A Killing in China Basin

SIX


Raveneau and la Rosa studied Carl Heilbron through the one-way glass and Raveneau made sure the audio and video feeds were working before they went in. Heilbron focused immediately on la Rosa, showing her a face that was pleasant and attentive as he said, ‘I killed her.’

Raveneau hadn’t even sat down yet. He slid a chair out and asked, ‘Who did you kill?’

‘The one in the building in China Basin and I don’t know her name. I never asked her name. I picked her up on Eddy Street. She was there with a couple of other whores. I offered her forty bucks, and after she got in the van I told her we were going to a building I know and that I wanted special sex. But she had a big problem with that. I freaked her out.’

‘What’s special sex?’ la Rosa asked softly.

‘Come on, Elizabeth, I know you know what I mean.’

‘Inspector la Rosa,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know what you mean. I need you to explain to me.’

It meant binding her wrists and ankles and slipping a piece of wire, not rope, around her neck. He told them he had a key to the padlock at the front gate but evaded telling them how he got the key. Kept answering, ‘It’s just a common Master Lock.’ He claimed he used the building another time with a young girl, a runaway he’d picked up, and gotten drunk before having sex with her. He talked about driving through the city at night. He liked to drive around at night. He talked about his job at Boyle’s Auto Body Shop and then touched the side of his neck and turned to Raveneau.

‘Would you mind getting me another Coke?’

Raveneau got him the Coke. When he returned Heilbron had shifted slightly in his chair so he faced la Rosa more directly. He licked his lower lip. He frowned as he explained.

‘I told her I was going to cut off her wind for a little while, then release the wire again, but she didn’t want to be unconscious. She got scared.’

‘When you started choking her?’ la Rosa asked, and Raveneau tried to catch her eye, tried to signal, just let him talk.

‘Yeah, the wire cut into her neck.’ He touched his neck to show where. ‘She moved around too much and started crying, and I didn’t want her to cry. I didn’t go there with her so she could start crying, so I tried to calm her down. I thought if she was unconscious for a little longer than usual she’d calm down.’

‘What do you mean more than usual?’ la Rosa asked, and Heilbron took a drink of Coke. ‘You wanted to relax her?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I pulled the wire tight until she stopped moving.’

‘When she stopped moving did you loosen it?’

‘No, I just kind of watched her.’

‘Weren’t you worried you would kill her?’

‘Not so much.’

‘Did you have sex with her?’

‘No, she was dead by then.’

‘You knew she was dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you feel for a pulse?’

‘No.’

Heilbron turned to Raveneau.

‘I threw everything in the bay.’

‘Show us where,’ Raveneau answered.

But Heilbron had another story to tell them first. He focused on la Rosa again, telling her about a woman he raped in San Jose. Neither Raveneau nor la Rosa revealed that they already knew San Jose detectives had questioned him about a rape two years ago. That came up when they ran his name before walking in to talk to him.

‘She had a flat tire. I helped her fix it. That was on a Sunday. She was back in these hills.’

At some point soon they’d have to read him his rights, Mirandize him, and with that he could request a lawyer. Raveneau liked to get the lawyer question out early so a defense lawyer couldn’t claim later his client hadn’t realized he was entitled to one. He studied Heilbron with a sense that something was off about his story, and Heilbron seemed to pick up on that, taking the conversation back to China Basin, telling them more about the wire around her neck – eye hook on one end of the wire so he could slide the other end through, pull it tight and release it easily.

They Mirandized him and Heilbron waved off having a lawyer. On the drive to China Basin he said he’d bought both the wire and the eye hook he had soldered on to it at Discount Builders on Mission Street. In China Basin he led them upstairs but to the wrong room. Maybe that was because the mattress wasn’t there any more. He got agitated. He wanted to leave the building and showed them where he had thrown her purse, phone, and ‘other things’ into the water.

