The Burning Room

by Michael Connelly

  “Didn’t Charlie Manson preach the same thing back in the day?”

  “He did. But just like somebody should have been watching Manson back in the day, we did start watching Burrows and his group.”

  “When?”

  “We didn’t get onto them until about ’94, when they started putting leaflets on windshields from L.A. to San Diego—which, by the way, they called Ban Diego.”

  “Cute. My case was a year before that.”

  “I know. I can’t directly help you there. You asked me what we had on Burrows and it’s all ’94 and on.”

  “What were they doing besides printing up leaflets?”

  “Nothing much. They had a compound out near Castaic and they shot their guns off and trained recruits and listened to a lot of speed metal on the stereo. Your basic hate group—long on rhetoric but not much else. The boldest thing they ever did was print up a racist manifesto and put out leaflets inviting people to an open house at the training camp. We kept a loose watch on them, had a plant inside the clubhouse, and the determination was that these guys were all talk and no walk. They would not start the war, they would just be cheerleaders when it came.”

  “A plant? Did you bug the place?”

  “No, we had a CI. One of the members of WAVE got jammed up on something else and agreed to inform.”

  “Where’d the money come from for this compound? Did these guys have jobs? What?”

  “The summaries I read before coming here described them as very well-funded, but the source of that funding was not determined. These guys were security guards and long-range truckers. It didn’t account for their funding.”

  “The robbery I’m talking about netted two hundred sixty thousand. There was another one a few months before that that could have been connected.”

  “Well, that could explain it, but I saw nothing about that in the summaries.”

  “Was Burrows the top man?”

  “No, he was just a worker bee. WAVE was started by a guy named Garret Henley, who was a long-haul trucker. He was the initial recruiter.”

  Bosch got out his notebook to write the name down.

  “You won’t be able to talk to him,” Walling said. “He died twelve years ago. Killed himself after being indicted for tax evasion. He knew he was going to go away. That’s how we got most of these guys—they stopped paying taxes.”

  “Then, who else?” Bosch asked. “Who were Burrows’s known associates? My case involved him and two gunmen.”

  Walling reached over and unfolded the newspaper she had put to the side. For the first time Bosch could see she had written notes on the edges of the columns. Walling read her own notes and then flipped the paper closed again.

  “The summaries said there were two brothers who were tight with Burrows. Matt and Mike Pollard. Also, if you are looking for a getaway driver, there was a wannabe stock car driver named Stanley Nance in the group. His nickname was ‘Nascar Nance.’ Maybe he was your driver.”

  Bosch liked all of this. It seemed to fit. Walling read his excitement.

  “Now, before you jump up and start doing an Irish jig, I ran a quick check on these three guys and you’re not going to like what I found,” she said.

  “What?” Bosch asked.

  “Well, Nascar Nance is driving the big oval in the sky. He killed himself in ’96 when he hit a bridge abutment at ninety-five miles an hour on the five. And both the Pollards were sent to federal prison for tax evasion but only one came out alive. Mike Pollard was sent to Coleman, which is in Florida, where he was stabbed to death in the prison library in ’06. Case was never solved and is suspected of being racially motivated.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Matt Pollard served his time in Lewisburg and paroled out in ’09. He had a five-year tail and reported to the federal parole office in Philadelphia. But he cleared parole two months ago and his whereabouts are currently unknown. These diehard anti-government types like to stay below the radar. They avoid driver’s licenses, Social Security, paying taxes, and so on.”

  Bosch frowned and was reminded that Ana Acevedo had likewise dropped off the grid. But then he thought of something that seemed like a discrepancy regarding the men of WAVE.

  “Burrows didn’t go to prison until ’06,” he said. “And he was out in twenty-two months.”

  “What can I tell you? The process is slow,” Walling said. “I don’t know the details of each case but they went after these guys one at a time, and Burrows came up last, I guess.”

  That didn’t sound right to Bosch.

  “Okay, but Burrows went up to the country club at Lompoc,” he said. “How does he get Lompoc, and the Pollards get Lewisburg and Coleman? Those are hard places. It sounds like Burrows caught a break.”

  Walling nodded.

  “You’d have to pull all three cases and see how they lined up differently. You didn’t ask me to do that. You asked about Burrows. Who knows, maybe his offenses were not as extensive. Plus he took a deal, and maybe the other two went to trial. A lot of things can explain the discrepancy.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just wondering if he got a payoff for being the confidential informant all those years before.”

  Walling shook her head.

  “There was nothing in the file I looked at that said anything about substantial assistance being given by the defendant,” she said.

  “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Bosch said.

  “Either way, you’re now asking things above my pay grade. I don’t have access to CI lists. For obvious reasons, those are under lock and key.”

  “Did you write down any of the case numbers? I could talk to the prosecutor.”

  “I did.”

  “What about the case agent who handled WAVE? Who was that?”

  “Nick Yardley. And he’s still in the L.A. office.”

  “Think he’d talk to me?”

