The Burning Room

5



They convened in Captain Crowder’s office after the press conference. Bosch, Soto, Crowder, and Lieutenant Winslow Samuels, the second in command of the Open-Unsolved Unit. Bosch updated them on the findings from the bullet lab, notably that Merced had been shot with a rifle—a fact heretofore unknown during ten years of investigation. Bosch explained that for the time being he wanted to keep this piece of information out of the media and Crowder and Samuels agreed.

“So where do you go with it from here?” Crowder asked.

“A rifle changes things,” Bosch said. “A drive-by with a rifle? Come on. Unlikely. A stray bullet from the neighborhood? Maybe. But the rifle still gives us something new.”

“Well, it’s definitely outside our unit’s protocol,” Samuels said. “No magic bullet, no case. This should be flipped over to Homicide Special, let them deal with it.”

The Open-Unsolved Unit followed a protocol when it came to investigating cold cases. It relied upon new evidence as the criteria for reengagement. That new evidence usually came from the application of recent advances in forensic sciences to old cases and the establishment of national databases to track criminals through DNA, ballistics, and fingerprints. These were the big three. The magic bullets. Without a hit on one of these databases, a case would be considered not viable and routinely returned to the archives.

Following this protocol, the Merced case would normally be returned to the archives. The bullet recovered from the victim’s body found no match in the national ballistics database. While a type and model of weapon had been identified, it normally would not be enough to pursue. But because of the media attention and politics surrounding this case, not to mention the interest from the OCP, there was no doubt that the case would be pursued. What Samuels was saying was that it should be done by someone other than Bosch and Soto and the Open-Unsolved Unit. The lieutenant was the squad whip, responsible for the unit’s statistics and justifying its cost in terms of cases cleared. He didn’t want to see one of his teams get bogged down in a shoe-leather case.

“I want to keep it,” Bosch said, looking at Crowder. “The chief gave it to us, we keep it.”

“You’ve got sixteen open files last time I counted, Bosch,” Samuels interjected.

“All of them waiting on lab results. We’ve got something going on this case. The rifle is the first new lead in ten years. Let us run with it. If something comes back from the lab on one of the other cases, we’ll handle it.”

“Besides, we just did the press conference,” Soto quickly added. “How’s it going to look if we’re on the case today and off tomorrow?”

Crowder nodded thoughtfully. Bosch liked Soto’s add to the argument, though she probably didn’t realize that she was crossing the tube—walking in front of a shotgun held by Samuels. She might pay for that later.

“For now we leave things as they are,” Crowder said. “You two work this thing and let’s meet again in forty-eight hours. I’ll update the OCP from there and decide whether we keep it.”

“It’s not a cold case,” Samuels said. “The guy died yesterday.”

“We’ll talk in forty-eight,” Crowder said, ending the discussion.

Bosch nodded. That was the first thing he had wanted to hear—that he and Soto were keeping the case, at least for another two days. But it wasn’t the only thing he wanted.

“What about when the phone starts ringing with calls for the reward the former mayor’s putting up?” Bosch asked. “Can we get any help with that?”

“That was just a publicity stunt,” Crowder said. “He’s running for governor.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bosch said. “We’re still going to get calls and we can’t be stuck on the phone all day.”

Crowder looked at Samuels, who shook his head.

“Everybody’s got active cases,” Samuels said, referring to the other teams in the squad. “And now you two are dropping out of the mix. I can’t see dedicating another body to it.”

Losing Bosch and Soto for an unknown amount of time was only barely palatable to Samuels. Giving up additional detectives to answer tip calls was not something he was even remotely willing to entertain.

Bosch had expected the request to be rejected, but the turndown might be useful to mention later if he and Soto asked for something else. Crowder had a give-and-take management style and a reminder that he had turned down their last request could tip the scales toward approval.

“And another thing,” Samuels said. “Was this guy Merced even a citizen?”

Bosch looked at him for a moment before answering. Soto jumped in ahead of him.

“Why?” she asked. “Does it matter?”

She got to the point. If Samuels was suggesting that extra hands not be put on the case because the victim was not a citizen, then she wanted that out in the open. Bosch liked that she had asked the question. But before Samuels answered, Crowder cut off the issue.

