The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  “I did,” Soto said, as she flipped open a notebook. “Breakfast at a place called Jimmy’s Egg, dinner at Mahogany—but that sounds to me like a strip bar. Another place called Brownie’s has good pies.”

  Bosch smiled.

  “Pies—that had to’ve been put in by Rick Jackson before he retired. He was always a pie man.”

  “You got that right. It was Jackson.”

  “Anything in there about the PD?”

  “Yeah, Jackson listed a guy he worked with at Tulsa PD. Ricky Childers. He’s a night-shift supe in the D bureau—at least he was two years ago. Jackson wrote good people.”

  “Okay, then we go to him.”

  15

  It was part of the Open-Unsolved Unit’s travel protocol for detectives to check in with the locals and explain what they were in town for and where they planned to go. Usually it was just a simple courtesy and the Los Angeles detectives were allowed to go about their work. Often the locals preferred or required that one of their own tag along. And sometimes the visitors from L.A. needed local help finding someone or facilitating an arrest. As Bosch had explained to Soto, he had learned from experience that calling ahead about his impending arrival could lead to problems.

  Sometimes locals would jump the gun and pre-scout the targets, which inadvertently tipped or spooked them. There’d also been cases where the locals had simply gone out and grabbed the suspect before Bosch got there, thereby robbing him of the ability to question the suspect before he was officially arrested and he lawyered up. There was also always the long-shot possibility that the target that Bosch was coming for was actually associated with the officer on the other end of the phone line. Bosch once called a detective in St. Louis in preparation for a trip there to make an arrest for murder. Little did he know that he was talking to a man who happened to be related by marriage to the person Bosch was coming to arrest. Bosch didn’t learn of this connection until after he got there and found that the suspect had fled the night before.

  “Never again after that,” Bosch told Soto. “Now I always go in cold.”

  They got to the downtown headquarters of the Tulsa Police Department shortly before 8 p.m. They had first checked into a nearby hotel because it was unclear what the night ahead would bring and Bosch didn’t want to lose the reservation should they not get to the hotel until after midnight.

  A uniformed officer at the front desk seemed unimpressed by their LAPD badges but agreed to call upstairs to the detective bureau and ask if Detective Childers was available.

  They were in luck. Childers was in and he told the officer to send Bosch and Soto up.

  They took the elevator the one flight up, and on the second floor in front of the entrance to the detective bureau was another counter. Nobody was there and they waited a minute until a man came through the door behind the counter.

  “How’s Rick Jackson?” he said.

  “Just retired,” Bosch said. “And wherever he’s at, he’s probably golfing.”

  “I hope so.”

  The detective reached his hand across the counter.

  “Ricky Childers. They put me in charge of this place at night.”

  They shook hands all around and Bosch handed Childers his badge rather than just flash it as he had done downstairs. Soto did the same. It was a show of respect.

  “Did you guys call ahead?” Childers asked. “The captain didn’t leave me anything on it.”

  “No, we just showed up,” Bosch said. “This morning we caught a line on a guy we need to talk to and jumped on a plane. We didn’t get the chance to call ahead.”

  Childers nodded but Bosch wasn’t sure he believed the story. Childers looked like a capable and experienced man. He was midforties and in good shape. He had a drawl and a long mustache that drooped down the sides of his mouth. It all gave him the aura of a gunslinger from the Old West, which Bosch guessed he was well aware of and fostered. He wore no jacket and carried his weapon in a shoulder harness. That helped paint that picture, too.

  “Who are we talking about here?” he asked.

  “A witness on a case we’re working,” Bosch said. “A murder case. We need to talk to him again because we’ve come to believe he might not have told us everything he knew.”

  “Holding back on you, huh?” Childers said. “That ain’t good. This fellow have a name?”

  “Angel Ojeda,” Soto said. “He’s thirty-nine and we think he’s been out here nine or ten years.”

  She handed Childers a sheet with a copy of Ojeda’s last California driver’s license.

  “Nine or ten years?” Childers said. “Then you’re working a cold case, huh?”

  “Something like that,” Bosch said. “The line we have on this guy is that he came out here to work at a bar called El Chihuahua. You know of the place?”

  “Oh, sure, we know of it. On Garnet in East Tulsa. That’s Little Mexico.”

  “What kind of place is it?”

  “It’s a dump with a pool table. Patrol goes in there a few times a week to break things up. You said this guy works there?”

  “That info is almost ten years old. It’s just a starting point.”

  “I’ll take you out there if you want. But let’s go on back to the squad first and see if we have anything on this Mr. Ojeda. Am I saying that right, Detective Soto? The J like an H?”

  “You got it right,” Soto said.

  Childers pointed toward a half door at the end of the counter and waved them around. Working cold cases had brought Bosch into detective bureaus all over the country. There was a sameness to them all. The Tulsa squad room could have been in Seattle or Baltimore or Tampa. Cluttered desks, walls of file cabinets, wanted posters on every wall and door. The room was largely deserted because of the hour. Bosch saw a uniformed cop at one desk and a detective at another. Childers led them to his own cubicle.

  “Grab a chair,” he said.

