A Killing in China Basin

SIXTY


Quinn was ghostly pale but oddly composed for someone who’d just been abducted and lived through a violent rescue. At first she didn’t seem to want to come out of the van and told Raveneau, ‘He was taking me to a house where we were going to live together.’

‘That’s over, give me your hand and I’ll help you get out.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘No, but he’s in bad shape.’

She refused a ride to the hospital to get checked out, said it was ridiculous, that all she’d done was ride in the back of a van. He hadn’t hurt her.

‘Why did you get into the van at Lake Merced?’

‘He had a gun.’

‘Did he pull it out of his pack?’

‘Yes. So you saw?’

‘I was there.’

Quinn paused on that, probably quickly realizing they’d followed her after la Rosa dropped her near her car. Whatever she thought about that she hid.

‘I drove there because I remembered the lake was pretty and I couldn’t think very well after I talked with you and your partner. He came up to me on a bike when I was standing looking at the water. He must have been following me. He must have had the bike in the van.’ Her voice wavered. ‘He said he was taking me to a house in the mountains, where for five years I wouldn’t be allowed to leave so that I would be even with him for his prison sentence.’

‘That’s over with.’ He waited a beat. ‘How did he know you’d be at Lake Merced?’

‘Maybe because he was following you he saw me today. He’s been stalking homicide inspectors. He told me he killed Inspector Whitacre.’

‘He told you that today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he say anything about following me or Inspector la Rosa?’

‘I don’t know. I’m so cloudy right now I don’t remember. He talked a lot but I don’t think he said anything about you. Will you take me to my car?’

‘Are you sure you’re good to drive?’

‘I feel nothing but relief. I’m fine to drive.’

‘We’re going to need you to come in. I can have someone pick your car up.’

‘No, I need my car. I’ll come in tomorrow.’

‘You’re very brave and tough. I think most of us would be shaking like a leaf after what you just went through. There are counselors who can help you with it. I can get someone who’ll talk it through with you this afternoon.’

‘I don’t need to talk to anybody and I don’t want to go to a police station.’

‘There’s no way around that. You’re going to need to make a statement today about what happened this afternoon. You can follow me back.’

‘But I told them back there what happened.’

‘There’s more to it.’

‘I don’t want to be interrogated.’

‘No one is going to interrogate you, but you’re going to need to answer some questions.’

Raveneau turned on to the big lot above Lake Merced and drove toward her car. As he slowed to a stop, he asked, ‘Were you meeting Deborah Lafaye here?’

‘Who?’

‘Deborah Lafaye.’

‘Oh, her, no, and I didn’t even know she lives in San Francisco.’ She looked puzzled or tried to. ‘Why would she want to meet me?’

Raveneau took a chance now and said, ‘She told us she was going to make an additional payment to you.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘There’s a path around the lake here. Why don’t we walk and talk a little before we go downtown and you get recorded on videotape? It might make you feel better to walk first.’

‘I’ve told you the truth. I came forward so I didn’t have to carry it around any more. I’ve told you the complete truth.’

‘I know you have. There are just loose ends.’

Steps led down to an asphalted path and they went left and followed the path across a wooden bridge over a finger of the lake. Along the shoreline below were tule reeds and stands of willow trees. The wind blowing in was clean and heavy with the coming rain and seemed to revive her. She got some color back and a little flash in her eyes and a smile.

‘I’m alive,’ she said. ‘I’m lucky.’

‘Yeah, I think you’re very lucky and it’s over with Cody. He won’t ever come after you again.’

‘His legs were all twisted around.’

‘His back is broken. He may not make it, Erin.’

‘If you want the truth, it all still makes me feel sad.’

‘Because way back when you could never have imagined this?’

‘That’s right.’ She bit her lower lip. ‘It’s such a mess. He wanted me to talk to him and I started to. I told him the truth about everything, where I hid and why. I was lying on the floor of the back of the van and not even really afraid, though I felt certain his plan was to eventually kill me. He told me he had to kill Inspector Whitacre. Why would he have to kill him?’

‘I don’t know. I do know he didn’t follow you here. His van was here when you pulled in. I was behind you.

‘Think about that as we drive to the Hall of Justice, OK. We need all the loose ends and I think everyone appreciates what you’ve done in coming forward.’

They walked back up to the cars and she followed him to Bryant Street. He put his pass on her dashboard so she wouldn’t get towed out of the red zone out front, and upstairs la Rosa was waiting. In the interview room she recounted it just as Raveneau had seen it and filled in many more details about the conversation with Stoltz. Then Raveneau took the conversation back to Stoltz finding her.

‘Did he say anything at all about how he knew to be at Lake Merced?’

‘Didn’t we already talk about this?’

‘Yeah, and you’ve got to forgive me on this. Sometimes I’m going to repeat myself and I know it’s exasperating and annoying, but you’ve got to roll with it. Did he mention Deborah Lafaye?’

She pursed her lips, seemed to be trying to remember, and said, ‘A woman jumped or was pushed off his boat last night. I think he said it was her. He said she was dead, that she drowned.’

‘She didn’t drown, Erin. She swam to shore. We talked with her this afternoon.’

Now they waited. When the wait got awkward la Rosa stood and said, ‘I’m going to get another tea. Would you like one, Erin?’

They did the tea thing and Quinn stalled; Raveneau brought her back to the question.

‘Who were you meeting?’

She answered oddly, saying, ‘I know every inch of Cody’s boat. When we were having our affair we would meet at the dock because the boat was safe. It took a key to get through the dock gate and the boat had a bed, and sometimes we’d go out on the bay. I can picture the gold colored paneling, the dark wood of the wheel and the white and blue paint like it was yesterday.’

So they touched on the relationship with Cody again, and then revisited Lafaye.

