The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch decided that on the first leg of the trip he would devote his time to the Bonnie Brae books. After Dallas he would be back on Merced.

  The Bonnie Brae murder books were not divided chronologically, as was the case with Merced. Usually, lengthy or wide-ranging investigations that required multiple binders were still chronologically composed. Detectives filled one book after the other as they proceeded and this allowed a linear review of the case. The Bonnie Brae investigation had originally been carried out by the Department’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, which was the investigative unit that handled arson cases and liaised with fire department investigators. With nine victims, the case from the outset was broken into specific avenues of investigation. The first murder book was a catchall for the case chronology and other reports generated during the investigation. Book 2 was dedicated solely to the identification and background of the victims. The next binder was dedicated to the investigation of the Pico-Union La Raza street gang. The fourth was fat with reports on the analysis of the origin of the fire and its spread through the Bonnie Brae Arms apartment building. This last binder was also the repository for all the media reports accumulated on the case. It was before the Internet, and the city’s newspapers were the main source of reporting in the community. The plethora of news clips shoved into large envelopes made this last binder the thickest of them all.

  While not entirely linear in presentation, murder book 1 was the binder most resembling a standard murder book and so it was the place Bosch started. As he worked his way through the book, Soto was on her laptop, writing the initial report on the investigative moves that led to their trip to Tulsa. It was required that work trips be fully documented in order to justify the hit to the unit’s travel budget. In this case, Captain Crowder had gotten funding for the trip through a discretionary fund attached to the budget of the OCP, so documentation was imperative.

  Most of the reports in the book that Bosch was reviewing had been composed by a detective 3 named Jack Harris. His rank was equal to that of a sergeant and he was the lead investigator of the five-person CCS task force pulled together to work the case. Bosch knew none of the detectives from past experience, though he had heard of Harris. He believed Harris was retired now, but during the eighties and nineties he seemed to frontline a number of CCS cases that either made news or were known within the Department. There was no reason to think of him as anything but competent, and that weighed in Bosch’s thinking as he delved into a case that had been unsolved for twenty-one years. He knew the chances were slim that he and Soto would be able to change that outcome. Whittaker and Dubose had already told them as they handed over the binders that they had thoroughly reviewed the case the previous year, looking for a scientific foothold, but had come up dry. The mandate of the Open-Unsolved Unit was to search old cases for new attack angles—those most often being areas where new forensic sciences could be applied. DNA and fingerprint technologies were the mainstays of this effort. And there was no such evidence in the Bonnie Brae case.

  Bosch had not expressed his pessimistic thoughts to his partner because of her emotional connection to the case. He promised Soto a full review of the lengthy files and he would conduct that review without taking anything away from his efforts on the Merced investigation. The plane ride was his chance to begin.

  The Bonnie Brae fire did most of its damage with smoke. The fire itself was largely contained to a single hallway and a room in the basement where large trash Dumpsters were positioned beneath two trash chutes that served the five floors of apartments above. The fire gutted the trash room and spread only into the basement hallway. But smoke from the blaze spread rapidly through the building, up stairwells, hallways, and the trash chutes. The fire and attendant smoke cut off the escape route of the children and teachers in the makeshift and unlicensed day-care facility in one of the basement rooms.

  A key reason the case had gone unsolved for so long was that a precious two weeks went by before the fire was determined to be arson. That kind of delay in a homicide investigation was usually too hard to overcome. Most cases not solved in forty-eight hours were never solved. A two-week delay in an investigation made the odds of success even longer.

  The delay was caused by the case initially being called accidental by fire department arson experts. The origin was determined to be a Dumpster located beneath one of the trash chutes. It was believed that combustion occurred when flammable materials already in the waste bin came in contact with a burning cigarette butt tossed into the trash chute from one of the floors above. It was a day before the scheduled trash pickup, and the complex’s maintenance man reported that the bins in the trash room were full. The fire quickly spread to the wooden ceiling joists and was carried throughout the room. The fire burned so intensely that there was nothing but wet ash left in the bin once the fire was extinguished.

  Despite the fire department’s declaration that the fire was accidental, patrol officers out of Rampart Division immediately started picking up street talk from snitches that the cause was intentional. The story repeated by many in the snitch world was that the Pico-Union La Raza gang had been having issues with the manager at Bonnie Brae over his refusal to let the gang openly sell drugs in the complex. The word was that the fire had been meant as a warning to the manager that there would be consequences if he continued to thwart the gang’s drug enterprises. The deaths that resulted were unintentional.

  It was nothing more than street talk until lab analysis of samples of the charred rubble from the burned-out trash bin came back from the state fire lab in Sacramento. Gas chromatography testing found at least two ILRs—ignitable liquid residues—in all batches of samples collected from the trash bin at the fire scene. The accelerants were listed in the report as petroleum and something called Varsol. The report concluded that there was no reasonable explanation for the presence of these chemicals in large quantities in the trash bin, and the case became an arson investigation.

  Bosch looked over at Soto, who was typing something on her computer.

  “You’re online there, right?”

