A Killing in China Basin

THIRTY-EIGHT


The next morning a partial toxicology report on Alex Jurika came in. Full screen would take another four to six weeks. Raveneau read through it and then handed the report to la Rosa. Jurika had a common date-rape drug, a horse tranquilizer, Ketamine, in her system. That was the most significant finding.

La Rosa read and stated flatly, ‘Heilbron,’ and Raveneau didn’t respond. Ketamine was in her system but she wasn’t raped. Was a sexual assault interrupted? Did she asphyxiate too soon and Heilbron lost interest in sex as he’d described, or was it a mistake to connect Ketamine to its usual companion, rape?

‘Here’s a different angle,’ Raveneau said. ‘Let’s say there’s no sexual element and the Ketamine was for a different purpose entirely.’

‘For what, then?’

‘To loosen her up and get her to talk about the credit fraud and identity theft businesses. Suppose someone wanted to gain control over her and in a drugged state get her to answer questions. So they brought her there, drugged her, and questioned her before killing her. Money as a motive.’

‘There are all kinds of other places easier than that building.’

‘True, but what if whoever wanted the information also planned to kill her afterwards? Then the building works well, or well enough. A filthy mattress used by junkies and whores puts a different spin on it.’

‘I like Heilbron,’ she answered. ‘I see him masturbating rather than raping her, and not leaving DNA evidence behind. He’s a voyeur. We know that about him already. It’s not hard to picture him getting aroused watching, same as he probably does driving around and filming. And he’s weirdly fixated on that building. I’m back to believing it could be him and he purposely misled us with the wrong room and wire instead of rope. He’s played us.’

They continued the debate on the drive over to Jurika’s apartment. Gloria was out front when they arrived. Her sister’s body was released to her this morning and she had asked to meet at the apartment. Raveneau wasn’t sure what that was about, but once they got inside she confessed, ‘I knew more than I told you last time. The cousin I told you about, Julie, she told me that she and Alex have used other people’s credit cards for years. She bragged about it when I confronted her in Phoenix. She said she didn’t think it was wrong since the cardholder doesn’t get stuck with the bill. She thought it was OK to cheat the credit card company.’

‘You more or less did tell us that,’ Raveneau said, ‘and we figured out the rest.’

‘Last January, Julie showed up in Los Angeles in a new full length leather coat, and I mean a really nice coat, light, high quality leather, a really pretty black – a five thousand dollar coat. I threatened her with all kinds of things and that’s when she told me her part was to keep an apartment rented where the credit card bills came and to pay them online under an account opened in a false name. She also told me the cards all came from older people with money. They had some way of getting them. If you want me to, I’ll call her right now.’

Now she had their attention. Raveneau was quiet waiting for more when la Rosa said, ‘Why don’t I call her? I’ve talked to her already. She knows me.’

She pulled her phone out and sat down on a kitchen chair. Raveneau watched her punch the numbers in, heard a faint ringing and la Rosa asked, ‘Is this Julie? It is, good, because this is Inspector la Rosa in San Francisco.’

La Rosa caught Raveneau’s eye and speaking to Julie Candiff said, ‘You remember me. That’s wonderful. What’s your day like tomorrow, Julie? We need you to fly out here tomorrow unless you want to come here this afternoon. We’re standing here with Gloria and she’s just told us what you told her and that means you lied to me, which really makes me angry. We’re trying to solve the murder of your cousin and you’re obstructing justice. We can contact the Phoenix police and ask them to help us, or you can book a flight and call me back and tell me what time you’re going to get in. What do you want to do?’

Raveneau didn’t have to overhear much conversation to realize Julie wasn’t going for the idea of flying here.

‘OK, then should I ask the Phoenix police to pick you up and hold you for us?’ la Rosa asked. She was still on the phone with her when Raveneau moved into Alex’s bedroom with Gloria, who sat down on the bed and started to cry.

‘I always thought it would be OK in the end. I thought she would eventually come home and somehow she’d turn back into the sweet little sister I used to have. I really don’t understand what happened to her.’

She pulled hair back from her face. She wiped her eyes.

‘There’s something else. I told you she emailed me and asked to borrow money, but I didn’t tell you that she also called me. That was two days before she died. She called me at work and I wouldn’t take her call.’

Now she wept, her face in her hands, and Raveneau sat down on the bed alongside her. For several minutes he didn’t say anything. He just sat with her. Then as she got a hold of herself he spoke.

‘I had an older brother named Donny and we went everywhere together as kids. He was two and a half years older and I was always trying to keep up and compete with him. Donny got drafted and sent to Vietnam when he was nineteen. Before he went to boot camp he was this happy go lucky, handsome young kid the girls fell all over because he could also play the guitar like nothing else and was in a band. When he came back from Nam he was completely changed and had a heroin habit. He’d become an addict, or was well on his way to becoming one. That was right about when I decided I was going to travel around the world alone. I’d saved my money and took off. I left and traveled for three years, working some places and getting along. I lost touch with him, probably because I wanted to.

‘When I got home in 1979 Donny was strung out on dope, skinny as a rail, filthy and wearing dirty rags. He didn’t have a job or money, and our dad wouldn’t let him in the house any more, which killed my mother, and I mean, I think it really did kill her. I was still talking to Donny, though he called me Officer Pig by then. I’d signed up with the San Francisco Police Department. He’d tell me it was an affectionate term but there was nothing affectionate in it, and the brother I’d grown up so close to, I could hardly stand to be around any more.

‘Then over a period of about three weeks, I got five or six desperate calls from him. I was working graveyard at the time, just trying to figure out how to be a police officer and where I fit in. My hours were messed up, so I used that as a reason why I didn’t get around to calling him back. Besides, it wasn’t the first time he’d been desperate. Most of the time what he was desperate for was money so he could buy a fix. And it’s not like I hadn’t tried hard to get him into a program where he could break his addiction. Either way, I didn’t return his calls.

‘It was his last call that haunted me for years. I had an answering machine and saved the tape with Donny’s call and I’d get drunk and replay it over and over, trying to hear what I should have heard. He made that call one night before driving out to the Golden Gate Bridge and parking on the Marin side. Then he walked out just past the north tower and jumped from a spot where he and I once saw a businessman from Cleveland jump off when we were kids. There were witnesses, and I know he did that to communicate with me that he hadn’t lost his mind and that he still remembered everything. He parked his car in the same slot that guy had so long ago. That was his message to me.

‘Donny’s body washed up on the Marin side and I was the one to identify it. It tore me apart for a long time, so I know something of what you’re feeling.’

When she lowered a hand he took it in his, something he never would have done a decade ago. Her body shook and Raveneau sat next to her as she wept for the way things had turned out, for the sister she’d lost, for everything that hadn’t been the way she had dreamed it would be.