The Burning Room

9

Bosch stayed late at the office, rereading the reports and summaries in the murder book and writing down any new observations or questions that came to him. His daughter was always busy on Wednesday nights with the Police Explorer unit she had joined at Hollywood Station. It was a group open to high school kids who were considering careers in law enforcement. They got a firsthand look at police work and often took part in ride-alongs and other operations. It was usually a full evening of activities, so there was no reason for him to go home, even though the day had started before dawn with the phone call from Captain Crowder.

The football field — size squad room had cleared out for the day and Bosch enjoyed the complete silence of the space and the darkness beyond the windows. He intermittently got up from his cubicle and walked the length of the room, wandering among the other cubicles and looking at the way other detectives set up and decorated their desks. He noticed that in several of the pods the detectives had gotten rid of the Department-issued, government-grade desk chairs and replaced them with high-end models with adjustable arms and lumbar-support systems. Of course, this being the LAPD, the owners of these chairs had secured them to their desks with bicycle locks when they left for the day.

Bosch thought it was all pretty sad. Not because personal property wasn’t safe in the Police Administration Building, but because the Department was more and more becoming a deskbound institution. Keyboards and cell phones were the main tools of the modern investigator. Detectives sat in twelve-hundred-dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was “Get off your ass and go knock on doors.” Bosch’s tour of the squad room left him feeling melancholy, like maybe it was the right time for him to be winding down his career.

He worked till eight and then packed everything into his briefcase, left the building, and walked down Main Street to the Nickel Diner. He sat at a table by himself and ordered the flat iron steak and a bottle of Newcastle. He was just getting used to eating alone again. His relationship with Hannah Stone had ended earlier in the year and that meant a lot of evenings by himself. He was about to pull some of his work materials out of his briefcase but then decided to give the work a rest while he ate. He passed the time talking with Monica, the owner, and she topped off his meal with a maple-glazed-bacon doughnut on the house. It put a new charge in his bloodstream and he decided it was too early to go home to his empty house.

On the way back to the PAB he stopped by the Blue Whale to see who was playing and who was coming later in the month, and he was pleasantly surprised to see Grace Kelly on the stage with a four-piece band. Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang. Bosch had some of her music on his phone and at times thought she was channeling the late, great Frank Morgan, one of his favorite sax men. But he had never seen her perform live, so he paid the cover, ordered another beer, and sat at the back of the room, his briefcase on the floor between his feet.

He enjoyed the set, particularly the interplay between Grace and her rhythm section. But she closed with a solo and it stabbed deeply into Bosch’s heart. The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was.

Bosch left after the first set to go back to the PAB. Along the two-block walk he texted his daughter to see if she was still out with the Explorers. She texted back right away saying she was already at home and about to go to sleep, tired from the day of school followed by the Explorers gig. Bosch checked his watch and realized time had moved swiftly. It was almost eleven. He then called Maddie to say good night and tell her he would work late since she was already going to bed.

“You’ll be all right if I don’t get home until later?”

“Of course, Dad. Are you working?”

“Yeah, I’m heading back to the PAB from eating. Just need to go over some stuff.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re drinking.”

“I had a beer at dinner. I’m fine. I’ll only be a couple more hours.”

“Be safe.”

“I will. What did they have you kids doing tonight?”

“We were at a DUI roadblock. Mostly just observing. There was one guy. He wasn’t drunk but he was completely naked. It was gross.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to Hollyweird Division. I hope you’re not scarred for life by that.”

“I’ll get over it. They wrapped him in a blanket and booked him.”

“Good. Now go to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning before school.”

Bosch disconnected and wondered once again if his daughter really wanted to be a cop or if she was going through the motions to please him in some way. He thought maybe he should talk to Dr. Hinojos about it. Maddie spent an hour with her every month, seeing the police psychologist in an unofficial capacity. Hinojos did it as a favor, having volunteered her time since Maddie had come to live with Bosch following her mother’s death.

When he got back to the squad room, it was still deserted, but his eyes immediately stopped at his partner’s desk. Soto’s handbag was sitting on her chair. She usually dropped it there in the morning when she came in and went to get coffee. She’d take out just the money she needed and leave the purse on her chair. But it was now 11 p.m. and there was the purse. He wondered at first if she had forgotten it when she left earlier but that seemed impossible because she kept her keys and, when off duty, her weapon in the large leather bag.

