A Killing in China Basin

THIRTY-NINE


When they left Gloria Jurika, la Rosa and Raveneau were talking. They were getting somewhere. A theft ring inside an elderly care business, Alex Jurika with a history of credit theft and a sudden need for substantial money from her sister – more things were going together if not fitting together. It felt like they were brushing along the edge of solving this case.

As they got back to the Hall, Raveneau fielded a call from Deborah Lafaye, the woman with the charity foundation. She wanted to go to lunch with him and him alone, pointedly saying, ‘Without your partner.’

He talked that over with la Rosa; then he met Lafaye at Slanted Door in the Ferry Building. She had already sat down at a booth. He slid in on the other side. From the booth they could look out across the bay. With the clouds the water was a gray-green and then bright again where the sun broke through.

‘I wanted to have lunch with you because I didn’t get the impression you understand how much information is out there and how easily it moves around now.’

‘Will that help us solve Alex Jurika’s murder?’

‘It might. She was very tuned into the online world, and I don’t mean to offend you but I got the impression when we met that you might not realize how easily information about other people can be gathered now. So to make a point I’ve learned some things about you. I spent half an hour alone on a computer to do this. Do you want to hear what I learned?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Your ex-wife lives in New York and has severe osteoporosis. I know some of the drugs she’s taking, and you do as well. You’ve paid over twenty thousand in the last eighteen months for drugs for her. I found that out searching medical resources we’re dialed into at the foundation.

‘I know you like wine. You belong to two local wine clubs. It turns out certain types of wine drinkers tend to donate to foundations like mine so we track the club lists. We pay a fee and get their lists.’

The waiter arrived and after they ordered she started on the interconnectivity of the Internet again. She was accustomed to having people listen to her, but Raveneau wasn’t that interested in a lecture today. He glanced out of the windows and followed the gray suspension span of the Bay Bridge.

‘I’m boring you.’

‘There’s a lot going on today.’

‘And you think I’m full of myself. You don’t know why I’m going on about Internet connectivity. You think I suggested lunch to make sure you don’t suspect me.’

‘I think you’re smarter than that.’

Raveneau ate Vietnamese rice cakes with rock shrimp and mung beans. Other than a glass of a Sauvignon blanc, Lafaye had ordered next to nothing.

‘I invited you to lunch because I’ve known Alex longer and better than the impression I left you with. When she worked for me she was on the computer looking for that connectivity I was boring you with. I didn’t know it at the time but Alex was already looking for that same connectivity in the market for identity theft.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Actually, it came up in a joking way one night when I said that I needed another identity, including a passport for traveling in countries where my real name could put me in danger. I’ve been very active trying to shut down illegal trade in human organs and other things like aid dollars that end up buying Mercedes instead of medicine for poor children. Things that could get me killed. My name is known some places and combined with the foundation website and the growth of the Internet I wasn’t as anonymous traveling as I used to be. Some areas became dangerous to go to with the reputation I’d started to get.’

‘So Alex got you a false identity.’

‘Yes. She knew someone who wanted to shed their current identity. I bought that identity so I could use it when I traveled in certain countries, and I only did it after there’d been an attempt to kill me. Mind you, this was quite a few years ago.’

Lafaye held her hands up, showed her fingertips, the scarring and deformation.

‘I did a lot of things that seem crazy now, but one thing I knew was I didn’t want this to happen again because I got recognized in the wrong locale. If you want to travel with me I’ll introduce you to a man named Huarang. He did the manicure work on my hands, though we’re on speaking terms now.

‘Huarang deals in organs, mostly kidneys, but he’ll get you a young healthy heart if you need a transplant. He’s very computer literate, or the people who work for him are, and they’re adept at locating potential donors by scouring hospital records. They match donors to recipients via databases they’ve built up during the years he’s been collecting UN money to inoculate and do blood tests at his clinic. He also gets grants from the Red Cross. In fact, his clinics do many good things. With me, he’s happy to provide the names of competitors.’

‘Now you can lecture me; how does it work with a kidney?’

‘When he gets an order for a kidney he searches his database and then front guys go out and locate the donor. If the donor is poor and the police are bribed, and it’s easily proved that the donor was paid well for his kidney, then often there’s nothing the unwilling donor can do later. He may have been drugged when he signed papers or had no idea what the papers said because he doesn’t read, and of course he had no idea that any of this connects to Huarang’s charity work, or that Huarang is connected to it in any way. He wakes up with stitches in his back and a check for the equivalent of five thousand dollars, which in the areas where Huarang works is a fortune.

‘Usually, the donor is a young man with a match to the recipient that has been verified by the doctors who will do the transplant. The donor is always healthy and will recover; meanwhile his kidney will move along a well-traveled chain where everyone steps on the price until it gets to the hospital and goes into a rich American or Saudi, or someone who can afford it but cannot afford to wait.’

‘Come on, you’re not telling me it’s this well known and he’s out there today operating like this, and at the same time collecting aid money for his clinics.’

‘He absolutely is and I became part of his Indonesia operation for a few months during the nineties. That’s when he did my nails for me. I offered my services to get inside his operation. I had medical training and I told him I didn’t have many scruples. That’s the magic combination. I was in the operating room at the compound at least a dozen times as a surgical nurse, assisting as a young man’s healthy kidney was removed. I watched the liver removed from a very fit young man I’d been joking with an hour before, a young man who thought he was just selling one kidney so that his mother could get a needed operation. They sewed him up, helicoptered him to a remote area of the jungle and shoved him out.’

