A Killing in China Basin (31 page)

‘Just listen. In order to go forward I need to know how Stoltz knew to be at Lake Merced. If you told him about the meeting with Quinn, tell me now. If it was on the boat you were under severe duress and maybe you weren’t coherent enough the next day to put it all together.’

‘But if there’s a trial I’ll get called to the stand.’

‘There won’t be a trial. I got a call from a doctor an hour ago. Stoltz’s kidneys and liver are shutting down. He’s not going to make it. It’ll stay with us. But I have to know.’

Lafaye looked down at the carpet. She looked saddened, as if disappointed in herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m truly sorry. But, yes, that’s what happened. He frightened it out of me on the boat and I didn’t tell you when I had a chance. Is that what you needed?’

‘Yes.’

‘I really am sorry.’

Raveneau nodded. ‘We’ll still have questions,’ he said. ‘There’ll be plenty of questions about how it worked with Jurika and Quinn and you.’ He stood. ‘We’ll talk when you get back.’

The private investigator had a few things for them, not a lot but a few things that mattered. The Quinn woman – his words – he believed lived in the Bucks Lake area, was only seeing a trickle of the payments made through Jurika. His client, Lafaye, had paid over two hundred thousand dollars in six years, an amount he considered foolish and unnecessary. It was also enough money to give Lafaye motive to kill Jurika and hope that Stoltz killed Quinn at Lake Merced. But that wasn’t the conclusion Raveneau was coming to.

When the private investigator finished, Raveneau left a message for Erin Quinn at the motel on Lombard, and when she didn’t answer a second message they drove over to the motel and the manager opened her door, showed them all her things were still there, so they decided to wait. When Celeste phoned he left la Rosa and stood outside in the cool air talking to her.

‘What are doing tonight?’ she asked.

‘Watching a motel. So far it hasn’t moved.’

‘Will you be around later?’

‘I don’t know, but things are moving. I’ll see you soon.’

At midnight they called in and got a combination of an undercover officer in an unmarked and a radio car to cover until six in the morning, when Raveneau said he’d be back. If she returned during the night a call would go to la Rosa and him. He returned just before six and brought coffees with him for the officers in the radio unit. He told them they could take off. Ten minutes after they did, Quinn showed up. She left her car running and the headlights on as she went into her motel room. She didn’t carry anything out of the room and left the motel room door open as she got back in her car. Later, Raveneau realized that the open motel room door was a signal that he should have seen. But he was finally seeing the Jurika killing. He was too caught up in that.

SIXTY-FOUR

Q
uinn drove the San Francisco waterfront as though sightseeing or looking for someone on the street. She passed the ballpark, crossed the Lefty O’Doul Bridge over Mission Creek and continued south into China Basin. It didn’t surprise him that she drove past the building where Alex Jurika died, or that after passing the building she turned and went back toward the downtown.

Raveneau gave her distance. In a separate car, la Rosa did the same. Morning commuter traffic fed into the city and at this hour many had their headlights on. Raveneau turned his off as the sky lightened and Quinn drove toward Golden Gate Park, and then to the apartment complex where her husband died. As she slowed there, he nodded to himself. He picked up his cell and called la Rosa.

‘Lafaye gave Stoltz Quinn and hoped Stoltz would kill her and that would be the end of her problem. I think her problem is bigger than she told us. I have a feeling it’s more than her board of directors disapproving of her using someone else’s identity to do good works. My bet is she used the Quinn identity for things other than saving the world. I’m guessing she made money with it in a way she now doesn’t want to admit and that’s why she kept paying the extortion money. She paid two hundred thousand dollars and didn’t call the police. Who does that without a solid reason?’

Quinn led them through the Presidio and then on to the Golden Gate Bridge. As she started to climb up the steep grade into Marin County, la Rosa asked, ‘What do you think, is she starting to drive home?’

‘Let’s give her another few miles.’

As he called her cell, Raveneau watched Quinn move over two lanes and take the next exit. When she picked up she said, ‘You want to meet with me, don’t you?’

‘We do. We’d like to meet this morning.’

‘And after that can I go back home?’

‘We can talk about that too. Where are you now?’

‘I’m in Marin in the car and close to the freeway. Can we meet at the motel?’

‘Sure, and we may take you back downtown.’

‘Are you going to arrest me?’

‘What we really want to do right now is talk with you.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘Tell me more about Lafaye. Where did she get the money for those first payments?’

‘Where do you think? She took it from the foundation.’

‘Did Alex know that’s what would happen?’

‘Alex was very clever. Alex was a very good read of people.’

‘That’s what I’m gathering. I’m thinking Alex wouldn’t have gone into a rundown building in China Basin at night with someone she didn’t know.’

Raveneau saw her get on 101 southbound back toward San Francisco and pulled back on behind her. He narrowed the gap between them and kept talking. She listened then abruptly interrupted him with an anxious edge in her voice.

‘A private investigator was asking questions about me in a town called Quincy not that far from where I live. He told people the woman he was looking for had extorted large amounts of money from his client. That’s what he was saying to people in Quincy and I knew he wouldn’t be there for just a couple of thousand dollars, so I knew Alex had lied to me. I needed to question her. I had to question her. What else could I do?’

‘You called her and came down to visit and talk it out.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get the Ketamine from a veterinarian up where you live?’

