The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  With her keyboard and mouse she controlled the screen. The view moved out through the window of the music store and close up on the four men located on and around the table. She then clicked the command and the shooting took place in slow motion, the bullet’s trajectory marked by a red line that crossed the screen and struck the figure sitting on the table—Merced.

  “Okay, so let’s start over but move over top,” Copeland said.

  The image shifted so that they were now looking down on the table. An overhead shot. Copeland ran the simulation, and the bullet again streaked into the picture as a red line hitting Merced. At the moment of impact the figure that was Ojeda, the trumpeter, was in motion behind the table. It was clear that if the bullet had not hit Merced, it was on course to strike Ojeda.

  “Wow!” Soto said.

  Copeland ran two more simulations. The first one was another overhead version but it was high in the sky and took in the entire plaza, adjoining streets, and the Boyle Hotel. This simulation showed the red line of the bullet streak across the screen from the hotel to the picnic table, again convincingly showing that Merced stopped the bullet before it could have hit Ojeda.

  The last simulation was a ground angle of the entire shot from the hotel to the table. Copeland stopped the program at the point the bullet struck the figure that was Merced. She then ran it again and then a third time before letting the simulation go to the end.

  “You’ll have to talk to the guys in the gun shop about trajectory and target lead, all of that,” she said. “But it is possible, when you look at this, to see that if figure B was being tracked with a scope, the shooter could have fired before realizing that figure A—your victim—was in the line of fire.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Tunnel vision. Some people call it ‘scope blindness’—all you see is the target.”

  He stood up. He was too charged to remain sitting.

  “The trumpet player,” he said. “We need to find him.”

  Copeland took a disc in a plastic sleeve off the side of the worktable and handed it to Soto.

  “I made a copy of the animation. I hope it helps. We would build a more detailed model if it was ever needed for court use.”

  Soto nodded and took the disc.

  “Got it,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Bailey, get some sleep,” Bosch said. “You earned it.”

  11

  Bosch and Soto hurried back to the PAB and divided up the work. It was decided that Bosch would write up the search warrant for the Boyle Hotel records and take it to the CCB to be signed by a judge. Meanwhile, Soto would work on locating the surviving three members of Los Reyes Jalisco—her priority being Angel Ojeda, the trumpet player.

  While Soto went for coffee before beginning her task, Bosch went to the captain’s office and knocked on the door. He wanted to give Crowder a brief update on the case. It was unusual for Bosch to keep his supervisor so closely informed about a case but he wanted to make sure Crowder was not falling under the sway of his lieutenant in terms of moving the Merced investigation out of Open-Unsolved and over to Robbery-Homicide. If Crowder knew that progress was being made, he would be less likely to move the case. After all, if Bosch and Soto actually solved it, then Crowder as their supervisor would be in for all the kudos that came with an arrest.

  To Bosch’s dismay Crowder picked up his phone and called Samuels into the office so he could hear Bosch’s report. Harry had hoped to keep Samuels out of this loop, since the lieutenant was pushing for the case to be transferred.

  Bosch quickly updated both men on the key information from the video-and-data-imaging unit—that they now knew where the shot came from and were working toward finding out who had rented that room at the Hotel Mariachi on the day of the shooting. He didn’t bother telling them about the animation Bailey Copeland had made that indicated the bullet that hit Merced might have been meant for Angel Ojeda, the trumpet player. Bosch wanted to pursue that aspect further before bringing it to Crowder and Samuels. He did tell the two supervisors that Soto was tracing the three other band members so they could be reinterviewed.

  “Okay, Harry,” Crowder said. “You’re making good progress. Keep it going.”

  “Okay, Cap.”

  “We’re putting Holcomb on the tip line,” Samuels said. “Starting today. Quarles has court.”

  Sarah Holcomb and Eddie Quarles were one of the other teams in the unit. Quarles was the veteran and Holcomb was one of the new transfers. They had a case that was currently on trial, and as the senior partner, Quarles would have the lead and therefore be assisting and testifying in court. Holcomb could attend trial but would have little to do. Rather than leave her there as a spectator, Samuels pulled her back into the unit to handle the reward calls that came in on Merced. Normally Bosch would have wished for a more experienced detective vetting the calls, but in this case having one of the unit’s rookies on the tip line would work better with a plan he was formulating.

  When Bosch got back to his desk he found a cup of coffee from the vending machine on the first floor. A good cup of coffee never came out of that machine but it always did the job and he appreciated that Soto had gotten it for him.

  “I’ll get the next round,” he said to his partner, who was already back at her computer.

  “No worries,” she said without looking away from her screen. “It all squares up in the end.”

  Bosch opened up his laptop and went to work on the warrant. He used a basic template for the first several pages, just filling in blanks about where he wanted to search and what he was looking for. The difficult part was narrowing down where the Boyle Hotel’s old records were currently located. The renovation project had been carried out by one agency and the materials Bosch sought had been turned over to another. That agency, the Historical Society, had them in storage somewhere. But the location of the targeted materials aside, it was the probable cause summary that counted most in the document, and there was no template for that. He had to persuade a judge to grant him the authority to temporarily seize the records of the now-defunct hotel. He had to show cause for why the records were pertinent to his case.

