A Killing in China Basin

FIFTY-THREE


Raveneau and la Rosa sat in an interview room eating Chinese to-go. It was late. It was good to eat and they did so without talking as the smells of ginger, cooking oil, and steamed rice filled the room. After the initial success of getting through Stoltz’s password and into his emails, the computer techs ran into a second firewall. That’s where things stalled and they were pessimistic about getting through it tonight. One tech wondered aloud if they ever would. When they finished eating, Raveneau checked with them again. Then he and la Rosa cleaned up the little round table in the interview box and left with the understanding that if anything changed they’d be called.

When the phone rang late in the night, Raveneau was deep in a dream where he was fifteen again and up in Presidio Heights on a night the fog was blowing low over the Julius Kahn playground. His older brother, Donny, was in trees off to the edge of the playground making out with a new girlfriend while he waited for them. He felt like a tag-along and leaned back against the rock wall, listening to sirens that at first were a faraway, hollow, lonely sound and then raw as they got closer.

He left the rock wall, moved out on to Cherry Street, feeling the sound now along his spine. He looked back for Donny and the new girlfriend, but they didn’t come out. He expected a fire or a car accident and looked up into the fog along the row of houses, listening for the snapping of wood burning and the pop of glass exploding and the orange light in the sky, or voices around a car wreck, but heard only a muffled sound of a heavy footfall, and then saw a man running toward him down Cherry Street, and not really running, but chugging along the way heavy guys do.

Just before a police car rounded the corner the guy slowed to a walk. The cops pulled in fast alongside him but they didn’t jump out and take him down, instead looked like they were asking directions. The man pointed the other way and the cop car did a U-turn. When they were gone the man started down the sidewalk straight at him.

Raveneau rolled in the bed and reached for the phone, answering even as the other images stayed with him. It was a dream he knew every frame of. The man would follow him back into the park and come within five feet of him. In those days he’d been a tall skinny kid, putting on a leather jacket every day and bell-bottomed jeans with holes at the knees. He had hair down to his shoulders that his dad mocked. The guy would go face to face with him and there would be a moment he’d carry the rest of his life, a moment when everything hung in the balance.

A motorcycle cop would interrupt that by racing down Cherry Street. The street dead-ended at the playground and the motorcycle’s headlights would cut an arc through the fog as the officer slowed to make a U-turn. When the light touched the man he’d run in the dream as he had in life, as if the light burned his skin. He’d go crashing through the brush down into the Presidio.

‘Inspector Raveneau,’ a tech said.

‘I’ve got him,’ Raveneau said. ‘I see where he’s going.’

‘Inspector?’

‘Oh, yeah, OK, this is Raveneau, go ahead, what have you got?’

Raveneau couldn’t place the voice on the other end. When you first come on as a homicide inspector and you’re learning how to solve a case and the officers out there on the street in the radio units are learning you, you find out that calls can come in the middle of the night from an excited patrol officer, someone you may have talked to weeks or months before and asked to watch for a suspect or witness, and now they’ve found that individual. It could be 3:30 in the morning when they call you, but you’d better be enthused and let them know how much you appreciate it, or else word gets around and your urgent requests start taking a backseat.

But now it clicked it was the computer geek calling about Stoltz’s encryption. They must be through the second firewall.

‘You said call you no matter what the hour.’

‘Yeah, and thanks for calling. Did you get through?’

‘We got through but I’ve never seen anything like this. We can read stuff, but it doesn’t stick. It’s like the program is a living thing and it adapts to us. We’re reading sentences and then they start scrambling, you know, going away again.’

‘What have you read?’

‘Things that are like observations of people and feelings he had, maybe after killing someone. We can only get it to hold for five seconds or so and then the program takes over again. I need somebody better than me to look at this.’

‘I’ll come in.’

‘No, I mean someone that understands encryption.’

‘I mean I’m coming in to read what I can.’

Streetlights blurred a syrupy yellow-orange in fog and his car climbed from shadow into light and the streets were empty as he drove toward Bryant. He called la Rosa.

‘They’re through the firewall, but there are problems still.’

And maybe it was the fog, but as he waited briefly for la Rosa downstairs at the Hall, the dream returned and Donny and the new girlfriend, Elena, came out of the trees. He told them about the heavyset guy who’d run when the motorcycle cop drove up and Elena put her arm around him and said, you’re so cute. He closed and with Donny leading and Elena behind him, they dropped down off the Heights, hugging the rock wall, staying on the Presidio side.

Raveneau shook the dream off but remembered how it had gone. The next day, Sunday, there’d been news about a cab driver murdered at the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets. He’d heard it first on his clock radio, on KFRC, before watching a TV report. Whoever the cab driver had picked up had probably killed him, and later that night after their dad got off his shift he told them that the police were initially given the wrong description, which was why the killer had gotten away. They’d been looking for a NMA, a Negro Male Adult, when they should have been looking for a Caucasian.

He’d debated telling his dad about the guy who’d come into the Julius Kahn playground, but he and Donny weren’t supposed to be out and they’d just gone a month of being grounded for a six-pack of Hamm’s beer their mom had found in their room. He would have grounded them for another couple of months, so Raveneau had written an anonymous letter to the homicide detail. He mailed it Monday morning before school and years later realized that was the moment he’d started toward a homicide career.

The next day, Tuesday, October 14, 1969, a different letter had arrived, this one to the San Francisco Chronicle, and Raveneau didn’t hold that letter in his hand until after he had his homicide star and his father had retired and Donny was dead. The envelope had been addressed with blue felt tip. Where the return address should have been was a crossed circle. That letter was still with the Zodiac binders. Raveneau had pored over all of them, but knew that particular letter word for word. It started this way:

This is the Zodiac speaking



I am the murderer of the



taxi driver over by



Washington St & Maple St last



night . . .