and regions through the Southwest and Mexico.

“Hey, guys,” Bosch said. “We’re from Open-Unsolved.”

“Of course you are,” said one of the men. “The big shots have arrived.”

Bosch nodded. He had been the same way in the past when a case was taken away from him. He held his hand out to the angry detective.

“Harry Bosch. And this is Lucia Soto. Are you Oscar or Benito?”

The man reluctantly shook Bosch’s hand.

“Ben.”

“Good to meet you. And I’m sorry about this. We both are. Nobody really likes this from either side. A takeaway. I know you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s not really fair. But it is what it is. We all do what the geniuses in command tell us to do.”

The speech seemed to placate Rojas. Rodriguez looked impassive.

“Just take the stuff,” Rodriguez said. “Good luck, guy.”

“Actually, I don’t just want to take the stuff,” Bosch said. “We’d like your help. I’d like to ask you about the case. Now, and later as we get into it. You two are the brain trust. Since day one. I’d be shooting myself in the foot if I didn’t ask for your help.”

“Did they get the bullet out?” Rodriguez asked.

“They did,” Bosch said. “We just came from the autopsy.”

Bosch reached into his pocket and pulled out the bullet. He handed the bag to Rodriguez and then watched his reaction. He turned and handed it to his partner.

“Holy shit,” Rojas said. “This looks like a .308.”

Bosch nodded as he took the bag back.

“Think so. Our next stop is the bullet lab at Regional. You guys never had it as a rifle, did you?”

“Why would we?” Rodriguez said. “We never had the goddamn bullet.”

“Did you look at X-rays from the hospital?” Soto asked.

The two Hollenbeck detectives looked at her like she was out of line questioning their work. Bosch could ask because he had the experience. But not her.

“Yeah, we looked at X-rays,” Rodriguez said, an annoyed tone in his voice. “The angle was bad. All we got was the mushroom. Couldn’t tell dick from that.”

Soto nodded. Bosch tried to get the focus off of her.

“Hey, if you guys aren’t too busy right now, we’d like to buy you a cup of coffee and talk about what’s in those books.”

Bosch could tell by the reaction on Rodriguez’s face that he had made a misstep.

“Ten years on a case and we get a cup of coffee,” he said. “Fuck you very much but I don’t need any coffee.”

Rodriguez pointed his chin at Soto.

“Besides, you’ve got heroina con la pistola on your team, man. Lucky Lucy. You don’t need us.”

Bosch realized that it wasn’t just the losing of the case that bothered Rodriguez. He was incensed that he was still working in a divisional detective squad while Soto had been elevated with zero experience to Open-Unsolved. Harry saw that the situation could not be helped at the moment and decided to get out of the station before things went further south. He noted that Rojas had not joined his partner in deriding Soto or the reassignment of the case. He would be the one Bosch would come back to when they were ready.

“Okay, we’ll just take the stuff, then.”

Bosch moved forward and put the three binders on top of the evidence box and picked it all up.

“Lucia, get the guitar case,” he said.

“It’s a vihuela, bro,” Rodriguez said. “Better get it right for the press conference.”

“Right,” Bosch said. “Thanks.”

He straightened up with his burden and checked the desks to see if there was anything he’d missed.

“Okay, guys, thanks for the cooperation. We’ll be in touch.”

He headed out of the alcove with Soto following.

“You do that,” Rodriguez said to their backs. “Bring coffee.”

They were out in the parking lot before either of them spoke.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Soto said. “I really shouldn’t be on this case. Or even in this unit.”

“Don’t listen to them, Lucia. You’ll do fine and I’m going to need you like crazy on this case. You’ll be very important.”

“What, as a translator? That’s not detective work. I feel like I’ve been given something I don’t deserve. I’ve felt this way since they gave me my choice of detective assignments. I should’ve taken Burglary.”

Bosch put the box and the binders down on the hood of the car so he could get out the keys. He popped the trunk, and going to the back of the car, they barely fit the instrument case and the box and binders into the trunk. Once it was all in place Bosch flipped the latches on the case and opened it. He looked at the vihuela without removing it. A single bullet hole splintered the polished facing of the instrument. He closed and latched the case. He then turned and finally responded to his partner.

“Listen to me, Lucia. You would’ve been wasting your time in Burglary. I’ve only worked with you a few weeks but I know you’re a good cop and you’re going to be a very good detective. Stop undercutting yourself. As you just experienced, there will always be people out there to do it for you. You just have to block them out. They want what you have and you can’t help that.”

Soto nodded.

“Thank you. Please call me Lucy. When you call me Lucia I feel like we’ll never be real partners.”

“Lucy, then. You’ve got to remember something here. This kind of case is a takeaway. A swoop and scoop. Nobody likes it when the RHD comes in and Bigfoots a case. People say things but they get past it. Those guys? Before this is over they’ll be very helpful to us. You watch.”