  It took him the rest of the morning to finish the search warrant. Shortly before lunch he printed it and asked Soto to read it over. It was a way of instilling “partnership” and teaching her the ropes. The search warrant was one of the investigator’s most useful tools. After she was finished he told her he was going to walk it to the courthouse while she continued to run down locations on their interview subjects. She reported that she had already tracked two members of Los Reyes Jalisco and that they were both local, but Angel Ojeda—the one they most wanted to talk to—was proving difficult to find. He had split from the band and even apparently left Los Angeles very soon after the shooting. Nothing had come up on law enforcement databases, and the INS base showed his Permanent Resident Card had not been renewed three years ago.

  “Maybe the other two know where he is,” Bosch suggested.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Or maybe they can give us a line on somebody who can give us a line. Are you free this afternoon to do this?”

  “Yeah, we need to keep momentum. We can drop the search warrant at the Historical Society on the way.”

  “Cool.”

  The place Bosch was going was the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center but nobody ever called it that. The name was too long and too difficult to collapse into the easy parlance cops liked to use. Most cops and lawyers called it the CCB for Criminal Courts Building or the 2-10 for its address on West Temple Street. It was a slightly uphill block from the PAB and Bosch walked it because it would take much longer to drive over and find a parking space.

  Bosch was in luck. The on-call judge who handled administrative matters including search warrant applications was Sherma Barthlett, a jurist Bosch had known since she was a prosecutor. They had always had a professional but easy rapport and when Bosch sent word to her through her clerk that he was there
with a warrant, he was immediately invited back to her chambers. More often than not the warrants went back to the chambers for the judge’s consideration while the detectives cooled their heels in the empty courtroom.

  “Harry, I can’t believe you’re still in the game,” she said as he entered.

  She got up and came around from behind her desk to formally shake his hand.

  “Barely,” he said. “I’ve got about a year left on my DROP contract but some days I’m not even sure I can make that.”

  “You? They’ll probably have to drag you out. Sit down.”

  She gestured to a chair in front of her desk while she returned to her spot behind it. She was a very pleasant woman whose easygoing demeanor always belied her ferocity as a prosecutor and now as a judge. Back when she was a prosecutor her nickname was “The Accountant” because not only did she specialize in financial crimes but she had a marvelous memory for all things numerical—from penal code numbers to phone numbers to the sentences received by violators in her cases years before. Bosch had worked with her twice in the nineties on murder cases motivated by financial gain. She had been a taskmaster but he couldn’t complain. They got first-degree verdicts both times. He handed the search warrant application across the desk to her.

  “What have we got here?” Barthlett said as she began flipping through the pages to the summary. “This is a records search.”

  “Right,” Bosch said. “Looking for a name on a hotel registry.”

  “The Historical Society . . .”

  Bosch didn’t respond. She was just reading out loud. He waited.

  “I remember the Merced case. I was out of the D.A.’s Office but I do remember this one. So now he’s died.”

  “Yes. It’s been in the papers.”

  “Between what I do here and my husband and kids, I have so little time to read the paper. . . . I’m always out of the loop.”

  Bosch just nodded, even though the judge’s eyes were on the document he had brought.

  The judge picked up a small gavel that was on her desk and Bosch realized that it was actually a pen. She signed the front signature page of the warrant and handed it back to him with a smile.

  “I hope it helps, Detective.”

  “Me, too. Thanks, Judge.”

  He got up and turned to the door.

  “When’s your retirement date?” she said to his back.

  He looked back at her.

  “Supposed to be end of next year,” he said.

  “Supposed to be?” she asked.

  Bosch shrugged.

  “You never know.”

  “You’ll make it, Harry,” she said. “And I hope Jerry and I get invited to the party.”

  Bosch assumed Jerry was her husband. He smiled.

  “You’re on the list.”

  * * *

  From the courthouse he walked through the Pueblo and over to Alameda. His first stop was Philippe’s for a French Dip sandwich. Getting food at Philippe’s had worked the same way for more than a hundred years. Customers lined up at the deli counter in front of carvers and waited patiently to order their sandwiches. The trick was to pick the fastest-moving line. Carvers who were chatty with the customers were slow. Bosch chose a woman who looked like she was all business and he chose right. His line moved efficiently and soon he was sitting at one of the communal tables with his sandwich, a side of potato salad, and a Coke.

  The food hit the mark as usual and Bosch was tempted to wait in line for another round but decided to stay hungry. The French Dip hadn’t been the only reason he had chosen Philippe’s. The restaurant was across the street from Union Station. When he was finished Bosch stepped out and crossed Alameda to enter the great hall of the train station. There was a bank of old-style phone booths near the entrance and he went into one to make a quick call, wrapping his tie around the mouthpiece to muffle his voice.

  12

  Soto was ready and waiting when Bosch got back to the PAB. The two members of Los Reyes Jalisco she had located were both in North Hollywood and just a few blocks apart, meaning they were most likely still associated as musicians and friends. They needed to be interviewed to see if they had any new thoughts or recollections about the case. Hopefully they also would have a line on Angel Ojeda, whose whereabouts remained unknown.

