A Killing in China Basin (3 page)

‘I read the interview notes on the mugger. Were you there? Did you listen in?’

‘Yeah, I did.’

‘Tell me about the mugger.’

‘Stoltz claimed that in the middle of his confrontation with Reinert a man with a gun showed up and robbed them. Backed them up at gunpoint and got into Stoltz’s glove compartment where he found Stoltz’s gun. He took their wallets and then shot John Reinert with Stoltz’s gun instead of his own when Reinert tried to prevent him from getting away. Then dropped Stoltz’s gun and ran with Stoltz chasing him.’

‘Chased him instead of helping Reinert?’

The lieutenant stared at him and asked, ‘What are we doing here? You read the file so you know this already.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Nervous but trying to pull it off. He claimed he chased the mugger because he knew instantly that Reinert was dead.’

‘How did he know?’

Becker shrugged. ‘He just knew. Maybe he sensed it because he’s so bright.’

‘You remember that?’

Becker nodded and Raveneau thought about Reinert dying. It wasn’t instant. It took him ten to fifteen minutes more to die. A patrol unit picked up Stoltz two miles away walking down Divisadero Street.

‘What did you think of the case Whitacre and Bates made?’

‘It was solid. They got the right man. Where are you on this China Basin murder?’

‘Nowhere yet.’

He left Becker and called the realtor who was trying to lease the building where their China Basin victim died. Yesterday, the realtor was cooperative. This morning he sounded self important as he launched into the city supervisors and the Port Authority, and how he wished he’d never left LA where they knew how to do business. When he finished, Raveneau offered, ‘Maybe you should move back there.’

‘Believe me, Inspector, I’m thinking about it. About your other questions, let me talk to my attorney and get back to you on who I’ve showed the building to. I’m not sure it’s ethical to provide a list. Some of these clients aren’t going to like a call from the police, let alone a homicide detective. You have to understand that if a prostitute breaks into the building at night there’s not much we can do. We’ve got a ten foot fence up with razor wire on top and “No Trespassing” signs posted everywhere.’

Raveneau learned now what he’d suspected last night, that the ‘For Lease’ sign was up only to demonstrate to the Port Authority and the city that the owners were serious about utilizing the property. That it had no power and smelled of rat droppings and human urine, and that the homeless, runaways, and drug users treated it as a hostel, or that prostitutes in the area were familiar with the building but avoided it because it wasn’t clean enough, that didn’t matter. The investors were playing a longer game that required a certain kind of negotiation with the Port Authority.

Raveneau was still on the phone with the realtor when Lieutenant Becker came to get him.

‘You’ve got a walk-in. There’s a man named Carl Heilbron in the second interview room. He says he’s here to see you and la Rosa about your China Basin victim. He claims to have information and knows you and la Rosa are assigned the case.’

‘When did he get here?’

‘Five minutes ago.’

Raveneau followed Becker to the interview room where they’d parked the guy. He looked like he was in his early thirties with long pencil-thin sideburns and short hair. Black shirt, canvas pants, lime-green tennis shoes, an ornate red tattoo on his right forearm, dressed like an artist but doing auto body work. A Diet Coke sat on the table in front of him and he stared at his right hand resting on the table near the Coke as if it was a phone and he was waiting for it to ring. Physical energy and nervousness emanated from him. He glanced up at the glass several times and brought the hand on the table down to his knee as his knee jiggled, then looked abruptly up at the glass again and smiled, as if spotting Raveneau and Becker standing there.

‘Looks like a nice normal guy,’ Becker said.

‘Let’s keep him in there while I find la Rosa.’

SIX

R
aveneau 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.

SEVEN

R
aveneau surfed through the local news stations and then left the TV on Channel 4. Near an armchair facing the TV, six porno magazines were stacked under a copy of
Sports Illustrated
. Three of the magazines featured women on women.

‘Bed is a like a rat’s nest,’ la Rosa called. ‘Come look at this.’

When he did, Raveneau saw only the rumpled sheets of a man living alone. The oddest thing was how clean the bathroom was. In his medicine cabinet was a prescription for antidepressants. He took a photo of the prescription label and they worked their way slowly through the bedroom again.

When a TV station anchor announced a murder in China Basin they moved out to listen.

‘Police are seeking help identifying the body of a woman found in China Basin Wednesday night . . .’