He did a 360 and scanned the squad room. There was no sign of her. But now he thought he had picked up the slight whiff of coffee. Soto was there. Somewhere.

He pulled his phone and shot her a text asking where she was. Her answer made him even more confused.

Home. About to hit the hay. Why?

Now Bosch didn’t know what to do. He texted back.

Nothing. Just wondering.

When he sent the second text, he thought he heard a slight bell tone from somewhere close by. Bosch always kept his text notification on vibration alert, since most of his messages came from his daughter and he didn’t want a dinging text to interrupt something at work. But Soto was different. She had hers set to an audible tone, and Bosch was sure he had just heard it. He typed out another text.

See you tomorrow.

He hit send and this time stood perfectly still and listened. Almost immediately he heard the bell again. He tracked it to the open door of the case closet on the other side of the squad room.

The case closet was actually a huge storage room where all the murder books and evidence boxes from case files under consideration by the Open-Unsolved Unit were stored. The space was big but the cases were so many that the year before, the Department had installed a rolling shelving system like the one often found in college library stacks and big law firms in which the rows of shelves are on tracks and can be collapsed. It allowed for more storage in a confined space. When a detective needed to get to a specific murder book, he or she had to crank open the row where that book resided. Each pairing of detectives in the OU had both sides of an entire row for their cases.

Bosch quietly stepped to the open door of the case closet and looked in. The smell of coffee was stronger now. He saw that the row that Soto and he shared for their cases was cranked closed. But ten feet farther down the bank of floor-to-ceiling shelves, the row belonging to another pair of detectives had been cranked open.

Bosch went into the room and quietly moved down to the open row. He hesitated when he got to the opening, then edged forward and looked around the corner into the three-foot-wide aisle between shelves.

No one was there.

Confused, Bosch looked toward the end of the room. Around the last set of shelves was an open alcove. There was a copy machine there. He now moved toward the alcove and was a few feet away from the corner when he heard the copy machine go into motion.

The machine gave him good sound cover. He stepped forward quickly and looked into the alcove. Lucia Soto was standing at the copier, her back to Bosch. On the work counter to her right was an open murder book, its binder rings spread apart. Next to the binder was a stack of three more murder books. And next to them was a steaming cup of coffee from LA Café, the nearby twenty-four-hour place.

Bosch watched silently as Soto went about copying the records and reports from the murder book. The copy tray was filling with paper.

Bosch didn’t know what to do. He had no idea why, but she was obviously copying the records of a murder case that was not assigned to them. He backed up and checked the opening in the shelves. Each team in the unit was assigned specific years for which they were responsible. Each detective team put their business cards in slots on either side of their row. He saw that the open row belonged to Whittaker and Dubose. Bosch couldn’t remember offhand which years Whittaker and Dubose were assigned to but the four murder books Soto had with her at the copy machine looked old. The blue vinyl of the binders was cracked and faded, the pages inside yellowed.

Bosch looked toward the alcove and thought about leaving as quietly as he had come in, but a rush of thoughts came to him and gave him pause. First, he thought how foolish Soto was being by copying the files. Every detective in the squad had a copier code that had to be tapped into the machine’s keyboard in order for it to function. This meant there would be a trail that would tell how much Soto copied and when. The second idea that pushed through to Bosch was the common knowledge that in recent years entrance standards for the Department had been lowered. People with minor drug busts and gang affiliations had gotten in. It was believed by some that organized crime and even terrorist organizations had infiltrated the force. Bosch wondered if Soto could be working for someone outside the Department, acting as a double agent: cold case detective by day and case intel gatherer by night.

He thought that he was probably letting his imagination get the best of him, but she had after all just lied to him in her texts. What was it she didn’t want him to know about?

Bosch had never been one to quietly back away from a problem. All at once he decided what to do and went back to the alcove. Lucia was removing a thick stack of copies from the machine. She didn’t notice him, because she was completely absorbed in her efforts.

“You get what you needed there?”

Soto nearly jumped out of her shoes. As it was, she had to stifle a scream when she whipped around to see Bosch. It took her a moment to compose herself and then respond.