She didn’t answer, and he thought again about Lafaye continuing to pay and not going to the police, but searching for Quinn on her own, and Quinn following the money trail back through the questions of the private investigator. Then she’d gone back to Jurika.

‘Alex wanted to show me a rundown building she was thinking of buying into. She wanted me to buy in also and made up a story about how we would own it together. She said she had a way to make it happen, so I said I’d come down and stay with her a few days and we’d go see the building. She was sleeping with the realtor and had a key, so we could go anytime.

‘She had a key and false papers to show me that I was half owner in this building. She had a whole new identity for me as the building owner: Alex and me, the credit thief and unemployed middle-aged woman buying a commercial building in San Francisco. She wanted me to sign these false papers and feel like I had two hundred thousand in equity. She claimed there was no mortgage. She got the realtor on the phone and he told me Alex had paid cash for the building.’

‘You must have been very angry.’

‘I wanted revenge. I needed to make things fair. I’ve lived very quietly and paid cash for everything, or done things for trade. I’ve lived poor. I never had one credit card. I cancelled everything when Cody went to jail because I knew what he’d do when he got out.’

‘Where are the papers Alex showed you?’

‘With me.’

‘I’d like to see them.’

‘You’ll see everything.’ She paused and then spoke too quietly for him to hear, but something passed along the edge of his consciousness, something he should realize, something missed. He was twenty seconds behind her as they went through the Waldo Tunnel. He watched her car going out the other side. As she started down toward the Golden Gate Bridge, her voice was much slower.

‘You’re right, I got the Ketamine from a vet I know. When did you figure it out?’

‘Last night.’

‘I just wanted to question Alex. I didn’t mean for anything else to happen.’

Having seen the marks on Jurika’s neck he didn’t believe her.

‘Where is the rope you used to strangle her?’

‘I threw it in a garbage can at a rest stop on the drive back home.’

As bridge traffic slowed to a crawl and her brake lights came on she described the room and the mattress, and moving a chair over and Alex convulsing on the mattress.

‘We were going to go out and celebrate after she showed me through the building. That’s why she was dressed up.’

Raveneau decided to close in and radio for backup. He carried a second phone, an emergency phone, and used that to text la Rosa, ‘Quinn confessing to Jurika murder. Call for backup.’ La Rosa could see him but probably not Quinn, but she’d figure it out.

‘Are you still there?’ he asked, and Quinn wasn’t. He tried calling her back and didn’t get an answer. He tried again as he reached the first tower of the Golden Gate. At this hour there were four lanes running into the city. Later, they’d move the cones and the other side would have more lanes for the reverse commute. Up ahead, the right-hand lane stopped moving and Raveneau changed to the cone lane, the center lane.

It was Quinn holding up traffic in the right lane, her car barely moving forward, cars bleeding out of that lane and honking. When she came to a stop Raveneau forced his way over, hitting his horn hard. He came close to an accident and then just stopped his car and got out. He ran toward her and he almost got there.

He got within ten feet. ‘Erin, no, Erin wait!’

She turned. She looked at him and then went over the rail before he could grab her. Raveneau saw her tumble, clothing fluttering, flapping, and the ocean foaming as she hit. Then he could barely keep his hand from shaking as he called for help. A Coast Guard rescue team from Fort Baker was there within minutes and they found her, but she was dead when they pulled her out.

Raveneau and la Rosa drove down to Fort Baker and identified her after the guard brought her into the dock, and in the car they found a written confession.

‘I should have known,’ Raveneau told la Rosa later. ‘I saw the open motel door and had a feeling when I came out of the Waldo Tunnel that I needed to catch her. I just didn’t put it together fast enough.’

‘We did everything we could.’

He didn’t answer that. He knew he should have seen it. He could have kept her from killing herself and the feeling stayed with him through the night.

Cody Stoltz died that same morning and late in the afternoon Lafaye’s lawyer called, and she and the lawyer came to the homicide office. There, she recounted the extortion in detail and told of her anguish and suffering, explaining that the risk to the foundation’s credibility had been too great for her to come forward.

She brought a record of almost all the payments she’d made.

‘I don’t have the very earliest,’ she said. ‘I paid those with cash I had saved.’

‘How much were they?’

‘Too much, and I don’t like to think about those first ones. I’ve blocked them from my memory.’

‘Do you think an audit of the foundation’s books would turn them up?’

She smiled at him. She said, ‘You and I are alike. You say just what you’re thinking, but to answer your question, no, I don’t think an audit will ever turn up anything.’

Raveneau didn’t either, but he held her gaze for a while. It rained most of that night but by dawn, when Raveneau went out to the Guadalcanal Memorial, the rain had stopped. He laid flowers at the base of the memorial for the men his father had served with and for Chris, and then stood near the front of the bow section looking out at the ocean. When the sun broke through the water turned from gray to green-blue. He watched a line of pelicans fly from shadow into sunlight and work their way south.

He knew the city would remember the story of Cody Stoltz and those he murdered, but few would remember Alex Jurika or Erin Quinn. Lafaye’s star would continue to rise. She was already walking with celebrities and showing up on bigger TV talk shows. But there was a reason the boy pushed from the helicopter haunted her and maybe her missing fingernails were to remind her not of the evil out there but within, and to keep her focused on what she wanted to be.

And maybe that’s where redemption lies, in what we someday could become. He touched the flowers, felt their soft petals between his fingers, then pressed his palm against the cold steel of the memorial and held it there a long moment before walking back to his car.