The Burning Room

10



In the morning Bosch and Soto met in the squad room, checked in on the board, and then went directly back to Bosch’s car for the drive over to the regional lab. Bosch had already been summoned by the video analyst he had left the discs with the day before. Initially the analyst, Bailey Copeland, had told Bosch she would need a couple days to work with the three discs—and that schedule included bumping the case up to the front of the line because of the importance and media attention it was receiving. But that morning, she called Bosch while he was driving in on the 101 and told him she had come up with something he should look at sooner rather than later.

On the way over, Bosch and Soto said little about the night before and his discovery of her secret investigation. Bosch immediately understood her motivations. He had similarly been driven to solve a case from his own past. So he had told her that he would help her, but it had to be done right. With less than a year to go in his plan to retire and take his pension in a lump-sum payment, he could not be sure the Department wouldn’t use any infraction to fire him to avoid the payout. He told Soto that if they could come up with a plan that would result in the official transfer of the Bonnie Brae case to them, then he would join her in working it. But he warned her that working a case that was not hers was a dangerous move in the Department—for her as well as him.

The video-and-data-imagery unit was on the third floor of the regional lab. Copeland was waiting for them in a video booth where there was a sound-and-video board set up on a lab table in front of a multiscreen wall display. The room was dimly lit and small, and Copeland had pulled in extra stools for Bosch and Soto.

“Thanks for coming in early,” Copeland said. “I’m going to show you what I have here and then go home.”

“You pulled an all-nighter on this?” Bosch asked.

“I did. I got excited and couldn’t leave it.”

“Thank you for that. Show us what you’ve got.”

The lab table was elevated and Copeland was a short woman. She stood during the demonstration, and sitting behind her, Bosch and Soto could still easily see the screens.

“Okay, let’s just run through it once and then we can go back. The first thing I did was create a triangulation program for our three videos. The time counters on at least one of them was off, so what I used to base time on was the one thing that is in each video.”

She clicked a button on a keyboard and three of the screens in front of them came to life, each showing its angle on Mariachi Plaza or the streets in front of it. She then almost immediately hit another key and the images froze. Copeland pointed at the center screen, which showed the video from the music store.

“You see the Ford Taurus here, passing the music store. That car is on each video.”

She pointed the car out on each of the screens. Bosch could already see that the clarity of each video had been greatly improved from when he had viewed them the day before. Copeland had fine-tuned them, made them crisper.

“By calibrating the three videos off the movement of that car, we can run all three simultaneously. Now let’s watch.”

She hit a key and the videos continued. The three screens were right next to each other and so it was not difficult for Bosch to watch all three at once. Copeland had found the triangulation point—the Ford—more than a minute before the shooting, so they watched and waited in anticipation before finally seeing Merced topple off the table to the ground and his bandmates start to scramble.

“Okay, so let’s watch again in slow motion,” Copeland said. “Tell me what you see.”

She started the playback again. Bosch’s eyes were primarily drawn to the center image, which showed Merced sitting on the table. It was the cleanest video and it was the only one showing the victim. It was eerie watching in slow motion, knowing what was to come. Soto, who had not seen the videos before that morning, leaned forward to watch more closely.

Bosch tried to pull his vision back to all three screens at the moment Merced was shot. But he didn’t see anything that drew his attention when the shooting occurred.

Copeland stopped the playback.

“So did you see it?” she asked.

“See what?” Bosch asked.

Copeland smiled.

“Let’s switch these around.”

She typed in a command and the three camera angles changed positions. Now front and center was the angle from the parking lot camera at Poquito Pedro’s restaurant.

“Okay, watch again.”

Copeland replayed the video in slow motion and Bosch kept his eyes on the center screen. Though clearer than when he viewed the video on his laptop the day before, it was still a grainy view of the street and a portion of Mariachi Plaza from a distance of two blocks.

“There,” Soto said. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” Bosch asked.

“In the window.”

She pointed to a second-story window of the Boyle Hotel. It was a darkened room.

“Good eye,” Copeland said. “Let’s watch again.”

She replayed the sequence again, and this time Bosch watched only the window his partner had pointed out. He waited and at the moment of the shooting, he saw a small pixel of light flash in the darkness. Copeland stopped the playback.

“That?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, that,” Copeland said. “You have to remember that most surveillance video, especially from ten years ago, is shot on slow speed because of storage capacities. The frame rate on this camera is ten.”

“So you’re saying that little dot of light is the muzzle flash?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s all the camera caught but it’s enough. The shot came from that window.”

Bosch stared at the frozen image on the screen. He knew there was no longer any need for the trajectory study. The shot had come from a second-floor room in the Mariachi Hotel.

“Here’s what I have,” Copeland said.

