The Burning Room

  Also by Michael Connelly

  Fiction

  The Black Echo

  The Black Ice

  The Concrete Blonde

  The Last Coyote

  The Poet

  Truck Music

  Blood Work

  Angels Flight

  Void Moon

  A Darkness More Than Night

  City of Bones

  Chasing the Dime

  Lost Light

  The Narrows

  The Closers

  The Lincoln Lawyer

  Echo Park

  The Overlook

  The Brass Verdict

  The Scarecrow

  Nine Dragons

  The Reversal

  The Fifth Witness

  The Drop

  The Black Box

  The Gods of Guilt

  Non-fiction

  Crime Beat

  Ebooks

  Suicide Run

  Angle of Investigation

  Mulholland Dive

  The Safe Man

  Switchblade

  First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2014

  Copyright © Hieronymus Inc. 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 145 8

  eISBN 978 1 74343 896 1

  For Detective Rick Jackson, With thanks for your service to the City of Angels, And hope that the second retirement sticks.

  Hit ’em straight!

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  It seemed to Bosch to be a form of torture heaped upon torture. Corazon was hunched over the steel table, her bloody and gloved hands deep inside the gutted torso, working with forceps and a long-bladed instrument she called the “butter knife.” Corazon was not tall and she stood on her tiptoes to be able to reach down and in with her tools. She braced her hip against the side of the autopsy table to gain leverage.

  What bothered Bosch about the grisly tableau was that the body had already been so violated for so long. Both legs gone, one arm taken at the shoulder, the surgical scars old but somehow raw and red. The man’s mouth was open in a silent scream. His eyes were directed upward as if beseeching his God for mercy. Deep down Bosch knew that the dead were the dead and they no longer suffered the cruelties of life, but even so he felt like saying, Enough is enough. Asking, When does it stop? Shouldn’t death be the relief from the tortures of life?

  But he didn’t say anything. He stood mute and just watched as he had hundreds of times before. More important than his outrage and the desire to speak out against the continuing atrocity inflicted on Orlando Merced was Bosch’s need for the bullet Corazon was trying to pry loose from the dead man’s spine.

  Corazon dropped back on her heels to rest. She blew out her breath and temporarily fogged her spatter shield. She glanced at Bosch through the steamed plastic.

  “Almost there,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what, they were right not to try to take it out back then. They would have had to saw entirely through T-twelve.”

  Bosch just nodded, knowing she was referring to one of the vertebrae.

  She turned to the table, where her instruments were spread out.

  “I need something else . . . ,” she said.

  She put the butter knife in a stainless-steel sink, where a running faucet kept the water level to the overflow drain. She then moved her hand to the left of the sink and across the display of sterilized tools until she chose a long, slender pick. She went back to work with her hands in the hollow of the victim’s torso. All the organs and intestines had been removed, weighed, and bagged, leaving just the husk formed by the upturned ribs. She went up on her toes again and used her upper-body strength and the steel pick to finally pop the bullet loose from the spinal column. Bosch heard it rattle inside the rib cage.

  “Got it!”

  She pulled her arms out of the hollow, put down the pick, and sprayed the forceps with the hose attached to the table. She then held the instrument up to examine her find. She tapped the floor button for the recorder with her foot and went on the record.

  “A projectile was removed from the anterior T-twelve vertebra. It is in damaged condition with severe flattening. I will photograph it and mark it with my initials before turning it over to Detective Hieronymus Bosch with the Open-Unsolved Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  She tapped the recorder button with her foot again and they were off the record. She smiled at him through her plastic screen.

  “Sorry, Harry, you know me, a stickler for formalities.”

  “I didn’t think you’d even remember.”

  He and Corazon had once had a brief romance but that was a long time ago and very few people knew his real full name.

  “Of course I would,” she said in mock protest.

  There was almost an aura of humility about Teresa Corazon that had not been there in the past. She had been a climber and had eventually gotten what she wanted—the chief medical examiner’s post and all of its trappings, including a reality television show. But when one reaches the top of a public agency, one becomes a politician, and politicians fall out of favor. Teresa eventually fell hard and now she was back where she started, a deputy coroner with a caseload like anyone else’s in the office. At least they had let her keep her private autopsy suite. For now.

  She took the bullet over to the counter, where she photographed it and then marked it with an indelible black pen. Bosch was ready with a small plastic evidence bag and she dropped it in. He then marked the bag with both of their initials, a chain-of-custody routine. He studied the misshaped projectile through the plastic. Despite the damage, he believed it was a .308-caliber bullet, which would mean it had been fired
by a rifle. If so, that would be a significant new piece of information in the case.

