“We have other leads and are closing in on a suspect,” Bosch said calmly. “But the investigation dictates we identify and talk to this woman. That’s what we’re—”
“You’re wasting resources, is what you’re doing,” Samuels interjected. “Who’s this suspect you’re telling us about for the first time?”
“Willman, the man who owned the murder weapon,” Bosch said. “It’s in the reports.”
“Your report said he’s dead,” Samuels said.
“He is, but we still think he took the shot,” Bosch countered.
“Why did he take the shot? For who?”
“We’re working on that,” Bosch said. “The other firearms we collected from his house have come back tied to other killings in San Diego and Las Vegas. It’s looking like this guy was a killer for hire.”
“So who hired him to take the shot at Mariachi Plaza?” Crowder asked.
“That’s what we’re working on,” Bosch said. “We’re tying up loose ends and this anonymous caller is one of them.”
Samuels wasn’t mollified. He shook his head disdainfully.
“You two have till end of watch Friday,” he said. “You put something together on this case or I’ll put a team on it that gets results.”
“Fine,” Bosch said. “That’s your call.”
“Damn right it’s my call,” Samuels said. “You two can go now.”
Bosch and Soto walked silently back to their cubicle. Bosch realized his teeth were clenched so tightly that his jaw was beginning to ache. He tried to relax but couldn’t. He wanted to turn around, go back to the captain’s office, and throw Samuels through the glass window next to the door. The guy wasn’t a detective. He had never worked cases. He was an administrator who believed the best way to motivate people was to belittle their efforts and show zero patience with difficult cases. He would be just the type of bureaucrat Bosch wouldn’t miss for a minute once he left the job.
When they got back to their desks, Bosch sat down and put his hands flat on the blotter and drummed his fingers on the surface, hoping it would somehow dissipate some of the bad energy he was carrying.
“I thought you didn’t want to tell them about the firearms yet,” Soto said to his back.
Bosch answered without turning to her.
“I had to give them something,” he said. “Just to get out of there.”
Bosch looked over toward the captain’s office. Samuels was still in there, talking to Crowder, gesturing with both hands.
“Hey, Harry!” Soto said. “We got our first ping from the tech unit.”
Bosch turned and pushed himself in his chair over to her desk. Soto had clicked on the link provided in the e-mail from Marshall Flowers. It went to a Google Maps page, and Bosch saw that the address in question was on Mulholland Drive between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and the Cahuenga Pass.
“Go to Street View,” he instructed.
Soto clicked her wireless mouse on the appropriate tab and soon her screen showed a street-angle photograph of the address from which the first ping on the anonymous caller’s cell phone had emanated. The image was of a roadway with a guardrail and beyond it a wide-angle view of the city sprawled below.
“There’s nothing here,” Soto said.
She was about to manipulate the image with her mouse when Bosch put his hand on her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “That’s Broussard’s house.”
“What? There’s no house. How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been there. I’ve driven by. That’s his house. You go down the drive from Mulholland. The house is below and you can’t see it from the street.”
“Oh, man. That means the phone’s in his house. The anonymous calls came from . . . it’s his wife! All this time, she’s been trying to rat him out.”
36
They decided it was too risky to go directly to the house. There was no telling if Broussard would be home, and even if he wasn’t, the exterior camera surveillance of the house suggested that there might also be interior monitoring of the premises as well as of his wife. Instead, Bosch and Soto put the house under surveillance, taking a position at the public overlook a block away. The plan was to wait for Maria Broussard to leave the home and then move in at the appropriate moment to confront her about the anonymous calls and ask her what she knew about the Merced shooting.
They split the surveillance, with one of them remaining in the car and the other sitting on one of the benches out on the overlook. It gave them front and back angles on the Broussard property fifty yards away. To help avoid boredom, they switched posts every thirty minutes, stopping long enough during the change to discuss the case or whatever else had come to mind.
During one of the transitions, Bosch told Soto about a previous surveillance he had been involved in on Mulholland Drive. It was a case from almost twenty years before when he had been assigned to the Hollywood Division detective squad and was partnered with Jerry Edgar. Edgar was a stylish dresser who liked custom-tailored suits and tasseled shoes. They were watching a house and were not even sure the subject—a suspect in a series of rapes and murders—was inside. It was winter cold but in the car it was stuffy because the windows were up. Both detectives had stripped off their suit jackets. The sun went down and no lights were visible from the house under surveillance. An hour went by and took them into full darkness. Still no light behind any of the windows of the house. Frustrated, Bosch finally said he was going to climb down the hillside and try to get a look at the back of the house for signs of life. Edgar urged him not to go. He warned that in the darkness he might easily slip and fall, possibly hurting himself, not to mention dirtying his clothes. Bosch told him not to worry as he reached over the seat to grab his jacket.
Sure enough, Bosch fell down the hillside. He didn’t hurt himself except for a few minor scrapes and bruises. But he muddied his clothes and ripped the seam between his suit jacket’s sleeve and shoulder. He also determined that the house in question was empty.
