A Killing in China Basin

by Kirk Russell

  SIXTEEN

  Before dawn the next day Raveneau drove to Lincoln Park Golf Course, paid the fee, and rented a cart. On the first tee three old boys cut the chill by spiking their coffee with brandy. Cigar smoke mingled with the smells of newly mown grass and alcohol. One gaffer pointed a glowing cigar tip at Raveneau.

  ‘Tee off,’ he said. ‘Play through us; we’re just marking time until the end.’

  Raveneau had brought a handful of his old clubs, a three-wood and some rusted irons, but he wasn’t here to play. A groundskeeper who worked here remained a prime suspect in one of his unsolved cases, one that pre-dated la Rosa. He hoped to find the man, Ray Bryce, cutting grass. Not that he had any new reason to interview Bryce. He was only here to let Bryce know he hadn’t forgotten.

  He teed off and as his first shot sliced into the trees the old boys hooted and offered to spike his coffee. The cigar smoker gave him some free advice as he got in the cart to leave.

  ‘Don’t count the first two shots and slow down.’

  Bryce migrated west after serving six years in a Virginia prison for attempted rape. He’d arrived in California fourteen years ago and found work as an electrician’s apprentice. When Raveneau looked at him for the Angela Ruiz murder and started unpeeling his past, he discovered Bryce had been questioned in southern California in 1998 after the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl who’d lived down the block from him in El Cajon. Three weeks after the girl’s body was found, Bryce moved north to San Francisco.

  Raveneau found Bryce working on the tenth green. When Bryce saw who it was he got off his mower and said, ‘You can’t do this to me.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything to you. I’ve got an open homicide that happened here and I’m going to work it until I solve it. You can understand me doing my job, can’t you, Ray?’

  Bryce’s claim was he’d stopped his mower pre-dawn and gone up into trees between two fairways to urinate. He’d relieved himself no more than five feet from her body and claimed he hadn’t noticed her until after he’d finished.

  This morning his black work boots were speckled with wet grass clippings and his knees wet. He smelled like fertilizer and as Raveneau teed up a ball he was unsure for a moment what Bryce would do next. What he did was hop on his mower and drive down the path to the green Raveneau was playing toward. When Raveneau chipped on to the green Bryce stooped and picked the ball up. He put it in his pocket, flipped Raveneau off, and drove away.

  With that, Raveneau turned around and took the cart back to the clubhouse. He took a call from la Rosa as he pulled away from Lincoln Park.

  ‘Two San Jose detectives are with Heilbron right now. How far away are you?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  Raveneau missed most of their interview but got there in time to hear them tell Heilbron that the DNA had turned up and this was his last chance for a plea bargain.

  ‘We’ll have results tomorrow, so you’re at the decision point, bud. Come clean and we’ll go to the DA and make sure he understands you cooperated.’

  Raveneau knew this wasn’t going anywhere but he watched Heilbron closely, especially after la Rosa went into the interview box. Heilbron focused on her as she sat down. He answered the San Jose detectives’ questions while looking at her. When she ignored him and left the room his face changed, became completely impassive, his dark eyes unreadable.

  At two that afternoon they cut Heilbron loose and the crime lab released his van, though not before showing la Rosa and Raveneau the hole drilled for the camcorder mounted inside at the rear of the van and operated with switches mounted at the dash. Heilbron got in his van and, with Raveneau and la Rosa tailing him, drove straight to China Basin.

  SEVENTEEN

  Heilbron slowed as he reached China Basin then continued south to his former employer, Boyle’s Auto Body. He pulled into an open bay, probably to pick up his last check or ask for his job back. Up the street, Raveneau eased the car over to the curb.

  ‘Who is this guy?’ la Rosa asked, and he understood what she meant. The San Jose detectives brought their file this morning. La Rosa read through it. So had he.

