The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  After a moment, Bosch handed the weapon to Soto, who had also put on rubber gloves, and started to take off his jacket. To look under the lower shelf of the bench, he was going to have to get down on the oil-stained floor. Mrs. Contreras noticed what he was doing and pulled a tarp off one of the shelves at the back of the garage. She started unfolding it and spreading it on the floor.

  “Use this so you don’t ruin your clothes,” she said.

  Soon Bosch was down on the floor, using the glow from his phone screen to illuminate the recesses of the underside of the lower shelf. There was another firearm—this one a long gun—and he took photos again before asking for the carpet cutter to slash through the plastic ties.

  He handed the heavy weapon up to Soto and then got up.

  “Oh my god,” Mrs. Contreras said.

  She now had both her hands protecting her unborn child.

  The gun was not a Kimber Model 84. Bosch recognized it as an M60 machine gun. Vietnam era, fed by ammo belts worn like bandoliers by the men who humped it through the jungle. Two bandoliers had been on the inventory list of guns and ammo sold by Willman’s wife after his death. Here was the weapon the belts went with. Bosch wondered if Willman had hidden the machine gun and the Glock because they were stolen or because they were valuable memorabilia.

  “Is that what you were looking for?” Mrs. Contreras asked.

  “No, not it,” Bosch said.

  He took the weapon from Soto because he could tell she was straining from the weight of it. Those who carried the M60 through the Vietnamese jungle had a love/hate relationship with it. They called it “the pig” whenever they had to lug the heavy weapon out on patrol. But heavy or not, it was the best gun to be holding in your hands in a firefight. Bosch carefully cradled it in the jaws of the twin bench vises.

  Bosch stepped back from the bench and looked around the garage one more time. He was invigorated from finding the two weapons. They weren’t what he was looking for but they proved that Willman had hidden guns. It supported his hope that the Kimber Montana might still be found.

  His eyes went up to the overhead rafters.

  “You can go up there if you want,” Mrs. Contreras said.

  She was now fully supportive of the search for weapons in the home she would soon be raising a child in. There was a fiberglass extension ladder on a rack on the other side of the garage. Bosch took it off the rack and, careful not to hit the car, walked it around to the bench. He extended it and propped it against one of the crossbeams and then held it steady while Soto went up first. He followed and they found themselves ducking below a low ceiling on a makeshift floor of planks spread across the crossbeams.

  Bosch looked for hiding spots, but there was really nowhere in the rafters to hide a rifle or any other weapon. He was about to give up the search when Soto called him over to the edge of the platform. He kept his hand up on one of the roof trusses for support.

  Soto pointed down through the opening between two of the crossbeams to one of the steel gun cabinets. He didn’t readily see what she wanted him to see.

  “What?” he said.

  “Behind the cabinet,” she said. “It’s attached to the two-by-fours but there is room between them.”

  She was right. There was more than a foot between each of the two-by-fours that ran vertically along the wall frame. Each of the spaces between was crammed with strips of insulation but they could easily have been removed behind the gun cabinets to create a secret storage space big enough for a rifle. Bosch had not realized the possibility of this when he had looked over the top of the cabinets before.

  “We need to take the cabinets down,” he said.

  It took them a half hour to remove the contents of each of the cabinets and then for Bosch—using Bernard Contreras’s tools—to loosen the bolts attaching the first steel cabinet to the two-by-fours behind it. To finish the project, he then had to hand the wrench to Soto while he attempted to hold the heavy steel cabinet.

  Working from the stepladder, Soto removed the four loosened bolts, and Bosch felt the weight hit him. It was too much.

  “Look out!”

  He let cabinet slide down the two-by-fours to the floor, where it hit the cement with a loud bang.

  “Everybody all right?”

  As the two women reported that they were fine, Bosch looked at the place on the wall where the cabinet had been. There was indeed a vertical space four inches deep between two of the two-by-fours. A length of wood had been nailed into place between the verticals to create a bottom rest to the hiding place. There was no gun there but there was a sheathed sword in the space. Bosch took it down to examine it. It was caked with dust. It looked like some kind of samurai sword and had a slight bend to its long blade, which had remained shiny and clean in its sheath.

  Bosch leaned the sword against the workbench and moved on to the second gun cabinet.

  Having learned from the first effort, Bosch took only ten minutes to loosen bolts on the second cabinet and put Soto in position on the stepladder. This time he knew what to expect and used his weight against the cabinet to slowly slide it down the wall. He heard Soto announce that there was a gun in the second hiding spot before he even straightened up.

  It was a rifle. Bosch’s adrenaline kicked in. He wanted to grab it and check to see if it was a Kimber, but he waited while Soto photographed it with her phone. He then took it down from the space and held it out across his body. Soto leaned in to help examine it for brand markings.

  “I need my glasses,” Bosch said.

  “There!” Soto said, excitedly pointing to the left side of the rifle’s receiver. “ ‘Kimber Model 84.’ It has to be it.”

  She located the serial number to the left of the brand mark and asked Bosch if he had the number from his notes. Bosch gave her the gun and went to his jacket, which Mrs. Contreras was holding, for his reading glasses and notebook. He flipped the notebook open to the page with the serial number written on it and read it out loud to Soto.

