A Killing in China Basin

by Kirk Russell

  ‘Yes, and he wanted me to get the story right. He was holding the gun he’d shot John with and I was supposed to call 911 and tell the police that he had gone looking for the killer. He said he’d turn up after crashing his car.’

  Her voice broke. A gasp came out of her as she said, ‘And then John died. He was telling all this to me in a whisper as John was trying to breath. If I’d run and called 911, maybe he would have lived.’ Tears ran down her face. ‘He made this noise, this sort of sound from his lungs and then he died, and Cody looked at me and said, “He’s over with. He doesn’t exist any more. You don’t ever have to think about him again.” Those were his exact words.’

  Her shoulders shook as she wept.

  ‘I am so sorry. I so wish it had never happened. I wish it had been me. I wish everything that came after never happened. It should have been me instead of John. It should have been me.’

  Raveneau waited, then asked quietly, ‘And you didn’t see the shooting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there something more to tell us about that?’

  She wept uncontrollably before saying, ‘Yes.’

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  They brought her back to the homicide office and she made her statement in an interview room.

  ‘I wasn’t at the window. I never saw Cody shoot him. I was outside on the landing. But everything else was true. Cody shot John and there wasn’t any mugger.’

  ‘Are you telling us you lied to Inspectors Whitacre and Bates about what you witnessed?’ Raveneau asked.

  She nodded and after a pause said, ‘Yes, I lied. I couldn’t do what Cody wanted.’

  ‘Did Cody know you didn’t see the shooting?’

  ‘Yes, he knew. When I came down I asked him over and over, what happened, what happened, and he told me John had gotten his gun out and shot at him. The shot missed and he was able to get his own gun out of the glove compartment. He said he didn’t shoot until John raised the gun and started to aim at him. Right after that he asked me, what did you see, and I remember saying, I didn’t see anything, I only heard the shots. I came down because I knew they were gunshots and John had been talking about getting his gun out of the car. I knew something very bad had happened.’

  ‘How did Cody respond when you told him you hadn’t seen anything?’

  ‘He said I did see and it was a mugger. He said listen closely because I’m going to tell you what you saw. He was completely calm and John wasn’t even dead yet. He said, this is what we’re going to tell people. There was a mugger.’

  She recounted a long back and forth dialogue about the mugger who’d stepped out of the bushes when John and Cody were arguing, and then said, ‘I talked to Alex a lot afterwards but I never told her I’d lied to make sure Cody got locked up. I said I was afraid of him and wanted a new identity, and Alex got me one. She sold my real name and info that goes with it. It seemed like a great idea since I knew Cody wouldn’t hurt whoever bought it. He might question them, but they wouldn’t know me.’

  ‘Who did she sell your identity to?’

  ‘A woman named Deborah Lafaye. She started and runs this international charity and I don’t really know what she’s done with my name. But I wanted to know who was buying it. I’ve never met her but you can google her name and come up with a lot. I thought it was perfect because I figured she was traveling a lot and would leave a trail that went everywhere. When I gave Alex the go-ahead I wanted it to go to someone who needed it for a good purpose. I was thinking of a woman hiding from an abusive ex-husband, but she found Lafaye in a chat room and after she’d gone back and forth with her, Lafaye made it clear she would only use it in foreign countries and that I should never make contact with her, so I haven’t.’

  She seemed unaware that Jurika had worked for Lafaye and they left it that way. Maybe Jurika thought that would blow the deal so hadn’t told her. Or maybe she had other motives.

  ‘How much were you paid for it?’ Raveneau asked.

  ‘Five thousand dollars.’

  ‘And then you became someone else?’

  ‘Yes. Alex got me a new identity.’

  Raveneau wrote down $5000, drew a dash and left a zero standing by itself. Lafaye had told them she’d paid fifty thousand dollars to Alex Jurika for the name. Jurika may have pocketed the balance.

