The Burning Room

33

They waited almost an hour for a cruiser from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. It then took another half hour to explain the situation and transfer custody of Burrows to the reluctant deputy. By the time they got back on the freeway, most of the afternoon was shot and Bosch felt the edginess that comes with having wasted time on a dead end. Soto, on the other hand, was silent. She kept her eyes on the screen of her tablet and said nothing.

“You hungry?” Bosch asked. “We can stop somewhere.”

“No, not after that,” Soto said. “Let’s just go talk to Boiko.”

“Okay, where to? North Hollywood?”

“Yes, but not his house. He’ll likely be at work. He’s now general manager of EZBank, and they’re centrally headquartered in North Hollywood at Lankershim and Oxnard.”

“Got it.”

The headquarters for the chain of check-cashing stores turned out to be an unmarked building in a block of small industrial businesses on Oxnard. It took almost two hours to get there, and once again Bosch had to pull the car up to a gate and show his badge to a camera.

This time the gate was opened without issue and Bosch pulled in and parked. Before getting out of the car, he instructed Soto to turn on her phone’s recording application and make sure that everything was recorded if they got the chance to talk with Boiko. The two detectives then got out and entered through a door marked only with the word Entrance, stepping into the operational center of the business, which essentially sold cash through an array of distribution centers. There was a small waiting room with generic landscapes on the walls, a receptionist seated behind a desk, and a uniformed security man standing next to a door that Bosch noted had no handle or knob.

“We’re here to see Maxim Boiko,” Bosch said.

The receptionist looked down at a calendar book on her desk and frowned.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

Bosch detected a slight accent. Eastern European. He pulled out his badge again and showed it to her.

“This is my appointment,” he said. “Tell Max it’s about the robbery.”

She kept her frown as she picked up a phone and made a call. She then spoke briefly in a language Bosch assumed was Ukrainian. After she received instructions, she hung up and looked at the security guard.

“Take them back to Mr. Boiko’s office,” she said.

The guard turned and looked up at a camera lens mounted over the door. He nodded and there was an electronic snap and the door opened. He held it for Soto and Bosch and they moved into a mantrap where they waited for the first door to close before the next one was opened. From there, the guard led them down a hallway past several closed doors until they reached the end of the hall and an office that contained two side-by-side desks facing a wall of video screens depicting the interiors of check-cashing stores as well as the operations inside the headquarters. Bosch noted that one of the screens was tuned to CNN International. Above the bank of monitors was a red-and-white poster that said “HANDS OFF UKRAINE!” and a collage of photos that showed street fighting between Russian troops and masked Ukrainian insurgents. Bosch saw one photo of a man using a slingshot to fire a projectile toward heavily armed troops.

One desk was empty and behind the other sat a man of about fifty with thinning, jet-black hair that was waxed back over his skull. He nodded at the security guard, a signal that he was no longer needed.

“Maxim Boiko?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, this is me,” the man said. “Are you here about Van Nuys or Whittier?”

Boiko still had a heavy accent despite his decades in Los Angeles. Bosch assumed Van Nuys and Whittier were the locations of the most recent robberies of EZBank stores. On the drive down from the desert Soto had shared some of her research on Boiko and the business. EZBank now had thirty-eight money stores in the tri-county area, more than two-thirds of them concentrated in the Los Angeles urban sprawl.

“Neither,” Bosch said. “We want to talk about Westlake. Nineteen ninety-three. You remember?”

“Holy smokes,” Boiko said. “Yes, I remember. I was there. You have found the bastards who rob me?”

Bosch didn’t answer. In an exaggerated way, he looked around the small room as if looking for a place to sit down. There were no other chairs besides the two behind the desks and Boiko was in one of them.

“Is there a place we can sit down and talk?” Bosch asked.

“Yes,” Boiko said. “Of course. You follow me.”

Boiko led them out of the office and back down the hallway. They went through a door into a loading-dock area where Bosch saw three white-panel vans that advertised a twenty-four-hour plumbing service on the sides.

“We disguise our delivery vans,” Boiko said. “So nobody knows we coming with the cash, you see. And the plumber, he pay us too for free ads on vans.”