  Bosch and Soto pulled chairs away from empty desks and rolled them over. They all sat and Childers turned off a clock radio on his desk that was quietly playing country music. It sounded like Hank Williams Jr.

  “Let’s see what we got on this fellow,” Childers said.

  Looking at the sheet with the driver’s license, he typed information into his desktop computer. Bosch assumed he was searching an internal data bank that would tell him if Ojeda had ever intersected in some way with the Tulsa police. Soto had already checked the national computers before they’d left L.A. and there were no hits.

  Childers hit the enter button and held his hands up like he had just performed a magic trick. A few seconds later three words appeared at the top of the screen.

  No Match Found

  “Dammit,” Childers said. “If he’s been working at the Chihuahua, he would’ve come up as a witness, victim, reporting party, something. You sure your info is good?”

  “It was good—about ten years ago,” Bosch said. “Maybe he changed his name. What comes up if you just plug in El Chihuahua.”

  “You got all night?”

  Childers typed the name of the bar in and this time the screen said there were 972 matches.

  “And this thing only goes back seven years,” he said. “We were on paper before that. You two want to sit here and look through all this? I’ll let you have at it.”

  Bosch thought for a moment about what would be the best use of their time and how they could narrow the focus of the computer search. Soto beat him to it.

  “I say we just go scope it,” she said. “See if he’s there. That’s why we came.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Childers said.

  Bosch nodded.

  Childers drove. Little Mexico was a twenty-minute drive east from downtown. It was dark but the streets were well lighted and Bosch didn’t see what he expected. The streets were wide with grassy medians. There were houses and churches and businesses with space around them. There were closed businesses, too. He saw a Tulsa patrol car parked at an out-of-business gas station. He had
to look long and hard before he saw any graffiti.

  “So,” he said. “This is your barrio.”

  “This is it,” Childers said.

  Bosch was in the backseat, having given Soto the front. This would allow him to sit next to Ojeda should they find him and take him back to the PD for questioning.

  Childers first made a slow pass by the El Chihuahua. It looked to Bosch like it had once been a Pizza Hut. It still had the red roof, but the windows were painted over, and there were a variety of hand-painted plywood signs affixed to the facade advertising cervezas, chicharones, and desportes. A lighted sign on a pole announced the name of the bar and depicted a cartoon of the dog breed named for the Mexican state of Chihuahua, its teeth bared for a fight and its front paws up and clad in boxing gloves.

  It was near ten o’clock and the parking lot was full. Several men were milling about outside the doors on either side of the building, holding bottles and smoking.

  “That’s a violation right there,” Childers said. “Open-container law—they can’t be drinking outside.”

  “Good,” Bosch said. “We can use that.”

  Childers pulled to the side of the road once they passed. He looked in the rearview at Bosch because he knew Harry called the shots in the partnership with Soto.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  Bosch thought for a moment.

  “We passed a Shamu back there in the old gas station,” he said. “Can we bring him in on this?”

  “Shamu?” Childers asked.

  “The black-and-white. Looked like the guy was writing reports.”

  “Shamu—like the whale. I like that. Yeah, I can get him over here.”

  “Okay, we get him. We all go in and look around. If we see our guy, we have the uniform ask him to step outside because we have a problem with the public drinking. If that works out, we get him in the car and Lucy and I take it from there. We don’t mention L.A. and we use your badges.”

  Childers nodded.

  “Sounds good.”

  He reached for the police radio between the seats and went through dispatch to instruct the nearby patrol car to respond to their location. He then signed off and put the radio mike down.

  “How rough’s the crowd going to be?” Bosch asked.

  “We should be all right,” Childers said. “But there ain’t going to be a lot of women in there. Detective Soto might give them . . . pause, if you know what I mean.”

  “I can handle it,” Soto said. “I didn’t come out here to wait in the car.”

  Her tone invited no debate.

  “Fine by me,” Childers said.

  They waited ten minutes for the patrol car to show. Childers flashed his lights as it was approaching on Garnet and the car crossed the oncoming traffic lane to pull up driver’s-side window to driver’s-side window. It was a one-man patrol, typical of cash-strapped municipalities. Childers knew the officer but didn’t bother to introduce Bosch and Soto other than to explain they were from Los Angeles. He relayed Bosch’s plan and the officer said he was good to go.

  Childers turned the car around and they followed the patrol car to the bar. There were no parking spaces available in the lot. They drove down one side and around the back and then down the other side, stopping near the door where a group of men were standing, drinking and smoking. Most of them had probably been hassled before for drinking outside. Upon seeing the patrol car, they jostled to get back indoors.

  Everybody got out of the cars and headed toward the door. Bosch heard the pulsing music coming from the bar. He moved to Soto’s left side. It was a routine way for them to approach a door where it was unknown what would be behind it. He was left-handed and she was right-handed. It was the safest way to approach.

  The uniformed officer was at least six-three and barrel-chested. His girth was accentuated by the bulletproof vest under his uniform. He entered the bar first and started clearing a path through the crowd. Soto drew eyes, as expected, which worked to Bosch’s advantage. He swiveled his focus and took in the faces, looking for one that approximated the ten-year-old photo of Angel Ojeda’s driver’s license from California.