Raveneau pulled a can of spray paint from the trunk of his car and marked a chunk of broken concrete for divers. Calling the divers in was problematic because now they were very skeptical about Heilbron’s account. His description of the victim was off. He dodged details, and on the ride back to the Hall he went dark on them. He went quiet.

But he did sign a confession and they booked him into jail. Raveneau figured they’d hold him all weekend and maybe as long as Tuesday afternoon, depending on what happened after San Jose detectives questioned him. Before they left him, Heilbron turned to la Rosa. ‘I read that article about you moving to Homicide.’

Raveneau knew there’d been some puff piece when la Rosa moved over from Vice. La Rosa didn’t acknowledge the comment. They left Heilbron with the jailers and upstairs learned that the San Jose police tracked him through one fingerprint left on the rim of a wheel. They were ready eighteen months ago to charge him with the rape of a woman who got a flat returning from a party late at night. He’d stopped and offered to help, assuring the woman that he worked in an auto shop, and then raped her in the back of the vehicle.

All they needed were DNA results from the victim’s swab, but somewhere along the way the swab samples taken the night of the rape got lost, and without DNA the district attorney’s office didn’t want any part of it, so the case went into limbo. A San Jose detective told la Rosa that the victim would no longer take their calls.

When la Rosa got off the phone with San Jose they drove down to meet the divers. Raveneau took his laptop. He filled out the search warrant application for Heilbron’s house as they waited and also called the Southern precinct to try to reach the responding officers, Garcia and Taylor, to question them about what spectators they might have talked to. He reached the younger officer, the tow-headed blond, Taylor, who after some coaxing admitted he’d talked to a couple of spectators. Said it was his first murder and he was sorry.

Then, as they were still waiting and walked down the street to get coffee, la Rosa turned and said, ‘I have to tell you something about me that happened right at the end of my senior year in high school. I try not to let it, but sometimes it still affects me. It was in late May at the start of the Memorial Day weekend. The weather had turned warm and we had finals ahead of us, but we knew we were done, so the parties were getting a little wild. I had just turned eighteen and there was this guy I’d always had a crush on. I was drunk, so was he, but I wasn’t ready to have sex with him. He held me down and raped me. Until you know that feeling of powerlessness and violation, you can’t know what rape is.

‘The next day I went by his house and when he opened the door I broke his nose with a piece of pipe. I heard he made up a story about falling off his mountain bike and he was such a dipshit he probably forgot about it all by the end of the summer. But me, I’m still angry. If he crossed the street in front of me, I’d run him over.’

‘Maybe you should talk to somebody.’

‘Yeah, I tried that. I’d rather kill him.’

‘Great.’

In China Basin, less than half a mile from the building, Rescue One divers set up to search a grid pattern. Four divers went into the water, their lights glowing from fifteen feet down where they found a black plastic purse that long ago had filled with bay mud. They searched for an hour and a half and didn’t find any of the things Heilbron described.

The on-call judge barely looked at the search warrant before signing it. They drove from his house to Heilbron’s. They pulled on latex gloves and Raveneau unlocked the front door with the key Heilbron had given them. He turned on a light. Before they stepped over the threshold, la Rosa asked, ‘Why did he tell us about the rape?’

‘Because it proves he could do the China Basin killing, that he’s got the stuff. Or maybe he’s testing himself and wants to see what it feels like to take ownership for a killing. I think he knows we’ll dead-end and he’ll walk.’

‘But, why do it? He’s going to lose his job. You know they’ll fire him. What’s he going to do next?’

‘That may be something to worry about. He may have built up to this point and he’s ready to move forward.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about, too.’

Raveneau pointed at the TV. ‘Let’s turn it on and see if they included our victim on the evening news. I didn’t see anything last night. I’ll check the refrigerator to see if there’s any beer.’

‘You don’t mean that, do you?’

No, he didn’t mean it about the beer, and they’d go methodically room to room. But he was serious about the TV. He found the remote and turned it on.