A Killing in China Basin (6 page)

She seemed uncomfortable with that which surprised him.

‘We’ve got fifteen tips off the TV report,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I know, I’ve got the list with me.’

He split the list with her and made a series of calls as he drove south on 101. Then he just drove, and looking west at the foothills remembered a summer afternoon twenty-five years ago when he picked up his ex-wife Angie at the San Francisco apartment in the Marina that she shared with two friends. That day they drove from summer bay fog into the heat of the Central Valley and in the dry foothills swam in Rollins Lake before continuing on to Lake Tahoe. He remembered the feel of the cold clean water of Tahoe, sitting on a granite slab at the water’s edge talking and laughing as they dried in the mountain sunlight. He saw the blade-like blue of Tahoe and the radiance of Angie’s face as if it were yesterday.

In Carmel he met with the hotel manager of the La Playa first and read the young man as wanting to assist and help the police. Raveneau showed him his gold homicide star and learned that Stoltz had reserved at the La Playa two and a half weeks ago. So it wasn’t an impulse trip. He stayed in room twenty-one, checked in at six fifteen p.m., and more importantly, checked out the next morning at seven.

The one night he was in Carmel Stoltz ate at a French restaurant, Anton & Michel. A waitress had no trouble remembering him.

‘He was weird. He asked if we could make scrambled eggs with truffles and I think he knew we wouldn’t have any truffles right now and that the chef couldn’t just do something off the menu. We were very busy that night. What was weird was he was so insistent. I went back to the chef twice.’

‘What else did he do?’

‘He ordered an expensive bottle of Pinot Noir and gave most of it to staff. He wanted me to sit and have a glass with him. Our management likes us to know all the wines, so I did, but I don’t think he really cared about the wine.’ She smiled a half-smile. ‘Weird but good looking, I mean, he wasn’t a bad guy, but it was like he really wanted to make a point.’

‘What do you think his point was?’

She laughed. ‘You know, I’m not sure. But what’s going on, why are you here?’

‘I want to make sure he was really here.’

‘Oh, he was definitely here.’

Raveneau spent hours watching video at the Chevron in Sand City before spotting Stoltz standing outside his Lexus gassing up. The time on the tape read 7:42. Stoltz had left the station at 7:48 after using the bathroom and paying cash for gas and water just as he’d claimed. It was lucky the video hadn’t already looped over itself, lucky the video system had been recently upgraded to carry more videotape capacity, the manager explaining earlier they had a problem with people gassing up with stolen credit cards.

Raveneau called la Rosa from Salinas as he got back to 101 and turned north. He worked through Stoltz’s chronology on the drive home.

Checked in at La Playa at 6:15 p.m.

Dinner at Anton & Michel 7:30 p.m. reso, paid by Visa, first drink at bar 7:21, bill rung out at 8:50.

Checks out of La Playa at 7:00 a.m. next morning.

Gas at Sand City Chevron 7:42 a.m.

Maid cleans room at La Playa, 11:00 a.m. Remakes bed. Replaces shampoo and soap samples.

Two of the times mattered: when the dinner bill was closed out and when he checked out of La Playa the next morning. The window between was a little under twelve hours, more than enough time to leave the restaurant, drive three hours north, murder Whitacre, and return to the hotel to check out at 7:00 a.m. So the alibi was valid, but not solid and digging deeper would have to wait.

He drove home and didn’t walk in the door until two in the morning. He ate a sandwich and drank a flat half bottle of beer sitting in the refrigerator. He left his notes on a counter in the kitchen. He showered. As he lay down he reached for his phone and sent a text to la Rosa, ‘I’m back.’

THIRTEEN

T
he next morning Raveneau and la Rosa put on the booties, spacesuits, caps, masks – the whole get-up – before going in to watch their Jane Doe autopsied. The medical examiner quietly catalogued female, five foot four, one hundred twenty-three pounds, of mixed race, likely Asian/Caucasian, black hair, brown eyes, significant large black-colored moles high on the right side of her back, a tattoo of a diamond on the heel of her left foot, two inch scar on her left knee, another small tatt low on her back and one on her scalp inside the hairline. Approximate age: thirty. A tiny stud piercing in her left nostril was removed. Wounds: ligature marks at neck, hemorrhaging at eyes and tongue, scalp wound at right temple, bruising at the back of the neck, another bruise, two inches by one inch, on the right thigh just above the knee. An abrasion on the right elbow that likely occurred shortly before death, possibly from a fall. There was more bruising where ankle and wrist restraints had been removed.