  “He might, but you have to remember, Burrows went to prison on an IRS case. Technically we would only have been assisting. Nick might shine you onto them, and if that happens you can forget it. IRS agents don’t talk to locals.”

  “I know.”

  “If you talk to Nick, don’t tell him you’ve talked to me. Tell him your information comes from the court file.”

  “Of course.”

  The waiter came with the food then. Bosch wanted to leave and keep moving with the case but he knew if he was rude to Rachel she might never help him again. He didn’t want to risk that.

  They started to eat and he tried some small talk.

  “So what’s Jack doing these days?” he asked.

  Jack was Jack McEvoy, the former Times reporter that Rachel had been with for the past few years. Bosch knew McEvoy as well.

  “He’s doing well,” she said. “He’s happy—and lucky, considering today’s journalism market.”

  “He’s still working on that investigative website?”

  “He recently jumped to a different one. It’s called Fair Warning. It’s consumer protection investigations and reporting. You should check it out. The government, the newspapers—nobody’s really watching out for Joe Citizen anymore. They do some interesting stuff on the site. And he loves the work again.”

  “That’s great. I will check it out. Fair Warning dot com?”

  “Dot org. It’s a nonprofit.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a look at it.”

  Bosch thought about asking her about the tightrope she walked at the bureau by being in a relationship with a reporter, but before he said anything, he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He put his fork down and checked it. It was a text from Soto.

  Ready to go

  A not-so-gentle reminder that the case was waiting. He looked at Walling, who was taking her time spreading cream cheese on a bagel.

  “You gotta go, right?” she said without looking up from her work.

  “Sort of,” Bosch said.

  “Then don’t worry about me. Go.”

  “Thank
s, Rachel. For everything. I’ll grab the check on the way out.”

  “Thank you, Harry.”

  Bosch took the English muffin off his plate and started to slide out of the booth.

  “Don’t forget this,” Rachel said.

  She handed the newspaper across the table. Bosch took it from her and stood up.

  “Tell Jack he is lucky.”

  “What? You mean about the job?”

  “No, Rachel, I mean about you.”

  31

  Bosch didn’t want to go into the squad room and get caught up in anything with Crowder or Samuels. So he texted Soto and waited in the same spot where he had dropped her off an hour earlier. It took her less than ten minutes to get out of the PAB and across the front plaza. She was carrying her iPad.

  She got in the car but Bosch did not pull out. They needed to set a plan for the rest of the day and he also wanted to know what she had told Crowder with regard to both of their current cases.

  “Okay, so where are we at?” he asked.

  “I did the interview and that was easy,” she said. “The reporter didn’t ask anything too tough and the only thing I gave him was the gun. He was really happy with that and the captain and lieutenant were happy and now we’re good to go on Bonnie Brae.”

  “What did you tell Crowder about that?”

  “Just that we’re looking at it as a diversion from the EZBank robbery and that it was an angle the first-run investigators didn’t explore. I told him we had a solid connection between the two locations and needed to hit the road today to nail it down.”

  “Perfect. Now, we have Burrows and Boiko padded down. Still no location on Ana Acevedo, right?”

  Soto shook her head with disappointment.

  “I can’t find her. I’ve tried all the software and data banks. AutoTrack, DMV, Lexis/Nexis, utilities, voter registration, auto loans—you name it.”

  “Think she’s dead?”

  “If she is, it wasn’t recorded anywhere I can find.”

  “Maybe she just changed her name.”

  He said it hopefully even though he was increasingly starting to believe Ana Acevedo had been killed and buried where she would never be found. If she had been used by Burrows and the two other robbers, she became a liability as soon as the robbery was over. Adding the Bonnie Brae deaths to the tally probably made her too risky a liability.

  “Nothing comes up in the usual places,” Soto said. “Marriage licenses, petitions to change names. If she switched her name, she didn’t do it legally or she went somewhere far away to do it.”

  “Maybe Mexico.”

  “Well, if she did, she never came back across and got a driver’s license or a bank account or cable TV. She just disappeared, and as far as I can tell, nobody ever reported her missing. At least not in this state.”

  Considering her work in just the past week, Bosch had no cause to doubt the thoroughness of Soto’s search for Ana Acevedo.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Maybe we use that to our advantage. We go to Burrows and Boiko and say she’s the one we’re looking for. That’ll be our angle in with them.”

  Soto nodded.

  “I like it,” she said. “Which one do we go to first?”

  “I like Burrows,” Bosch said. “With what I just heard at breakfast, he’s the one. The EZBank job could’ve been all about getting money to start the white supremacist outfit he was part of back then.”

  “What a guy. I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “Yeah. He’s a quite a citizen.”

  Bosch pulled onto 1st and headed down to Los Angeles Street so he could get over to the freeway. Adelanto was going to be an easy two-hour drive out into the Mojave. There was more than enough time to tell Soto everything Walling had told him about Rodney Burrows.

