One Through the Heart

by Kirk Russell

  The next call from the undercover unit came with a question. ‘Is he a drinker?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘He’s still at the bar. He’s been in there since before midnight, almost an hour and a half, and he’s been drinking sparkling water. Does that sound like him to you?’

  ‘Not the guy I know.’

  ‘OK, it looks like he just got a text message. He’s picked up his phone and now he’s waving the bartender over and he’s got his wallet out. He’s paying. It looks like we’re rolling again.’

  Hugh drove toward the Marina and up to Chestnut Street and right on Chestnut. After four blocks they guessed he might be heading to the Presidio or the bridge, but then he backtracked. Before he reached Lombard he went right and then drifted down several blocks and parked.

  ‘He’s on foot.’

  Hearing that Raveneau hurried to his car. He cut across town listening to them report Hugh walking three blocks then making a cell call from a street corner. The phone went back in his coat pocket, and he continued on another block and a half then turned and went up a flight of steps of a house. The front door opened quickly and he was inside.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ one of the team asked and Raveneau didn’t have an answer, but it was on him to decide what to do next. That Hugh had walked three blocks without looking for parking closer to the house didn’t make sense to Raveneau. He was here now. He saw places to park. He eased and told himself his imagination had run too far too fast. It probably was a girlfriend and parking farther away had to do with street permits and avoiding a parking ticket. He played everything back through his head again and one of the surveillance team, a young woman officer, took a walk past the house. As she did, she heard one then a second sound from inside the house and said, ‘Gunshots. Three.’

  Now Raveneau was out of his car and hurrying toward the house steps. He took them two at a time with the surveillance team close behind. He pounded on the door and the door opened and Hugh without a word moved aside to let him in. As Raveneau stared at Lindsley he knew Lindsley was dead.

  ‘Ben, he pulled a gun on me. I had no choice. He called me and said he wanted to surrender himself and had always trusted me. He told me he wanted me to bring him in. He knew me from Lash’s poker games. I knew it was risky but I was already in North Beach at a bar and he said he was close to killing himself. He said he would if I didn’t come alone. I almost called you but with the way it’s gotten between us I just couldn’t do that. I drove here, parked three blocks away and called nine one one just before I went up. That’s what the sirens you’re hearing outside are about. I figured they would get here as he surrendered, but he didn’t want to surrender. What he wanted to do was kill me. I think he was afraid I would remember something that happened way back when and maybe that’s because of something you’ve uncovered with your cold case investigation. I don’t know what it was but he had a gun. It’s still there on the couch.’

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘I have no idea but he may have been getting ready to tell me as he eased that gun out from between those sofa cushions. Fortunately, I saw the gun before he started to raise it. I aimed at his chest and hit him on his left side. He got one shot off that went into the wall behind me. I could have easily missed him. I could be dead.’

  ‘Hugh,’ Raveneau started and then stopped. The on-call inspectors would handle this. They would get Hugh’s statement and his.

  Raveneau made sure Hugh was moved out of the building. Two uniform officers led him down to a car and he waited in the back until the on-call inspectors showed. Raveneau waited too, but on the sidewalk. He called la Rosa. He called Coe, told him Lindsley was dead, and Coe said quietly, ‘We suspected he had a place in San Francisco. I’ll be there inside an hour.’

  ‘I won’t be here when you get here, but I want to know we’re still on for tomorrow.’

  ‘Skyline Boulevard, seven a.m., bring our dogs though they don’t scent well to construction debris. Why aren’t you staying there at the Lindsley scene?’

  ‘Because the on-call inspectors just got here. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  At dawn the next morning Raveneau parked so the K-9 units would see his car as they drove up the road. That way no one would miss the turnoff on to the dirt road. He carried his coffee as he walked out the dirt road and the chill air felt like the start of the true fall. Fog had come in with the night and strands of fog moved through the trees in the ravines below; the trees dripped and the bay leaves were pungent with the damp and the road dark with moisture though it would dry with the first sunlight. He had fifteen to twenty minutes before the K-9 units would arrive and wanted to walk it alone first.

  He stopped where Baylor had backed up and the rear tires of the heavy truck sank along the edge of the road as the dump bed lifted. Baylor took a pretty good risk as the bed rose and more weight transferred to the rear axle before the heavy debris slid out. He could have ended up down in the ravine. The construction debris tore through the brush leaving what looked like an avalanche scar. Looking at it more closely today, he understood why Hugh’s bill for the clean-up was so big.

  He walked out to where the road ended at the abandoned house site. Before construction started it must have been a rounded knoll that got bulldozed into a flat dirt pad. The builder got part-way through the foundation before the financial system seized up and the bank called his loan. Rebar cages rose out of piers drilled in the ground and filled with concrete. Along one side, the builder had stacked form boards to pour a retaining wall. On the rest of the site the dirt was damp and dark like the road in, but also cracked and hard from the long hot summer and dry fall.

