The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch quietly stepped to the open door of the case closet and looked in. The smell of coffee was stronger now. He saw that the row that Soto and he shared for their cases was cranked closed. But ten feet farther down the bank of floor-to-ceiling shelves, the row belonging to another pair of detectives had been cranked open.

  Bosch went into the room and quietly moved down to the open row. He hesitated when he got to the opening, then edged forward and looked around the corner into the three-foot-wide aisle between shelves.

  No one was there.

  Confused, Bosch looked toward the end of the room. Around the last set of shelves was an open alcove. There was a copy machine there. He now moved toward the alcove and was a few feet away from the corner when he heard the copy machine go into motion.

  The machine gave him good sound cover. He stepped forward quickly and looked into the alcove. Lucia Soto was standing at the copier, her back to Bosch. On the work counter to her right was an open murder book, its binder rings spread apart. Next to the binder was a stack of three more murder books. And next to them was a steaming cup of coffee from LA Café, the nearby twenty-four-hour place.

  Bosch watched silently as Soto went about copying the records and reports from the murder book. The copy tray was filling with paper.

  Bosch didn’t know what to do. He had no idea why, but she was obviously copying the records of a murder case that was not assigned to them. He backed up and checked the opening in the shelves. Each team in the unit was assigned specific years for which they were responsible. Each detective team put their business cards in slots on either side of their row. He saw that the open row belonged to Whittaker and Dubose. Bosch couldn’t remember offhand which years Whittaker and Dubose were assigned to but the four murder books Soto had with her at the copy machine looked old. The blue vinyl of the binders was cracked and faded, the pages inside yellowed.

  Bosch looked toward the alcove and thought about leaving as quietly as he had come in, but a rush of thoughts came to him and gave him pause. First, he thought how foolish Soto was being by copying the files. Every detective in the squad had a copier code that had to be tapped into the machine’s keyboard in order for it to function. This meant there would be a trail that would tell how much Soto copied and when. The second idea that pushed through to Bosch was the common knowledge that in recent years entrance standards for the Department had been lowered. People with minor drug busts and gang affiliations had gotten in. It was believed by some that organized crime and even terrorist organizations had infiltrated the force. Bosch wondered if Soto could be working for someone outside the Department, acting as a double agent: cold case detective by day and case intel gatherer by night.

  He thought that he was probably letting his imagination get the best of him, but she had after all just lied to him in her texts. What was it she didn’t want him to know about?

  Bosch had never been one to quietly back away from a problem. All at once he decided what to do and went back to the alcove. Lucia was removing a thick stack of copies from the machine. She didn’t notice him, because she was completely absorbed in her efforts.

  “You get what you needed there?”

  Soto nearly jumped out of her shoes. As it was, she had to stifle a scream when she whipped around to see Bosch. It took her a moment to compose herself and then respond.

  “Harry! You almost scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

  “I think that’s the question you need to answer, Lucia.”

  She made some kind of motion with her hands, as if trying to catch her breath after the scare he put on her. It gave her time to come up with an answer.

  “I’m just looking at some old cases, that’s all.”

  “Really? Cases that don’t belong to you? To us?”

  “I’m trying to learn homicide work, Harry. I look at cases. Sometimes I copy them so I can take them home. I know that’s against policy but . . . I didn’t think it was a big deal. I couldn’t sleep, so I came in to make some copies.”

  The story and her delivery of it were almost embarrassing in their phoniness. Bosch moved into the alcove and over to the work counter. He flipped over the contents of the binder from which she had been copying documents. He read the front page, which was always the initial report and summary of the case. He immediately recognized it.

  “So you’re just randomly pulling and looking at cases?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  Bosch looked at the spines on the other binders and quickly realized that all four books were from the same case. It was the 1993 Bonnie Brae apartment fire case. Nine people—most of them children—perished in an apartment in the Westlake area. The victims had been in an unlicensed day-care center in the low-income complex’s basement and had become trapped by flames and smoke. Half the children crammed into the small space died of smoke inhalation. The fire was labeled arson but no arrests were ever made, despite a task force composed of fire department arson experts and LAPD investigators.

  Bosch shoved the loose pages she had been copying into a binder and then stacked all four of them before picking them up. He turned and walked past Soto.

  “Bring your coffee,” he said.

  He carried the binders out to their cubicle and put them down on his desk. He pointed Soto to her desk and told her to sit down. She moved her purse off the chair and sat.

  Bosch stayed standing, pacing a short track behind her and talking to her back. She sat with her head bowed, eyes down like a suspect who knows the charges are coming.

  “I’m only going to have this discussion with you one time,” he began. “If you lie to me and I find out, then we are finished as partners and I’ll see to it you are finished as a cop—Medal of Valor or not.”

  He paused and looked at the back of her neck. He knew she could feel it. She nodded.