“Let me see what I can do,” Crowder said. “Maybe one of those ladies in the OCP can come down here and answer calls for a few days. I’ve been thinking about asking the chief for help with all the call-ins we get on a daily basis anyway. I’ll let you know. I gotta say, after the fucking Zeyas gave this Department, I really wouldn’t mind seeing him stroke out a check for fifty grand.”

“Roger that,” Bosch said.

It was true. Zeyas had been no friend to the Department while he was in the mayor’s office. He had the allegiance of a council majority that adhered to his policies and granted his requests. Over the eight years they had control of city government, they had repeatedly slashed the Department’s overtime budget and taken a hard line on even minimal pay increases for the city’s nine thousand sworn officers.

Bosch knew the meeting was over. He stood up and Soto followed suit. Samuels stayed seated. He was going to discuss things with the captain after they left.

“Forty-eight hours and let’s talk, Harry,” Crowder said.

“You got it.”

Bosch and Soto returned to their cubicle, where their desks were pushed to the right and left half-walls and they worked with their backs to each other. This was a holdover from the way the pod had been set up with his previous partner, Dave Chu. It had worked well because Chu was a veteran investigator and didn’t need Bosch watching over him from across the desk. But Soto was not even close to veteran status and Bosch had requested that City Services come out and reconfigure the space so that the two desks faced each other. He had made that request the week Soto started in the unit and was still waiting.

On Bosch’s desk was the instrument case along with the evidence box and the binders they had dropped off before heading to the press conference. Bosch had been waiting since they left Hollenbeck to open the box and get his hands into the case. He remained standing and used a penknife to cut the red tape on the box. There was no chain-of-evidence sticker on the box, so he had no idea how long ago Rojas and Rodriguez had sealed it.

“I liked what you said in there,” Bosch said. “About us keeping the case.”

“It was a no-brainer,” Soto said. “Why do you think Samuels asked if Merced was a citizen?”

“Because he’s a pencil pusher. He cares about statistics and keeping the most people working the most cases, because that leads to better statistics. He’d like us to forget about Merced and move on to an easy one.”

“Meaning that if Merced wasn’t a citizen he wouldn’t count, and we could move on to the next one?”

Bosch looked up from the box at her.

“Politics,” he said. “Welcome to Homicide.”

He opened the box and was surprised to find it contained very little. He took out two stacks of DVD cases held together with rubber bands. He put them aside and then lifted out individually bagged pieces of bloody clothing. It was the mariachi outfit Merced had been wearing when he was shot.

“Son of a bitch,” Bosch said.

“What?” Soto asked.

He held up the brown paper bag containing a white blouse with dried blood on it.

“This is Merced’s shirt,” he said. “He was wearing it when he got shot.”

He handed the bag to her and she held it with both hands as she looked into it.

“Okay,” Soto said. “And?”

“Well, I don’t know a lot about the case yet because we haven’t looked at the books, but I do remember that when Zeyas was running for mayor back then, he kept rolling Merced out in a wheelchair at all his rallies. And sometimes he was supposedly wearing the bloody shirt he’d had on that day at the plaza.”

Soto’s face revealed shock that Zeyas, her hero, would stoop so low as to stage a fraud before the public to gather sympathy and votes.

“That’s so sad that he would do this.”

Bosch had long been cynical about all politicians. But he felt bad delivering the lesson to Soto.

“Hell, he probably didn’t even know,” he said. “You know that guy Spivak who works for him and was there at the press conference? He’s been around city politics for as long as I can remember. He’s the kind of guy who could cook this up and not bother his candidate with the details. He’s a pure mercenary.”

Soto handed the bagged shirt back to Bosch without a word. He put it on his desk with the other articles of clothing and looked back into the box. There was a stack of 8 x 10 crime scene photos on the bottom and that was it. He was disappointed that the case had resulted in so little in the way of physical evidence.

“That’s it,” he said. “This is all they came up with.”

“I’m sorry,” Soto said.

“What are you sorry about? It’s not your fault.”

He picked up one of the DVD stacks and snapped off the rubber band. There were six different plastic cases and they were marked with names, dates, and events—all but one having occurred before the day of the shooting at Mariachi Plaza. Four were weddings and two were birthday celebrations.

