A Killing in China Basin

by Kirk Russell

  ‘You must be a pretty good swimmer.’

  ‘I broke the girls’ breaststroke records in high school, but that was a long time ago and I swallowed a lot of water last night. I don’t like the taste of the sea as much as I used to and I’ve never been so glad to crawl on my knees over rocks.’

  ‘How did you come to meet Stoltz on a boat on a dock in San Francisco?’

  ‘He proposed the meeting in an email, though I didn’t know it was him, obviously. I’ve corresponded in a chat room with a person who turned out to be him. That’s because I’ve searched for Erin Quinn. He’s also looking for her and somehow learned that I was Alex’s friend, and that’s probably where he got the idea I knew where the real Quinn is.’

  She coughed again and her face reddened as she tried to suppress it, then gave up and spat whatever it was into the Kleenex. She was weaker after that bout. The nurse had warned Lafaye had gotten some water in her lungs. The worry was pneumonia. They didn’t think she could talk for long. Other than the cough, it seemed to Raveneau she was doing pretty good.

  ‘Inspector, I don’t want your partner shoving a photo in my face, so when she gets back I’d appreciate it if you’d slow her. What’s she doing working anyway? I thought she got shot.’

  ‘The bullet grazed her.’

  ‘She’s pretty tough.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘You bet I am.’

  ‘You said he wrote you an email. I’d like you to forward those emails to me.’

  ‘I have to talk with my attorney first.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘To make sure I’m not overlooking anything. When will you press kidnapping and attempted murder charges? He tried to run me over with the boat.’

  She lifted an arm and as she did the door opened and la Rosa walked back in.

  ‘I knew he would try to run me over. I dove under the boat. That’s not luck. Then I swam toward lights. I swim nearly every day at a club and I don’t think the distance is much different, and it really wasn’t any colder than the workouts used to feel. I’m tired though, very tired. It’s all I can do to talk to you.’

  ‘We understand and we’re going to let you sleep. We’ll leave soon, but a few more things first. I went to your office this morning. Remember, we were going to meet.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ but her attention was on la Rosa now. ‘Let me see the photo,’ she said, and la Rosa showed her six photos. She pointed at Stoltz immediately.

  ‘Your office was broken into. Is there something there Stoltz might want to steal?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I believe he intends to kill Erin Quinn when he finds her.’

  She coughed hard again. When she finished Raveneau asked, ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he have reason from the emails you’ve exchanged with him to think you knew where she was?’

  ‘None that I can think of, and clearly I had no idea this person I’ve talked to online for years was this man you’re looking for.’

  ‘You drove there. You boarded the boat, but you didn’t know it was Cody Stoltz until you were out on the water?’

  ‘He hid his features.’

  ‘Like a spy,’ la Rosa offered. ‘He fooled you.’

  She smiled at la Rosa, as though smiling at a mildly amusing comment by a child. Raveneau bored in.

  ‘So this guy was in a disguise and you went for a boat ride with him anyway?’

  Lafaye stared, debated, and then said, ‘Correct. For years I’ve exchanged email messages with an unknown someone who had a grudge against Erin Quinn. Online he said she’d stolen thousands of dollars from him. I had the impression they’d planned to get married and she’d cleaned out a joint bank account and run off. Neither of us revealed our true identities, so it wasn’t strange to me that he’d want to keep hiding his on the boat.’

  ‘You didn’t know who he was, but you figured you were OK to take a boat ride with him.’

  ‘All right, Ben, I’ll plead guilty to being stupid or eager, or whatever it is you want to charge me with, except anything criminal, which I’m not guilty of. Frankly, I’m lucky to be alive.’

  ‘We’re glad you’re alive and I’m sure it was very frightening.’

  ‘Why don’t you find him first and then we’ll talk about the emails.’