  “The Bonnie Brae fire,” he said. “I didn’t work it, but I was here and I remember. Nine deaths, never cleared. The rumor at the time was that Pico-Union La Raza started the fire because the apartment manager wouldn’t let them deal in the building. That’s all I know. Like I said, it wasn’t my case, but it was a big case and rumors and stories get around.”

  He stopped his pacing, grabbed the back of her chair, and turned her to face him.

  “Now you come along after becoming a hero for taking down a couple of Thirteenth Street shooters, and it so happens that the Thirteenth and Pico-Union street gangs are sworn enemies for all of eternity.”

  Bosch pointed to his temple.

  “So now I find you copying files on Bonnie Brae and I think to myself, Didn’t this girl tell me she was born in Westlake before moving out to the Valley? And I gotta ask myself, Who is she pulling files for?”

  “It’s nothing like that, Harry. I—”

  “Let me just finish here. You don’t need to talk just yet.”

  He turned away from her and looked down at the binders stacked on his desk. He was full of steam now. He turned back.

  “It’s well known in this Department that they let their guard drop when they had to fatten the ranks, and infiltrators got in. People who are something else first and cops second. But I’ll tell you right now, this isn’t how I’m going to go out. You think I’m some old fool you can pull shit on right under my nose and I won’t know it? I’ve thought there was something off about you from the start. You don’t want to be a cop. You want to be something else.”

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  She started to stand up but Bosch put his hand on her shoulder and held her in her seat.

  “No, I’m right. And you’re going to sit there and tell me what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for, or we’re going to be here till the sun comes up and people start coming in and asking what’s going on.”

  She reached across her body with one hand and Bosch tensed. But her hand went to her left wrist. She unbuttoned her cuff and violently pulled the sleeve up her arm. She turned her arm to reveal the tattoo on the inside
of her forearm. It was an RIP list with five names on a tombstone. Jose, Elsa, Marlena, Juanito, Carlos.

  “I was in that basement when the fire started, okay?” she said. “These are my friends. They died.”

  Bosch slowly stepped over to his desk and pulled out the chair so he could sit down. He looked at the binders for a moment and then back at his partner.

  “You’re trying to solve this thing,” he said. “On your own.”

  Soto nodded and pulled her sleeve back down.

  10

  In the morning Bosch and Soto met in the squad room, checked in on the board, and then went directly back to Bosch’s car for the drive over to the regional lab. Bosch had already been summoned by the video analyst he had left the discs with the day before. Initially the analyst, Bailey Copeland, had told Bosch she would need a couple days to work with the three discs—and that schedule included bumping the case up to the front of the line because of the importance and media attention it was receiving. But that morning, she called Bosch while he was driving in on the 101 and told him she had come up with something he should look at sooner rather than later.

  On the way over, Bosch and Soto said little about the night before and his discovery of her secret investigation. Bosch immediately understood her motivations. He had similarly been driven to solve a case from his own past. So he had told her that he would help her, but it had to be done right. With less than a year to go in his plan to retire and take his pension in a lump-sum payment, he could not be sure the Department wouldn’t use any infraction to fire him to avoid the payout. He told Soto that if they could come up with a plan that would result in the official transfer of the Bonnie Brae case to them, then he would join her in working it. But he warned her that working a case that was not hers was a dangerous move in the Department—for her as well as him.

  The video-and-data-imagery unit was on the third floor of the regional lab. Copeland was waiting for them in a video booth where there was a sound-and-video board set up on a lab table in front of a multiscreen wall display. The room was dimly lit and small, and Copeland had pulled in extra stools for Bosch and Soto.

  “Thanks for coming in early,” Copeland said. “I’m going to show you what I have here and then go home.”

  “You pulled an all-nighter on this?” Bosch asked.

  “I did. I got excited and couldn’t leave it.”

  “Thank you for that. Show us what you’ve got.”

  The lab table was elevated and Copeland was a short woman. She stood during the demonstration, and sitting behind her, Bosch and Soto could still easily see the screens.

  “Okay, let’s just run through it once and then we can go back. The first thing I did was create a triangulation program for our three videos. The time counters on at least one of them was off, so what I used to base time on was the one thing that is in each video.”

  She clicked a button on a keyboard and three of the screens in front of them came to life, each showing its angle on Mariachi Plaza or the streets in front of it. She then almost immediately hit another key and the images froze. Copeland pointed at the center screen, which showed the video from the music store.

  “You see the Ford Taurus here, passing the music store. That car is on each video.”

  She pointed the car out on each of the screens. Bosch could already see that the clarity of each video had been greatly improved from when he had viewed them the day before. Copeland had fine-tuned them, made them crisper.

  “By calibrating the three videos off the movement of that car, we can run all three simultaneously. Now let’s watch.”

  She hit a key and the videos continued. The three screens were right next to each other and so it was not difficult for Bosch to watch all three at once. Copeland had found the triangulation point—the Ford—more than a minute before the shooting, so they watched and waited in anticipation before finally seeing Merced topple off the table to the ground and his bandmates start to scramble.

