A Killing in China Basin

THREE


At Vice, Elizabeth la Rosa was a rock star. Successes there got her on to the homicide detail at thirty-two, which was young, unless you looked at what she did orchestrating two significant and complex drug stings that slowed a Mexican cartel’s push to establish distribution in the Bay Area. She was taller than average and dark-haired, with a smile that made you want to smile as well. Raveneau liked her, but he was having trouble connecting. She was standing with the responding officers, Taylor and Garcia, when he drove up.

Nearby, though not close enough to overhear them, was the homeless man, Jimmy Deschutes, who’d flagged down the patrol car. Deschutes was thin and wiry with a piece of rope for a belt. His priors were for vagrancy, loitering, panhandling, trespassing, and urinating in public. The responding officers had searched his daypack, a pink plastic bag with a smiling Mickey Mouse.

In the pack they found clothes, small rocks, bottle glass smoothed by the ocean, a flashlight with several extra batteries, two rolls of toilet tissue, and dozens of salt, pepper, mustard, and catsup packets. Asked if he’d taken anything off the victim, he said no.

The building, a two-story white-painted stucco-faced relic, had a rusted link fence surrounding and iron bars protecting the lower windows. A ‘For Lease’ sign hung from the second floor and had for a while. The responding officers called the real estate agency. They left a message then cut the chain that looped through a padlock holding the gate shut.

They cut it but not before Deschutes showed them how he usually got in, wriggling under a cut flap of chain link along the bay side of the fence. He claimed to sleep in the building regularly and demonstrated how easy it was to jiggle the lock on the door facing the water. Then he led them up to the second floor where her body was and pointed at the mattress, saying, ‘Where I sleep most of the time.’

The second floor was brightly lit now. Paramedics brought a generator from the Bluxom Street Fire Station. CSI was on the way. So was a photographer. The medical examiner was inside. Raveneau, with la Rosa standing alongside him, questioned Taylor and Garcia, the responding officers. When they finished they walked down the street to talk privately.

To the northeast, hulking in late night city glow, was the ballpark, home of the baseball team, the Giants. A couple blocks this way was the concrete plant. Businesses in this area had a decidedly industrial tone and most closed at the end of the working day. Not much traffic through here at night, though neglected buildings had a way of getting discovered.

‘Let’s take Deschutes’s tour,’ Raveneau said. ‘He’s not going to contaminate anything. He’s already been in there once with Taylor and Garcia.’

Deschutes wore pants with a long tear on one leg and fairly new Nike tennis shoes. The shoes might matter. Raveneau felt sure he recognized Deschutes from the Tenderloin, but could be he moved around regularly. The homeless had encampments and territories and usually didn’t wander too far, but some were walkers and Deschutes looked fit enough. Down here the encampment was out along the old railroad tracks, yet Deschutes remained insistent that he often slept here in the building.

As they looked at the loose flap of chain link where Deschutes said he routinely crawled through, Raveneau said, ‘We should check it out to make sure it works. Go ahead and slide under, partner. I’ll hold the flap.’

She answered sharply. ‘I don’t need the old school jokes.’

They moved to the back door and Raveneau was last in, turning to look at the line of moonlight on the bay and the gray rocks before entering. The room was stacked with office furniture. Down a hallway a light shone at the bottom of stairs. He let Deschutes lead. Behind him, la Rosa muttered, ‘He shouldn’t be in here with us.’

They went upstairs to the second floor and walked past rooms that looked like former offices, though ransacked, some even missing their doors. In the room where the victim was, the lights brought from the fire station not only lit the space, but were also heating it. The warming air smelled of urine, mold, and dust, the floor littered with needles and fast food wrappers. In the doorway, the medical examiner stood to one side writing notes.

Deschutes described what he’d seen and confirmed again that he didn’t touch her. Raveneau took him back downstairs and la Rosa stayed with the ME. When Raveneau returned he opened his notebook. The victim appeared to be of mixed race, Asian and white, possibly in her early thirties, and was lying on her right side on a mattress on the concrete floor.