She put in commands that blew up the center-screen image. She centered the window on the screen and they studied the white dot in the field of black.

“We have to get those hotel records, Harry,” Soto said.

“That’s room 211,” he said.

“Search warrant?” she asked. “Keep everything clean?”

Bosch nodded again.

“I’m not finished,” Copeland said.

She reconfigured the screens so the angle on Merced was at the center again. She then put an isolation circle on one of the band members. It wasn’t Merced. It was one of the men standing. The trumpet player. She hit the playback and the circle stayed on him, keeping him in focus while the rest of the screen slightly blurred.

“Watch him,” she said.

Bosch did as instructed and watched the shooting once again but this time seeing only the trumpet player as he reacted to Merced’s being shot. He moved quickly away, running offscreen.

“Okay,” Bosch said, apparently not seeing what Copeland wanted him to see. “What are we looking at?”

“Two things,” Copeland said. “First his reaction. This has nothing to do with video enhancement. I’m just talking about his reaction. Watch the others.”

She moved the isolation circle to one of the other men and replayed the video. It was the accordion player who sat right next to Merced on the table. The man saw Merced topple off the table and started smiling, presumably because he thought it was some kind of stunt. But then he saw the guitar player ducking under the table and dropped down too, pushing himself under as best he could.

“And now the guitar,” Copeland said.

The circle moved to the man standing and playing the guitar at the rear corner of the table. He too was initially confused when Merced was hit, but then he understood and ducked down to use the table as well as his guitar as cover.

“Let’s see the trumpet player again,” Bosch said.

They watched in silence.

“Again,” Bosch said.

They watched again.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s see the whole thing again without any isolation.”

When the replay was over he just stared at the screen.

“You see what I mean?” Copeland asked. “I’m not talking about him running. That’s understandable.”

“You think he knew the shot was coming?” Soto asked.

“I don’t know about that either,” Copeland said. “But what I’m talking about is that he shows no confusion about it. Just the flight instinct. It’s like he knew right away that Merced was shot, and the other guys tumbled to it late.”

Bosch nodded. It was a good observation—one that had escaped him during the multiple times he had watched the video the day before. He had focused solely on Merced and not paid proper attention to the other band members.

“Which one is that?” he asked.

“The trumpet—I think that was Ojeda,” Soto said. “Angel Ojeda. He’s the one who said in his statement that he ran.”

“Okay, let’s talk about Mr. Ojeda’s position now,” Copeland said. “With the triangulation, I was able to make a digital model of the shooting. It’s crude because I thought it was better to go with speed over quality.”

She typed in commands and killed all but the center screen. She then opened up a crudely animated version of the shooting from the angle of the music shop. The band members were little more than stick figures with letters affixed to them. Merced was marked A and Ojeda was figure B.

“This program measures spacial gradations and accurately re-creates a multidimensional animation that we can manipulate.”

With her keyboard and mouse she controlled the screen. The view moved out through the window of the music store and close up on the four men located on and around the table. She then clicked the command and the shooting took place in slow motion, the bullet’s trajectory marked by a red line that crossed the screen and struck the figure sitting on the table—Merced.

“Okay, so let’s start over but move over top,” Copeland said.

The image shifted so that they were now looking down on the table. An overhead shot. Copeland ran the simulation, and the bullet again streaked into the picture as a red line hitting Merced. At the moment of impact the figure that was Ojeda, the trumpeter, was in motion behind the table. It was clear that if the bullet had not hit Merced, it was on course to strike Ojeda.

“Wow!” Soto said.

Copeland ran two more simulations. The first one was another overhead version but it was high in the sky and took in the entire plaza, adjoining streets, and the Boyle Hotel. This simulation showed the red line of the bullet streak across the screen from the hotel to the picnic table, again convincingly showing that Merced stopped the bullet before it could have hit Ojeda.

The last simulation was a ground angle of the entire shot from the hotel to the table. Copeland stopped the program at the point the bullet struck the figure that was Merced. She then ran it again and then a third time before letting the simulation go to the end.

“You’ll have to talk to the guys in the gun shop about trajectory and target lead, all of that,” she said. “But it is possible, when you look at this, to see that if figure B was being tracked with a scope, the shooter could have fired before realizing that figure A—your victim—was in the line of fire.”

Bosch nodded.

“Tunnel vision. Some people call it ‘scope blindness’—all you see is the target.”

He stood up. He was too charged to remain sitting.

“The trumpet player,” he said. “We need to find him.”

Copeland took a disc in a plastic sleeve off the side of the worktable and handed it to Soto.

“I made a copy of the animation. I hope it helps. We would build a more detailed model if it was ever needed for court use.”

Soto nodded and took the disc.

“Got it,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Bailey, get some sleep,” Bosch said. “You earned it.”