  “Will you stay for the rest, or was that all you wanted?”

  She asked it as if there were something else going on between them. He held up the evidence bag.

  “I think I should probably get this going. We’ve got a lot of eyes on this case.”

  “Right. Well, then, I’ll just finish up by myself. What happened to your partner anyway? Wasn’t she here with you in the hall?”

  “She had to make a call.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe she wanted us to have some alone time. Did you tell her about us?”

  She smiled and batted her eyelashes and Bosch looked away awkwardly.

  “No, Teresa. You know I don’t talk about stuff like that.”

  She nodded.

  “You never did. You’re a man who keeps his secrets.”

  He looked back at her.

  “I try,” he said. “Besides, that was a long time ago.”

  “And the flame’s gone out, hasn’t it?”

  He pushed things back on subject.

  “On the cause. You’re not seeing anything different from what the hospital is reporting, right?”

  Corazon shook her head, able to move back as well.

  “No, nothing different here. Sepsis. Blood poisoning, to use the more common phrase. Put that in your press release.”

  “And you have no trouble linking this back to the shooting? You could testify to that?”

  She was nodding before Bosch was finished speaking.

  “Mr. Merced died because of blood poisoning, but I am listing cause of death as homicide. This was a ten-year murder, Harry, and I will gladly testify to that. I hope that bullet helps you find the killer.”

  Bosch nodded and closed his hand around the plastic bag containing the bullet.

  “I hope so too,” he said.

  2

  Bosch took the elevator up to the ground floor. In the past few years the county had spent thirty million dollars renovating the coroner’s office but the elevators moved just as slowly as ever. He found Lucia Soto on the back loading dock, leaning against an empty gurney and looking at her phone. She was short, well-proportioned, and 110 pounds at the most. She wore the kind of stylish suit that was in vogue with female detectives. It let her keep a gun on her hip instead of in a purse. It said power and authority in a way a dress could never say it. This one was dark brown, and she wore it with a cream blouse. It went well with her smooth brown skin.

  She glanced up as Bosch approached and then stood up hurriedly like a kid who’d been caught doing something wrong.

  “Got it,” Bosch said.

  He held up the evidence bag containing the bullet. Soto took it and studied the bullet through the plastic for a moment. A couple of body movers came up behind her and pulled the empty gurney toward the door of what was known as the Big Crypt. It was a new addition to the complex, a refrigerated space the size of a Mayfair Market where all of the bodies that came in were staged before being scheduled for autopsy.

  “It’s big,” Soto said.

  Bosch nodded.

  “And long,” Bosch said. “I’m thinking we’re looking for a rifle.”

  “It looks like it’s in pretty bad shape,” Soto said. “Mushroomed.”

  She handed the bag back and Bosch put it in his coat pocket.

  “There’s enough there for a comparison, I think,” he said. “Enough for us to get lucky.”

  The men behind Soto opened the door of the Big Crypt to wheel the gurney in. Cold air carrying a disagreeable chemical scent blasted across the loading dock. Soto turned in time to see a glimpse of the giant refrigerated room. Row after row of bodies stacked four high on a stainless-steel scaffolding system. The dead were wrapped in opaque plastic sheeting, their feet exposed, toe tags flapping in the breeze from the refrigeration vents.

  Soto quickly turned away, her face turning white.

  “You okay?” Bosch asked.

  “Yes, fine,” she said. “That just grosses me out.”

  “It’s actually a big improvement. The bodies used to be lined up in the hallways. Sometimes stacked on top of one another after a busy weekend. It got pretty ripe around here.”

  She held a hand up to stop him from further description.

  “Please, are we done?”

  “We’re done.”

  He started moving and Soto followed, falling in a step behind him. She tended to walk behind Bosch and he didn’t know if it was some sort of deferential thing to his age and rank or something else, like a confidence issue. He headed to the steps at the end of the dock. It was a shortcut to the visitor parking lot.

  “Where do we go?” she asked.

  “We get the slug over to firearms,” Bosch said. “Speaking of getting lucky—it’s walk-in Wednesday. Then we go pick up the file and evidence at Hollenbeck. We take it from there.”

  “Okay.”

  They went down the steps and started crossing the employee parking lot. The visitor lot was on the side of the building.

  “Did you make your call?” Bosch asked.

