A Killing in China Basin

by Kirk Russell

  He called Celeste, told her what happened, and apologized. ‘I’m on my way to you now.’

  When he got to the Four Seasons Celeste was at the bar and a little bit drunk. She was trying to be cheerful but couldn’t understand why he didn’t call her earlier.

  ‘I was afraid you’d stood me up. Remember I said all you ever have to do is call and let me know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was wrapped up in this guy I was following. How about we restart the night?’

  But it didn’t work out very well. They split a bottle of wine at dinner but after drinking whatever she had before he got there it was more than she could handle. Suddenly they were talking about her old boyfriend again, how he left her, how much it hurt her, and then back to now and how all she needed was a phone call as she waited at the bar. That was all fair.

  After dinner they went up to her room and Celeste said, ‘I’m really drunk,’ and fell asleep on top of the bed with her clothes on. He thought about going home but instead undressed her and put her under the covers, and then moved a chair over to the window and sat thinking about la Rosa’s close call, the car he’d chased, and Becker’s face after his brother was shot.

  He listened to Celeste’s soft snore and wondered how much he really knew about her. She’d gone a long way over the edge worrying when he didn’t show up on time and put away three martinis. Maybe her old boyfriend leaving her had left her damaged in a way he couldn’t help.

  Sometime later he got into bed with her, and very late in the night he woke to her whispered, ‘I’m sorry for thinking you stood me up and sorry for getting so scared. I didn’t used to be like that, and I’m sorry I talk about Gary too much. I know if I don’t stop you’re going to go away. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done everything wrong. Things that seemed right at the time, that look like bad decisions now.’

  ‘I like being with you. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Being with a drunk.’

  ‘You’re not a drunk.’

  His cell rang and Raveneau reached for it.

  ‘Inspector, sorry to bother you but about fifteen minutes ago in the hills behind Stoltz’s house we found a Taurus matching your description and with an A, an L, and a number four on the plates. It’s on a street about a mile and a half from here and registered to a David Williams.’

  Raveneau shut his phone slowly. He reached over for Celeste and held her tight for several minutes. Then kissed her and got dressed. If that was Stoltz in China Basin, then Stoltz was out of control. Celeste spoke as he was dressing.

  ‘I understand if you want to end it.’

  ‘That’s the last thing I want. I’ll call you.’

  FORTY-NINE

  They came up the road and around the curve, with the SID officer saying, ‘Right up here under these trees, does that look like your car?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  ‘He could be watching this so I’m going to keep driving, but earlier we got a Los Altos patrol officer to shine a light inside and try the door. It’s locked and there’s nothing on the seats. The hood was still warm.’

  ‘He must get home from here.’

  ‘That’s what we figure too. He burned us. It must be that a computer controls the lights in the house or they’re pre-programmed. We think he got out through the rear.’

  Trying to understand Stoltz leaving the car here, Raveneau said, ‘He got scared when I chased him. He dumped the car here and he’s probably back in his house now.’

  ‘We would have seen him go back in.’

  With Raveneau’s testimony they could probably get another search warrant tonight and go through his house again, but they wouldn’t find anything and tomorrow Stoltz’s lawyer would make more noise. Yesterday, in a press conference, the lawyer even threatened the press, citing Richard Jewell, who when he was cleared of the Atlanta Olympics bombing settled with NBC for half a million. She claimed SFPD was intentionally destroying her client’s reputation.

  The brass was a little worried about that and Captain Ramirez called him, but Raveneau knew this was the car he’d followed. It wasn’t registered to Stoltz, but it was the car and here it was parked within a mile and a half of Stoltz’s house. He was waiting for you to come home and when you flushed him out and followed him, he got so scared he dumped the car on the side of the road and went down his rabbit hole.

  ‘Stop for a minute, OK. I want to stand outside.’