  ‘Do you know if Alex had any continuing contact with Deborah Lafaye?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t talk to Alex much after that. I had made up my mind to disappear. I think it was probably more than a year before I talked to her again.’

  Raveneau accepted that Erin felt she had to come forward now. He understood that. But it felt like something was still missing in her confession. That she had lied to Whitacre and Bates said plenty about her. He was weighing that as well.

  Unprompted now, she said, ‘I know how wrong what I did was, but it doesn’t change anything. Cody still killed John.’

  Raveneau nodded. ‘We know he did.’ He paused and added, ‘Inspector la Rosa and I are going to step outside for a few minutes.’

  ‘I don’t want to be left alone in here.’

  ‘Have you been in an interview room before, Erin?’

  ‘Yes, I was arrested twice when I was nineteen.’

  And once when you were twenty-two, but all three were out of state and we haven’t been able to get the prints, which was what he wanted to talk to la Rosa about. He told her again they’d be back in a few minutes.

  Outside, he told la Rosa, ‘I think we ask her for her fingerprints so we can confirm she is Erin Quinn. Then we’ll run her prints and see what happens. But we don’t want to stop her from talking, and it seems to me she’s getting more skittish. But I also think she’s holding something still. What do you think?’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘If we press her about the name she’s living under now she may want to walk out. She’s not going to give us her current alias. Let’s leave that alone for the moment.’

  On the screen they saw her start to move around. She looked agitated and Raveneau said, ‘Keep her here. I’m going to run to the bathroom and I’ll be right back.’

  Raveneau was standing at the urinal when his cell rang.

  ‘She walked. She’s at the elevator. Do I let her go down?’

  His voice echoed in the bathroom.

  ‘Stay with her. She needs a ride back to her car so give it to her and I’ll follow.’

  La Rosa dropped her on a corner in China Basin and reported that Quinn wouldn’t let her take her to her car.

  ‘I’ve got her, I see her,’ Raveneau said. ‘She’s walked back up to Third Street and looks like she’s going to cross.’

  But it was another forty-five minutes before Quinn unlocked a white Enterprise rental car. He watched her pull away and then trailed her. Ten minutes later he read off the license plate to la Rosa. It took la Rosa another fifteen to find out the car was rented yesterday afternoon in Sacramento by a Corinne Maher.

  ‘That’s got to be her identity,’ la Rosa said. ‘They required her to show a driver’s license. I’m running Corinne Maher through DMV. Where is she now?’

  ‘About to cross Van Ness and driving a little erratically, a little bit of speed up and slowdown, but not watching her rear-view mirror, in fact, she’s hardly looking in it. It shouldn’t be hard to stay with her.’

  After seeming to drive with no real direction, she drove out to Ocean Beach, where she parked and walked the sand, her hair blowing sideways in the wind.

  ‘She’s either killing time or doesn’t know where she’s going to go next. I don’t think she faked being distraught.’

  Now she came back to the car and sat there. Finally, the brake lights flashed and then she backed out. She started tracking back through the city and once again it seemed aimless.

  La Rosa came back with a driver’s license address for a PO Box at Bucks Lake.

  ‘Where in the hell is that?’ she asked.

  ‘North of Tahoe along the Feather Rive
r. There are places up there you could hole up.’

  Quinn drove toward the southwestern corner of San Francisco and parked in the big lot above Lake Merced. In the late afternoon the lot had a modest amount of cars, not many, and she was up against the railing, looking across the lake at the golf course that rimmed the far side. Down at the end of the gray-green lake was a boathouse. The lake rippled with wind. Raveneau got the feeling she was waiting for somebody and scanned the vehicles in the lot again, working from one to the next with his binoculars. There were only three vehicles he couldn’t see into.

