The Burning Room

Bosch pulled out onto Ventura Boulevard and pinned the accelerator. He wasn’t going back to the Broussard house the way he had come. It was too slow and he didn’t think Mulholland was the way to approach it. He flipped down the red flashers on the windshield but reserved the siren for when he needed it at intersections.

“Harry, what woman?” Soto demanded. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Hold on,” Bosch barked back.

He had his phone out and had called Flowers again. He waited as the line buzzed repeatedly and the call was finally picked up.

“Flowers, talk to me.”

“We just got it. No change, Detective. The coordinates are still the same.”

Bosch disconnected and dropped the phone into the center console. He was angry with himself. He glanced over at Soto but only for a moment. He was now going sixty on crowded Ventura Boulevard and needed his eyes on the road.

“I should’ve said, ‘I fucked up,’ back there. It wasn’t you, Lucy. It was me.”

“Harry, what the hell is it? What are you talking about?”

“The other night I was at that overlook on Mulholland. I was watching Broussard’s house.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to get a measure of him, I guess. I thought maybe I’d get a look at him or something.”

“Okay. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. But the lights were on and I could see into the house. I had my binoculars. I saw a woman in the kitchen. She was emptying the dishwasher. And she had brown hair, not blond. I didn’t…I didn’t remember that till back there at the store.”

“I don’t—who was it?”

“It was the maid. Our caller is the maid, not the wife, and now Broussard knows. His wife just called him.”

Soto didn’t respond at first as she followed the trail and came to the end with the same conclusion as Bosch.

“Shit,” she said.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Hold on and check to the right up here.”

He hit the siren as they approached a red light at the intersection with Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Bosch looked left and Soto looked right.

“Clear!” she yelled.

Bosch never looked, trusting his partner. He saw the left was clear and blew through the intersection unscathed.

“Okay, you have your iPad?” he asked.

“Yes, in my bag,” Soto said. “What do you need?”

“Pull up a map that shows Broussard’s house.”

She pulled the tablet out of her bag.

“What am I looking for?”

“Up top on Mulholland the place is a fortress, a concrete vault. But down at the bottom there’s a pool.”

“Right, I saw it today.”

“There’s got to be access to it from down below. Find the pool man’s way in. What street is down there?”

“Got it.”

She went to work on it and Bosch concentrated on driving. Ventura Boulevard was a four-lane road. He had room to maneuver and keep his speed.

“Okay,” Soto called out. “Right on Vineland. That’ll take us up.”

Thirty seconds later Vineland came up. Bosch took the right and they were on a steep two-lane street through a residential neighborhood. Winding curves and curbside parking made it narrow and treacherous at speed and Bosch throttled back. Luckily, there were few other moving vehicles to contend with.

“Okay, what’s the next turn?” he asked.

“Wrightwood Drive, you go right,” Soto said. “Then left on Wrightwood Lane. That puts us right below the house. The access has to be there.”

Bosch made the first turn and then almost immediately came to the second.

“Here,” Soto said.

“Got it.”

They were now running parallel to and below Mulholland. Bosch leaned forward to look up through the windshield. The angle was bad.

“Look up there,” he instructed. “Do you see the house?”

Soto lowered her window and leaned out to look up.

“No, not—wait, yes, we’re coming up on it,” Soto said. “Right up here!”

There was a panicked urgency in her voice. She didn’t want to be wrong about the path she had put them on. Bosch pulled up to a large concrete passageway recessed into the slope between two residences. It was closed with an iron gate, behind which Bosch could see three city-issued trash containers against the right wall. Blue for recyclables, green for garden cuttings, and black for trash—the L.A. way. Beyond them the space retreated into darkness. The gate was locked with a chain. Anchored above it on the concrete wall was a camera housing that matched those Bosch had seen on Broussard’s house from up on Mulholland Drive.

“This is it,” he said. “The chain is padlocked on the inside. There’s got to be a back entrance to the house.”

“What do we do?” Soto asked.

“I can break that chain with the tire iron,” Bosch said.

“There’s a camera.”

“We’ve got to hope he’s not watching. Let’s go.”

After retrieving the tire iron from the trunk of the car, Bosch quickly moved to the gate and slipped the long tool into one of the chain’s links. He was about to start winding it to leverage pressure on the chain when he looked at Soto. This was new territory for her.

“I consider this exigent circumstances,” he said. “We have to go in.”

He was laying down the legal groundwork for breaking into the premises of a suspect in a murder investigation. The threat of imminent danger to an individual created the exigent circumstances that allowed them to act and enter without court order.

“Right,” Soto said. “Of course. Imminent threat to life. Our witness is in there and we have strong reason to believe the suspect knows.”

Bosch nodded.

“Okay, be ready.”

“For what?”

“Anything.”