Raveneau listened to the medical examiner’s quiet progress, heard him say ‘no evidence of sexual assault.’ He looked at the gray skin of her face and tried again to guess the reason she was in the China Basin building. There weren’t any needle marks, nothing indicated drug use. Prostitution or a sexual liaison was possible, and his guess was still that she came in through the gate with her assailant. One of them had a key. He and la Rosa would need to interview Heilbron again, as well as the realtor.

As they cut her open he and la Rosa left the room. They’d get the rest from the report. They didn’t need to watch her liver weighed.

‘What do you make of the tattoo on her heel?’ he asked after they’d stripped off the suits and were outside in the cool breeze of the corridor leading back to the Hall.

‘I don’t make anything of it.’

‘Maybe we can track down her name through the tattoos.’

‘That seems like another goose chase.’

‘Another one?’

‘Well, like one.’

Their Jane Doe’s sketch had run in this morning’s
San Francisco Chronicle
, but how many people read the newspaper any more? Still, at Homicide they had new calls, new tips. In the late morning an email tip on a different case arrived via the ‘Contact Us’ link on the SFPD website. The tip named two kids who’d allegedly witnessed a stabbing outside a club in the Mission several weeks ago. Raveneau called the high school and confirmed that both young men were seniors and at school today. At noon they drove over, met with a dean first, and then one of the two young men, who immediately denied having been at the club that night.

La Rosa took the lead with the second young man and impressed Raveneau. She was soft spoken and easy with the boy, a sixteen-year-old named Robert Fuentes. She was more relaxed and confident than with Heilbron. She’d also changed her look, cut her hair short this weekend, turning her proud face more handsome and mannish, something she told Raveneau on the drive here that she regretted. She told him something else this morning, that her roots were upper middle class. Her father was a knee surgeon, her mother in marketing, and both tried and failed to talk her out of police work, arguing that she could do better for herself.

Raveneau spoke decent Spanish but la Rosa was fluent and hip to the language the kid used. Forty minutes into the interview Fuentes gave up a name, H Man, Hector Jimenez, a gangbanger, and told them where to look for him.

They picked Jimenez up off the street in the mid afternoon and brought him in. He was a big man, coffee-colored, half-Puerto Rican, half-Mexican and muscled, wearing a canary-yellow shirt that came down to mid thigh. Jimenez knew to say nothing and lawyer up but inexplicably did the opposite: confessed to the shooting, saying he was high and the victim had come on to the girl he was with so he had no choice. They were hours with him in the small interview room and after he signed a confession they booked him.

Then they went to see Heilbron who was hostile and unwilling to talk to them at all. The thrill of confessing had passed and he made no attempt to answer Raveneau’s questions. Instead, he said, ‘I made up the whole thing, I didn’t kill her. I got everything from one of the cops outside. He’ll remember me. Ask him.’

Raveneau and la Rosa knew they’d have to kick him loose, but that didn’t mean they weren’t conflicted about it. Then, as they were leaving, Heilbron called to la Rosa. She glanced at Raveneau and then went back, demanding as she got close, ‘What is it?’

‘I know you’re not married. I want to ask you out. I’d like to spend time with you.’

‘Would you?’

‘Last night I kept waking up thinking about you. We should get together.’

‘Let’s do that. Let’s do it in an interview room tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about San Jose. How does that sound?’

She didn’t wait for his answer. Outside, Raveneau turned and said, ‘Let’s get a drink and celebrate our first week on-call together and you getting the Jimenez confession today.’

In the old days Raveneau drank Scotch and when somebody wanted to buy the homicide inspector a drink he usually accepted. He’d get warmed up and entertain a small crowd with stories as Angie waited at home. That was back when he thought it meant something to appear on TV answering questions about a homicide investigation at a press conference. It was also when he thought an eighteen-year-old Scotch meant the whiskey had been in a barrel for eighteen years, as opposed to the truth, which was that just a fraction of the barrel had. He hadn’t known anything more about Scotch than he’d known about homicide investigations. Now he ordered a glass of wine, la Rosa a margarita.