  Off to his right an elderly Chinese couple came up the stairs from the path below that ran around Lake Merced. They moved slowly toward their car. Less than a minute later a young woman with black hair almost down to her waist backed a baby stroller up the stairs, working the stroller on two wheels as though it was luggage. She rested at the top, leaned over and talked to the child in the stroller. Quinn didn’t pay any attention to her. Then a dark blue chopped Honda Accord with chrome wheels pulled in and drove toward the railing. She turned and looked at it but the Honda driver didn’t stop. He wheeled around and left.

  Another ten minutes passed. Raveneau talked with la Rosa and then picked up on a mountain biker coming in from his left. The rider wore a red helmet, bike gear, wraparound sunglasses, and got Raveneau’s attention as he slowed near Quinn. He checked out the rest of the lot as he got off his bike. Quinn turned and stared at him as he slid a small pack off his back and unzipped it.

  Now Quinn started to back up and Raveneau said, ‘It’s the mountain biker. He’s made contact and she’s scared. She backed up as he approached her.’

  ‘Is it him?’

  ‘Body is right, it could be, but I need him to turn. He’s standing very close to her. He may have a gun or a knife. I’m going to have to get closer.’

  Raveneau’s view was blocked as Quinn and the man moved away from the guard rail, the man standing too close to her as they came alongside a car and then disappeared alongside a new GMC van. When the bike rider came into view again he was alone and Raveneau called out, ‘It’s Stoltz! He’s got her in a van and he’s getting in. I’ll stay behind him but we’re going to need everybody. I think he’s armed and I don’t think she wanted to go with him. We don’t want this to turn into a chase. They’ve got to shut the road down. I’m southbound on Lake Merced Boulevard.’ He looked over at the sign.

  ‘Just passing Brotherhood Way and accelerating. He’s jumping on it. Get me backup, get them out here fast. He’s on his way somewhere.’

  He said the next more to himself than her. ‘We should have seen this,’ he added, and then focused on the road.

  FIFTY-NINE

  She sat on the floor of the van, knees drawn up, head bowed but refusing to answer him. At the lake she didn’t run or scream. She did exactly what he told her to, as if she’d expected him, as if she always knew it would happen like this, and that both angered him and gave him confidence. He turned to look through the steel mesh. The van’s tall rear doors had no interior handles and were heavy duty and reinforced against theft. The mesh behind his head was sturdy. She really was his now.

  ‘Erin.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘We’re going to talk,’ he said, and pulled off the road, drove to the corner of a shopping mall lot.

  ‘You’re going to talk to me. It’s going to be a long drive and I want you to talk.’

  ‘Why don’t you just kill me here?’

  ‘Because I have a house for us; we’re going to live together. It’s in the mountains and very beautiful, the kind of place you’ll like.’

  ‘You’re kidnapping me, Cody. That’s what’s happening, and you’re going to kill me.’

  ‘No, I didn’t search for you to hurt you. I know you got scared that night. I know you did what you did because you were scared.’

  ‘You shot John.’

  ‘John got himself killed. He tried to shoot me first. He got his gun out and—’

  ‘And then you made up that lie.’

  ‘It was a mistake to have asked you to lie. I admit that.’ He turned and looked through the mesh again. ‘But what you did was worse.’

  ‘Just admit it, you shot John! You wrecked our lives!’

  She yelled and he liked that. It was better to get it out now and get it done. She turned to look at her again and said, ‘I want to know everything about you. I want to know everything that’s happened to you.’

  ‘What happened is I had to get a new identity to hide from you. You shot John, then you made up a story to try to hide what you did, and when that didn’t work you blamed other people. But you want to know about my life. You want to play out this fantasy, OK, here’s my life, here’s how it’s been.’

  It just spilled out of her and he knew she wanted to be with him again. He heard it in her voice. She told him about living in a cabin near a lake and then he told her about the mountains where they were going now.

  ‘It’s dry and remote but the there’s a creek and a beautiful canyon. There are coyotes and bobcats and some mountain lion. We’re going to start over.’

