A Killing in China Basin (2 page)

‘I can pick you up at the Hall or meet you at the scene,’ Raveneau said, but knew already what her answer would be. Elizabeth la Rosa was ambitious, independent, and intent on making her mark. She had an angel in the brass and didn’t need an aging homicide inspector on what she thought was the tail-end of a career to watch over her. La Rosa wanted to wade into the fray.

‘I’ll meet you there,’ she said. ‘I’m out the door.’

THREE

A
t Vice, Elizabeth la Rosa was a rock star. Successes there got her on to the homicide detail at thirty-two, which was young, unless you looked at what she did orchestrating two significant and complex drug stings that slowed a Mexican cartel’s push to establish distribution in the Bay Area. She was taller than average and dark-haired, with a smile that made you want to smile as well. Raveneau liked her, but he was having trouble connecting. She was standing with the responding officers, Taylor and Garcia, when he drove up.

Nearby, though not close enough to overhear them, was the homeless man, Jimmy Deschutes, who’d flagged down the patrol car. Deschutes was thin and wiry with a piece of rope for a belt. His priors were for vagrancy, loitering, panhandling, trespassing, and urinating in public. The responding officers had searched his daypack, a pink plastic bag with a smiling Mickey Mouse.

In the pack they found clothes, small rocks, bottle glass smoothed by the ocean, a flashlight with several extra batteries, two rolls of toilet tissue, and dozens of salt, pepper, mustard, and catsup packets. Asked if he’d taken anything off the victim, he said no.

The building, a two-story white-painted stucco-faced relic, had a rusted link fence surrounding and iron bars protecting the lower windows. A ‘For Lease’ sign hung from the second floor and had for a while. The responding officers called the real estate agency. They left a message then cut the chain that looped through a padlock holding the gate shut.

They cut it but not before Deschutes showed them how he usually got in, wriggling under a cut flap of chain link along the bay side of the fence. He claimed to sleep in the building regularly and demonstrated how easy it was to jiggle the lock on the door facing the water. Then he led them up to the second floor where her body was and pointed at the mattress, saying, ‘Where I sleep most of the time.’

The second floor was brightly lit now. Paramedics brought a generator from the Bluxom Street Fire Station. CSI was on the way. So was a photographer. The medical examiner was inside. Raveneau, with la Rosa standing alongside him, questioned Taylor and Garcia, the responding officers. When they finished they walked down the street to talk privately.

To the northeast, hulking in late night city glow, was the ballpark, home of the baseball team, the Giants. A couple blocks this way was the concrete plant. Businesses in this area had a decidedly industrial tone and most closed at the end of the working day. Not much traffic through here at night, though neglected buildings had a way of getting discovered.

‘Let’s take Deschutes’s tour,’ Raveneau said. ‘He’s not going to contaminate anything. He’s already been in there once with Taylor and Garcia.’

Deschutes wore pants with a long tear on one leg and fairly new Nike tennis shoes. The shoes might matter. Raveneau felt sure he recognized Deschutes from the Tenderloin, but could be he moved around regularly. The homeless had encampments and territories and usually didn’t wander too far, but some were walkers and Deschutes looked fit enough. Down here the encampment was out along the old railroad tracks, yet Deschutes remained insistent that he often slept here in the building.

As they looked at the loose flap of chain link where Deschutes said he routinely crawled through, Raveneau said, ‘We should check it out to make sure it works. Go ahead and slide under, partner. I’ll hold the flap.’

She answered sharply. ‘I don’t need the old school jokes.’

They moved to the back door and Raveneau was last in, turning to look at the line of moonlight on the bay and the gray rocks before entering. The room was stacked with office furniture. Down a hallway a light shone at the bottom of stairs. He let Deschutes lead. Behind him, la Rosa muttered, ‘He shouldn’t be in here with us.’

They went upstairs to the second floor and walked past rooms that looked like former offices, though ransacked, some even missing their doors. In the room where the victim was, the lights brought from the fire station not only lit the space, but were also heating it. The warming air smelled of urine, mold, and dust, the floor littered with needles and fast food wrappers. In the doorway, the medical examiner stood to one side writing notes.