  He got lucky. Almost immediately he spotted a man behind the bar on the right side of the room who looked like Ojeda. He appeared to be one of three bartenders, but he wasn’t taking orders or opening bottles of beer. He was leaning against a back counter next to the cash register and watching the crowded barroom. Soon his eyes came to Bosch and registered the white face in a sea of brown faces. Bosch knew in that instant that he had probably made Bosch as a cop. But he doubted Ojeda—if it was Ojeda—would have made him as a cop from L.A.

  By now Bosch and Soto were not walking next to each other. The pathway through the crowd was too thin and they were moving in single file. Soto was much shorter than Bosch and her view was totally impeded by the crowd. Electronic dance music with a Latin beat blared from speakers. There were flat screens high on the walls and over the bar, showing soccer and boxing. The unmistakable stink of marijuana was in the air.

  Bosch leaned forward and spoke loudly over Soto’s shoulder and into her ear.

  “He’s here. Behind the bar. Tell Childers.”

  The message was sent up the line, and by the time the small troop made it up to the side of the bar, the patrol officer had his instructions. He signaled the man by the cash register over and told him he needed to step outside. The man hesitated, gesturing to the crowd as if to say he had to stay to take care of business. The big patrol cop leaned farther over the bar and said something that was convincing. The man raised the fold-over countertop and came out from behind the bar. He made some sort of hand signal to one of the bartenders he’d left behind and headed toward the nearest door. The patrol officer redirected him to the door that Bosch and company had come in through and they crossed the barroom again and exited.

  Outside the bar, the man Bosch had zeroed in on immediately went on the offensive, directing his protest at the uniformed officer even though he should have known that the suits are always in charge.

  “Why you hassling me, man? I have a business here.”

  “Sir, calm down,” the uniform said. “We have a problem we need to—”

  “What problem? There is no problem.”

  Bosch was sure it was Ojeda and was pleased that he obviously spoke English.

  “Kevin, let me speak to the man,” Childers said.

  The officer stepped back and Childers moved in, getting right in the barman’s face.

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Why? Why do I give you my name?”

  “Because we have a big problem here, sir, and if you don’t start cooperating, it’s going to get bigger. Now, what is your name?”

  “Francisco Bernal. Okay?”

  “You got an ID on you, Francisco Bernal? A driver’s license?”

  “I don’t drive. I live behind the bar.”

  “Good for you. A green card, then? A passport?”

  The man looked at Soto with an expression of disgust that she would be part of this shakedown. He pulled his wallet and from the billfold pulled a folded piece of paper. He handed it to Childers, who opened the paper and looked at it quickly before handing it to Bosch. He then stepped aside so Bosch could take things from there.

  Bosch looked at the document and the patrol officer helped by holding his flashlight on it. It was a photocopy of a Permanent Resident Card identifying the man as Francisco Bernal. Technically, every bearer of a green card was required to carry it at all times. But the reality was that a Permanent Resident Card was precious and difficult to replace if lost or stolen. Most people carried photocopies and locked the originals away. These copies were usually accepted during casual police stops. But Bosch was also aware that it was easier to make a phony photocopy than a counterfeit green card.

  As Bosch studied the document, a few bar patrons stepped outside to see what was going on. Childers aggressively moved toward them, pointing at the door and
ordering them back inside. They complied quickly.

  Bosch looked up from the document and eyed the man he still believed was Angel Ojeda.

  “You know it’s a misdemeanor to not carry the real thing, right?”

  The man shook his head in frustration.

  “This is bullshit,” he said.

  Bosch moved up close to him and held out a folded piece of paper that he had been carrying.

  “Is this bullshit?” he asked.

  The man grabbed the paper from Bosch’s hand and unfolded it. It was the copy of the California driver’s license with his old picture on it. Bosch saw a flash of recognition in the barman’s eyes. It confirmed he was Ojeda.

  “You just lied to a police officer,” he said. “You have what I believe is a false identification and immigration document. Do you know what kind of trouble you’re in?”

  Bosch took a step back and nodded to the patrol officer.

  “Hook him up, Kevin,” he said.

  The patrolman turned off his flashlight and went to work.

  16

  Just as every squad room looked the same to Bosch, so too did the interrogation rooms: Always stark, brightly lit cubes designed to instill hopelessness in those who waited to be questioned. From hopelessness comes compromise and cooperation. They had let Ojeda cook for close to an hour before Bosch entered the room. The plan was for Bosch to take the first shot, and if that didn’t work, then Soto would replace him and work the witness from a different angle. She would be watching Bosch’s effort on video in another room.

  Ojeda was sitting at a small table. Seeing him in the cold light of the room, Bosch saw that he was a handsome man with a full head of jet-black hair, smooth skin, and a trim build. There was a weariness or sadness in his dark eyes. As Bosch pulled out the chair opposite him, he tossed Ojeda’s photocopy of a supposed green card on the table.

  “What do you want me to call you, Angel or Francisco?” he asked.

  “I want you to call me a lawyer,” Ojeda said. “I know my rights here.”