The surveillance a bust, Bosch and Edgar drove back to Hollywood Station, where it was revealed in the harsh fluorescent light of the squad room that the torn and muddied jacket Bosch wore was Edgar’s.
Soto laughed so heartily at the story that she didn’t hear Bosch when he announced “Car!”
He had to grab her arm and tell her again.
“There’s a car pulling out,” he said, directing her back toward their Ford. “Let’s go.”
“Can you tell, is it her?” Soto asked.
“I can’t see the driver. But that’s a woman’s car.”
“Oh, really? What makes it a woman’s car?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t see a guy driving that.”
They jumped in the Ford and Bosch started the engine. The car that had left the Broussard residence was coming their way. Bosch waited for it to pass the parking turnout and then pulled onto Mulholland behind it. The car was a two-seat silver Mercedes. Its windows were tinted and there was no way to confirm who the driver was, let alone if it was a woman. He realized that his comment about the car was probably sexist but his gut told him there was a woman driving that car. Whether it was because of the model of the car or not, he had to go with it.
“It’s gotta be her,” he said.
“Better hope so,” she said.
They got no help with a confirmation when Soto called the com center and asked an operator to run the Mercedes’s plate. The car was registered to Broussard Concrete Design, which meant it could easily have been driven by either one of the Broussards.
Bosch gave the Mercedes some distance and followed it west on Mulholland. At the light at Laurel Canyon it went straight and Harry began to entertain all manner of paranoid ideas about them being led astray. Perhaps they had been spotted on the overlook and someone left the house in the Mercedes on a leisurely cruise along the mountain ridge in an effort to pull them far off the surveillance.
But finally the car turned right and started down t
he northern slope of the mountain on Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. The car now appeared headed into Sherman Oaks or Van Nuys, but then it turned sharply just before Ventura Boulevard into the parking lot of a Gelson’s supermarket. Bosch quickly made up the ground between them and pulled in as well. He got eyes on the Mercedes and parked one lane away from it.
When the driver’s door of the Mercedes opened, it was indeed a woman who emerged from the vehicle. She was small and dressed in silver pants and a knee-length coat worn open over a pale blouse. She had blond hair, which threw Bosch because he expected a brunette.
“Is that her?” he asked. “She’s blond? Didn’t she have dark hair in the photo from the mayor’s election?”
“She did,” Soto said. “She also has dark hair on the DL issued three years ago.”
Bosch opened his door.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
They followed the woman in and watched as she pulled a shopping cart out of the stack and proceeded down the store’s first aisle. Gelson’s was an upscale chain that attracted customers who were interested in quality over price. As the woman began filling her cart, Bosch didn’t see her check a single price tag. It gave him confidence that they were following Maria Broussard. Still, the blond hair threw him and he wasn’t sure why.
“It’s a dye job,” Soto whispered when they casually moved in closer to the woman in the produce section.
“How do you know?” Bosch whispered back.
She held up her phone to him. On the screen was a photograph Soto had Googled of Charles and Maria Broussard. It showed them embracing for the camera. Maria had dark brown hair.
Soto then thumbed to the next image, and the screen displayed the same woman with blond hair.
“She’s dyed it,” she said. “Judging by dates here, I’d say sometime in the past year.”
“Okay,” Bosch said. “Let’s talk to her.”
They moved in on her from either side of an end display of bananas.
“Mrs. Broussard?” Bosch asked.
The woman looked up from the banana bunch she was considering with an easy smile. It froze when she saw a stranger’s face. It then dropped off her face like an avalanche when she saw the badge he was holding.
“Yes?” she said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“We want to talk to you about your husband and the phone calls you’ve been making.”
“I don’t know what you mean. My husband’s fine. I was just with him at our home fifteen minutes ago.”
“We’re talking about the anonymous calls to the police tip line from your house,” Soto said.
Maria Broussard spun around, not realizing that Soto was behind her.
“That is crazy,” she said, her voice tight with panic. “I have never made a call to the police, anonymous or otherwise. Calls about what?”
Bosch studied her for a moment, trying to read her. Something wasn’t tracking here.
“About the shooting of Orlando Merced,” he said.
He saw something flare in her eyes. Some sort of recognition, but he wasn’t sure if it was of the name or something else.
“Stay away from me,” she said.
She grabbed her purse out of the shopping cart and moved between Bosch and Soto and away. She walked as quickly as her high heels allowed her.
Soto started after her.
“Mrs. Broussard—”
Bosch grabbed her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “Something’s wrong. She . . .”
He didn’t finish. He pulled his phone and went to the recent calls list. He hit the number he had used that morning to make contact with the tech unit. He asked for Marshall Flowers and started moving toward the market’s exit.
“Let’s go,” he said to Soto.
“Where?” she said. “What are we doing?”
Flowers picked up the call.
“Marshall,” Bosch said urgently, “I need you to ping the phone again.”