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ Raveneau answered. ‘When Heilbron walked into the homicide office and tossed out the San Jose rape after confessing to this killing, he was building his credibility. He knew the DNA was missing, probably wouldn’t magically show up, and if it does Heilbron’s probably been advised by a defense attorney that the amount of time it was lost will get it discredited as evidence. The district attorney won’t go anywhere near a chain-of-custody problem.’

  ‘OK, but he knew the San Jose detectives would come interview him again.’

  Raveneau paused. He looked over at her.

  ‘He wanted that. It was another chance to taunt them and that’s probably what he’s trying to do with us. I’m not seeing the evidence yet that he’s our guy and I doubt we will. He was standing outside talking to the responding officers when we were upstairs. He got what he knows about the inside of the building from them.’

  Taylor, the younger officer, had looked at a photo of Heilbron and IDed him.

  ‘Then why are we following him?’ she asked.

  ‘Because the rape was probably him, and we aren’t one hundred percent certain yet on China Basin.’

  Heilbron’s van backed out suddenly on to Third Street forcing a bus to veer around it. He accelerated away from the auto shop and Raveneau had to jump on the gas just to stay within two stoplights of him. Heilbron drove to the house he leased in South San Francisco and backed into the one-car garage. Inside, he pulled the shades in the bay window that faced the street.

  ‘Let’s go back to Boyle’s,’ Raveneau said. ‘Let’s find out what happened.’

  In Boyle’s Custom Auto Body an employee restoring a yellow Camaro pointed them toward a rear office with this warning: ‘Boyle isn’t here today, but the office manager Katrina is, but she’s worse than the hurricane was so watch out.’

  Katrina had a pinched nose, hair dyed a light red, and earrings that looked like car keys hanging from her ears. She took Raveneau’s card and studied it as if she was with Homeland Security. Raveneau watched and then pulled his homicide star.

  ‘Carl Heilbron just got fired,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t work here any more. Why is he walking around anyway? Why isn’t he in jail? Seems like every time the police talk about a person of interest they’re back on the street the next day. If he said he killed her, does he have to prove it to you before you keep him in jail?’

  ‘He recanted his confession and we don’t have anything to hold him on.’

  ‘So hold him anyway. He’s a creep. He delivered a car to the home of one of our customers last summer and the next night was caught looking in the windows of her house. He didn’t get arrested and now she gets free engine care.’

  Katrina stared at them as though he and la Rosa had let that happen.

  ‘Boyle talked the customer out of calling the police.’

  ‘That’s your boss?’ Raveneau asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he around?’

  She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Only if it rains.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Simple. When it rains he can’t play golf, and since he doesn’t like to be around his wife he comes to work. Boyle thinks Heilbron is the best auto body man here, so Boyle and the rest of the misogynist pricks look the other way when Heilbron goes into the bathroom for an hour with one of his magazines. He’s disgusting.’

  They listened but didn’t learn much and drove back to the homicide office. Raveneau saw the TV vans from three blocks out. He counted five as they picked up coffees at Café Roma, and then watched a reporter warming up, practicing, pulling her voice down lower, getting more baritone into it as she asked, ‘Is a killer targeting San Francisco’s homicide detail?’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘here we go.’

  Upstairs Becker told them to stay completely away from all media. The brass would
handle this one. They sorted new tip calls and emails, and Raveneau left messages for several people and made contact with two; the first was an older woman who thought the sketch of the China Basin victim she saw in the Chronicle was her daughter stolen from her stroller in Iowa in 1949. The second was a young man who said he didn’t know her name but recognized her from meeting her in a bar one night.

  ‘You recognize her from the sketch?’ Raveneau asked.

  ‘Definitely. She was at Dorati’s. I’m just having trouble with her name. It was something like Alice or Alicia.’

  ‘What about a last name?’

  ‘I know, man, I’m trying.’

  ‘We’ll come see you. How do we find you?’

  He got the young man’s name and a phone number and email. La Rosa struck out with her calls, left nine messages and talked with two men and a woman, people they’d go see but didn’t sound like leads.