  “It’s a match,” she said.

  Her voice had a tremble as she said it.

  They had found David Willman’s unaccounted-for rifle. The next step was to see if it was also the rifle used to shoot Orlando Merced.

  Bosch put on his jacket and looked at the two gun cabinets on the floor of the garage. There was no way he was going to be able to put them back in place.

  “Mrs. Contreras, we are going to have to take these weapons with us,” he said.

  “Please do,” she said. “My husband’s not going to believe this.”

  “Well, your husband may not be happy, because I’m not going to be able to lift those cabinets up and put them back.”

  “Don’t worry. He and his friends can do that. They hang out in here enough and this will be a great story for him to tell.”

  “That makes me feel better. We’re going to write out a receipt for you now.”

  They put the weapons in the trunk of the car, laying them across a blanket Bosch kept in his surveillance kit. They then thanked Mrs. Contreras and gave her the receipt.

  Finally they headed back toward Los Angeles. There was an almost palpable excitement in the car. Bosch had started the day feeling that he had reached a dead end on the case because Broussard had taken the ultimate measure in protecting himself. But now things were different. He had what he believed would prove to be the murder weapon in his trunk. It had been a fast turnabout.

  Bosch checked his watch and figured it would be almost five by the time they got back to the city. He pulled his phone and called the gun shop at the crime lab. He asked for Gun Chung.

  “How long are you going to be there?” Bosch asked.

  “I’m on the schedule till four,” Chung said. “What’s up?”

  “We have the gun from the mariachi thing. At least we think we do. But we won’t get there in time. We’re coming in from Riverside.”

  “How far out are you?”

  “I’m thinking closer to five.”
<
br />   “It’s okay. I’ll wait. Bring it right here and I’ll do the comparison.”

  “We won’t have to wait in line?”

  “I’ll be on my own time. I can do what I want.”

  “I appreciate that, man. We’ll be there as soon as we can. Can you do me one other favor?”

  “What is it?”

  “Call up to latents and see if somebody can meet us. I’d like to see if we can pull prints off this.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Bosch disconnected the call and told Soto that they were going directly to the lab where Gun Chung was willing to wait for them to do a comparison between the slug taken from Orlando Merced’s spine and a bullet fired from the rifle in the trunk.

  “Let’s say it’s a match,” she said. “That we have the murder weapon.”

  “Okay,” Bosch said.

  “Let’s run the scenario. I want to try to see how this works.”

  Bosch nodded. It was a good exercise to a certain extent. The investigator never wanted to create a scenario and then work the evidence to fit it. But starting with the assumption that they had just recovered the murder weapon led to some inalterable conclusions.

  “Well, you start by going back to our original theory based on the ballistics and the video evidence,” he said.

  “That the bullet that hit Merced was intended for Ojeda,” Soto said.

  “Right. Then from there you have the confirmation that the weapon belonged to David Willman. Did he take the shot? We don’t know that. Did he have the skill? Yes. Did he know someone he could have given his gun to so they could take the shot? I think that’s also a yes.”

  He drove for a few minutes, grinding out the story in his head before continuing.

  “Okay, so if you draw a line between Ojeda and Willman, who else does it intersect?”

  “Broussard.”

  “Broussard. He grew up with Willman and was in business with him.”

  “And his wife was having an affair with Ojeda.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “The way I see this from Broussard’s angle is he warned Ojeda to stay away from his wife but Ojeda wouldn’t move on. So Broussard goes to Willman and says, ‘I need a piece of work taken care of.’ Willman takes the job and sets it up with a shooter or decides to handle the job himself. I’m guessing the latter—rule of thumb, the fewer people in a conspiracy, the better.”

  “Agreed. I go with Willman.”

  “Willman takes the shot but hits Merced instead of Ojeda. Everything goes sideways. Now they know that if they hit Ojeda, it will really bring some heat because there is no way the police will continue to think the first one was a random shot or gang related. They’ll know there is something going on here. So Broussard has no choice but to tell Willman to stand down—at least for now.”

  “Meantime, Ojeda sticks around just long enough to feed his bullshit statement to the cops and then splits town.”

  “So the shot actually does the job. They hit the wrong guy but the right guy goes away anyway.”

  “And Willman becomes a loose end for Broussard. A guy who knows the secret.”

  “You have to wonder why Willman agreed to go out hunting with Broussard that day. He must’ve told him that he had an insurance policy.”

  “He kept the gun.”

  “Broussard must’ve somehow thought he was in the clear, that the gun wasn’t going to show up and connect up the whole thing, with him in the middle.”

  Soto turned completely sideways to look at Bosch as she made the next connection.

  “It was the bullet! It was inside Merced. He must’ve thought when Merced survived and they weren’t going to take the bullet out of him that Willman’s ace in the hole wasn’t as valuable as he thought. It didn’t matter if he kept the rifle, since there was no slug to compare it to because it wasn’t removed from Merced. There was no way to prove it had fired the shot.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Willman thought he was safe enough to give Broussard a gun and go off into the woods with him. Only he wasn’t.”

