The Burning Room

Adelanto was off the 15 freeway almost halfway to Las Vegas. As he drove, Bosch was quiet and contemplative while Soto used her electronic tablet to continue her search for Ana Acevedo. The past decade had seen an explosion in the availability of digital search sites that could be used for finding people. While almost all of them used the basic identifiers such as name, birth date, and Social Security number, there was still a wide range of ways in which those identifiers were applied. Some sites were more real-estate based, others more reliant on banking or legal data. Still others specialized in auto purchasing and financial data. The bottom line was that the prudent investigator didn’t rely on only one or two search engines for conclusive results. There was always another data bank to check.

As Soto occasionally cursed or muttered things like “That’s not her!” and “Would you give me a break?” Bosch was slowly realizing the gravity of the situation he had put himself in. Before that morning, the Bonnie Brae case had seemed like an abstract long shot, and by encouraging Soto and helping her he was solidifying their bond as partners. Now, because of Soto’s good work, they were on the verge of confronting the man who could very well be responsible for the deaths of nine people, including Soto’s childhood friends. He realized that there was no way he should let Soto anywhere near this man, but the circumstances he had set in motion made it inevitable. He was going to have to be as careful about Soto as he was about Burrows—should the two meet.

“How are you doing, Lucy?” he asked.

Soto was looking down at her tablet screen. She glanced over at him and he put his eyes back on the road.

“You’ve been with me just about all morning,” she said. “Why do you ask that?”

“It’s just that, you know, Burrows—this could be the guy. You’re going to be cool, right?”

“I’ll be cool, Harry. Don’t worry.”

Bosch took his eyes off the road again to look at her for a long moment.

“What?” she said.

“I just want to be sure I don’t have to worry about you,” he said.

“Harry, I’m a cop and I’ll act like a cop. Totally professional. I’m not going to go all apeshit on the guy, okay? This is about justice, not revenge.”

“There’s a thin line between those two things. I’m just saying that if you start to pull anything, I’ll be all over you in a second. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand. Can I go back to work now?”

She held up her tablet as part of the question.

“Sure. But you follow my lead if we talk to this guy. I want to run the missing-person play on him, see if I can get him to talk to us about Ana. Then we go from there.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Okay, then.”

Rodney Burrows’s address corresponded to a neighborhood of small houses on narrow but deep lots. There were no trees or bushes or even a lawn that Bosch could see anywhere in the neighborhood. It was all burned out and left dusty and barren by the desert sun.

The Burrows homestead was surrounded by a chain-link fence that was topped with razor wire and that probably wasn’t all that different from the fence that surrounded the federal prison where Burrows had done his time. Bosch wondered if the similarity was lost on Burrows.

As Bosch studied the man’s fenced compound, the irony was not lost on him. Burrows, like many others with his beliefs and practices, had most likely moved eighty miles away from the city and into the desert town because he wanted to get away from all that he felt was wrong with society and its large urban centers. In his estimation the problems came down to things like immigration and crowding from growing populations of minorities who sapped the infrastructure and lived off the government dole. So he lit out, as they say in white-power circles, for open spaces and white faces. He found Adelanto and established his homestead, only to find that the small town was no different from the big town. It was a microcosm—a ladle dipped into the melting pot and coming out with the same mixture of ingredients. Adelanto was a town with minorities in the majority, and so it was no wonder to Bosch that Burrows had surrounded himself with a six-foot chain-link fence, his last-ditch effort to keep the world out. And the capper to the irony was that Adelanto was the Spanish word for “progress.”

Burrows’s fence formed a chute that Bosch angled the Ford into so he could reach out the window to a call box at the entry gate. The box featured a keypad, a camera lens, and a call button. It was attached to a pole below one sign that said “Beware of Dog” and another that showed the black silhouette of a handgun above the words “We Don’t Call 911.”

Bosch was uncomfortable the moment he saw the setup because it would allow Burrows to control the situation in terms of the initial contact and confrontation. Soto was uneasy as well.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“Nothing much we can do,” Bosch said. “We see if we can get him to open up.”

Bosch reached out the car window and pushed the call button to make contact. He had to push it a second time before getting a response. The voice on the box was male and gruff.

“What is it?”

Bosch held his badge out to the camera but intentionally held it in a way that one of his fingers covered the embossed letters that said Los Angeles.

“Police, sir. We need you to come out to the gate, please.”

“Why would you need me to do that?”

“We have an investigation and we need you to help us, sir.”

