The Burning Room

31



Bosch didn’t want to go into the squad room and get caught up in anything with Crowder or Samuels. So he texted Soto and waited in the same spot where he had dropped her off an hour earlier. It took her less than ten minutes to get out of the PAB and across the front plaza. She was carrying her iPad.

She got in the car but Bosch did not pull out. They needed to set a plan for the rest of the day and he also wanted to know what she had told Crowder with regard to both of their current cases.

“Okay, so where are we at?” he asked.

“I did the interview and that was easy,” she said. “The reporter didn’t ask anything too tough and the only thing I gave him was the gun. He was really happy with that and the captain and lieutenant were happy and now we’re good to go on Bonnie Brae.”

“What did you tell Crowder about that?”

“Just that we’re looking at it as a diversion from the EZBank robbery and that it was an angle the first-run investigators didn’t explore. I told him we had a solid connection between the two locations and needed to hit the road today to nail it down.”

“Perfect. Now, we have Burrows and Boiko padded down. Still no location on Ana Acevedo, right?”

Soto shook her head with disappointment.

“I can’t find her. I’ve tried all the software and data banks. AutoTrack, DMV, Lexis/Nexis, utilities, voter registration, auto loans—you name it.”

“Think she’s dead?”

“If she is, it wasn’t recorded anywhere I can find.”

“Maybe she just changed her name.”

He said it hopefully even though he was increasingly starting to believe Ana Acevedo had been killed and buried where she would never be found. If she had been used by Burrows and the two other robbers, she became a liability as soon as the robbery was over. Adding the Bonnie Brae deaths to the tally probably made her too risky a liability.

“Nothing comes up in the usual places,” Soto said. “Marriage licenses, petitions to change names. If she switched her name, she didn’t do it legally or she went somewhere far away to do it.”

“Maybe Mexico.”

“Well, if she did, she never came back across and got a driver’s license or a bank account or cable TV. She just disappeared, and as far as I can tell, nobody ever reported her missing. At least not in this state.”

Considering her work in just the past week, Bosch had no cause to doubt the thoroughness of Soto’s search for Ana Acevedo.

“All right, then,” he said. “Maybe we use that to our advantage. We go to Burrows and Boiko and say she’s the one we’re looking for. That’ll be our angle in with them.”

Soto nodded.

“I like it,” she said. “Which one do we go to first?”

“I like Burrows,” Bosch said. “With what I just heard at breakfast, he’s the one. The EZBank job could’ve been all about getting money to start the white supremacist outfit he was part of back then.”

“What a guy. I can’t wait to hear this.”

“Yeah. He’s a quite a citizen.”

Bosch pulled onto 1st and headed down to Los Angeles Street so he could get over to the freeway. Adelanto was going to be an easy two-hour drive out into the Mojave. There was more than enough time to tell Soto everything Walling had told him about Rodney Burrows.