Deschutes described what he’d seen and confirmed again that he didn’t touch her. Raveneau took him back downstairs and la Rosa stayed with the ME. When Raveneau returned he opened his notebook. The victim appeared to be of mixed race, Asian and white, possibly in her early thirties, and was lying on her right side on a mattress on the concrete floor.

White cotton rope, what appeared to be clothesline, was pulled tightly around her neck, the knot surrounded by bruising. The rope extended three feet beyond the mattress, and looked as if it was dropped after she was strangled. Orange ties bound her wrists behind her and held her ankles pressed together. From the position of her body, and that she was dressed, he made a guess that he had no right to make yet, that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. But that didn’t mean this wasn’t someone’s sexual fantasy.

The medical examiner had commented as they arrived that death was probably within the last two hours, so Jimmy Deschutes was either here when she died or very shortly after. Deschutes’s reward for flagging down the patrol car was that he became their first suspect.

Drool ran from the victim’s mouth. Where it reached the mattress, the mattress was still wet. He followed the marks on her neck to the purple-colored silk top, the pants, belt, her shoes – the right off her foot and lying on the floor. No coat, no purse, no apparent reason to be here. He saw scuff marks where her shoes had rubbed back and forth on the mattress. He saw struggle. He guessed she was conscious and it looked from how her make-up ran that she had cried. She knew what was happening.

CSI arrived, lugged in their gear, their baggy cargo pants floating around them. The photographer showed up. La Rosa stayed near the CSI team; that’s what her generation believed in.

Raveneau walked back outside, walked China Basin Street looking at vehicles, taking down plate numbers in case one of these cars was hers. He studied the handful of spectators, and saw the medical examiner come out and go to his wagon. Raveneau went over to talk to him. In San Francisco the medical examiners were all doctors. This ME would take their victim the distance, doing the autopsy and toxicology.

‘Think you can get to her before Monday?’

‘I can tell you tomorrow. I don’t know tonight.’

After CSI had vacuumed and gone, the photographer finished, and the victim was in the thin white bag that the ME had put his seal on, Raveneau and la Rosa spent another forty minutes in the building before driving back to the Hall of Justice. They rode the elevator up and were quiet for the moment. They ate the egg croissants they picked up on the drive back and made coffee, and went downstairs to the morgue and rolled her prints, putting on latex gloves and inking her fingers with the ME looking over them.

Shortly after nine that morning they ran her prints through the local AFIS system. When they didn’t get a hit, they ran them through both the state and the western states systems. Nothing there either and Raveneau suggested they return to China Basin and start knocking on doors.

But no one had a female employee who hadn’t showed up this morning, nor had anyone seen anything unusual, though one owner asked, ‘What’s unusual any more?’

At noon, the bars and clubs began to open their service doors and they questioned the bartenders and owners they could find. No one remembered the shimmering rich purple shirt that they carried in an evidence bag.

Perhaps, Raveneau suggested to an assistant manager at the next club, one of your bartenders remembers two women, one with a purple silk shirt and high Asiatic cheekbones, black hair cut back from her face, a tiny stud in her left nostril, and her friend at the bar with her. Maybe they met a man or a couple of men and paired off.

They worked a wider radius and a bartender on Folsom Street, a young guy with spiked hair and a pallid face, saw something familiar in the shirt, but then couldn’t quite find the memory.

When they returned to Homicide they put together a press release without a photo but with a description of the victim and her clothing. La Rosa walked it over to the PIO, the Public Information Officer, so they wouldn’t miss the news cycle.

Late in the afternoon Raveneau returned to the building. He might find something. He might not. He didn’t expect to. But it had become his habit to return alone when the scene was quiet. Over the years he had even come to the irrational belief that the spirits of the dead linger a short while.

He felt sorrow as he walked through the building trying to see why she was here. If she was local and there was family or others who had cared for her, then there was a good chance they’d hear from someone soon. Bringing her killer to justice was the responsibility he and la Rosa carried. For anyone who had loved her, they could do little more. And a murder conviction seldom brought closure. Closure was a well-meaning idea capitalized on by radio self-help hosts and talk-show psychologists promoting books. The only true way to free your heart from a terrible act was forgiveness, and forgiveness was one of the most difficult things for a human being. It got bandied about as if common, but it wasn’t. Forgiveness was a kind of transcendence, beyond justice and maybe beyond most all of us.