“What sort of investigation?”

“Sir, would you please come out?”

“Not until I know what’s going on.”

“It’s a missing-persons case, sir. It will only take a few minutes.”

“Who’s missing? I don’t know anyone in this neighborhood. They could all go missing as far as I’m concerned.”

This was not going the right way. Bosch decided to go strong.

“Sir, you need to come to the gate. If you refuse, then we are going to have a problem.”

There was a long pause before the voice came back over the box.

“Just hold your horses. It’s going to take me a few minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Bosch backed up from the box enough to be able to open the door and exit the car. He put it in park and looked at Soto. He still was unsure of how she was going to react to seeing the man who might be responsible for the tragedy of her childhood, if not her life.

“Okay, I’m going to get out, act casual, and wait for him,” Bosch said. “You stay in the car. I’ll signal you if I need you.”

“Okay,” Soto said. “What are you going to do?”

“Not sure yet. Play it as it lays.”

“Sounds good.”

Bosch unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car. He walked to the front and leaned against the grille in a very casual pose, hands back on the hood for balance. The house was about fifty yards up the driveway. Soon he saw the garage door open and a pickup truck that had been backed into it start down the driveway to the gate. As it got closer, the automatic gate in front of Bosch began to slide open. He could see a man behind the wheel and a dog on the seat beside him. He then saw a rifle in the rack behind the driver’s head. Bosch started to get concerned but tried not to show it. The truck stopped twenty feet short of the gate and the man left it idling as he climbed out. Bosch heard him tell the dog to be good.

The first thing Bosch saw when the man closed the truck door was that he had a western-style holster on his belt and strapped around his right thigh. There was a pistol in it. This escalated things quickly and Bosch dropped the casual pose and stood up off the front of his car. He pointed at the man and issued a command.

“Stop right there, sir!”

The man stopped in his tracks and looked around as if confused by the circumstances. He was shorter than Bosch expected. For some reason his adversaries always loomed large in his imagination, and then, more often than not, they didn’t measure up to what he expected. Burrows had a beefy physique beneath his plaid shirt and jeans. He had a bushy red beard and wore an old John Deere hat.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Sir, why are you wearing a holstered weapon?” Bosch called back.

“Because I always do and because I have a right to bear arms on my own goddamn property.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Rodney Burrows and would you stop with the ‘sir’ all the time?”

“Okay, Mr. Burrows, I want you to reach across your body with your left hand, take the gun out of the holster, and put it on the hood of your truck.”

Perhaps sensing something in the tone of Bosch’s voice, the dog started barking and had moved over to the driver’s seat to be closer to its master.

“Why would I do that?” Burrows asked. “I’m on my own property.”

“For my safety, sir—Mr. Burrows,” Bosch responded. “I want the gun on the hood of the truck.”

By pointing at the truck, Bosch set off another paroxysm of barking from the dog. It started moving back and forth in the truck cab, jumping from seat to seat. Bosch heard the passenger door of the Ford open behind him and knew Soto was getting out. But he did not want to turn his eyes away from the armed man in front of him.

When he saw Burrows start to raise his hands, palms out, he knew Soto had drawn her weapon.

“Sir!” Soto yelled, her voice high and tense. “Put the weapon on the hood!”

“Soto, I have this,” Bosch said. “Stand down.”

“Sir!” she called again, ignoring Bosch. “The weapon!”

“Okay, okay,” Burrows said. “I’m doing it.”

He started moving his right hand toward the holster.

“Left hand!” Bosch yelled. “Left hand!”

“Sorry,” Burrows said casually. “Left hand. Jesus!”

He removed the gun from the holster with his left hand and casually tossed it onto the pickup’s hood. It banged hard on the steel and caused the dog to increase its volume and animation.

“Lola, shut up!” Burrows yelled.

The dog did not oblige. With the gun on the hood of the truck Bosch felt safe enough to glance back at Soto. She was behind the open passenger door of the plain-wrap in a two-handed combat stance, arms braced on the windowsill, her weapon still aimed at Burrows’s center mass.

“Soto, cool it,” Bosch said. “I’ve got this.”

“I’ve got you covered, partner,” she said.

“Stand down,” Bosch said evenly. “Holster your weapon.”

He waited for Soto to comply, then turned back to Burrows and stepped forward, putting his body in the line between Burrows and Soto.

Bosch pulled Burrows away from the truck and over to the plain-wrap. He proned him over the hood and started checking him for other weapons. He looked over him at Soto, giving her a hard stare.