‘Were you in the helicopter when the kid got pushed out?’

‘I was. I watched him fall. Without a liver he was dead anyway.’

‘So it didn’t matter.’

‘Of course, it mattered.’

She stared hard at him.

‘Huarang is just one dealer in one country. There are many people who need organ transplants. There are Americans routinely getting transplants outside the United States for the simple reason that it’s more affordable elsewhere and, guess what, sometimes organs are more abundant and cheaper. Who knew?

‘Huarang was probably trying to sell my organs when I escaped. When he destroyed my fingernails he did it because one of his men had found a video camera among my things and I was on tape talking about what I’d witnessed. I’d shot the operating room and the helicopter taking off from the pad in the jungle clearing on its way to make a delivery.

‘Huarang said, “You beautiful woman, so I give you a choice.” He pointed at one of the two goons who’d brought me in and said, “Either he’ll dig your right eye out of its socket and fill the hole with gauze or we take your fingernails.” They tied me to a chair and he tore my nails off one by one with pliers, the first one fast, I think to shock my system, and then more slowly. He said he would stop after I told him the truth about why I was there, and when I did, he didn’t stop, and at some point I passed out. When I came to they were washing my hands with alcohol and he was washing his in a sink. They say you don’t remember severe pain, but they’re wrong.’

‘Did you go to the police?’

‘No, you go to the US embassy and try through them. Huarang pays off the local police and ultimately it was a local matter. The police chief went out and questioned Huarang. I heard he stayed for dinner and I was advised later by the State Department not to pursue it further.’

She told Raveneau other stories, and created the impression that she wanted to convey her bravery and foolish boldness and undaunted willingness to take risks for her fellow human beings.

‘I often dream of that boy falling from the helicopter. Sometimes I see myself jumping after him. Maybe it’s guilt that I didn’t save him. I remember looking down and he was just above the canopy of the trees, and then he vanished. I remember thinking that the animals would eat him, and as he went through that canopy of forest he just vanished from earth as though he’d never existed.’

She rested one of her hands on the tablecloth, turned the misshapen nails of her right hand so they couldn’t be ignored.

‘I could have plastic surgery, but I keep them this way so I don’t forget. I had a lot of anger, depression, sleeplessness, I couldn’t focus for a long time, and then I saw where I could make a difference.’

She had told this story many times before. That was obvious.

‘How did you know the identity you got from Alex wasn’t stolen?’

‘I knew her well enough.’

‘Everyone we talk to says she was a thief and a liar, including her sister.’

‘She was complex.’

‘And I think you’re pretty thorough and careful. I’m betting you looked into the history of the identity you were about to buy. You didn’t buy another woman’s identity blind.’

‘I checked only to make sure she didn’t have a criminal history. She did have one but she was smarter than me. She hid that history before putting her identity on the market. She’d already come some distance in trying to erase herself.’

‘And why was she doing that?’

‘She was afraid a man was going to get out of prison and then come after her.’

‘And this was all here in San Francisco?’

‘Yes.’

Sometimes things click together. Sometimes people contact you again and say they want to meet and talk more because they’re one step ahead of you and are afraid you’re going to catch up to them.

‘Can I guess the woman’s name?’

‘That would be very impressive, Inspector. I’d be quite impressed. But first I want you to understand that I’ve never used that identity in the United States. I only used it in a few countries and I don’t do that any more either.’

‘OK, if you don’t use it any more, where is it?’

‘I don’t keep it in the US. After 9/11 they started checking more and I don’t want to be caught with my regular passport and that one as well. That would get ugly. I keep it in a safe deposit box in Mexico City. It’s sitting there right now. If I need it somewhere else they send it to me by courier.’

‘Where did you use it before putting it away in the safe deposit box?’

‘African countries, Latin America, and places in Asia where I knew they wouldn’t be cross-checking my face with other photos.’

‘And how about the woman whose identity you bought, do you know where she lives now?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what name she lives under?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Do you know if she’s still alive?’

‘Alex might have known. Maybe you’ll find it in her computer.’

‘What else are we going to find?’

‘Hopefully what you need to solve the murder.’

The waiter returned now with the check. She waited until he left before saying, ‘Now it’s time for your guess.’

Raveneau put down his water glass. He made sure he had eye contact and he saw the tiny flinch at the corner of her eyes as he said, ‘Her name is Erin Quinn. She returned to her maiden name after the murder of her husband. The man she’s afraid of is Cody Stoltz and you’re seeing his name in the news so much it’s making you nervous.’

Now she looked like she’d been slapped, but she covered it well, smiling, her eyes lighting up, grabbing the check, laughing as she said, ‘Wow, I insist on buying. How did you do that?’

‘I’ve got a feeling you have more to tell me. Now would be a good time. Why don’t you come to our office?’

‘Not today, Inspector, and I think I’ve told you everything now.’ She smiled at him. ‘I am impressed.’

From the car Raveneau called la Rosa.

‘How was lunch with Ms Goodworks?’

‘She wanted to tell me about the name and identity she sometimes uses in other countries where it’s not safe to use her own name. She must have felt like she had to get a jump on us.’

‘Let me guess, Florence Nightingale.’

‘No, the former Mrs Reinert, Stoltz’s lover, Erin Quinn. See you in a few minutes.’