He yelled it and the dog picked her head up off the floor.
“You know what?” Burrows said. “I don’t care anymore. Just take me to L.A. I want to see a lawyer.”
He started to stand up but Bosch was waiting for the move. He jumped up, reached across the table, and drove Burrows back down into his seat with one hand on his shoulder.
“Sit down. And don’t get up until I tell you to.”
Bosch heard the low rumble of the dog’s growl from the doorway.
“You’re violating my civil rights,” Burrows protested. “You can’t come in here to my home on my own property and tell me what to do.”
Bosch looked over at Soto and nodded toward the phone. Burrows had asked for a lawyer so the interview was technically over. She switched off the recording app.
Bosch turned back to Burrows.
“Funny how you guys always say the same thing,” he said. “You want nothing to do with this country and its laws and then all of a sudden you want us to play by the very rules you deny.”
“I want my lawyer.”
“You invited us into your home, Mr. Burrows. You had a choice and you invited us in. If you’re saying you want a lawyer, then we’ll stop all of this right now, take you to L.A., and book you.”
Burrows put his elbows on the table and drew his hands over his face.
“Or,” Bosch said, “you could just tell us about that robbery at EZBank.”
Burrows shook his head like he had no choice.
“Two guys,” he said. “They came in, shot up the place, and gave me the butt end of one of the guns. I got a cracked skull and a concussion and couldn’t really remember anything after that. But what I was told was they had me on the ground and they put the gun against my head to shoot unless someone opened the security door.”
“What happened?” Bosch said.
“Ana opened the door. She’d already pulled the silent alarm. She knew the police were coming, so she opened the door. Then the robbers came in and made them open the vault and the cash drawers.”
“Made who open the vault?”
“The manager of the place was back there with her. It was him.”
“Who was that?”
“Uh, his name was . . . I can’t remember. It was like a Russian name.”
“You mean Ukrainian?”
“Whatever.”
“Was it Maxim?”
“Yeah, that was it. We called him Max.”
“He was fucking Ana on the side, too, right?”
Again the surprise showed.
“No, that’s bullshit,” Burrows said. “That’s not what happened.”
“You sure?”
“I woulda known.”
“Really? You said you weren’t living with her. You weren’t there every night. You just told me.”
“But I woulda known.”
“How many days a week were you there?”
“Three or four times. It woulda been more but her roommate didn’t like me. But there was nobody else.”
“So what you’re saying is that after this robbery Ana Acevedo quit her job and quit you at the same time?”
“That’s what happened. She had PTS.”
“I get that about the job. But what about you?”
“She said I was a reminder of what happened at the store.”
“What store?”
“The place we worked. EZBank. We called it the store.”
“When was the next time you saw Ana after she quit?”
“How many times I gotta tell you? She came to the hospital to say good-bye. I never saw her again.”
“So she bagged you. How’d the police treat you after the robbery?”
“Yeah, that’s who you should be investigating. Those bastards, they tried to put the whole thing on me. They said I set it up. Like, yeah, part of the master plan was to have my skull cracked open like an egg.”
“They arrest you?”
“I was never charged. You know why? Because I had nothing to do with it. I had a fucking concussion and these guys were telling me while I was in the hospital bed that I set the whole thing up. What bullshit!”
Bosch didn’t respond. He was assessing things. He had checked all the boxes he’d come to check. They had Burrows, by his own words, solidly inside the Bonnie Brae and aware of the trash chute—he had taken out the trash. It was time to sharpen the blade, time to get on point with Burrows. He glanced back at Soto and she nodded slightly. The recording was back on. It’s legal viability would be questionable but Bosch wanted this part recorded just the same.
“Tell me about the fire,” he said.
Burrows looked confused.
“What fire?” he asked.
“At the Bonnie Brae.”
“That fire that same day? I don’t know anything about it. Ana didn’t live there anymore. Her roommate had kicked her out. That fire was set by the gangbangers who owned that street. Like the year before with the riots, these people burning down their own neighborhoods, killing their own children. How fucked is that? I mean, this was our whole point.”