  They talked another twenty minutes with her and then left unsure if kidnapping could be filed today. As they passed Lafayette on the drive back, Raveneau looked at the field of white crosses on the face of a hill to his right. There were many crosses bright in sunlight on the hillside.

  ‘What’s that about?’ la Rosa asked.

  ‘They’re a reminder and a memorial for soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a cross for each one.’

  They lost the sun as they came back through the Caldecott Tunnel to the bay side. Gray clouds sat at horizon.

  ‘Looks like rain,’ Raveneau said, and then took a call from the office.

  ‘Inspector, a woman called for you a few minutes ago and said she had new information on the John Reinert murder. Do you want her phone number?’

  ‘The John Reinert murder?’ La Rosa turned her head immediately. ‘Yes, give me the number.’

  When he hung up, la Rosa said, ‘That’s probably another kook, another nut feeding on all this. Why is it the kooks all come here?’

  ‘Goes back to the Gold Rush, I think. San Francisco was where you went to start all over again. I’m going to call the number.’

  He did and a woman answered. She said softly but with some irony, ‘I thought that would get your attention.’

  ‘John Reinert died thirteen years ago,’ Raveneau said. ‘What can you tell me?’

  ‘Thirteen years, two months, and sixteen days, but I don’t really keep track like that any more.’

  Then he knew. He reached for a pen and something to write on.

  ‘In those days I was Erin Reinert.’

  ‘Where are you now, Erin?’

  ‘In San Francisco, here to talk to you and your partner.’

  ‘And we’d very much like to talk to you. Can you meet us at the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street?’

  ‘No, I want to meet you in China Basin. I want you to show me where Alex Jurika died.’

  ‘Did you know Alex Jurika?’

  ‘Once, I knew her very well.’

  ‘We’ll meet you in China Basin. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

  He gave her the address and hung up.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Erin Quinn wore a black leather coat and jeans. Her face was fuller, her hands chapped, hair streaked with gray, eyes distant, haunted. She looked away as she talked. She looked through the chain link at the bay as Raveneau unlocked the gate. Inside, the interior still smelled strongly of new paint and carpet.

  ‘She was killed upstairs,’ la Rosa said, talking as she led the way up. ‘Tell us about yourself. Where are you living?’

  ‘In the Sierras, but I don’t want to say where until after you arrest Cody. I don’t want any publicity. I don’t want anyone to know about me, especially him.’

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘I’ve never thought I had the right to remarry. I had my chance and I ruined it.’

  ‘Do you believe Cody Stoltz has kept looking for you all these years?’

  ‘Yes, and he blames me.’

  ‘Why does he blame you?’

  ‘Show me where Alex was killed.’

  They had reached the room anyway, but it was nothing like that night. A row of cheap new fluorescent lights hung on pendants from the ceiling. The floor had a low-grade commercial carpet and the walls new white paint. La Rosa resumed her soft questioning.

  ‘Tell us more about you and Alex.’

  ‘I was with Alex when I met my husband. I met Cody the same night.’ She looked down at the floor, asked, ‘How did Alex die?’

  ‘She was strangled,’ la Rosa said. ‘She was bound and strangled.’ />
  ‘In this room?’

  La Rosa glanced at Raveneau, then described the murder scene before asking, ‘Did you keep in touch with Alex?’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t talk often.’

  ‘What about email?’ Raveneau asked, thinking about the qnn@yahoo.com emails.

  ‘Never, because I was afraid of him hacking into her computer, and then finding me.’ She turned to la Rosa. ‘Who do you think killed her?’

  ‘Who would kill her?’ Quinn asked. ‘Who do you think killed her?’

  La Rosa glanced at Raveneau again before answering, ‘We don’t know yet. We’re hoping you can help us.’

  When Quinn was silent Raveneau asked, ‘Could Cody have gone to Alex to try to find you?’

  She exhaled hard and said, ‘Anything is possible with him. He wouldn’t know unless he figured some things out, but he might have done that.’