Bosch nodded. He thought it was a good idea. He never understood why armored trucks were so obvious, practically announcing here is the money wherever they went. He didn’t mention that if the plumber paid for the ads, then they weren’t free.

They crossed the dock and Boiko opened the door to another office, which contained a lunch table with four chairs.

“Please sit at table,” he said. “Would you like a coffee?”

Bosch and Soto declined. They sat down and Bosch formally introduced them. Bosch had decided to use more or less the same tack with Boiko as he had with Burrows: use Ana Acevedo as the tool for digging out information about the Bonnie Brae fire. But Boiko had a clean record and that gave Bosch less leverage. He had to use more finesse this time around. There was that one piece of intelligence Bosch had received from Gus Braley about Boiko’s being more concerned at the time of the robbery that his affair with his employee would be exposed than he was about the robbery itself. That gave Bosch an edge. It wasn’t a hammer but it was something.

“We are taking a look at the robbery in ’93 and hope you can help us,” he began.

“Of course,” Boiko replied. “We lost very much money. But twenty-one years? Why do you come now?”

“Because it came up in another investigation. Something current that I can’t tell you about.”

“Okay, I guess. But will I get the money?”

Bosch didn’t recall there being any sort of reward offered in the case.

“What money is that?” he asked.

“That was taken by the robbers,” Boiko said.

“Oh, well, like you just said, it has been twenty-one years. I would not count on there being any money. But you never know.”

“Okay.”

“You guys recovered the losses through insurance anyway, didn’t you?”

“Not all. We took the bath. We learn, though, on insurance. Never have more than what is insurance, you see? We never have that problem again.”

“Good to hear. And you, you’ve come far, too. You had a couple stores then, now you’re everywhere.”

“Yes, I am very successful with the company.”

“Congratulations. Your wife and children are very proud, I bet.”

“Wife, yes. No children. Too busy. Work, work, work.”

“Right. Well, we don’t want to keep you from it for too long. The reason we are here is that we’re looking for someone and we were told you might be able to help us.”

“Okay. Who is this?”

“Ana Acevedo.”

Boiko frowned and then made a very bad effort to look confused by the name.

“Who is this person?” he asked.

“You remember Ana,” Bosch said. “She worked in the store with you. She was there the day of the robbery. You opened the safe when the robbers put the gun to her head.”

Boiko nodded vigorously.

“Oh, Ana, sure, yes. I could not remember, being very long time. She’s not working here anymore. Not since then.”

“Right, we heard she quit.”

“Yes, quit. She said too much stress, things like that. She thought the robbers would come back again.”

“We were also told that she was your girlfriend, so we were hoping—”

“No, no, no, no. She’s not my girlfriend.”

Boiko put his hands up as if to ward off an attack.

“Well, maybe not now,” Bosch said. “But back then. You used to visit her at the Bonnie Brae apartments where she lived. You remember that.”

Boiko went back into his mouth-open, eyes-on-the-ceiling pose of amnesia.

“No, her boyfriend was the security man who guarded us,” he said. “They were together, yes.”

Bosch leaned across the table as if to speak confidentially man to man. He lowered his voice.

“Look, Maxim, it’s in the file,” he said. “You and Ana. That’s why you opened the safe.”

“No, please,” Boiko responded. “Take out of the file. This is not a true thing. I am married man. My wife I love.”

He signaled toward the door as if his wife were standing on the other side of it. It made Bosch wonder if the woman who had received them and spoke in another language on the phone was his wife.

“Look, Max,” Bosch said. “We’re not here to embarrass you or cause you any problems. So calm down a beat. But we do have the file and there are witnesses in there who say you visited Ana at the Bonnie Brae on a regular basis and you even admitted this to Detective Braley way back then.”

“Okay,” Boiko said, his voice a whisper. “Back then, but not now.”

“Okay, back then,” Bosch said, making the concession. “That wasn’t so hard. It was a long time ago so, so what? It happens. You said you knew about the other guy, the security guard?”

Boiko shook his head as he realized that his admitting to the affair now opened a door to what might be a cascade of questions.

“I did not know and then I did,” he said. “And so I stopped.”

“You stopped going to the Bonnie Brae to see Ana?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, this is true.”

“Why didn’t you tell her to stop seeing the security guard? I mean, you were the boss at the store, right? Why were you the one who stopped?”