She looked unconvinced.

“I don’t know about Rodriguez. He’s got a major board up his ass,” she said.

“But at the end of the day he’s a detective and he’ll do what’s right. Let’s go.”

“Okay.”

They got back in the car and drove out 1st, past the Chinese Cemetery and over to the 10 freeway. From there it was a two-minute cruise up to the exit for Cal State, where the Regional Crime Laboratory was located.

The crime lab was a five-story structure that stood in the middle of campus. It had been built as a partnership between the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, a logical decision since both agencies together handled more than a third of the crimes that occurred in the state of California and many of those crimes overlapped their jurisdictions.

However, inside the lab, the departments maintained many separate facilities. One of these was the LAPD’s Firearms Analysis Unit, which included the so-called bullet lab where technicians worked in a low-light room using lasers and computers to attempt to match bullets from one case to another.

This was where the hope of the Merced case lay. The investigation conducted by Rodriguez and Rojas may have been thorough ten years before but they never found a bullet shell from the shooting and the slug had remained inside Merced’s body until now. The chances were slim but if the bullet removed from the victim’s spine during the autopsy could be matched to any other crime, then a whole new avenue of investigation would open for Bosch and Soto.

The normal protocol at the lab was to submit a bullet or shell casing for analysis and wait in the backlog, sometimes for weeks, before getting an answer and a report. But on walk-in Wednesday, bullet cases could be walked in and handled on a first-come first-served basis.

Bosch checked in with the bullet lab supervisor and was assigned to a technician appropriately named Gun Chung. Bosch had worked with him before and knew that Gun was the name on his birth certificate and not a nickname.

“Gun, how’s it going?”

“Very well, Harry. What have you brought me today?”

“First of all, this is my new partner, Lucy Soto. And second, I’ve brought you a tough one for today.”

Chung shook hands with Soto and Bosch handed him the evidence bag with the bullet slug in it. Chung used a pair of scissors to open the bag and removed the slug. He hefted it in his hand and then held it under a lighted magnifier that he pulled over by its mechanical arm.

“It’s a Remington .308. Soft-nose—gives you maximum mushrooming. A round like this is primarily used for long-range shooting.”

“You mean like a sniper rifle?”

“More likely a hunting rifle.”

Bosch nodded.

“So can you do anything with it?”

Bosch was asking whether the condition of the slug would preclude it from comparative analysis. The slug had gone through the front and back wood panels of Orlando Merced’s vihuela and then penetrated his body mass before lodging against the twelfth thoracic vertebra of his spine. The bullet had mushroomed during these impacts, leaving very little of its shaft intact. The shaft was where striations from the barrel of the gun the bullet had been fired from would create a unique pattern, allowing it to be compared to other projectiles in the BulletTrax database.

With the bullet Bosch had just handed to Chung, there was no more than a quarter inch of undamaged form. Chung looked closely at it through the magnifier and seemed to be taking his time deciding if the slug was a candidate for ballistic profiling. Bosch did his best to lobby him while he looked.

“Ten-year-old case,” he said. “The coroner just took that out of the victim’s spine. I think this might be our only chance to move things along.”

Chung nodded.

“It’s a two-step process, Harry,” he said. “First, I have to see if there is enough to work with here. And second, even if we put it in the data bank, there is no guarantee of a match. The database on rifle projectiles is limited. Most of our bullet crimes involve handguns.”

“Understood,” Bosch said. “So what do you think? Enough there?”

Chung pulled back from the magnifier and looked up at Bosch and Soto.

“I think we can try,” he said.

“Perfect,” Bosch said. “What kind of time are we looking at?”

“It’s a slow day. I’ll work it up right now and we’ll see what happens.”

“Thanks, Gun. Should we leave you alone or hang out?”

“Either way. There’s a cafeteria on the first floor if you want to go get coffee.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Bosch and Soto had no sooner sat down in the cafeteria, Bosch with black coffee and Soto with a Diet Coke, than Harry’s phone buzzed. It was Crowder back at the PAB.

“Harry, where are you?”

“At Regional with the bullet.”

“Anything good?”

“Not yet. We’re waiting to run it through the database.”

“All right. Well, I need you to get back here right away.”

“Why, what is it?”

“We got the Merced family here and the media and the press conference is in twenty-five minutes.”

“What press conference? We don’t have—”

“Doesn’t matter, Harry. The number of reporters here hit critical mass and the chief called a press conference. The ME already put out that they’re ruling it a homicide.”

Bosch almost cursed Corazon’s name out loud.

“The chief wants you and Soto standing with him,” Crowder said. “So get back over here. Now.”

Bosch didn’t answer for a moment.

“Harry, did you hear me?” Crowder said.

“I heard,” Bosch said. “We’re on our way.”