  Raveneau walked over to the car. He looked down at the hillside falling away and up ahead, where the road climbed into country grown over with trees, brush, and rye grass. Maybe he had another car or motorcycle, or some other way of getting out of here once he parked the Taurus. Or maybe he had a way to get back to his house.

  At first light a K-9 unit and a second surveillance team arrived. When la Rosa got there, she and Raveneau hung back as the handlers worked the dogs. A bloodhound went down the road shoulder and half a mile below moved back and forth along a guard rail.

  The dog seemed to want to get around the guard rail, poking its head underneath and barking. When the handler walked it around the railing the bloodhound picked up the scent again and went down the slope.

  They watched and la Rosa asked, ‘Do you get poison oak?’

  Below were several large poison oak bushes, their leaves mostly gone and what was left dry and close to falling. There was greasewood and rye grass and oak, and the handler and dog were partially hidden by the trees and brush.

  ‘I got it as a kid. I don’t get it any more,’ he said, and watched the handler come to the base of the steep slope.

  ‘Looks like he’s about to wave us down,’ Raveneau said. ‘The dog has found something.’

  He thought of other times he’d seen the dogs circle a spot along a creek bed or in trees down a ravine.

  ‘Your dad was a cop, wasn’t he?’ la Rosa asked.

  ‘Yeah, he was a uniform cop, a beat cop. He got discharged from the navy after World War Two, met my mom, and then they stayed and settled here. In those days SFPD still had cops walking the beat. He thought all homicide inspectors were prima donnas. He only trusted uniform cops. He congratulated me when I got my homicide star, but he didn’t think much of it.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘It was fine. We figured out a way to joke about it.’

  ‘Were you close to him?’

  ‘Closer in the end, but he was hard on my brother and I growing up.’

  ‘So who do you have?’

  ‘I got divorced a dozen years ago, and we had one child, a son who was killed in Iraq.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ben, no one told me that.’

  ‘I don’t talk about it much.’

  ‘Were you close to your son?’

  ‘Yes, very close.’

  ‘It must have been very hard.’

  It still is, he thought, and asked, ‘What about you?’

  ‘My grandfather was a cop and I adored him. Even when I was little he treated me like I was an equal riding along with him in a big car. He died when I was in college. He was on patrol driving alone at night on a rural road in Minnesota and had a heart attack and ran into a tree. No one found him until morning, but they think he was alive all night and couldn’t reach the radio. He drank vodka, smoked Marlboros, and ate blood-red steaks he had to beat the black flies off of. He was my hero.’

  Ten minutes later, the dog handler and the bloodhound were back on top and the handler had taken his hat off and was telling Raveneau, ‘There’s a manhole cover over a storm drainage line. He may have gone in there.’

  They went down the steep slope and took a look. From the spot where the dog had stopped your eye followed a line of brush and grass where the scar left from the installation of drainage pipes still showed. Raveneau sighted where it ran down toward the valley and it all began to make sense. He hiked back up the steep slope, slick with dry grass, and got a tire iron and the crowbar he carried in his trunk, and used the crowbar to lift the iron cover. It was the kind of
thing he and Donny would crawl into as kids.

  After looking down the manhole they started making calls, trying to get someone from the local Public Works or Sewer Department, whoever handled run-off. Turned out the sewer people handled storm drainage easements and an engineer walked them through a map, pointing out the easement line.

  ‘It’s a forty-eight inch culvert that drains these hills,’ he said. ‘There are branches that feed into it and there’s an easement through the property you’re speaking of.’

  ‘Will I be able to walk down it?’

  ‘No, in most of it you’d have to work your way along in a crouch. As you get lower the pipe will get bigger. Everything up in these hills feeds in. But most of it is not too steep. Slick in places, I’m sure. Do you really want to go in there?’

  ‘No.’

  They drove back up and SID reported that they still hadn’t seen any sign of movement in the house. Raveneau turned to la Rosa after retrieving a Maglite.

  ‘He could be in there and my phone isn’t going to work, so give me forty minutes and then come find me.’

  ‘That sounds brilliant.’