  “Yes, what do you need?”

  “Can you Google something? It lists Varsol here as one of the ILRs. What is—”

  “It’s a high-grade paint thinner. Expensive. It’s used a lot in machine shops and auto-repair shops to clean engine parts.”

  Bosch just looked at her, impressed by her knowledge.

  “I Googled it before when I first started reading the reports,” she said. “Once they identified the accelerants, it helped set the path of the investigation. Because Varsol is expensive, they figured it was something handy to the arsonist rather than something he went out specifically to buy. So they figured it had to be someone who worked at a place where this stuff was on hand. The arsonist used the waste mix that came from cleaning oily machine parts—Varsol and grease. He probably put it in a container, lit it, and dropped it down the trash chute.”

  “Molotov cocktail.”

  “Right.”

  “Wouldn’t that have made an explosion? A sound . . . people would have heard?”

  He realized he was talking about her—as a child—being among those people.

  “That’s one of the things I remember most, being asked that. But the trash room was at basement level and down the hall from the children’s room. And we were loud, you know? Ten kids in a confined space like that. I never heard anything. I wish I had.”

  Bosch nodded. He wondered if Soto somehow felt guilty over not having heard the firebomb explode when she was seven years old and playing with her friends. It wasn’t her fault but he knew he could never convince someone who carried something like that inside for twenty years.

  He went back to reading the reports.

  “Let me know when you get to the tampon affidavit,” Soto said.

  Bosch looked up at her, thinking he had misheard her.

  “What?”

  “The tampon affidavit. It’s a hoot.”

  He nodded and we
nt back to reading the investigative chronology. After the ILRs were confirmed, the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section was called in to investigate the case along with the fire department, but the investigation had lost momentum in the intervening weeks.

  The investigators focused on the information coming in from the streets that pointed toward the fire being a gang scare tactic that went wildly beyond what it was planned to do. The apartment complex’s manager was a key witness in this investigation and he provided information about the ongoing threats from the Pico-Union gang. The CCS sought and received a wide-ranging search warrant that was served on the homes and workplaces of twenty-nine members of the gang four weeks after the deadly fire. Before dawn a task force composed of CCS investigators and officers from the Gang Intelligence Unit hit the locations simultaneously, the search resulting in the seizure of drugs, weapons, and potential evidence in the arson case as well as the arrest of twenty-two of the targeted gang members on charges related to the seized drugs and weapons.

  Reading a copy of the document returned to court after the search warrant was served, Bosch saw that very little had been seized that directly related to the arson. The only thing that came close was a gallon container of Varsol from an auto-repair shop where one of the gang members, an apprentice mechanic named Victor Chapa, was employed. Everything else listed on the warrant return was window dressing—drugs and guns that looked good spread out on a table for the media to photograph but that amounted to nothing in terms of evidence in the Bonnie Brae case.

  Still, the seizures and arrests were enough to put the squeeze on Pico-Union La Raza. Most of the gang members had records and were facing prison or jail time if they were convicted on even the minimal charges. It gave Jack Harris and his team powerful leverage with which to squeeze out cooperation and turn gang brother against gang brother.

  The man at the center of the squeeze play was Victor Chapa. Of everybody caught in the net, he was the one with direct access to the accelerant found in the ashes of the fire. Though the manager of the Bonnie Brae complex could not identify him as one of the gang members who threatened him, and Chapa provided an airtight alibi, he was still seen as the man who most likely obtained the fuel and probably built the firebomb. This latter assumption was based on the fact that though he did not live with a woman, a box of tampons was found in a bathroom cabinet in his apartment during the court-ordered search. The tampon was known to the CCS arson experts to be used often as the wick attached to a Molotov cocktail.

  Chapa was arrested during the search of his apartment for possession of cocaine. This was based on residue in a pipe fashioned out of a piece of a car antenna found in a living-room ashtray in an apartment shared by four men. It was a bullshit case that would never go the distance but it was enough to hold and sweat him for forty-eight hours. He was questioned at length and then booked in a cell where an undercover officer was posing as another custody. Aside from providing the details of his alibi, Chapa spoke neither to his interrogators nor to his cellmate. He gave up nothing. He was twenty-eight years old at the time and a long-term member of Pico-Union. He had also been to state prison on a stolen property bust. He stood tall and was released on a bond after his arraignment—a hearing at which his attorney also produced an affidavit from a former girlfriend stating under oath that she had left the box of tampons found in Chapa’s apartment.

  “The old tampon defense,” Bosch said.

  “Works every time,” Soto said.

  Bosch looked over at her computer screen and saw a map.

  “What’s that?”

  “I found El Chihuahua. Tulsa has an area called Little Mexico. It’s there.”

  “Good. We’ll check it out tonight.”

  “Doesn’t look like the kind of place you’re going to fit in, Harry.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  He went back to reading. According to the investigative chronology, none of the gangbangers brought in during the dawn raid copped to any knowledge of the Bonnie Brae fire. All denied it, all claimed to be insulted that the gang would be suspected of having anything to do with the deaths of nine people, most of them children, and all of them from La Raza—the gang’s home turf.