  At three, the door to the homicide detail got locked and a general meeting held. Captain Ramirez asked Raveneau to summarize events from his Thursday morning meeting with Whitacre. He knew the feeling among the inspectors was that Whitacre ate his gun and this meeting was an unnecessary melodrama. He didn’t have anything that would change that belief, but he did recount in detail what he and la Rosa learned in Oakland and what he knew of Whitacre’s death.

  When he finished, Captain Ramirez stood and said, ‘Across the street they think they’re on to a big story and they may end up feeding the ego of the killer if there is a connection, so I want all of you to be more careful.’

  No one made any cracks as he said that. No one wanted to get bit by Ramirez. As the meeting ended he motioned for Raveneau to follow him into his office.

  ‘What were you doing at Lincoln Park this morning?’

  ‘Checking on a suspect.’

  ‘Does that mean you have new evidence, a new lead, or what does it mean? I’m asking because Mr Bryce filed with the Office of Citizen Complaints and then called here to let us know. They’ll want to know why you went by there. He’s claiming you’re harassing him.’

  ‘Someday I’ll arrest him for murder.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t arrested anybody for that lately. You inspectors think you’re immune, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re not. You’re out chasing this guy around a golf course and I’m taking the blowback. I don’t like that. We need investigative results, not harassment complaints. You can take that message back out with you.’

  ‘I’ll let you deliver it, sir; you’re better at it.’

  Late in the afternoon Lieutenant Becker took Raveneau aside and asked, ‘What did you say to Ramirez?’

  ‘That I’ve got a stack of General Orders on my desk and three memos about the next shooting qualification day, and that if we got rid of those we’d have more time for golf.’

  Becker looked perturbed, then annoyed.

  ‘You don’t want to alienate Ramirez. It’s not worth it, and you of all people know that. So I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but if you push too hard right now you’re going to wake up one morning in Idaho, living in a little one-room cabin next door to your old partner, Kidd.

  ‘Every morning the two of you can chop wood together in the bitter cold before the sun comes up, and then warm up in the town café eating eggs, bacon, and a stack of pancakes, eating your way to a heart attack before you spend your afternoon on a little boat on some wind-fucking-driven mountain lake with your war stories and your fishing poles. I hear it gets to fifty below where Kidd is, so you’ll have ice fishing to look forward to as well. And you’ll have your satellite dish. You’ve got to have that.

  ‘They’re pushing hard from above. They’re pushing so hard I don’t know if it wasn’t someone in the brass who called the press today, and I can guarantee this: If the solve rate doesn’t go up around here, a sea change is coming and seniority isn’t going to mean—’

  They never finished their conversation and that was fine with Raveneau, and for that matter he was glad he got under Bryce’s skin. La Rosa waved him over. She was on the phone to the crime lab and covered the mouthpiece.

  ‘They’ve got a copy for us of the video off the camcorder in Heilbron’s van. They think there’s footage shot in China Basin. Do we want to pick it up this afternoon?’

  Raveneau nodded. ‘Tell them we’ll come get it right now.’

  EIGHTEEN

  After the ride Stoltz drank a beer with the two patent attorneys he regularly cycled with. They’d pushed it this afternoon. It was good ride, just under two hours. The bikes were loaded and they’d taken over one of the picnic tables outside Guthrie’s, a local haunt where they always parked before riding the loop. Not that he saw these guys that often, maybe once a month. Usually, he rode alone. It felt good now though to lose the helmet and kick back together in the last sunlight with a beer.

  Both Jonathan and Steve were in tight physical shape, same as he was, middle-aged guys but eating up much younger riders and having fun with that. But among the three of them, Stoltz easily dominated. He was just stronger.

  Stoltz saw their expressions change as he said, ‘I’ve never talked about this with you guys because I’ve wanted to bury it and forget it ever happened to me, but now I’m going to ask your advice.’