Flowers seemed confused.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Ping the phone. Do it now.”
“We hit it twenty minutes ago. It hasn’t moved all morning, Detective.”
“Ping it again and call me back. Now.”
He disconnected before Flowers could protest. They exited the store and Bosch saw Maria Broussard striding toward her car. She was on her phone.
“We have fucked up,” Bosch said.
He started walking and then broke into a run toward the Ford. Soto gave chase, calling across the roof of the car when she got there.
“Harry, what are you talking about?”
“The woman I saw had brown hair. Get in.”
Bosch pulled out onto Ventura Boulevard and pinned the accelerator. He wasn’t going back to the Broussard house the way he had come. It was too slow and he didn’t think Mulholland was the way to approach it. He flipped down the red flashers on the windshield but reserved the siren for when he needed it at intersections.
“Harry, what woman?” Soto demanded. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Hold on,” Bosch barked back.
He had his phone out and had called Flowers again. He waited as the line buzzed repeatedly and the call was finally picked up.
“Flowers, talk to me.”
“We just got it. No change, Detective. The coordinates are still the same.”
Bosch disconnected and dropped the phone into the center console. He was angry with himself. He glanced over at Soto but only for a moment. He was now going sixty on crowded Ventura Boulevard and needed his eyes on the road.
“I should’ve said, ‘I fucked up,’ back there. It wasn’t you, Lucy. It was me.”
“Harry, what the hell is it? What are you talking about?”
“The other night I was at that overlook on Mulholland. I was watching Broussard’s house.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to get a measure of him, I guess. I thought maybe I’d get a look at him or something.”
“Okay. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. But the lights were on and I could see into the house. I had my binoculars. I saw a woman in the kitchen. She was emptying the dishwasher. And she had brown hair, not blond. I didn’t . . . I didn’t remember that till back there at the store.”
“I don’t—who was it?”
“It was the maid. Our caller is the maid, not the wife, and now Broussard knows. His wife just called him.”
Soto didn’t respond at first as she followed the trail and came to the end with the same conclusion as Bosch.
“Shit,” she said.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Hold on and check to the right up here.”
He hit the siren as they approached a red light at the intersection with Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Bosch looked left and Soto looked right.
“Clear!” she yelled.
Bosch never looked, trusting his partner. He saw the left was clear and blew through the intersection unscathed.
“Okay, you have your iPad?” he asked.
“Yes, in my bag,” Soto said. “What do you need?”
“Pull up a map that shows Broussard’s house.”
She pulled the tablet out of her bag.
“What am I looking for?”
“Up top on Mulholland the place is a fortress, a concrete vault. But down at the bottom there’s a pool.”
“Right, I saw it today.”
“There’s got to be access to it from down below. Find the pool man’s way in. What street is down there?”
“Got it.”
She went to work on it and Bosch concentrated on driving. Ventura Boulevard was a four-lane road. He had room to maneuver and keep his speed.
“Okay,” Soto called out. “Right on Vineland. That’ll take us up.”
Thirty seconds later Vineland came up. Bosch took the right and they were on a steep two-lane street through a residential neighborhood. Winding curves and curbside parking made it narrow and treacherous a
t speed and Bosch throttled back. Luckily, there were few other moving vehicles to contend with.
“Okay, what’s the next turn?” he asked.
“Wrightwood Drive, you go right,” Soto said. “Then left on Wrightwood Lane. That puts us right below the house. The access has to be there.”
Bosch made the first turn and then almost immediately came to the second.
“Here,” Soto said.
“Got it.”
They were now running parallel to and below Mulholland. Bosch leaned forward to look up through the windshield. The angle was bad.
“Look up there,” he instructed. “Do you see the house?”
Soto lowered her window and leaned out to look up.
“No, not—wait, yes, we’re coming up on it,” Soto said. “Right up here!”
There was a panicked urgency in her voice. She didn’t want to be wrong about the path she had put them on. Bosch pulled up to a large concrete passageway recessed into the slope between two residences. It was closed with an iron gate, behind which Bosch could see three city-issued trash containers against the right wall. Blue for recyclables, green for garden cuttings, and black for trash—the L.A. way. Beyond them the space retreated into darkness. The gate was locked with a chain. Anchored above it on the concrete wall was a camera housing that matched those Bosch had seen on Broussard’s house from up on Mulholland Drive.
“This is it,” he said. “The chain is padlocked on the inside. There’s got to be a back entrance to the house.”
“What do we do?” Soto asked.
“I can break that chain with the tire iron,” Bosch said.
“There’s a camera.”
“We’ve got to hope he’s not watching. Let’s go.”
After retrieving the tire iron from the trunk of the car, Bosch quickly moved to the gate and slipped the long tool into one of the chain’s links. He was about to start winding it to leverage pressure on the chain when he looked at Soto. This was new territory for her.
“I consider this exigent circumstances,” he said. “We have to go in.”
The Burning Room Page 32