  In that sense, the bust itself was a bust and that ratcheted up the pressure on Harris and his team. It was the case of the year and the press was all over it—the Department’s Media Affairs Office was demanding daily updates on the investigation. The pressure pushed Harris into a play that backfired fatally. He chose to continue to squeeze Chapa by strategically putting the word out through the snitch network on the streets in Pico-Union that the police raid had produced a cooperating witness who would soon be taken before a grand jury.

  The idea was that Chapa would feel the pressure and come in. He would have no choice but to grab the lifeline the police were throwing him and cooperate by admitting his part in procuring the firebomb and revealing the name of the man who dropped it down the trash chute.

  Chapa was placed under surveillance as a protective measure and Harris waited for results as the pressure came down on the mechanic.

  He didn’t have to wait long. On the second day of the surveillance—once all of Pico-Union had been properly seeded with the story about a cooperating witness—Harris and company saw their squeeze play fall apart with what were most likely deadly consequences for Chapa.

  The team was set up on the 6th Street auto-repair shop where Chapa worked as an apprentice mechanic. All customers and cars going in and out of the three-bay garage were watched from a rooftop vantage point. Ground teams stood by around the corner, ready to trail Chapa when he left work for the day.

  But Chapa never left work. When the shop closed and the garage doors came down, Chapa was not among the employees leaving. Citing a potential threat to life, the police broke into the shop without a warrant and found no sign of Chapa. An internal investigation concluded that the CCS ploy and surveillance became known to Chapa and members of his gang. He was either forcibly or voluntarily spirited out of the shop in the trunk of a customer’s car that was picked up after repair work had been completed that day. Chapa was never seen again, despite a standing warrant for his arrest for failure to show for a court hearing relating to his drug charge.

  With Chapa gone and Harris and his team under internal investigation for the handling of the suspect, the momentum of the investigation lagged. The task force was disbanded and the case was moved through a series of CCS detectives over the years. Eventually it became reactive rather than proactive. Every time a member of Pico-Union La Raza was arrested for any reason, he was questioned about the Bonnie Brae fire by the current CCS detective handling the case. These efforts proved futile and the case eventually grew cold.

  The back of the binder Bosch was reviewing contained a large folded chart that delineated the hierarchy of the Pico-Union La Raza circa 1993. Its edges cracked and tore in places as it was unfolded for the first time in years. Soto leaned over to look at it with Bosch.

  “You look at this before?” Bosch asked.

  “No, I never got to it,” she said.

  The diagram showed the names and photos of the gang’s shot callers. Most of the photos were mug shots from prior arrests. The chart also noted whether each man was currently incarcerated in 1993 and what his area of responsibility to the gang was, whether it be in drug sales, transportation, production, weapons, muscle, and so on.

  “This might be a place to start,” Bosch said.

  “How so?” Soto asked.

  “We run these names. Some will be dead but some of them will be in prison, I’m betting. We could use that. Go see them, offer them daylight. Somebody might flip. If somebody in that gang did this, then somebody’s still gotta know. We hit the right guy looking for a way out of the pen, we might get lucky.”

  “I wonder why Whittaker and Dubose didn’t do that.”

  “Because they’re lazy. If a case has no science, they move on to the next one. No need to leave the office.”
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br />   Bosch started to carefully fold the chart back up without further damage.

  “Don’t be like that,” he continued. “You want to be a good detective, go out and knock on doors.”

  “I will, Harry,” Soto said. “I promise.”

  The pilot announced that they were beginning the descent into Dallas. Bosch decided he’d put the binders aside and rest his eyes. He still had much to look through, including the envelopes containing all the newspaper reporting on the case. All of that would have to wait until he next had time for the Bonnie Brae case.

  “What about Chapa?” he asked. “You think dead or alive?”

  “Definitely dead,” Soto said. “Or else he would’ve turned up somewhere by now. He’s probably buried somewhere in the desert.”

  Bosch just nodded. He thought she was probably right. Chapa didn’t disappear from that garage of his own volition. There was no loyalty in a gang once the scent of informant blood was in the water.

  The plane banked toward Dallas and Bosch changed the subject.

  “You like barbecue?” he asked.

  “I guess,” Soto said. “Sometimes.”

  It wasn’t an enthusiastic response. He just nodded.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “There’s a place in the DFW terminal called Cousin’s,” he said. “It’s good stuff. I think I’ll hit it before the next flight.”

  “I think I’ll just meet you at the gate. That okay?”

  “Sure. Did you check the bible before we split? Anything on Tulsa?”

  He was talking about a journal kept in the unit in which detectives contributed reports on cities they had visited on cases, noting good places to eat and stay that were within the Department’s travel per diem. It also contained tips in regard to dealing with local law enforcement and judiciary. The unit had been operating for nearly ten years and there was no state in the union that had not been covered. The bible was thick with travel advice and there was even talk about trying to get it published as a fundraiser. They were calling it Blue Plate Special: A Cop’s Guide to Digs, Dives, and Donuts.