  Adelanto was off the 15 freeway almost halfway to Las Vegas. As he drove, Bosch was quiet and contemplative while Soto used her electronic tablet to continue her search for Ana Acevedo. The past decade had seen an explosion in the availability of digital search sites that could be used for finding people. While almost all of them used the basic identifiers such as name, birth date, and Social Security number, there was still a wide range of ways in which those identifiers were applied. Some sites were more real-estate based, others more reliant on banking or legal data. Still others specialized in auto purchasing and financial data. The bottom line was that the prudent investigator didn’t rely on only one or two search engines for conclusive results. There was always another data bank to check.

  As Soto occasionally cursed or muttered things like “That’s not her!” and “Would you give me a break?” Bosch was slowly realizing the gravity of the situation he had put himself in. Before that morning, the Bonnie Brae case had seemed like an abstract long shot, and by encouraging Soto and helping her he was solidifying their bond as partners. Now, because of Soto’s good work, they were on the verge of confronting the man who could very well be responsible for the deaths of nine people, including Soto’s childhood friends. He realized that there was no way he should let Soto anywhere near this man, but the circumstances he had set in motion made it inevitable. He was going to have to be as careful about Soto as he was about Burrows—should the two meet.

  “How are you doing, Lucy?” he asked.

  Soto was looking down at her tablet screen. She glanced over at him and he put his eyes back on the road.

  “You’ve been with me just about all morning,” she said. “Why do you ask that?”

  “It’s just that, you know, Burrows—this could be the guy. You’re going to be cool, right?”

  “I’ll be cool, Harry. Don’t worry.”

  Bosch took his eyes off the road again to look at her for a long moment.

  “What?” she said.

  “I just want to be sure I don’t have to worry about you,” he said.

  “Harry, I’m a cop and I’ll act like a cop. Totally professional. I’m not going to go all apeshit on the guy, okay? This is about justice, not revenge.”

  “There’s a thin line between those two things. I’m just saying that if you start to pull anything, I’ll be all over you in a second. Understand?”

  “Yes, I understand. Can I go back to work now?”

  She held up her tablet as part of the question.

  “Sure. But you follow my lead if we talk to this guy. I want to run the missing-person play on him, see if I can get him to talk to us about Ana. Then we go from there.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Rodney Burrows’s address corresponded to a neighborhood of small houses on narrow but deep lots. There were no trees or bushes or even a lawn that Bosch could see anywhere in the neighborhood. It was all burned out and left dusty and barren by the desert sun.

  The Burrows homestead was surrounded by a chain-link fence that was topped with razor wire and that probably wasn’t all that different from the fence that surrounded the federal prison where Burrows had done his time. Bosch wondered if the similarity was lost on Burrows.

  As Bosch studied the man’s fenced compound, the irony was not lost on him. Burrows, like many others with his beliefs and practices, had most likely moved eighty miles away from the city and into the desert town because he wanted to get away from all that he felt was wrong with society and its large urban centers. In his estimation the problems came down to things like immigration and crowding from growing populations of minorities who sapped the infrastructure and lived off the government dole. So he lit out, as they say in white-power circles, for open spaces and white faces. He found Adelanto and established his homestead, only to find that the small town was no different from the big town. It was a microcosm—a ladle dipped into the melting pot and coming out with the same mixture of ingredients. Adelanto was a town with minorities in the majority, and so it was no wonder to Bosch that Burrows had surrounded himself with a six-foot chain-link fence, his last-ditch effort to keep the world out. And the capper to the irony
was that Adelanto was the Spanish word for “progress.”

  Burrows’s fence formed a chute that Bosch angled the Ford into so he could reach out the window to a call box at the entry gate. The box featured a keypad, a camera lens, and a call button. It was attached to a pole below one sign that said “Beware of Dog” and another that showed the black silhouette of a handgun above the words “We Don’t Call 911.”

  Bosch was uncomfortable the moment he saw the setup because it would allow Burrows to control the situation in terms of the initial contact and confrontation. Soto was uneasy as well.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “Nothing much we can do,” Bosch said. “We see if we can get him to open up.”

  Bosch reached out the car window and pushed the call button to make contact. He had to push it a second time before getting a response. The voice on the box was male and gruff.

  “What is it?”

  Bosch held his badge out to the camera but intentionally held it in a way that one of his fingers covered the embossed letters that said Los Angeles.

  “Police, sir. We need you to come out to the gate, please.”

  “Why would you need me to do that?”

  “We have an investigation and we need you to help us, sir.”

  “What sort of investigation?”

  “Sir, would you please come out?”

  “Not until I know what’s going on.”

  “It’s a missing-persons case, sir. It will only take a few minutes.”

  “Who’s missing? I don’t know anyone in this neighborhood. They could all go missing as far as I’m concerned.”

  This was not going the right way. Bosch decided to go strong.

  “Sir, you need to come to the gate. If you refuse, then we are going to have a problem.”

  There was a long pause before the voice came back over the box.

  “Just hold your horses. It’s going to take me a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Bosch backed up from the box enough to be able to open the door and exit the car. He put it in park and looked at Soto. He still was unsure of how she was going to react to seeing the man who might be responsible for the tragedy of her childhood, if not her life.