“No, I had my wife, you see. I wanted very much to stop. She — Ana — had started the whole thing and it was very big mistake for me.”

“You mean she came on to you first?”

“Yes, exactly as you say.”

Bosch nodded like he completely understood how Max had been taken advantage of.

“Okay, how often were you at her apartment before that?”

“Not too many.”

“Where is Ana Acevedo right now, Maxim?”

Boiko held his hands out in an almost pleading manner.

“This I don’t know. I tell you. Not since her quitting time.”

“You haven’t seen her since then? We have witnesses who—”

“No! That is a lie. What witness? This is security guard tell this? Burrow?”

Bosch thought it was curious that Boiko could still remember the partial name of the security guard he worked with twenty-one years before.

“I can’t tell you who the witness is,” Bosch said. “But you’re saying you haven’t seen her since back then, correct?”

“This is correct,” Boiko said.

“What about talking to her on the phone? Any contact with her at all since then?”

“Only for her taxes.”

“What do you mean, for taxes?”

“When she wanted to file for IRS refund, she had new address and ask me to send to her the taxes.”

“You mean like a W-2 or a 1099 form?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“So she had moved away after the robbery and wanted you to have her new mailing address?”

“This is what happened, yes.”

Bosch tried to keep a calm tone in his voice. But it was difficult. Boiko’s answer gave him renewed hope of finding Ana Acevedo.

“You have employee records here, right?” he asked.

“Of course,” Boiko said.

“Okay, is there still a file on Ana Acevedo? A file with that address in it?”

“But it is twenty years ago.”

“I know, but she was an employee and there might still be a file.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Where? Are the files in this building?”

“Yes. I could check if you—”

“Yes, I want you to check. Right now I want you to check. We can wait.”

Boiko got up and left the room. Bosch looked at his watch. It was almost five. He had a feeling that these last few minutes were going to lead to something that would salvage the whole day.

“What are you thinking?” he asked Soto.

She pursed her lips for a moment and considered her response before giving it.

“Probably the same thing you’re thinking,” she finally said. “Both these guys today said Ana pursued them. Seems a little out of the ordinary. Like she was a nympho or she maybe had a plan.”

Bosch pointed a finger at her. Exactly what he had been thinking.

“Couple that with her disappearance and what do you get?” he asked. “And I’m not talking about her just leaving town. I mean, she disappeared.”

“You get somebody who moves to the top of the list,” Soto said.

Bosch nodded toward the door.

“When he comes back we have to ask him about that day,” he said. “About the suspects and the identification of them as being white. If that still holds up we have to look into her life and find the intersections. The nexus, as you call it.”

Before Soto responded, the door opened and Boiko returned. He was holding a sheet of paper.

“I have an address for you,” he proudly announced.

He put the sheet of paper down on the table between Bosch and Soto and then returned to his seat. Bosch leaned over the table to look at the paper. It was a photocopy of an Internal Revenue Service W-2 form for 1993 earnings and deductions. It was made out in the name of Ana Maria Acevedo and carried an address in Calexico, California, on it.

“Calexico?” Soto asked. “What’s in Calexico?”

“She moved there,” Boiko said, helpfully stating the obvious.

Soto pulled her bag up from the floor and dug out her digital tablet. Bosch looked at Boiko.

“Do you remember her mentioning Calexico?” he asked.

“No, I don’t remember,” Boiko said.

“What about family? Did she have family there?”

“No, she was born here. She told me. And she had family in Mexico.”

“Do you remember where in Mexico?”

“No, I don’t think—”

“Harry,” Soto interrupted. “Take a look.”

She passed the tablet to him and he looked at the screen. Soto had plugged the address from the W-2 into Google Street View. Bosch was looking at a photo of the street address to which the IRS form had been sent in early 1994. It was a large building of Spanish Mission — style that looked like a school. But closer reading of a sign posted near the tiled walk out front told Bosch otherwise.

The facts tumbled together for Bosch. The EZBank robbery and Bonnie Brae fire occurred in October 1993. By the time Ana Acevedo filed a 1993 tax return six months later, she was apparently living in a convent in a town on the California-Mexico border.

It was becoming obvious to Bosch why she had gone there. Redemption, salvation, and refuge were the first things that came to mind.