  They sat with it in silence for a while. Bosch ran it all through once more and couldn’t knock it down. It was only case theory but it held together. It worked, but it didn’t mean that it was the way it had happened. Every case had unanswered questions and loose ends when it came to motives and actions. Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully reasonable explanation for it? It was that understanding that kept him from watching and being able to enjoy films and television shows about detectives. He found them unrealistic in their delivery of what the general audience wanted: all of the answers.

  He looked up at the overhead freeway signs. They were coming up on the exit for Cal State, where Gun Chung waited for them in the lab.

  26

  Their case theory took on a higher degree of validity after Gun Chung positively identified the Kimber rifle they brought in as the weapon that had fired the bullet that was lodged in Orlando Merced’s spine for ten years.

  After the weapon was processed for fingerprints, Chung fired a round from the Kimber into the bullet tank in the lab, fished it out with a net, and then compared it on the double microscope to the slug taken from Merced. The original slug was badly damaged. Still, it took Chung less than ten minutes to declare the comparison a match he would confidently testify to in court.

  Bosch had Chung fire rounds from the M60 and the handgun into the tank as well. He asked Chung to run digital profiles of the bullets through the projectile database when he got a chance. The two other weapons may have had nothing to do with the Merced case, but they bore checking out. Willman had hidden the weapons for a reason. The two extra guns were loose ends that needed to be tied up.

  The samurai sword should also be checked and traced if possible. But that was not Chung’s domain. Bosch planned to run checks on sword thefts and crimes involving the use of such weapons as soon as he broke clear of the current investigations and had the time.

  * * *

  When Bosch and Soto got back to the PAB, there was no one in the squad to report their news to. Crowder and Samuels were long gone for the day. Almost all the other investigators had signed out as well. Bosch stored the three guns and the sword recovered in Hemet in the firearms vault located in the file room. He planned to run ATF traces on the M60 and the Glock the next morning.

  When he got to the module, Soto was reading through the latest batch of tip sheets that Sarah Holcomb had left on her desk.

  “Anybody call up and say a guy named Dave Willman took the shot?” Bosch asked. “And that Charles Broussard asked him to do it?”

  “You wish,” Soto said.

  Bosch sat down at his desk. He was tired. Driving sapped his energy these days.

  “Anything else in there?” he asked.

  “Not much. Our anonymous lady who thinks the ex-mayor has all the answers returned my call, but Sarah missed it and the woman just left a message saying the same thing—talk to Zeyas. Sarah ran the number this time and it goes to an unregistered cell—a throwaway.”

  “Not that surprising. If she’s not a citizen, she wouldn’t have the proper ID and bank account to get a legit carrier. Most of the illegals in this city use throwaways. They’re cheap and available at every bodega in the city.”

  Soto was calling the number again, holding her desk phone to her ear while continuing the conversation.

  “I have to say, her persistence makes me wonder.”

  “Wonder what? Whether the ex-mayor was in on the Merced shooting?”

  “No, not that. That’s pretty far-fetched. But who knows, maybe he knows something.”

  “Okay, then you’re the one who gets to ask His Honor about that—based on an anonymous caller’s tip. See if they’ll let you keep your Medal of Valor after that.”

  “I know. It’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy. It’s just reckless until some
thing more comes up to support it, and I don’t really think anything else is going to.”

  Soto hung up the phone.

  “It went to message again.”

  Bosch pulled his chair over to hers and said he wanted to change the subject and discuss their next steps. It was imperative that they now gather complete profiles of both Broussard and Willman. He exercised his senior-partner status and elected to take Broussard while Soto took on Willman. He also said that he believed it was time to go to the District Attorney’s Office to talk to a filing deputy about what they had and what was needed to make a prosecutable case. He would attempt to set that up for the next day, hoping to get John Lewin or another deputy he was confident would be up to the task. Lewin was a guy who always looked for ways to work with investigators to get a winnable case filed. Some of his counterparts on the seventeenth floor of the CCB seemed more interested in looking for reasons not to file cases.

  “What about Bonnie Brae?” Soto asked when Bosch was finished.

  “I think it’s got to wait,” Bosch said. “For now, at least. We have to go with the momentum we’ve got on Merced. On top of that, we have to assume Broussard is working against our momentum. He’s got to know that Merced has died and that we now have the bullet. He might already be watching us. So our time is best spent on Merced and moving quickly.”

  She looked disappointed but accepted his decision.

  “What if I work it on my own time?” she asked.

  Bosch thought for a moment.

  “I would never tell you not to work something on your own,” he said. “They call them ‘hobby cases’ around here. But that doesn’t seem like the right description for that case and what it means to you. I understand that you want to keep the momentum you have going. Completing the nexus and all of that. I just want to make sure you keep a hard focus on Merced.”

  “I will, Harry. I promise.”

  “Okay, then do what you have to do.”

  On his way home Bosch once again went up Mulholland instead of Woodrow Wilson so that he could cruise Charles Broussard’s home. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to see. The chances of catching sight of the suspect—yes, Bosch had now reached a point where he considered him a suspect—were almost nonexistent. But still Bosch was drawn to the concrete fortress where Broussard had hidden himself from public exposure and the law for so long.