‘Was the meeting today with her?’

‘You’ve asked that so many times! I don’t know how Cody knew to go to Lake Merced. I have no idea. I wasn’t meeting anybody.’

Raveneau nodded. He went back through her statement about the abduction today and then took her downstairs. In the elevator he said, ‘We need you to stay in town for a few days. The department will pay for lodging.’

‘I really don’t want to do that.’

‘We need you to do that. I’ve got to ask you to. You’re our best link to several open cases.’

‘Is that a standard procedure?’

‘This is a very unusual situation. I can make you a reservation at a motel we use on Lombard Street. It’s not the swankiest but it’s clean and fairly nice.’

‘You’re not really answering my question.’

‘And you haven’t answered mine about the meeting at Lake Merced.’

She held his gaze now, none of the furtive glances he’d seen when they’d first met. She didn’t want to stay in San Francisco and he knew she was debating telling him she was leaving. Raveneau pulled out his cell.

‘I’ll call the motel. It’s a good place and I’ll lead you over there.’

She watched him as he talked to the motel. Then he led her over, and after she’d checked in, he drove to the hospital and learned that one of the two bullets had severed Stoltz’s spinal cord, and that if he lived he’d be a quadriplegic.

The doctor Raveneau spoke to said, ‘There’s absolutely no way he’ll ever walk or use his arms again. I doubt he’ll be able to move his head or even talk, and I’d only give him a fifty-fifty chance of living. He’s got a helluva fight ahead of him. Was he the cop killer?’

The question had a hard ring to it.

‘It looks that way.’

When he left the hospital it was dusk. He called la Rosa.

‘How soon before you get back?’ she asked. ‘The techs are through the third firewall. They’re ready for us.’

‘I’m going to make one stop.’

‘Don’t you want to see what they found?’

‘Yeah, I can’t wait to see it, but I’m going to stop by the Reinert’s old apartment first.’

‘What are you going out there for?’

‘Go see what the techs found and I’ll catch up to you.’

‘They want me to handle a press conference. I’ll probably be doing that when you get back.’

‘No sweat.’

When he got to the apartment building he saw they’d stripped a lot of the exterior skin, removed windows and gutted several of the units in the last two weeks. Much of the pink stucco and rococo style ornamentation along the roofline was gone. Unit 5, where the Reinerts had lived, was one of those that had been completely gutted. He figured a way to get around the construction fencing and walked up the stairs with a flashlight. The exterior walls were stripped so all he had to do was squeeze between the two-by-four studs. Once in the Reinerts’ unit he found where the kitchen had been by looking at the plumbing pipes in the wall.

Then he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, someone who knew how to walk quietly and that turned out to be a security guard who clicked his flashlight on Raveneau’s face. Then he moved the beam to the homicide star Raveneau held up for him to see. He told the guard the story of what had happened here.

‘You’re talking about the man the police shot today, had the woman in back?’

‘Yeah, and there wasn’t much choice but to shoot him.’

‘Never is.’

Some social comment there but Raveneau let it slide. He looked through the hole in the exterior wall where a kitchen window had been centered above the sink and figured this must have been the window where Quinn had told Whitacre and Bates that she’d seen the shooting from. He studied what you could see. The parking lot in back, but it was small. Some cars, but not all. Part of the stairs. Less of everything at night and you’d have a real hard time identifying anybody or what they were doing in the lot. Yet Whitacre and Bates had accepted her version.

He’d have to go back and reread the file yet again. Maybe she’d only claimed to have seen muzzle flashes, though what he remembered was her stating she’d seen Cody Stoltz shoot her husband. Or maybe the lighting was better in those days, but he doubted that, and it was certain the parking lot hadn’t been any closer.

‘I’ve been thinking of applying to the police,’ the guard said. ‘How long would it take me to get into Homicide?’

‘Might take you ten years, maybe a little longer, though my partner got there in less.’

‘Get out of here, man, you’re messing with me. Ten years?’

‘There aren’t many openings and the homicide detail isn’t big.’

‘How long you been there?’

‘Forever.’

‘Did you watch CSI?’

‘At least once.’

‘What do you think?’

‘That if we had those people working for the city we could probably get by with just a couple of inspectors, maybe only one.’

He thanked the guard and left him looking out the hole where the kitchen window had been. When he got back to the Hall the press conference was almost over. He passed by it and went up and opened the Reinert murder file to Quinn’s witness statement. It was as he’d remembered. She’d told Whitacre and Bates where her husband had stood and where Stoltz was, and that hadn’t been possible. Not even if she had stood at the window.

He went to see the computer techs and they couldn’t show him what they’d found without first telling him how they’d broken through. But their pride was earned and understandable and he put his impatience aside. What they’d found on the other side of the last firewall was a list of contact names, such as who he’d bought the stolen pickup from in LA, and where he purchased guns, and a list of all the vehicles and aliases, including passport and driver’s license info. There were two houses, one in the town of Brantley in southern California, where he was taking Quinn, and one in the north. Both houses were owned by the same LLC. The house up here was on the road from Calistoga over to Santa Rosa. He read a San Jose address just as la Rosa walked in ebullient from the press conference.

She asked, ‘When did you get back?’

‘A half hour ago, and you were already winding down so I came up here to see what they found.’

‘Did you hear any of the press conference?’

‘No.’

‘They told me I was live on CNN.’

‘That’s great, take a look at this.’

He showed her an address of a building in San Jose and put his coat on.

‘This must be where the cars and whatever else is stored.’

‘The bat cave you were talking about.’

‘Yeah.’

She looked at the address and at Raveneau adjusting his coat and said, ‘Let me tell Ramirez I can’t go to dinner.’

‘Meet you downstairs.’