“These must be videos of Merced’s band performing at weddings and stuff,” he said.

He took the band off the next stack and found different markings on each of the three cases.

1st STREET BRIDGE

MARIACHI SUPPLIES & MUSIC

POQUITO PEDRO’S

“‘Poquito Pedro’s,’” Bosch read out loud.

“Little Peter’s,” Soto said.

Bosch looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess you knew that.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry every five minutes. I think these are camera views of the plaza. Poquito Pedro’s is a restaurant a half block down the street from the plaza—I saw it today when we went by—and they put cameras on the First Street bridge back then to try to stop the suicides.”

“What suicides?”

“About ten or twelve years ago a girl jumped off the bridge into the concrete riverbed. And then there were a bunch of copycats. Other kids. Weird, like suicide was contagious or something. So CalTrans put up cameras so they could monitor the bridge at the com center, where they have cameras on popular suicide sites. You know, so if it looks like somebody’s getting their courage up to jump, they can send somebody out to try to stop them.”

Soto nodded.

“We’ll have to look at these,” Bosch said.

“Now?” Soto asked.

“When we get to them. We have to read through the books. That’s always the starting point.”

“How do you want to split them up?”

“I don’t. We both need to familiarize ourselves with all aspects of the case. We both read through everything—even the tip binder. But if we send them out to get a second copy, we’ll lose a week waiting. So why don’t you go first and I’ll go back to the lab and pick up the slug and Chung’s report. By the time I get back you’ll probably be on the second book and I’ll take the first.”

“No, maybe you should start. I have my meeting at one today. I could go back to the lab now, then go grab lunch before hitting Chinatown. By the time I get back, you’ll be on the second book.”

Bosch nodded. He liked the idea of being able to dive into the murder books right away. By “my meeting,” Soto meant her weekly visit to a Department shrink at the Behavioral Sciences Center in Chinatown. Because she had been involved in a shooting involving fatalities—in this case her partner and two gunmen—it was required that she have continuing psychological evaluation and post-traumatic stress therapy for a year after the incident.

“Sounds good.”

He put the two DVD stacks to the side of his desk and put the packaged clothing back into the evidence box. He then moved the box to the floor behind his chair and focused on the instrument case. Before opening it he studied all the stickers covering its front panel. It showed Merced had been a traveling musician with stops all across the Central Valley up to Sacramento and south through all parts of Mexico. There were stickers from U.S. border towns in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as well.

Bosch opened the case and studied the vihuela. The compartment it was set in was lined with purple velvet. He gingerly lifted the instrument out and held it up by its neck. He turned it so he could see the exit hole made by the bullet in the back. It was larger than the entry hole on the front because the bullet had mushroomed during the first impact.

He now held it to his body like a musician, checking where the bullet hole would line up with his own torso.

“‘Stairway to Heaven,’ Harry.”

Bosch looked into the next module. The request had been called out by Tim Marcia, the squad jokester.

“Not my style,” Bosch said.

According to the Times account he had read that morning, Merced had been sitting on a picnic table when struck by the bullet. Bosch sat down on his desk chair and propped the instrument on his thigh. He strummed its five strings once and checked the alignment of the bullet hole again.

“After you pick up the stuff from Chung, go over to ballistics and see if you can get someone to meet us at Mariachi Plaza tomorrow with a trajectory kit.”

Soto nodded.

“I will. What’s a trajectory kit?”

“Tubes and lasers.”

Bosch strummed the vihuela again.

“We’ve got two holes in this and then we have where the bullet ended up in Merced. If we can make an approximation of his location and position, we may be able to get a line on where the bullet came from. Now that we know it was a rifle, I think we are looking for a perch.”

“You don’t think Rojas and Rodriguez already did this?”

“Not if they thought it was a handgun or a drive-by. Like I told the captain, the rifle changes everything. It means this probably wasn’t random. It probably wasn’t a drive-by and it might not even be gang related. We’re starting from scratch and the first thing we have to do is figure out where the bullet came from.”

“Got it.”

“Good. See you after Chinatown.”