  The new house would have looked out down through the treed ravines and out across to coastal mountains. He walked through, touched rusty rebar and sun-hardened wood, now twisted and gray. He finished his coffee and walked the perimeter of the shaved-off knoll. He looked down into the trees and kept his mind off Hugh and the clothes in two bags in his trunk. He found a deer trail and walked a ways down it and then climbed back up and walked out to the main road as the first SFPD K-9 Unit showed up.

  After a phone call and a little mix-up on directions, the FBI dog handler arrived. Raveneau’s idea was to search both sides of the dirt road, keeping the dog teams separated with one team on either side working along the steep embankments toward the knoll with abandoned construction. He put the coffee mug back in the car and the bags with the clothes out of the trunk then watched how the handlers let their dogs scent the clothes. He showed them the tire tracks and pointed out debris from the two loads dumped here.

  ‘He either backed in or drove in to the construction site and turned around, and that’s what I think he did. He drove in and turned around because with the trees overhanging it would have been hard to back in.’

  No one said anything. If they had, they probably would have said, so what? They didn’t care how Baylor drove the truck. Neither did they like the steep terrain, poison oak and brush. The Fed dog handler asked how far down they needed to go and Raveneau, imagining Baylor pointed down at a big oak, said, ‘At least that far, and both sides of the road and all the way around the construction site.’

  ‘That’s going to take hours.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here early.’

  That was the end of conversation before the handlers started their dogs. Now they were well down the steep sides and he heard the dogs barking and the handlers’ voices in fragments carrying up through the fog. He listened for a while and then walked out to the house site with a knot in his stomach and an image of Hugh making the phone call from the sidewalk a block and a half from where Lindsley sat waiting. He could easily be wrong about this search today.

  A couple of hours passed and the early cool warmed and sunlight dried the road. Both handlers hiked up at different times to give their dogs water. Neither was to the knoll yet and then both were and neither dog had scented anything yet. They worked their way
around the knoll and met up. When that happened they climbed back up to the construction site together.

  The Fed handler said, ‘My girl here is about done.’

  ‘Can she go another half hour?’

  ‘She’s pretty well done.’

  ‘I want to get one of you to go lower. There’s a deer trail off the back of the site. I want to move the perimeter out another fifty yards just at the knoll here.’

  Harrison with the SFPD German shepherd said, ‘That should just be one of us. I’ll do it.’

  He went down with BP, the dog named after the Gulf oil spill, and Raveneau, like the handlers, didn’t hold out a lot of hope of still finding something, but the deer trail was the obvious way to get farther down. The deer were probably here before the house and from the tracks they were here after it. He saw Baylor emptying the bed and then coming in here to turn around, but after doing that, and before leaving, shutting the engine off and getting out. From here you couldn’t see Skyline Boulevard. The trees hid it and no one driving by would see the truck, and the truck once turned around would block the entrance to the site.

  Baylor would have checked it out. He would have found the deer trail and figured out it was the easy way to get down where no one would ever go. He took a call from la Rosa now, and then heard the dog, BP, barking louder. ‘I’ve got to call you back. Is Baylor willing to talk to us?’

  ‘Only if we offer him something. Any luck out there?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  But now Harrison was calling to him and Raveneau hurried down the trail, nearly tripping on a root. As he got there, Harrison, the handler, asked, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just figured the timing worked. It was his opportunity.’

  Raveneau stopped talking as he saw what the dog had found.

  ‘Why here when those other dump loads of debris were bound to get found?’

  ‘Timing. It was on a day when he had a full load to dump. He was here to do the illegal dumping and he figured that off this end of the construction site was far enough away from what slid out of the bed.’

  The skull and the clothing were together. That was another mistake. He could have lost the clothing anywhere, absolutely anywhere. Dropped them on a street corner, dropped them in a garbage, donated the clothes to Salvation Army or left them on a bus station bench and no one would have been the wiser. The skull he should have broken into pieces, but maybe there was a reason he did it this way, Raveneau thought, leaving the plastic bag he carried the skull and clothes in as well. Maybe he wanted them together and maybe that was driven by anger.

  Raveneau waited hours for a photographer. He asked the Chief Medical Examiner to drive down, and he was at the site until mid afternoon.

  But now he was with la Rosa across the table from Matt Baylor in an interview room. They had brought Baylor up the fire escape to the Fifth Floor and Baylor didn’t complain about climbing the stairs in manacles. He was in an upbeat mood. Maybe he thought he was being offered a deal because his Uncle Hugh ‘had nailed one of the guys who set the fires last night and the cops didn’t want to be going after a hero officer’s nephew.’

  Baylor might have believed that but Raveneau didn’t think so. Still, neither Raveneau nor la Rosa did anything to alter his mood yet. They talked up the risk Hugh took to confront Lindsley alone and liked the idea of Baylor feeling that he was basking in Hugh’s halo. The media ran the story that way: career officer lured to a late night meeting kills the fourth arsonist in a shoot out. Inside the Homicide Detail was a different view but if they were correct Hugh did it the right way. He contaminated the scene in a way that would make it difficult to solve.

  La Rosa set up her laptop and Baylor asked, ‘What’s up with the laptop?’

  Raveneau answered for her. ‘We’ve got some photos to show you.’

