A Killing in China Basin (22 page)

‘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

R
aveneau 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

O
n 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.

The file on Erin Quinn totaled one hundred and twenty-eight pages and they had to copy it and take it with them because it was time to hook up with the Public Works people in Los Altos. As they got in the car, la Rosa said, ‘This is amazing. Who is this guy? He’s got a whole story and bio for this Melanie Pace he became online. Listen to this: Melanie Pace actually existed. She was a San Francisco State student killed in a freak car accident when a thunderstorm caused a flash flood that swept her car off the road in New Mexico. He’s got the newspaper article right here.’

But on page one hundred and fourteen it was a different name that caught them. Raveneau was driving as la Rosa read aloud to him.

‘I feel like we should be saying Eureka, not Jurika,’ she said. ‘He worked some pretty small threads back to Jurika. He figured out Quinn shed her identity and Jurika sold it. Ben, he just figured this out, like two weeks ago.’

‘And went to Jurika to get answers and ended up killing her.’

‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what happened.’

In Los Altos they rendezvoused with the Public Works guys who’d knock on the door of Mrs Stoltz’s house. Raveneau listened to the conversation via the wire the Public Works foreman wore. He watched through binoculars as the foreman turned and pointed at an exterminator van in the street.

‘He’s with us, ma’am, and we’ve got an emergency. With your permission we’d like to access our line through a manhole in our easement through your property.’

When she learned that a large rat infestation had been discovered yesterday in the storm drainage pipes running back into the hills, she gave immediate permission to get on to the property. She knew about the easement and manhole, but now came a trickier part.

‘Is anyone living in the other house?’ the foreman asked.

‘My son is.’

‘Is he home?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you mind calling him?’

‘No, I don’t mind at all, but his car is there. He must be home but that doesn’t matter. I’m giving you permission to do whatever you need to do on the property.’ She started down the gravel drive to the guest house and then turned on the foreman. ‘Oh, come on now, you know who my son is. You must know. Everyone knows what they’re doing to Cody. You don’t have to pretend with me.’

‘I’m not pretending about the rats, ma’am, and I’m just being polite about your son. I don’t want to surprise him.’

Good line. They watched her knock on Stoltz’s door with the big foreman standing to her side. If Stoltz answered, no question he’d object. Then he’d have to sneak out there and try to retrieve the daypack and they’d videotape that, maybe meet him coming back up the hole. But Stoltz didn’t answer and the foreman and crew went out to the manhole and the SID team dressed as exterminators followed with a Public Works foreman.

They placed a groundhog camera near the manhole to try to capture Stoltz’s discovery that Public Works had gone down and found the backpack. If he called and claimed it, and slim chance he’d do that, but if he did, they’d refer him to the exterminators. The exterminators would admit that yes, they had found it. They’d ask, is it your pack, sir? If he said yes, they’d get that on tape. They’d tape his explanation and let him know the daypack and laptop were safe and that they’d return them soon, but not that fast. Not until they got every last thing out of its hard drive.

FIFTY-TWO

L
afaye had always assumed that her years of emails with [email protected] were an anonymous exchange of information. She didn’t know Stoltz had discovered her identity three years ago and after doing so had made a point of learning everything he could about her. The email he sent her this afternoon read simply, ‘I have information you’ll want. It took work to get and cost me some money. Interested in splitting the costs?’

‘What is it?’

‘Found where she’s living.’

‘Confirmed?’

‘Very close to. If you’re in, you’re in for ten grand.’