The Burning Room

It took them a half hour to remove the contents of each of the cabinets and then for Bosch—using Bernard Contreras’s tools—to loosen the bolts attaching the first steel cabinet to the two-by-fours behind it. To finish the project, he then had to hand the wrench to Soto while he attempted to hold the heavy steel cabinet.

Working from the stepladder, Soto removed the four loosened bolts, and Bosch felt the weight hit him. It was too much.

“Look out!”

He let cabinet slide down the two-by-fours to the floor, where it hit the cement with a loud bang.

“Everybody all right?”

As the two women reported that they were fine, Bosch looked at the place on the wall where the cabinet had been. There was indeed a vertical space four inches deep between two of the two-by-fours. A length of wood had been nailed into place between the verticals to create a bottom rest to the hiding place. There was no gun there but there was a sheathed sword in the space. Bosch took it down to examine it. It was caked with dust. It looked like some kind of samurai sword and had a slight bend to its long blade, which had remained shiny and clean in its sheath.

Bosch leaned the sword against the workbench and moved on to the second gun cabinet.

Having learned from the first effort, Bosch took only ten minutes to loosen bolts on the second cabinet and put Soto in position on the stepladder. This time he knew what to expect and used his weight against the cabinet to slowly slide it down the wall. He heard Soto announce that there was a gun in the second hiding spot before he even straightened up.

It was a rifle. Bosch’s adrenaline kicked in. He wanted to grab it and check to see if it was a Kimber, but he waited while Soto photographed it with her phone. He then took it down from the space and held it out across his body. Soto leaned in to help examine it for brand markings.

“I need my glasses,” Bosch said.

“There!” Soto said, excitedly pointing to the left side of the rifle’s receiver. “‘Kimber Model 84.’ It has to be it.”

She located the serial number to the left of the brand mark and asked Bosch if he had the number from his notes. Bosch gave her the gun and went to his jacket, which Mrs. Contreras was holding, for his reading glasses and notebook. He flipped the notebook open to the page with the serial number written on it and read it out loud to Soto.

“It’s a match,” she said.

Her voice had a tremble as she said it.

They had found David Willman’s unaccounted-for rifle. The next step was to see if it was also the rifle used to shoot Orlando Merced.

Bosch put on his jacket and looked at the two gun cabinets on the floor of the garage. There was no way he was going to be able to put them back in place.

“Mrs. Contreras, we are going to have to take these weapons with us,” he said.

“Please do,” she said. “My husband’s not going to believe this.”

“Well, your husband may not be happy, because I’m not going to be able to lift those cabinets up and put them back.”

“Don’t worry. He and his friends can do that. They hang out in here enough and this will be a great story for him to tell.”

“That makes me feel better. We’re going to write out a receipt for you now.”

They put the weapons in the trunk of the car, laying them across a blanket Bosch kept in his surveillance kit. They then thanked Mrs. Contreras and gave her the receipt.

Finally they headed back toward Los Angeles. There was an almost palpable excitement in the car. Bosch had started the day feeling that he had reached a dead end on the case because Broussard had taken the ultimate measure in protecting himself. But now things were different. He had what he believed would prove to be the murder weapon in his trunk. It had been a fast turnabout.

Bosch checked his watch and figured it would be almost five by the time they got back to the city. He pulled his phone and called the gun shop at the crime lab. He asked for Gun Chung.

“How long are you going to be there?” Bosch asked.

“I’m on the schedule till four,” Chung said. “What’s up?”

“We have the gun from the mariachi thing. At least we think we do. But we won’t get there in time. We’re coming in from Riverside.”

“How far out are you?”

“I’m thinking closer to five.”

“It’s okay. I’ll wait. Bring it right here and I’ll do the comparison.”

“We won’t have to wait in line?”

“I’ll be on my own time. I can do what I want.”

“I appreciate that, man. We’ll be there as soon as we can. Can you do me one other favor?”

“What is it?”

“Call up to latents and see if somebody can meet us. I’d like to see if we can pull prints off this.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Bosch disconnected the call and told Soto that they were going directly to the lab where Gun Chung was willing to wait for them to do a comparison between the slug taken from Orlando Merced’s spine and a bullet fired from the rifle in the trunk.

“Let’s say it’s a match,” she said. “That we have the murder weapon.”

“Okay,” Bosch said.

“Let’s run the scenario. I want to try to see how this works.”

Bosch nodded. It was a good exercise to a certain extent. The investigator never wanted to create a scenario and then work the evidence to fit it. But starting with the assumption that they had just recovered the murder weapon led to some inalterable conclusions.

“Well, you start by going back to our original theory based on the ballistics and the video evidence,” he said.

“That the bullet that hit Merced was intended for Ojeda,” Soto said.

“Right. Then from there you have the confirmation that the weapon belonged to David Willman. Did he take the shot? We don’t know that. Did he have the skill? Yes. Did he know someone he could have given his gun to so they could take the shot? I think that’s also a yes.”

He drove for a few minutes, grinding out the story in his head before continuing.

“Okay, so if you draw a line between Ojeda and Willman, who else does it intersect?”

“Broussard.”

“Broussard. He grew up with Willman and was in business with him.”

“And his wife was having an affair with Ojeda.”

Bosch nodded.

“The way I see this from Broussard’s angle is he warned Ojeda to stay away from his wife but Ojeda wouldn’t move on. So Broussard goes to Willman and says, ‘I need a piece of work taken care of.’ Willman takes the job and sets it up with a shooter or decides to handle the job himself. I’m guessing the latter—rule of thumb, the fewer people in a conspiracy, the better.”

“Agreed. I go with Willman.”

“Willman takes the shot but hits Merced instead of Ojeda. Everything goes sideways. Now they know that if they hit Ojeda, it will really bring some heat because there is no way the police will continue to think the first one was a random shot or gang related. They’ll know there is something going on here. So Broussard has no choice but to tell Willman to stand down—at least for now.”

“Meantime, Ojeda sticks around just long enough to feed his bullshit statement to the cops and then splits town.”

“So the shot actually does the job. They hit the wrong guy but the right guy goes away anyway.”

“And Willman becomes a loose end for Broussard. A guy who knows the secret.”

“You have to wonder why Willman agreed to go out hunting with Broussard that day. He must’ve told him that he had an insurance policy.”

“He kept the gun.”

“Broussard must’ve somehow thought he was in the clear, that the gun wasn’t going to show up and connect up the whole thing, with him in the middle.”

Soto turned completely sideways to look at Bosch as she made the next connection.

“It was the bullet! It was inside Merced. He must’ve thought when Merced survived and they weren’t going to take the bullet out of him that Willman’s ace in the hole wasn’t as valuable as he thought. It didn’t matter if he kept the rifle, since there was no slug to compare it to because it wasn’t removed from Merced. There was no way to prove it had fired the shot.”

Bosch nodded.

“Willman thought he was safe enough to give Broussard a gun and go off into the woods with him. Only he wasn’t.”

They sat with it in silence for a while. Bosch ran it all through once more and couldn’t knock it down. It was only case theory but it held together. It worked, but it didn’t mean that it was the way it had happened. Every case had unanswered questions and loose ends when it came to motives and actions. Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully reasonable explanation for it? It was that understanding that kept him from watching and being able to enjoy films and television shows about detectives. He found them unrealistic in their delivery of what the general audience wanted: all of the answers.

He looked up at the overhead freeway signs. They were coming up on the exit for Cal State, where Gun Chung waited for them in the lab.