  “What?” Soto asked, confused.

  “You said you had to make a call.”

  “Oh, yes, I did. Sorry about that.”

  “No problem. You get what you need?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  Bosch was guessing that there had been no call. He suspected that Soto wanted to skip out on the autopsy because she had never seen a human body hollowed out before. Soto was new not only to the Open-Unsolved Unit but to homicide work as well. This was the third case she had worked with Bosch and the only one with a death fresh enough for an autopsy. Soto probably hadn’t been counting on live autopsies when she signed up to work cold cases. The visuals and the odors were usually the most difficult things to get used to in homicide work. Cold cases usually eliminated both.

  In recent years the crime rate in Los Angeles had decreased markedly across the board, including and most dramatically the number of homicides. This had spurred a shift within the LAPD’s investigative priority and practice. With fewer active murder cases, the Department increased its emphasis on clearing cold cases. With more than ten thousand unsolved murders on the books in the past fifty years, there was plenty of work to go around. The Open-Unsolved Unit had nearly tripled in size over the course of the previous year and now had its own command staff, including a captain and two lieutenants. Many seasoned detectives were brought in from Homicide Special and other elite units within the Robbery-Homicide Division. Also, a class of young detectives with little if any investigative experience was brought in. The philosophy handed down from the tenth-floor OCP—Office of the Chief of Police—was that it was a new world out there, with new technologies and new ways to look at things. While nothing beats investigative know-how, there is nothing wrong with combining it with new viewpoints and different life experiences.

  These new detectives—the “Mod Squad,” as they were derisively called by some—got the choice assignment to the Open-Unsolved Unit for a variety of reasons ranging from political connections to particular acumen and skills to rewards for heroism in the line of duty. One of the new detectives had worked in IT for a hospital chain before becoming a cop and was instrumental in solving the murder of a patient through a computerized prescription delivery system. Another had studied chemistry as a Rhodes Scholar. There was even a detective who was formerly an investigator with the Haitian National Police.

  Soto was only twenty-eight years old and had been on the force fewer than five years. She was a “slick sleeve”—not a stripe of rank on her uniform—and made the jump to detective by being a twofer. She was Mexican-American and spoke both English and Spanish fluently. She also punched a more traditional ticket to the detective ranks when she became an overnight media sensation after a deadly shoot-out with armed robbers at a liquor store in Pico-Union. She and her partner engaged four gunmen. Her partner was fatally shot but Soto took down two of th
e robbers and held the second pair pinned in an alley until SWAT arrived and finished the capture. The gunmen were members of 13th Street, one of the most violent gangs operating in the city, and Soto’s heroics were splashed across newspapers, websites, and television screens. Police chief Gregory Malins later awarded her the Department’s Medal of Valor. Her partner received the award as well, posthumously.

  Captain George Crowder, the new commander of the Open-Unsolved Unit, decided the best way to handle the influx of new blood into the unit was to split up all the existing partnerships and pair every detective who had OU experience with a new detective who had none. Bosch was the oldest man in the unit and had the most years on the job. As such he was paired with the youngest—Soto.

  “Harry, you’re the old pro,” Crowder had explained. “I want you watching over the rookie.”

  While Bosch didn’t particularly care to be reminded of his age and standing, he was nonetheless happy with the assignment. He was entering what would be his last year with the Department, as the clock was ticking on his DROP contract. To him, every day he had left on the job was golden. The hours were like diamonds—as valuable as anything on earth. He thought that it might be a good way to finish things, training an inexperienced detective and passing on whatever it was he had to pass on. When Crowder told him his new partner would be Lucia Soto, Bosch was pleased. Like everybody else in the Department, he had heard of Soto’s exploits in the shoot-out. Bosch knew what it was like to kill someone in the line of duty, as well as to lose a partner. He understood the mixture of grief and guilt that would afflict Soto. He thought that he and Soto could work well together and that he might train her to be a solid investigator.

  There was also a nice bonus for Bosch in being teamed with Soto. Because she was a female, he would not have to share a hotel room when on the road on a case. They would get their own rooms. This was a big thing. The travel component to a job on the cold case squad was high. Oftentimes those who think they have gotten away with murder leave town, hoping that by putting physical distance between themselves and their crimes, they are also outdistancing the reach of the police. Now Bosch looked forward to finishing his time in the Department without having to share a bathroom or put up with the snoring or other emissions from a partner in a cramped double at a Holiday Inn.