  ‘I’m going to follow it until I find the access ladder that comes up in the easement crossing the Stoltz property, just like the Public Works guy described.’

  In the concrete pipe the air was cold and smelled of mud and the algae. Where it got steeper he fell several times and his back ached from squatting and shuffling forward. His flashlight only reached so far and there was a possibility he’d encounter Stoltz, so he was ready for that and tense all the way along, a walking target with a light.

  When he reached the ladder that should lead up to the Stoltz property he found a daypack suspended there. For several seconds he held the flashlight beam on it, and then took photos with his phone before unclipping it and looking inside. He climbed the access ladder, shouldered the lid off and looked out along a tall row of pines at the back of the guest house. With the manhole resting heavily on his shoulder he called la Rosa.

  ‘I’m looking at the back of his house. I found a daypack suspended in here.’

  ‘What’s in—’

  ‘A laptop. I’m on my way back with it.’

  FIFTY

  Raveneau lingered, standing on a rung of the manhole ladder, his head and shoulders above ground. He rested a hand on cold dry pine needles and studied the terrain. Overhead, the sky was white and cold. In the walnut orchard to his right, the soil looked damp and dark. Mom’s house loomed off the side of the guest house and he could only guess at what the property was worth or why Stoltz, living in circumstances most could only dream of, would come after them. The easement for storm drainage ran alongside a tall row of pines planted long ago as a windbreak. Branches reached over him. They shadowed the easement and at the end of the trees he saw a hedge that ran all the way up to the back of the guest house alongside the beds of roses. That had to be how he did it. That was his route.

  The iron lid scraped loud enough to be heard some distance and he dropped his flashlight as he climbed back down. Fortunately, it didn’t break when it hit. Leaning against the wall of the big concrete pipe he studied the backpack again. Taking it meant playing their hand, but he only debated for a few minutes.

  He worked his way back, first through the big pipe, and then into the smaller branch, carrying the daypack like a football, and after a while slipping the pack straps over his shoulders and wearing it. Working up the incline he straddled the green slime along the pipe bottom, but slipped several times and cut his knee deep enough to start blood trickling down his calf.

  At some point the pipe got claustrophobic. His progress was slow up the incline, flashlight cutting a darkness that just seemed to go on and on. The four foot pipe wore him out and made his knees ache. Then he saw sunlight and crab-walked the last hundred yards fast to that bright shaft of light. Now he stood in the sun letting the ache ease in his back and knees, blinking at the brightness as he slid the pack off and handed it to la Rosa.

  ‘Have a good time down there?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s great. We ought to pack a picnic and come back. There are a lot of rats so it’s not lonely, but I’ve got an idea for how the little fellas can help us. But right now, let’s go see what CSI can pull off the laptop, and then get it booted up.’

  They drove back to San Francisco, la Rosa at the wheel and Raveneau talking with Public Works in Los Altos. In the CSI office several fingerprints got pulled from the laptop, though all but three were smudged. One was a fourteen pointer that matched Stoltz and there were hairs and a piece of a small scab vacuumed out of the spaces between the keyboard keys.

  Raveneau had to step away to talk to the Public Works guys again. He needed a truck and some uniforms, but they had a protocol. It took the chief of police in Los Altos and a number of calls.

  ‘We want it to be credible,’ Raveneau said. ‘It’s got to be an emergency response as though you’d just discovered these rats, a public health warning, an infestation you’re acting on immediately.’

  ‘That’s just going to give us bad press. It could get someone here fired.’

  ‘No one is going to care. They’ll just be surprised you’re acting so fast and then we’ll explain it all later.’

  ‘What is it you’re going to explain?’

  ‘I can’t tell you yet.’

  There was silence on the other end, but he hadn’t said anything about the backpack and laptop. He’d told the Public Works guy, Corrigan, next to nothing and yet was asking him to provide a truck and uniforms and at least one employee who could play along.