White cotton rope, what appeared to be clothesline, was pulled tightly around her neck, the knot surrounded by bruising. The rope extended three feet beyond the mattress, and looked as if it was dropped after she was strangled. Orange ties bound her wrists behind her and held her ankles pressed together. From the position of her body, and that she was dressed, he made a guess that he had no right to make yet, that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. But that didn’t mean this wasn’t someone’s sexual fantasy.

The medical examiner had commented as they arrived that death was probably within the last two hours, so Jimmy Deschutes was either here when she died or very shortly after. Deschutes’s reward for flagging down the patrol car was that he became their first suspect.

Drool ran from the victim’s mouth. Where it reached the mattress, the mattress was still wet. He followed the marks on her neck to the purple-colored silk top, the pants, belt, her shoes – the right off her foot and lying on the floor. No coat, no purse, no apparent reason to be here. He saw scuff marks where her shoes had rubbed back and forth on the mattress. He saw struggle. He guessed she was conscious and it looked from how her make-up ran that she had cried. She knew what was happening.

CSI arrived, lugged in their gear, their baggy cargo pants floating around them. The photographer showed up. La Rosa stayed near the CSI team; that’s what her generation believed in.

Raveneau walked back outside, walked China Basin Street looking at vehicles, taking down plate numbers in case one of these cars was hers. He studied the handful of spectators, and saw the medical examiner come out and go to his wagon. Raveneau went over to talk to him. In San Francisco the medical examiners were all doctors. This ME would take their victim the distance, doing the autopsy and toxicology.

‘Think you can get to her before Monday?’

‘I can tell you tomorrow. I don’t know tonight.’

After CSI had vacuumed and gone, the photographer finished, and the victim was in the thin white bag that the ME had put his seal on, Raveneau and la Rosa spent another forty minutes in the building before driving back to the Hall of Justice. They rode the elevator up and were quiet for the moment. They ate the egg croissants they picked up on the drive back and made coffee, and went downstairs to the morgue and rolled her prints, putting on latex gloves and inking her fingers with the ME looking over them.

Shortly after nine that morning they ran her prints through the local AFIS system. When they didn’t get a hit, they ran them through both the state and the western states systems. Nothing there either and Raveneau suggested they return to China Basin and start knocking on doors.

But no one had a female employee who hadn’t showed up this morning, nor had anyone seen anything unusual, though one owner asked, ‘What’s unusual any more?’

At noon, the bars and clubs began to open their service doors and they questioned the bartenders and owners they could find. No one remembered the shimmering rich purple shirt that they carried in an evidence bag.

Perhaps, Raveneau suggested to an assistant manager at the next club, one of your bartenders remembers two women, one with a purple silk shirt and high Asiatic cheekbones, black hair cut back from her face, a tiny stud in her left nostril, and her friend at the bar with her. Maybe they met a man or a couple of men and paired off.

They worked a wider radius and a bartender on Folsom Street, a young guy with spiked hair and a pallid face, saw something familiar in the shirt, but then couldn’t quite find the memory.

When they returned to Homicide they put together a press release without a photo but with a description of the victim and her clothing. La Rosa walked it over to the PIO, the Public Information Officer, so they wouldn’t miss the news cycle.

Late in the afternoon Raveneau returned to the building. He might find something. He might not. He didn’t expect to. But it had become his habit to return alone when the scene was quiet. Over the years he had even come to the irrational belief that the spirits of the dead linger a short while.

He felt sorrow as he walked through the building trying to see why she was here. If she was local and there was family or others who had cared for her, then there was a good chance they’d hear from someone soon. Bringing her killer to justice was the responsibility he and la Rosa carried. For anyone who had loved her, they could do little more. And a murder conviction seldom brought closure. Closure was a well-meaning idea capitalized on by radio self-help hosts and talk-show psychologists promoting books. The only true way to free your heart from a terrible act was forgiveness, and forgiveness was one of the most difficult things for a human being. It got bandied about as if common, but it wasn’t. Forgiveness was a kind of transcendence, beyond justice and maybe beyond most all of us.