In his peripheral vision Bosch saw Soto come off her relaxed lean against the counter. He turned and gave her another look that pushed her back down. Now was not the time to air personal emotions and clash with the racist. They had a purpose here, and the more they kept Burrows talking, the closer they got to it.
“Explain that,” he said to Burrows. “Who are you talking about? What was the point?”
“The WAVE, man,” Burrows responded. “We saw this coming. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Before the race war?”
“You could call it that. But it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s coming.”
“Which one of the Pollard brothers made the firebomb?”
“What firebomb?”
“The one they dropped down the trash chute at the Bonnie Brae.”
Burrows seemed stunned speechless.
“Before they robbed the EZBank,” Bosch said.
“You’re crazy,” Burrows said. “We were completely nonviolent. We never hurt anyone. You can’t pin that on us. In fact, I didn’t even know those guys back then. That came after.”
Bosch leaned across the table.
“Bullshit. You don’t just say, ‘I think I’ll sign up for a race war now.’ You knew them and you all knew what you wanted. And you needed money to build your little clubhouse out in Castaic.”
“No! You’re crazy and that’s it, I’m done talking. Either take me in and book me or get the hell out of my house and off my property. Now!”
Bosch stood up and signaled Burrows to get up.
“Then, stand up.”
“Why? What are you doing?”
“We’re going to L.A.”
“Oh, come on, you’re not going to do this, are you?”
“Stand up, please.”
“We talked! I helped! What do you want? I don’t know anything about Ana Acevedo! I had nothing to do with that fire and you have zero evidence that I did. I met the Pollards a year later in Castaic.”
Bosch walked around the table, coming toward Burrows. Soto joined him and the physical message was clear.
“Okay, okay,” Burrows said, raising his hands. “I get it, I get it. You people don’t give a shit about the truth. You just need a scapegoat and I’m it. I’m always the easy fucking target.”
“That’s right,” Bosch said. “You’ve got it.”
Burrows stood and Soto moved in behind him to cuff his wrists.
Bosch walked him out of the house while Soto carried the weapons. They closed the door with the dog inside and moved down the driveway. At the truck, Bosch opened the door and used the remote to open the gate.
Burrows was placed in the back of the Ford and the guns went onto the blanket in the trunk. Bosch then waved Soto back toward the pickup so they could talk without Burrows’s being able to hear.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“I think he’s a
racist dirtbag like we knew all along,” she said. “What do you think?”
“He’s that, for sure. But I don’t think he’s our inside man.”
“Why? He puts himself in the Bonnie Brae. He admits he knew where the trash chute was. He had access. He had motive. And he couldn’t have cared less about who might’ve been hurt in that place.”
Bosch paused for a long moment and looked over her head at the Ford. It appeared that Burrows had his head down. Bosch could not see him.
“It’s not so much what I heard,” he finally said. “It’s what I saw. The reads I got. The tells. He didn’t know about Boiko and Ana. He didn’t know a lot.”
“And what, you believe him?”
“Lucy, I’ve been reading people for almost forty years. You reach a point where you trust your instincts. My read on this one is that he’s not the guy.”
She folded her arms tightly across her chest.
“I wish I was that good at reading people. Have you ever been wrong?”
“Sure, I’ve been wrong. Nobody bats a thousand. But that doesn’t change what I’m feeling here right now.”
“Then, what do you want to do, just kick him loose? He was wearing a gun on his hip like he’s some kind of cowboy.”
“No, I don’t want to kick him loose. I want to turn him over to the San Berdoo sheriff on the gun charges and let them sort that out. Then we get out of here and go on to the next one.”
“Boiko.”
“Yeah. And then Ana. We still need to find her. And look, I’m not saying we close the book on Burrows. We’ve still got our nets in the water. Maybe we come up with something that changes how we look at him. But for now . . .”
He looked back at the Ford again. Burrows had now straightened up and Bosch could see him staring out through the windshield at them.
“You want me to call the sheriff?”
“Yeah, go ahead. Tell them they’ll probably want to bring animal control out too.”
Soto nodded glumly.
“You got it, Harry.”
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.
The Burning Room Page 29