  She didn’t say anything to that, but he meant it. There were three rooms for her, and later, in a year or so, if everything went well, if she was good, he’d let her out on a chain in the yard. There was the room she’d sleep in at night and where he’d visit her. He did not plan to ever tell her where she lived or ever let her talk to anyone else. Or at least not for a very long time and there was no landline phone or even a paved road yet. His cell phone didn’t even work up there. If he was away on a trip she would have the long chain and ankle bracelet, and no knives or anything she could hurt herself with. She would have food and the TV until he got back. The mail already came to the PO Box down in Brantley and there were no neighbors, just the dirt road and the locked gate and the signs warning trespassers.

  She’d fall in love with him again. It was a matter of being together and having time, but first things had to be even. She had to make up for the five years he did in prison. She needed to know what it felt like to be locked up. That was important.

  He checked the rear-view mirror. Not far from the freeway now and the long drive south. They would need to make a stop at the warehouse for supplies for her first few months, and then they would be on their way.

  ‘Did you like living at Bucks Lake?’

  ‘It’s was always pretty, but there wasn’t any real way to make any money and I was always afraid you were going to find me.’

  Just like her to be so frank. That was the Erin he remembered and he smiled at that. For the first time it seemed like her.

  ‘You don’t have to watch out any more, and I took care of Lafaye too. She’s gone.’

  ‘You killed her?’

  ‘No, she jumped off my boat and drowned. I drove around looking for her but I couldn’t find her. She was looking for you. That’s how I found you. I found you through her. She told me you were going to meet her at Lake Merced. You were blackmailing her.’ He turned and smiled. ‘So I said I’d meet you instead.’

  He thought that was kind of funny but she didn’t and started to cry.

  ‘Don’t cry. It would spoil everything and we have so many things to talk about.’

  ‘I’m not going to spoil anything. You were once all I had.’

  She moved up to the mesh and he could smell her, the warm heat from her face as he turned and leaned toward her and swerved the van toward the shoulder.

  ‘I want to try to kiss you through the mesh,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to get to know each other again. Try turning your head toward me again. Do it quickly.’

  She didn’t really try but there would be time to get to know each other again. There were rules he wanted her to memorize but those could wait until they were at the house.

  Now the traffic up ahead slowed. It distracted and agitated him. He wanted the timing to be very clean today. The drive south was long. They slowed to a stop and he s
aw police and emergency vehicle lights.

  ‘An accident,’ he said and felt her breath on the back of his neck. She was already working on him. He loved it how quickly she adapted. There were other police vehicles up there and if he’d been alone he would have turned on traffic radio to make sure it was an accident.

  ‘I was out of money,’ she said. ‘That’s why I was after her. She must have told you.’

  ‘She did.’ He turned. ‘Money isn’t going to be a problem any more.’

  She didn’t answer and then said, ‘Money probably doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘You think I’m going to hurt you? Is that why you say that?’

  ‘You’ve hunted me for years. You’ve kidnapped me. You ordered me into a van at gunpoint. Is that the person I knew once? Or were you always that person?’

  ‘I spent five years in a cage.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that but I couldn’t pretend there was a mugger.’

  ‘It’s OK, but it has to be even.’

  ‘What has to be even?’

  ‘We’re not going to talk about that yet.’

  ‘That’s fine, and I’m OK dying, I really am.’ Her voice quavered. ‘There won’t be any satisfaction in it for you and maybe God will forgive me for what we did to John.’

  ‘You aren’t going to die but it has to be even.’

  She didn’t say anything for over a minute and they barely moved forward.

  ‘Cody?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are we really going to live together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re going to keep me somewhere.’

  ‘For five years and then we’ll travel all over the world.’

  ‘Five years to match your five years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’

  More police cars now and a fire engine, but no smoke and no ambulance and they sat for ten minutes before the cars ahead started to move slowly forward. He questioned her more about the lost years and she told him she caught fish out of Bucks Lake and worked as a waitress, and did other seasonal stuff for employers who preferred to pay her under the table.