  ‘There actually are a lot of rats down there. You do have an infestation.’

  ‘There are rats everywhere on earth.’

  ‘OK, well, these are the ones that can help us.’

  ‘When do you need all this by?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  They booted up the laptop and ran into a firewall and after an hour of trying to get through called one of the contract techs the city used. As the techs huddled over the laptop Raveneau and la Rosa went down to Café Roma for coffee.

  ‘The last thing I need is coffee,’ la Rosa said as they crossed Bryant. ‘I’m already too wired up.’

  But she bought a piece of chocolate cake and a big coffee. He got a coffee and they took a table. It was hard waiting and there was no way of saying how long it would be. Behind him, on the other side of a glass wall, someone worked on the big coffee roaster.

  ‘How’s your scalp?’ he asked, and la Rosa the college basketball player, the girl who’d torn her ACL playing soccer as a kid and carried a scar on her leg from that repair and another scar above her left eyebrow from a lacrosse stick, leaned over toward him and lifted her hair. She was proud of how it was healing. Healthy red pink healing tissue swelled around the black stitches.

  ‘Looks good.’

  ‘I heal fast.’

  ‘What about inside?’

  ‘Are you asking if I’m thinking about how close a call it was?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re thinking a situation could come up with Stoltz.’

  ‘It could.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it, but you’re not imagining you’re going to leave me behind.’

  ‘I’m asking how you feel.’

  She picked up her coffee and then set it down again.

  ‘I admit I didn’t want to get in that culvert with you. I should have gotten in there with you because he could have been in there.’

  ‘I’m not asking about that.’

  ‘Nothing like this has ever happened to me, so it’s not easy to answer your question.’

  ‘You’re not answering it.’

  Raveneau’s phone rang and it was the computer tech, Meacham. At the counter, the two employees standing there watched his reaction. The city was waiting and watching. La Rosa watched him, as did the media pair at another table, but he didn’t betray any of what he felt about what Meacham had just said. He leaned
toward la Rosa, said quietly, ‘He got through.’

  FIFTY-ONE

  On the other side of the firewall was a single document, a file named ‘Erin’. In it were pieces of information about Erin Quinn’s life, a Louisiana driver’s license number, her social security and passport numbers, addresses dating back to childhood, the schools she’d attended, the location of a sister and two brothers and notes on questioning them. Using Excel, Stoltz had outlined his search. He’d emailed extensively with one of her brothers who lived in upper Michigan, misrepresenting himself to Norman Quinn as an old girlfriend of hers named Melanie Pace, and writing that they’d been buds when they were in college together at San Francisco State. As Melanie Pace he was trying to get back in touch with Erin.

  All of his emails with Norman Quinn, both sent and received, as with his emails with everyone, were chronologically arranged and spread. They often had margin notes alongside them, referring to what action he’d taken, how he was chasing down the lead. Norman had provided names of other people who knew her and in some cases had written or called an introduction ahead of Stoltz contacting them.

  Then he’d written a final email to Stoltz that seemed to capture it all.

  My sister is gone and really I’m the only one in the family who hasn’t accepted that. She disappeared when he was in prison but from things she said, we believe somehow Stoltz had a hand in it. Erin called our sister, Lily, on 22 March, 2002, and said she was scared, that she’d had several hang up calls and had seen two guys this morning that she’d seen at the beach yesterday. She told Lily that Cody Stoltz had warned her he’d reach her from prison, that she’d betrayed him.

  This is hard for me to write but my family thinks Erin is dead. If you continue to search for her, I’ll help you in any way I can, but I’m afraid I’ve already given you every bit of information on her that I have. Like you, I can’t bear the idea that somebody killed her. I pray to God that she’s going to turn up someday with amnesia. After her husband was shot she lost connection with everything for a little while, so I like to think she’s living somewhere and doesn’t remember who she is. I think about her every day. I wish you all the best and it’s comforting to know there’s someone else out there still looking for her. For that, I love you. Norman