  ‘What things?’ La Rosa asked.

  ‘How does revenge sound?’

  Raveneau caught his partner’s eye. This is where it got tricky. She was about to give them motive.

  ‘Cody wanted to be known as very bright, as the guy that thinks up the ideas that change things. He thought he was going to be famous but I don’t think money ever really mattered to him.’

  ‘Because he already had it,’ la Rosa threw out, and Quinn didn’t respond. She held herself as though she was cold and stared at the floor until Raveneau said, ‘We’d like to go back to our office with you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to a police station. Can we talk in your car?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Raveneau sat in the backseat with her. In the front la Rosa took notes, her pen scratching on the pad she carried. Quinn spoke in a flat voice tinged by sadness.

  ‘In those days Alex was pretty wild and I was the more conservative one, but we both partied a lot. John and Cody were best friends and they were in a hotel bar together the night we met them. We were out cruising. Everything that happened after was my fault and I’m going to tell you why. I’ve made up my mind to tell you.

  ‘We met in a bar on Spear Street that isn’t there any more. That night Alex sort of paired off with Cody and I went with John. Alex and Cody ended up going home together. Cody was very aggressive with women. He was very good looking. They went home together and did whatever they did, and John and I talked until late, and then we took this long walk along the Embarcadero and past Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way out to Fort Mason and the Golden Gate Bridge.’

  ‘Pretty good walk,’ Raveneau said.

  ‘Yeah, and we saw the sunrise from under the bridge and then had this great breakfast, but what we had was more intellectual than anything else and we were too young to realize it wasn’t enough. We would have made great friends but we weren’t meant to be married. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I do,’ la Rosa said from the front seat.

  ‘We got married six months later. By the time the affair started with Cody I was very angry with John, and the marriage was less than a year old and failing. John had started snorting a lot of cocaine and his temper was totally out of control. He was also drinking too much, and there was the gun thing. I don’t remember what started it. I think it was because of a carjacking in San Francisco. This was right when all that sort of stuff started to happen and Cody and John had sports cars they worried about getting stolen.

  ‘Cody already knew how to shoot. John didn’t. They went shopping and bought guns one Saturday so no one could take their precious cars. I didn’t want the guns in the apartment, so they kept them in their cars. The day John got killed they’d been out to a shooting range in the afternoon.’

  That was in the murder file. Raveneau had read it. Whitacre and Bates confirmed that Stoltz and Reinert had been at in indoor range in Fremont.

  ‘I really fell in love with Cody. John’s new cocaine habit and his jealousy and insecurity were oppressive. I hated coming home. But Cody was all energy and fun. I didn’t know then how angry he could get. He had a beautiful body and he was so bright. He was already well known in certain circles for the work he was doing. John looked up to him and I thought he was a god.’

  ‘What were you doing for work at the time?’

  ‘I quit my job when we got married. I wasn’t doing anything and that was part of the problem. I was living off my husband and sort of despised myself for staying with him just because I had no job or place to go.’

  ‘And what about Alex? What was she doing for work?’

  ‘She did temp work but always had plenty of money. She told me once that she’d inherited money. Another time it was because she’d come up with an idea for online bookkeeping that got patented, but I’m sure that wasn’t true, and I’m sure you know by now she was into credit fraud.’

  ‘When did you know?’

  ‘Not until after John was dead, but she never really ever talked to me about the credit cards. I just sort of figured it out when she offered to get me a new identity. After Cody went to prison Alex made me into someone else.’

  She paused and looked down at her hands. Raveneau looked at la Rosa’s eyes.

  ‘With Cody and me it built up to a boiling point, and then one afternoon we just tore each other’s clothes off, and then there was no going back. After that everything either of us said to John was a lie. We were lying as routinely as breathing and I made excuses so John and I didn’t sleep together any more. I kept myself chaste by avoiding sleeping with my husband. How’s that for classy?’