  “Okay, so let’s watch again in slow motion,” Copeland said. “Tell me what you see.”

  She started the playback again. Bosch’s eyes were primarily drawn to the center image, which showed Merced sitting on the table. It was the cleanest video and it was the only one showing the victim. It was eerie watching in slow motion, knowing what was to come. Soto, who had not seen the videos before that morning, leaned forward to watch more closely.

  Bosch tried to pull his vision back to all three screens at the moment Merced was shot. But he didn’t see anything that drew his attention when the shooting occurred.

  Copeland stopped the playback.

  “So did you see it?” she asked.

  “See what?” Bosch asked.

  Copeland smiled.

  “Let’s switch these around.”

  She typed in a command and the three camera angles changed positions. Now front and center was the angle from the parking lot camera at Poquito Pedro’s restaurant.

  “Okay, watch again.”

  Copeland replayed the video in slow motion and Bosch kept his eyes on the center screen. Though clearer than when he viewed the video on his laptop the day before, it was still a grainy view of the street and a portion of Mariachi Plaza from a distance of two blocks.

  “There,” Soto said. “I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” Bosch asked.

  “In the window.”

  She pointed to a second-story window of the Boyle Hotel. It was a darkened room.

  “Good eye,” Copeland said. “Let’s watch again.”

  She replayed the sequence again, and this time Bosch watched only the window his partner had pointed out. He waited and at the moment of the shooting, he saw a small pixel of light flash in the darkness. Copeland stopped the playback.

  “That?” Bosch asked.

  “Yes, that,” Copeland said. “You have to remember that most surveillance video, especially from ten years ago, is shot on slow speed because of storage capacities. The frame rate on this camera is ten.”

  “So you’re saying that little dot of light is the muzzle flash?”

  “Yes, exactly. It’s all the camera caught but it’s enough. The shot came from that window.”

  Bosch stared at the frozen image on the screen. He knew there was no longer any need for the trajectory study. The shot had come from a second-floor room in the Mariachi Hotel.

  “Here’s what I have,” Copeland said.

  She put in commands that blew up the center-screen image. She centered the window on the screen and they studied the white dot in the field of black.

  “We have to get those hotel records, Harry,” Soto said.

  “That’s room 211,” he said.

  “Search warrant?” she asked. “Keep everything clean?”

  Bosch nodded again.

  “I’m not finished,” Copeland said.

  She reconfigured the screens so the angle on Merced was at the center again. She then put an isolation circle on one of the band members. It wasn’t Merced. It was one of the men standing. The trumpet player. She hit the playback and the circle stayed on him, keeping him in focus while the rest of the screen slightly blurred.

  “Watch him,” she said.

  Bosch did as instructed and watched the shooting once again but this time seeing only the trumpet player as he reacted to Merced’s being shot. He moved quickly away, running offscreen.

  “Okay,” Bosch said, apparently not seeing what Copeland wanted him to see. “What are we looking at?”

  “Two things,” Copeland said. “First his reaction. This has nothing to do with video enhancement. I’m just talking about his reaction. Watch the others.”

  She moved the isolation circle to one of the other men and replayed the video. It was the accordion player who sat right next to Merced on the table. The man saw Merced topple off the table and started smiling, presumably because he thought it was some kind of stunt. But then he saw the guitar player ducking under the table and dropped down too, pushing himself under
as best he could.

  “And now the guitar,” Copeland said.

  The circle moved to the man standing and playing the guitar at the rear corner of the table. He too was initially confused when Merced was hit, but then he understood and ducked down to use the table as well as his guitar as cover.

  “Let’s see the trumpet player again,” Bosch said.

  They watched in silence.

  “Again,” Bosch said.

  They watched again.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s see the whole thing again without any isolation.”

  When the replay was over he just stared at the screen.

  “You see what I mean?” Copeland asked. “I’m not talking about him running. That’s understandable.”

  “You think he knew the shot was coming?” Soto asked.

  “I don’t know about that either,” Copeland said. “But what I’m talking about is that he shows no confusion about it. Just the flight instinct. It’s like he knew right away that Merced was shot, and the other guys tumbled to it late.”

  Bosch nodded. It was a good observation—one that had escaped him during the multiple times he had watched the video the day before. He had focused solely on Merced and not paid proper attention to the other band members.

  “Which one is that?” he asked.

  “The trumpet—I think that was Ojeda,” Soto said. “Angel Ojeda. He’s the one who said in his statement that he ran.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about Mr. Ojeda’s position now,” Copeland said. “With the triangulation, I was able to make a digital model of the shooting. It’s crude because I thought it was better to go with speed over quality.”

  She typed in commands and killed all but the center screen. She then opened up a crudely animated version of the shooting from the angle of the music shop. The band members were little more than stick figures with letters affixed to them. Merced was marked A and Ojeda was figure B.

  “This program measures spacial gradations and accurately recreates a multidimensional animation that we can manipulate.”