“Here’s a tip,” he said to Burrows. “When the cops knock on your door, don’t answer it with a gun on your belt and a rifle in your truck.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing, man,” Burrows protested. “I am on my own land. I have every right to—”

“You are a convicted felon in possession of a firearm,” Bosch said. “That trumps any of your bullshit.”

“I don’t recognize your law.”

“Yeah, well good for you. The law recognizes you. Do you have any other weapons?”

“I got a knife,” Burrows said. “Back pocket. This is bullshit. This is government harassment. And this hood is fucking hot!”

Bosch didn’t respond. He didn’t care how hot the hood was. He dug the knife out. It was a switchblade. He pushed the spring lock and a four-inch blade popped out. He held it up high so Soto could see it and would be able to deflect any claim that Bosch had planted it. He closed it and put it on the car’s hood, sliding it out of reach.

Bosch leaned his weight on Burrows, pushing his chest down on the hood. He could feel the heat Burrows had complained about. Then in a long-practiced maneuver, he kept a forearm on the man’s spine to hold him in place while he pulled the handcuffs off his belt and hooked one onto Burrows’s left wrist.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Burrows asked.

Bosch brought Burrows’s left arm up behind his back and shifted his weight to the other forearm so he could bring the right wrist back to complete the cuffing. He then stood Burrows back up and turned him around.

“You can’t do this,” Burrows said. “Arrest me on my own property.”

“Wrong,” Bosch said. “I own you now, Burrows. Is there anyone else in your house?”

“What? No, no one.”

“Any other dogs besides the one in the truck?”

“No. What is this? What do you want?”

“I told you. We want to talk about a missing person.”

“Who?”

“Ana Acevedo.”

Bosch watched his reaction, seeing how long it took Burrows to recognize and remember the name. It took a few seconds and then it hit.

“I haven’t seen her in, like, years.”

“Good. We’ll talk about that. You now have a big decision, Rodney. You want to go inside and talk here? Or do you want to drive back to L.A. with us and do it at the station?”

“You’re from L.A.?”

“That’s right. I guess I forgot to mention that. You want to answer questions here or there?”

“How about I just ask for my lawyer and you don’t ask me a fucking thing?”

“That would be a choice. We’ll take you down to L.A. and get you a phone as soon as we get there. I promise.”

“No, right now. Here. My lawyer’s up here. L.A. is a shithole. I don’t want to ever go there again.”

“Then make a choice. Talk to us here or call your lawyer from L.A. I’m sure he’ll be able to get you out by morning—after a night in the zoo.”

Burrows shook his head and said nothing. Bosch knew they were skirting very closely around an interpretation of whether or not he had just asked for an attorney.

“Okay,” Bosch said.

He pulled Burrows back from the hood and started walking him toward the rear door of the car.

“We’ll get animal control out here for the dog,” he said.

Immediately Burrows tensed and tried to stop moving.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “We can go inside but I don’t know anything about Ana Acevedo.”

“We’ll see,” Bosch said.

“What about my dog? And my truck?”

Bosch looked back at the truck. It was still running. The dog had its front paws up on the dashboard and was looking intently back at Bosch.

“They’ll be fine,” he said.

He turned Burrows toward the house, keeping one hand on his upper arm. With the other he signaled to Soto to get the gun and the knife.

“You have to close the gate,” Burrows protested. “Otherwise, they’ll come in.”

“Who will?” Bosch asked.

“The people out there. The kids on the street.”

“How do we close it?”

“There’s a clicker in the truck.”

“We’re not opening the truck.”

“The dog is harmless. She likes to bark.”

“Okay, I’ll open the truck. But just so you know, if the dog comes at me, I’m going to shoot it.”

“She won’t.”

Bosch signaled Soto over so she could take control of Burrows while he walked over to the pickup. He drew his weapon and then lowered it to his side. He opened the door and was greeted with a paroxysm of barking. But the dog backed up against the passenger door. Bosch reached in and pushed the button on a remote clipped to the windshield visor. The gate to the Burrows compound started to close.

“Lola, down,” Burrows shouted.

The dog leaped out of the truck and past Bosch in a gray blur. By the time he had raised his gun, the dog was already on the ground and by Burrows’s side.

“Good girl,” Burrows said. “Can you kill the engine? Gas ain’t cheap around here.”

“It ain’t cheap anywhere,” Bosch said.

He reached in and turned off the engine, then grabbed the rifle off the rack.