  Neither responded, wariness entering as he fucked everything up by bringing personal problems to the after-ride beer. Stoltz started with Steve who at least looked curious and was also the softest so easiest to get to.

  ‘You guys know I went to prison. Obviously, you know that. I had this good friend named John Reinert, a software engineer, a great one. You both would have liked him. He married a woman named Erin he’d only known for about three months.’

  ‘Bad news,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘You got that right, and I was best man at the wedding. She moved into his apartment in San Francisco and the three of us hung out a lot together. Then sometime in the spring she fell in love with me, only I didn’t really know it. I mean, I knew she was attracted, but hey, all women are attracted to me.’

  Jonathan and Steve chuckled.

  ‘The night John got killed we’d gone back to their apartment, and I don’t know how well you guys know San Francisco—’

  ‘I read about it,’ Jonathan said. ‘We both googled you before we started riding with you.’

  ‘Right, you didn’t want to fuck up your careers, but now that I’m back there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to come up with some stuff that makes you some money. So you talked it over with your wives. Yeah, I’ve got you guys figured out.’

  This time they giggled like little girls. Stoltz smiled.

  ‘Want me to shut up?’

  ‘No, keep going,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘OK, well, everything you read was wrong, or almost all of it, and I had a real hard time dealing with that. It took me a long time to get my head on straight.’

  ‘But you took a plea bargain,’ Steve said.

  ‘I did, but the way they set it up you don’t really have much choice. The DA’s office isn’t there for justice. They’re just about putting points on the board. Anyway, back to that night. I’d just broken off a long relationship and wasn’t seeing anybody, and that was probably part of the problem with Erin the night John got killed. She thought I was available.’

  ‘But she was married,’ Steve said, and got a little prim look on his face.

  ‘Young man, it happens even when they’re married.’

  Jonathan laughed hard at that and Steve looked away. But Stoltz needed both of them.

  ‘She was awesome,’ Stoltz said, ‘but she was married to my best friend so I avoided ever being alone with her. That night we went back to their apartment after dinner. Erin had some great tequila she’d bought in Mexico and some good dope.’

  As soon as he said dope, he knew he’d made a slight miscalculation. He saw a little twitch under Jonathan’s right eye and remembered Jonathan had a problem with marijuana.

  ‘She and John liked t
o get high, but I don’t do any drugs, so I went down to my car to get something after they lit up. I had a BMW in those days, an M5—’

  ‘What color?’

  With the car he had Jonathan back, nodding at him, ready to cut in with his own car story.

  ‘Dark blue.’

  ‘I bet you thought you were some hot shit.’

  ‘I did, and I wasn’t.’

  ‘I had one of those too.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Same car.’

  ‘No wonder we’re riding together. Anyway, I was a geek with new money.’

  They both smiled. They saw a lot of guys get self-important when they hit it big.

  ‘If I hadn’t gone to my car, none of it would have happened.’ He stopped there and took a drink of beer. ‘That night we were talking about going up the coast in two cars. John had a Porsche and the weather for the weekend coming up was supposed to be good, so we thought we’d race each other up to Mendocino. I went down to get a map.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Jonathan said, ‘I’m getting lost here.’

  ‘The night it happened I was at their apartment. We’d gone to dinner and then come back to their apartment. I went down to the parking lot to get a map out of my car.’

  ‘How far down?’

  ‘One flight. The cars were in this tiny lot in back, and I don’t know what it’s like there now, but then it was pretty quiet except that you had this kind of slopover from the Haight-Ashbury area. Some drug dealing went on close by and that night I’d done something stupid. I’d left my car unlocked after getting the map and had a gun in my car because John and I had been going out to a range and learning how to target shoot. There’d been a couple of carjackings in recent months in the area where I was living, so I’d bought a gun and was learning how to use it.’

  He caught a second reproving nod from Jonathan and without giving any sign of having seen it, held up his hand and said, ‘I had decided no one was going to take my car from me. But it was a stupid idea to keep a gun in the car.’