“Harry! You almost scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

“I think that’s the question you need to answer, Lucia.”

She made some kind of motion with her hands, as if trying to catch her breath after the scare he put on her. It gave her time to come up with an answer.

“I’m just looking at some old cases, that’s all.”

“Really? Cases that don’t belong to you? To us?”

“I’m trying to learn homicide work, Harry. I look at cases. Sometimes I copy them so I can take them home. I know that’s against policy but… I didn’t think it was a big deal. I couldn’t sleep, so I came in to make some copies.”

The story and her delivery of it were almost embarrassing in their phoniness. Bosch moved into the alcove and over to the work counter. He flipped over the contents of the binder from which she had been copying documents. He read the front page, which was always the initial report and summary of the case. He immediately recognized it.

“So you’re just randomly pulling and looking at cases?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

Bosch looked at the spines on the other binders and quickly realized that all four books were from the same case. It was the 1993 Bonnie Brae apartment fire case. Nine people — most of them children — perished in an apartment in the Westlake area. The victims had been in an unlicensed day-care center in the low-income complex’s basement and had become trapped by flames and smoke. Half the children crammed into the small space died of smoke inhalation. The fire was labeled arson but no arrests were ever made, despite a task force composed of fire department arson experts and LAPD investigators.

Bosch shoved the loose pages she had been copying into a binder and then stacked all four of them before picking them up. He turned and walked past Soto.

“Bring your coffee,” he said.

He carried the binders out to their cubicle and put them down on his desk. He pointed Soto to her desk and told her to sit down. She moved her purse off the chair and sat.

Bosch stayed standing, pacing a short track behind her and talking to her back. She sat with her head bowed, eyes down like a suspect who knows the charges are coming.

“I’m only going to have this discussion with you one time,” he began. “If you lie to me and I find out, then we are finished as partners and I’ll see to it you are finished as a cop — Medal of Valor or not.”

He paused and looked at the back of her neck. He knew she could feel it. She nodded.

“The Bonnie Brae fire,” he said. “I didn’t work it, but I was here and I remember. Nine deaths, never cleared. The rumor at the time was that Pico-Union La Raza started the fire because the apartment manager wouldn’t let them deal in the building. That’s all I know. Like I said, it wasn’t my case, but it was a big case and rumors and stories get around.”

He stopped his pacing, grabbed the back of her chair, and turned her to face him.

“Now you come along after becoming a hero for taking down a couple of Thirteenth Street shooters, and it so happens that the Thirteenth and Pico-Union street gangs are sworn enemies for all of eternity.”

Bosch pointed to his temple.

“So now I find you copying files on Bonnie Brae and I think to myself, Didn’t this girl tell me she was born in Westlake before moving out to the Valley? And I gotta ask myself, Who is she pulling files for?”

“It’s nothing like that, Harry. I—”

“Let me just finish here. You don’t need to talk just yet.”

He turned away from her and looked down at the binders stacked on his desk. He was full of steam now. He turned back.

“It’s well known in this Department that they let their guard drop when they had to fatten the ranks, and infiltrators got in. People who are something else first and cops second. But I’ll tell you right now, this isn’t how I’m going to go out. You think I’m some old fool you can pull shit on right under my nose and I won’t know it? I’ve thought there was something off about you from the start. You don’t want to be a cop. You want to be something else.”

“No, you’re wrong.”

She started to stand up but Bosch put his hand on her shoulder and held her in her seat.

“No, I’m right. And you’re going to sit there and tell me what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for, or we’re going to be here till the sun comes up and people start coming in and asking what’s going on.”

She reached across her body with one hand and Bosch tensed. But her hand went to her left wrist. She unbuttoned her cuff and violently pulled the sleeve up her arm. She turned her arm to reveal the tattoo on the inside of her forearm. It was an RIP list with five names on a tombstone. Jose, Elsa, Marlena, Juanito, Carlos.

“I was in that basement when the fire started, okay?” she said. “These are my friends. They died.”

Bosch slowly stepped over to his desk and pulled out the chair so he could sit down. He looked at the binders for a moment and then back at his partner.

“You’re trying to solve this thing,” he said. “On your own.”

Soto nodded and pulled her sleeve back down.