FOUR

T
oward dusk, as Raveneau returned to the homicide office, Cody Stoltz joked with the staff at a Starbucks in Palo Alto as he waited for his macchiato. Then on his way to a table he stopped briefly to check in with a middle-aged woman who’d been laid off and was looking for a job. He met her last time he was here. Same as today, she’d had her laptop open and was working on her resume. She seemed grateful that he took the time to say hello.

When he sat down it was at a corner table. He pulled out his laptop and used Google Earth to find Whitacre’s house. He wasn’t necessarily ever going to go anywhere with it, but it gave him pleasure to see Whitacre’s dumpy little stucco box with its faux Spanish look. Whitacre’s neighborhood wasn’t far from the freeway, so maybe the exhaust had caused Whitacre’s cancer. He hoped so. The lawn was dry, shrubs ratty, the pine tree sickly and out of place. Whitacre’s old American relic of a car sat in the driveway.

Past the car was a fence. On a long bike ride he once checked out the fence and gate. The fence was redwood, silver-gray with age. A couple of flagstones led from the white concrete of the driveway to the gate. Through the gate was a door to the kitchen. It was a nowhere house on a nowhere block in the bleak life Whitacre lived. But none of that changed what Whitacre had done.

FIVE

W
hen the homicide detail moved from Room 450 on the fourth floor to Room 561 on the fifth floor, the difference was more than just moving up a floor in the gray monolith of the Hall of Justice. In the old office, the window behind Raveneau’s desk looked northeast over the roof of the morgue, past the county jail, better known as the glass palace, and into the city. Tall cabinets holding case files and nicknamed ‘the towers’ had loomed over the cramped quarters, but up here the homicide inspectors had a large open room and a row of windows looking southeast toward China Basin. They had a row of computers and new high-tech equipment.

Raveneau’s desk backed up to la Rosa’s. Nearby was a coat stand, a concept that would have been comic in the closed quarters of the former office. From his desk he watched the dark water of the bay lighten with dawn and the outline of the hills across the bay haloed in crimson light as the sun rose. The door to the homicide office opened and Lieutenant Becker waved at him. Raveneau stood to go talk to him before Becker got too busy.

‘Do you remember a shoot-out between two yuppies in the parking lot of an apartment complex out near Golden Gate Park in 2000?’

Raveneau paused to give Becker a chance to remember the case before continuing.

‘They were friends, Cody Stoltz and John Reinert. The shooting was after an argument about John Reinert’s wife, Erin. Stoltz had an affair with her that Reinert found out about. That led to a confrontation in a parking lot below the Reinerts’ apartment and then a shooting that Erin Reinert witnessed from the apartment’s kitchen window. She disappeared; moved away somewhere after Stoltz took a plea deal. He did five for voluntary manslaughter.’

‘The letter writer?’

Raveneau nodded.

‘What about him?’

‘Ted Whitacre thinks Stoltz is following him and after revenge. I saw him yesterday morning. He asked me to knock on Stoltz’s door and let him know we know he’s been tailing Whitacre.’

‘That’s not how we do it.’

‘Maybe not, but I’m going to let him know Whitacre saw him.’

Becker said nothing but shook his head.

‘What do you remember about the Reinert killing? I’m looking for what’s not in the file.’

Raveneau knew Becker wouldn’t really have any problem with him visiting Stoltz. He wasn’t going to endorse it, but underneath he was still one of them. Becker knew what a gentle reminder a homicide inspector’s knock on the door could be for a guy who’d already done time for murder. Cloud computing or whatever it was he was working on now would look a lot better to Stoltz after a conversation.

Becker answered, ‘I was there when Bates and Whitacre brought Stoltz in. Stoltz was so shocked at what he’d done that in his head I think he tried to turn it into an accidental shooting. He came up with a story of how he wasn’t the shooter at all. He needed to transfer it to someone else and created a fictional mugger.’