‘The homicide dick who drinks white wine,’ la Rosa said after the waitress left.

‘When I was the Great Inspector I drank Scotch. In those days I couldn’t find a hat big enough to fit my head.’

‘How do they fit nowadays? They must be tight still.’

‘Not as tight.’ He studied her a moment and said, ‘I should have asked you this weeks ago. Everyone calls you Liz, but what do you prefer?’

‘Oh, I don’t care.’

‘No, I’m asking, I mean it.’

‘I like Elizabeth but no one uses my full name.’ She smiled a warm smile. ‘I’m OK if you just call me Inspector. I’m still getting used to it and I love the sound of it.’

‘I’m going to call you Elizabeth.’

Raveneau finished his wine and as la Rosa downed her margarita they ordered another round. It felt like they got somewhere today and maybe also crossed a generational gap. Getting the Jimenez confession made it a lucky day, but that was before they knew what had happened across the bay in Oakland.

FOURTEEN

C
harles Bates’s wife, Jacie, routinely took an evening walk, mostly when there was still light and often with CD, the D for Charles’s middle name, Douglas. Tonight she was walking alone. Not even their old dog, Chief, was with her. With his back legs Chief was too slow. She left the house a little after five, knowing it would get to dusk as she came through the end of the walk. Even so, she stopped to chat with a neighbor before starting for the dead-end street that turned into the park.

She picked up her pace. Jacie heard that she could lose weight at her hips by walking faster and she wanted to be down five pounds before she and CD went to Hawaii. They had a condo rented on Maui, same one they went to last year on their thirty-second anniversary. She looked forward to going there more than anything else right now.

Up ahead, joggers, hikers, mountain bikers, parked their cars in the rough dirt lot between the trees near where the park trails started. Lately, there were two small construction remodels in the neighborhood and those workers were still figuring out that the road didn’t go through, so when a white pickup passed her going fast toward the dead-end she figured it was another construction worker about to make the same mistake.

The man driving the pickup glanced at her as he passed. Where she was she wouldn’t see him turn around, but she knew it wouldn’t be long. It wasn’t. She heard his truck rattling back down the narrow road, coming faster making up for the lost time, and she moved over to the side, close to the edge but not in the mud. When he got closer she might step off, but because he had come by her slow on the way in she wasn’t much concerned.

Now the truck rattled around the corner, frame floating toward the crown of the road and Jacie frowning disapproval. She heard it accelerate. In the cool gray light of dusk she made out his white face and dark hair, but not his features. She raised a hand, meaning to say slow down, but not waiting, getting out of the way as he swerved, either losing control or coming on purpose. She was once a very good dancer and was on her back foot turning and two steps off the asphalt before the gap closed. She heard the sound when it hit her, but that was all.

She didn’t know that afterward he wrestled the truck back on to the road, straightening the wheel to keep it from rolling, or that his bumper carried dry grass and dirt from where it gashed the hill. She didn’t know that the old pickup’s glove compartment had popped open or that he’d recovered from his near crash and backed up over her body, resting the truck with a foot on the brake as the wheel rose up on her chest.

The impact crumpled the right fender and broke the headlight. A chrome headlight ring was left up on the slope. Pieces of headlight glass were all over the road shoulder. Neighbors heard tires squeal. But the whole thing took less than ninety seconds from start to finish. What the driver worried most about was his right headlight. If traffic was bad it would be nearly dark when he got there. Last thing he wanted was getting pulled over for a blown light.

But, hey, no worries, everything went fine. He parked under the freeway among the empty warehouses in drug city and moved quickly, emptying five gallons of gas inside the truck cab, coughing blindly at the surge of fumes as he backed away. He was in the car, engine on, headlights off, when the flash of light came and the faint tinkling sound of windows breaking came from well down the street. Warehouse windows caught the light and made the fireball bigger. So big that as he drove away the street radiated a cheerful orange-yellow light.