One Through the Heart (32 page)

‘It wasn’t exactly a lie.’

‘Did you report the illegal dumping to the police?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

‘Were both loads there?’

‘Yes, and maybe more.’

‘Did he do it again?’

‘No.’

‘Why did you do the thing about the fraudulent tags? Why didn’t you confront him?’

‘You want the truth?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘The truth is I didn’t want to get into it with Hugh. I thought he would freak out.’

‘OK, here’s the last thing, I need to know exactly where that load got dumped.’

‘The county people know where it is. I showed them the area. I didn’t have the exact area because I couldn’t get too close, but they found it. It’s not like it was that hard.’

‘Good because I’m going to want you to show me. What are you doing right now?’

‘Really? They cleaned it up. There’s not going to be anything to see.’

‘There’ll be something and I can’t wait for the county.’

‘But what’s the point?’

‘I can’t tell you right now.’

Raveneau met him forty minutes later and they drove the winding road into the hills in Ferranti’s new Ford pickup, which was like a rolling office. It had everything a contractor could want except good gas mileage, and he was driving Raveneau who wasn’t a prospect or client or a way to make any money. Ferranti found the general area on the second try but it didn’t make any sense that Baylor upended the dump load off this main road, so they tried a side road and then a dirt driveway to a site where it looked like a house was started and then abandoned. They backtracked from there and found it, and it clicked for Ferranti once he saw the site. He remembered watching Baylor turn on to the dirt road. There were white-painted pieces of stucco from Lash’s house way down the slope and a few chunks of broken concrete they probably figured weren’t worth moving.

‘I want to be sure,’ Raveneau said, and got out and half slid, half walked down the steep slope as Ferranti watched. Raveneau brought back a piece of stucco about the size of his hand. It was cement gray on one side and white-painted with a sand texture on the other face. Wire mesh lath poked through and he held on to it with the wire lath as he scrambled back up.

‘Is that house color? Does this look right?’

‘It’s definitely it.’

‘Half the time people say definitely to me they change their minds later. How certain are you?’

‘I’m certain.’

‘OK, drop me back at my car.’

He called la Rosa first and walked through his idea with her. When she couldn’t pick it apart he called Coe figuring the Feds were still in as long as Lindsley was a person of interest. Coe pushed back a little, asking, ‘Why don’t you use your own K-Nine unit?’

‘We will but it’s a big area and we’ll need help.’

‘How again does this connect to Brandon Lindsley?’

‘I didn’t say it did. I said it might.’

‘I’ll have to call you back.’

That was the Fed way and that was good enough for Raveneau. Coe was in. Coe would get approval and they could get dogs out there tomorrow.

R
aveneau struggled with the idea then sat with his commander and talked with him before calling the Special Operations Unit and asking for surveillance on Hugh Neilley. It was difficult to do and depressing. That night he got a call from the two officer team tracking Hugh. Hugh left his house half an hour ago and now was in San Francisco in China Basin close to where Raveneau lived.

‘He’s headed toward you, Inspector. What’s this about?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

A few minutes later one of the undercover officers reported that Hugh had slowed not far from where Raveneau lived, but did not stop and drove past. He skirted the water in China Basin, passing the ball park and continuing along the Embarcadero past the Ferry Building and on to Bay Street and beyond Fisherman’s Wharf before doubling back to North Beach, parking down the street from a bar and walking. He probably just wanted to talk to me, Raveneau thought. He felt a strong sense of relief, a feeling like a wave passing through his chest.

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.’

A
t 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.’