  “I thought we’d drop off the warrant at the Historical Society and then head to the Valley,” she said. “Get a head start before the traffic gets bad.”

  “The traffic’s always bad,” Bosch said.

  The first man to be interviewed was named Esteban Hernandez, the band’s guitar player. He lived in a large apartment complex on North Lankershim that had a center courtyard with a filled-in pool where tenants gathered during the day. As Bosch and Soto walked down the exterior walkway to apartment 3-K, the men who were gathered in one group on what was now the concrete surface of the pool looked up at them and talked openly. Bosch picked up the words policia, heroina, and la tiradora and knew they had recognized Soto.

  When they got to 3-K, Bosch knocked loudly and they waited.

  “Those guys down there, they made you,” Bosch said. “I heard ’em.”

  “From TV,” Soto said.

  “That bother you? Didn’t Thirteenth Street put out a bounty on you?”

  “Supposedly. But then they got the message.”

  “What message?”

  Before she could answer, the apartment door was opened by a heavyset man Bosch was able to recognize from the music store video of the Merced shooting. Wide shoulders and skinny hips with an ample belly and a thick push-broom mustache.

  “Mr. Hernandez?” he said. “LAPD.”

  He flashed his badge and then introduced Soto. She spoke to Hernandez in Spanish and he responded in kind. They were invited into the small but neat efficiency apartment. Hernandez sat on a cot that had been made up to look like a couch with several pillows propped against the wall behind it. Bosch stayed standing near the door and let Soto move front and center, since this was going to be her interview. She remained standing as well, positioning herself directly in front of Hernandez.

  Bosch could understand most of the interview from Soto’s side of it. She started off explaining that the Merced shooting had now become a homicide and that she and Bosch were investigating the matter. She asked a few open questions getting at whether Hernandez remembered anything new about the shooting or if he had any thoughts ten years later. Hernandez was more difficult for Bosch to understand. His voice was raspy and he may have been drinking before they got to him. He seemed to be slurring some words and mumbling others. But it did become clear he had nothing new to add to what was already in his statement and in the murder book.

  Soto then asked him if he knew where the other two surviving members of the band, Angel Ojeda and Alberto Cabral, could be located. Bosch liked that she had asked about Cabral even though they had an address for him. It was a move that a more experienced detective would employ to check a witness’s veracity. He appreciated that he didn’t have to tell Soto to handle it that way.

  Hernandez shook his head about Ojeda but pointed his thumb over his shoulder and gave an address for Cabral. Soto asked him a few more general questions and then, when the interview seemed to be over, she asked him why he thought Ojeda had run that day. Hernandez appeared to feign confusion.

  “¿Qué?”

  She asked him again, telling him there was a tape of the shooting and that Ojeda took off the moment Merced was shot, as if he knew what was going on.

  Hernandez said he hadn’t noticed Ojeda’s movements because he was too busy ducking for cover once he realized Merced had been shot. Soto seemed to accept that but then opened a line of questioning about Ojeda, asking if he had enemies or had gotten into any kind of trouble around the time of the shooting.

  Hernandez wasn’t helpful. He either didn’t know much about Ojeda or was acting as though he didn’t. He did say that Ojeda had been with the band only nine months before the shooting and had
dropped out of it right afterward. Hernandez and Cabral joined with two other musicians and continued to perform as Los Reyes Jalisco.

  Soto asked where Ojeda had come from to join the band and Hernandez shrugged. He knew he was originally from Chihuahua but he couldn’t remember the exact circumstances of him joining the band. He said he believed that Cabral had met him at Mariachi Plaza and brought him into the group because he thought that the addition of a trumpet player would help them score more and better jobs. As he talked, Hernandez seemed to remember more. He added that Ojeda was very handsome and that was also a consideration in adding him to the band. He came with a small following in the mariachi circuit, and it was believed that his looks might help them get jobs at the plaza, where any competitive edge was good to have.

  Soto thanked Hernandez, and Bosch nodded. The detectives then drove a few blocks farther up Lankershim to a very similarly designed apartment complex where Cabral lived. However, Cabral was not at his apartment or in the courtyard, where a group of men were sitting around a grill, preparing a meal. When asked by Soto about Cabral and his possible whereabouts, the men shook their heads. They were no help.

  Bosch and Soto were so far north of downtown and the PAB that they decided to sit in the car for a while and wait to see if Cabral showed up. Bosch moved the car to a red no-parking curb near the gated entrance of the complex so they would be sure to see the musician if he entered.

  “So what do you think?” Soto asked once they were parked and watching.

  “I think you handled that interview really well,” Bosch said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I think what I thought before. We have to find Ojeda. I hope he didn’t go back to Chihuahua, because that’ll be a needle-in-a-haystack job.”

  “I don’t know. His green card lapsed. Makes me think he went back.”

  “The question will be why.”

  Soto nodded.

  “Did you believe Hernandez, that he didn’t keep track of him?” she asked.