  ‘You’re wondering if I’ve ever seen the guy that Hugh wasted?’

  ‘If you have we’d be interested, but this is different. We’re going to come around to your side of the table. We’ve got this set up as a slide show. We’re not really high enough up in the brass to do PowerPoint and there’s no intro music, so we’re going to be right into the opening shots right away. I’m guessing you’ll recognize where they were taken and I should tell you they were all taken today.’

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘You’re going to have to tell us that. You’re the man with the answers.’

  The first photo could have been from someone’s vacation somewhere looking down a dirt road with the oak and bay branches overhanging it and out toward a foggy vista.

  ‘I took that,’ Raveneau said. ‘Do you recognize the road?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It runs out to the secret prison.’

  ‘Why are you fucking with me?’

  La Rosa was wondering the same thing.

  ‘I’m not really. I’m just slowly getting into a good mood. You probably haven’t ever seen me in a good mood, so it seems strange.’

  La Rosa gave him another look and he nodded and moved to the second photo. This showed the dirt pad leveled and the foundation construction, pier rebar poking up, twisted form wood of the retaining wall.

  Baylor frowned. He looked down at the photo again and he looked up he said, ‘OK.’

  ‘OK, what?’

  ‘I recognize this. It’s where I dumped those loads.’

  ‘That’s right, and we were out there with dogs today. I’ve got a question as we get to these next photos.’

  Baylor didn’t respond. He just watched the screen and waited for the next one and that was the deer trail leading down off the back of the site. The fourth showed the skull and clothes.

  ‘My question is why didn’t you bury it deep or at least lose the clothes? The dogs might still have found it, but I doubt it.’

  Now there was a long silence as Baylor stared at the screen and Raveneau and la Rosa sat quiet. They could only imagine what must be tumbling through his head. Raveneau was banking on the fight Baylor had with his uncle.

  ‘He wanted me to lose them.’

  There we go.

  ‘Who did?’

  Another long silence. It was hard for him and then his anger returned and he spit out the words, ‘Uncle Fucking Hugh, and I don’t know why I did it for him. Because he said he’d deal with some other problems I had going, I guess. It was weird and I felt strange doing it but he said not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter. He said it was old news and over with. Those were his exact words.’

  ‘Did he ever say whose skull it was?’

  ‘He told me where it was in the bomb shelter and it was pretty obvious it was hers. He said he didn’t kill her and he didn’t find out about the skull until later. I got it out the day I went down there the first time. He said I owed him and that’s when he said it was old news and over with and didn’t matter anymore. It was just something that needed to be done so he didn’t get questioned about what kind of job he did on an investigation.’ Baylor looked at Raveneau. ‘Hugh didn’t trust you. He’s retiring at the end of the year and he didn’t want some asshole asking questions about the case.’

  ‘Asking him or asking someone else?’

  ‘I don’t really know, but, yeah, maybe he didn’t want you finding it and then talking to other people.’

  ‘He told you where to find it. Did he say he had been in the shelter and seen it?’

  ‘I don’t think he ever went down there. Someone else told him it was there. Something like that, and I don’t know if you know but Hugh was getting paid by the professor. He was getting ten grand a month as a consultant when the professor was writing his book. That was after his divorce and it went on for years. He didn’t want to fuck that up.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  Baylor nodded and this was a thing about Baylor he’d learned. You couldn’t really know with him. Raveneau doubted Hugh did anything more than tell his nephew that he worked as a consultant for Lash on a book and probably
told him how much he made. For years he had wanted his nephew to like and respect him.

  ‘He was getting the money in cash and he told me it saved him.’

  ‘When did he tell you that?’

  ‘We were drinking at the house one night. It’s all fucked up, I know, but that’s what happened. So if I testify or whatever, what do I get? One thing I want is out of jail right now.’

  ‘How did you get back in?’

  ‘Hugh backed out of the bail deal.’

  But even then there wasn’t enough to take on Hugh Neilley. Hugh wouldn’t say a word. He’d lawyer-up, and the one who told him about a skull and some clothes in a bomb shelter, the one ‘hanging around the professor’s house’, as Baylor put it, Raveneau guessed was Lindsley. Hugh could answer that if they could get him to talk.

  They held off interviewing Hugh. They waited on DNA confirmation on the skull and then re-interviewed Albert Lash. Raveneau told Lash, ‘Ann Coryell’s skull was recovered from the bomb shelter. We believe Brandon Lindsley killed her and if you can help prove that we’ll clear you. We’ll put out a statement and hold a press conference and tell the world how you got framed.’

  Lash looked suspicious but interested. Not a bad place to start. He answered quickly and the voice software worked well. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘It’s complicated because Lindsley made an effort to frame you. He told Inspector Neilley in 2006 that you had killed her and her skull was in the bomb shelter. He told Neilley about the shelter and how to access it. Similar to how he tried to frame you with the knife and surgical saw. We’re going to need Neilley to cooperate, and to get some leverage on him we want you on tape saying you were paying Hugh Neilley ten grand a month in cash as a consultant.’