A Killing in China Basin

FORTY-NINE


They came up the road and around the curve, with the SID officer saying, ‘Right up here under these trees, does that look like your car?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

‘He could be watching this so I’m going to keep driving, but earlier we got a Los Altos patrol officer to shine a light inside and try the door. It’s locked and there’s nothing on the seats. The hood was still warm.’

‘He must get home from here.’

‘That’s what we figure too. He burned us. It must be that a computer controls the lights in the house or they’re pre-programmed. We think he got out through the rear.’

Trying to understand Stoltz leaving the car here, Raveneau said, ‘He got scared when I chased him. He dumped the car here and he’s probably back in his house now.’

‘We would have seen him go back in.’

With Raveneau’s testimony they could probably get another search warrant tonight and go through his house again, but they wouldn’t find anything and tomorrow Stoltz’s lawyer would make more noise. Yesterday, in a press conference, the lawyer even threatened the press, citing Richard Jewell, who when he was cleared of the Atlanta Olympics bombing settled with NBC for half a million. She claimed SFPD was intentionally destroying her client’s reputation.

The brass was a little worried about that and Captain Ramirez called him, but Raveneau knew this was the car he’d followed. It wasn’t registered to Stoltz, but it was the car and here it was parked within a mile and a half of Stoltz’s house. He was waiting for you to come home and when you flushed him out and followed him, he got so scared he dumped the car on the side of the road and went down his rabbit hole.

‘Stop for a minute, OK. I want to stand outside.’

Raveneau walked over to the car. He looked down at the hillside falling away and up ahead, where the road climbed into country grown over with trees, brush, and rye grass. Maybe he had another car or motorcycle, or some other way of getting out of here once he parked the Taurus. Or maybe he had a way to get back to his house.

At first light a K-9 unit and a second surveillance team arrived. When la Rosa got there, she and Raveneau hung back as the handlers worked the dogs. A bloodhound went down the road shoulder and half a mile below moved back and forth along a guard rail.

The dog seemed to want to get around the guard rail, poking its head underneath and barking. When the handler walked it around the railing the bloodhound picked up the scent again and went down the slope.

They watched and la Rosa asked, ‘Do you get poison oak?’

Below were several large poison oak bushes, their leaves mostly gone and what was left dry and close to falling. There was greasewood and rye grass and oak, and the handler and dog were partially hidden by the trees and brush.

‘I got it as a kid. I don’t get it any more,’ he said, and watched the handler come to the base of the steep slope.

‘Looks like he’s about to wave us down,’ Raveneau said. ‘The dog has found something.’

He thought of other times he’d seen the dogs circle a spot along a creek bed or in trees down a ravine.

‘Your dad was a cop, wasn’t he?’ la Rosa asked.

‘Yeah, he was a uniform cop, a beat cop. He got discharged from the navy after World War Two, met my mom, and then they stayed and settled here. In those days SFPD still had cops walking the beat. He thought all homicide inspectors were prima donnas. He only trusted uniform cops. He congratulated me when I got my homicide star, but he didn’t think much of it.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘It was fine. We figured out a way to joke about it.’

‘Were you close to him?’

‘Closer in the end, but he was hard on my brother and I growing up.’

‘So who do you have?’

‘I got divorced a dozen years ago, and we had one child, a son who was killed in Iraq.’

‘I’m sorry, Ben, no one told me that.’

‘I don’t talk about it much.’

‘Were you close to your son?’

‘Yes, very close.’

‘It must have been very hard.’

It still is, he thought, and asked, ‘What about you?’

‘My grandfather was a cop and I adored him. Even when I was little he treated me like I was an equal riding along with him in a big car. He died when I was in college. He was on patrol driving alone at night on a rural road in Minnesota and had a heart attack and ran into a tree. No one found him until morning, but they think he was alive all night and couldn’t reach the radio. He drank vodka, smoked Marlboros, and ate blood-red steaks he had to beat the black flies off of. He was my hero.’

Ten minutes later, the dog handler and the bloodhound were back on top and the handler had taken his hat off and was telling Raveneau, ‘There’s a manhole cover over a storm drainage line. He may have gone in there.’

They went down the steep slope and took a look. From the spot where the dog had stopped your eye followed a line of brush and grass where the scar left from the installation of drainage pipes still showed. Raveneau sighted where it ran down toward the valley and it all began to make sense. He hiked back up the steep slope, slick with dry grass, and got a tire iron and the crowbar he carried in his trunk, and used the crowbar to lift the iron cover. It was the kind of thing he and Donny would crawl into as kids.

After looking down the manhole they started making calls, trying to get someone from the local Public Works or Sewer Department, whoever handled run-off. Turned out the sewer people handled storm drainage easements and an engineer walked them through a map, pointing out the easement line.

‘It’s a forty-eight inch culvert that drains these hills,’ he said. ‘There are branches that feed into it and there’s an easement through the property you’re speaking of.’

‘Will I be able to walk down it?’

‘No, in most of it you’d have to work your way along in a crouch. As you get lower the pipe will get bigger. Everything up in these hills feeds in. But most of it is not too steep. Slick in places, I’m sure. Do you really want to go in there?’

‘No.’

They drove back up and SID reported that they still hadn’t seen any sign of movement in the house. Raveneau turned to la Rosa after retrieving a Maglite.

‘He could be in there and my phone isn’t going to work, so give me forty minutes and then come find me.’

‘That sounds brilliant.’

‘I’m going to follow it until I find the access ladder that comes up in the easement crossing the Stoltz property, just like the Public Works guy described.’

In the concrete pipe the air was cold and smelled of mud and the algae. Where it got steeper he fell several times and his back ached from squatting and shuffling forward. His flashlight only reached so far and there was a possibility he’d encounter Stoltz, so he was ready for that and tense all the way along, a walking target with a light.

When he reached the ladder that should lead up to the Stoltz property he found a daypack suspended there. For several seconds he held the flashlight beam on it, and then took photos with his phone before unclipping it and looking inside. He climbed the access ladder, shouldered the lid off and looked out along a tall row of pines at the back of the guest house. With the manhole resting heavily on his shoulder he called la Rosa.

‘I’m looking at the back of his house. I found a daypack suspended in here.’

‘What’s in—’

‘A laptop. I’m on my way back with it.’