  ‘It happens,’ la Rosa said. ‘You’re not alone there and we understand.’

  ‘I only wanted to be with Cody but I didn’t have the courage to leave John.’

  Her right hand came up now, touched her forehead in an odd gesture and then returned to her lap. She shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t see Alex much after I got married. It seemed like it was Cody, John, and I hanging out together all the time. Everybody liked Alex but it was as though some part of right and wrong was never taught to her. I remember once she used the phone in our apartment to call a friend in London. They talked for two hours and she never told me. I tracked it down through the phone company and the guy in London said he’d been on the phone to Alex. She was like that. She’d apologize and offer to pay but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t do it again tomorrow. Have you ever known anyone like that?’

  ‘Those are the only people we know,’ Raveneau said. ‘That’s who we hang out with every day.’

  That got the faintest smile.

  ‘Alex had this charisma, this kind of crazy impulsive streak and she’d get you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise. I was jealous of her because guys gravitated toward her. I’m trying to think of an example . . . OK, here’s one. We go to a hotel up on Nob Hill, one of the stuffy ones, you know, boring, and as we’re leaving some woman is dropping her Mercedes with the valet. I remember she had this perfect blonde hair and the Mercedes was this gold-colored two-seater. The doorman was helping somebody else and when this woman got out of her car she wanted the valet to carry a package in. Her car was sitting there with the driver’s door open and the engine still running and Alex turned to me and said, “We don’t need a cab after all. We’ll just borrow this. Get in.”

  ‘We drove it to within a couple of blocks of another bar on Union Street and then left it with the keys in it and walked away.’

  Her chest heaved as she sighed and said, ‘Now comes the part that’s not in your police files on John’s murder. You know we went to dinner and then went back to the apartment. We’d all done lines of coke. We drank more and John fell asleep. The inspectors asked if we’d done any drugs and I said only John had. If they’d tested me or Cody we would have come back positive. But those inspectors wanted to believe me.’

  ‘Inspectors Whitacre and Bates.’

  ‘Yes. We’d been talking about a weekend trip that we’d planned to take together to Mendocino; or rather Cody and I were talking. We were holding each other in the kitchen because
we thought John was asleep and then he walked in and caught us. When he did, Cody pretended it was nothing, but John wigged out. The marriage ended when he walked in. Everything ended. Then Cody said he was leaving and John asked if he wanted to kiss me goodbye first. He should have left right then, but he didn’t. He kissed me long and hard and then walked out the door. That’s Cody, and of course John went crazy and followed him down. Cody wanted the confrontation. He knew John would follow and he knew the guns were in the cars. I was supposed to back up his story about the mugger, but I couldn’t do it.’

  Raveneau saw it now. He knew what she’d say next. ‘So you came up with your own.’

  ‘That’s right; I came up with my own version. How did you know that?’

  ‘Tell us what happened.’

  ‘I don’t know what was said in the parking lot, but Cody was ready. Earlier in the night he told me he was going to be ready if something happened later. Somehow he made it happen and I know he must have shot John. I heard the shots, and when I went downstairs Cody was kneeling next to John who was lying between two cars in this little back parking lot. He was alive. He might not have died. He was having a very hard time breathing, but he was breathing. He was still alive and we didn’t do anything. Cody leaned over him and he told me what to say about a mugger. If John was conscious he heard it. It was that horrible and you should arrest me, but at least I don’t have to hold it inside any more.’

  ‘Did Cody ask if you’d seen the shooting?’

  ‘No, he just told me what to say, and there’s something else I have to tell you. I had nothing to do with John getting murdered, but I did lie afterwards and that’s why Cody has looked for me all these years. He knows I lied.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the conversation with Cody after John was on the ground shot. What did Cody tell you to do?’

  ‘He said to tell the police there was a mugger who’d tried to rob them and had shot John and run, and that no matter what to stick with that story.’

  ‘Did he tell you he’d shot John?’