Counterfeit Road dbr-2

by Kirk Russell

  That victim was older, forty to forty-five, short hair, thick neck, thick shoulders, and looked like he’d worked with his hands all his life. The entry wounds at the back of his skull were close together. Raveneau guessed the shooter came right up behind him, and like the previous victim he was shot in the chest, then in the head, and probably in the chest first, Raveneau thought, one in the heart, one in the head. He had pitched forward on to the cabinet he was working on then slid down. A cordless drill lay nearby.

  Raveneau checked out the space again, a long rectangle with rooms divided according to the work being done. At one end was the owner’s office. In the bay nearest it finished cabinets were stacked ready to deliver. Adjacent to that was the bay where this victim was. His name was Dan Oliver. He was the one who had signed for delivery of the finish-grade plywood. That meant he used the forklift to unload the plywood and then drove it down to the far end of the building where materials were stored and where the forklift was parked now. After parking the forklift he made it back to here and started work on the cabinet. All that must have taken several minutes and Raveneau turned to Ortega.

  ‘Where’s the delivery truck driver? Where are we at on him?’

  ‘We’re trying to locate him. He did his last delivery before we called his boss.’

  ‘He would know whether Oliver signed first.’

  Ortega didn’t respond, instead asked, ‘What else do you see?’

  The third victim was a woman in her early thirties named Amber Diaz. She was about five foot four, one hundred thirty pounds, a masculine look to her, and a bloody trail. After being shot she tried to escape and the shooter had stepped on blood droplets as he moved in. She was also chest shot and Raveneau wondered if she had then ducked her head. She made it halfway across the room and by then was bleeding badly from the trough a bullet plowed through her scalp. When the shooter caught up to her he put one through her skull, and yet it appeared from blood smears that after that she convulsed on the floor. Hers was the most affecting for Raveneau because though wounded she fought to live.

  ‘He shot all four but didn’t wait for the owner,’ Ortega said. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  What struck Raveneau most was the narrow window of time the shooter was operating with and the improbability of the coincidental timing. He talked with Ortega about that as they moved to where the last victim fell and the paramedics worked on him before taking him to the hospital. Pieces of alder trim were scattered. Ortega pointed at the bloody concrete where they worked on him.

  ‘He was sixteen, a boy. Wrong place, wrong time, should have listened to his mother and stayed in school. She arrived as they were loading him. They don’t live far from here.’

  ‘Where’s the owner?’

  ‘In his office down there at the end and his wife and lawyer are on the way.’

  ‘Let’s get him out of here. Let’s see if we can get him to go in with us right now.’

  Raveneau knew Ortega didn’t really want his help. It was Ortega’s to solve with Hagen, Gibbs, and Montoya. With the new way of doing things they would all work as one team, and Raveneau had a reputation of liking to work alone. No one really believed that he and la Rosa got on as well as they did.

  ‘Why don’t I go find the plywood delivery guy and bring him in,’ Raveneau offered.

  ‘We’ve already talked to his employer. We’re working on that.’

  ‘But we should have heard something more by now.’

  Ortega stopped on that. He wanted to say no, but knew it was true, and in the end Ortega probably liked the idea of getting him out of the building.

  ‘OK, Raveneau, go find him.’

  THIRTEEN

  Raveneau called the trucking company owner from his car while still parked down the street from the cabinet shop. He heard an edge of exasperation and pictured a man used to giving orders, not answering questions.

  ‘You are Inspector who?’

  ‘Raveneau.’

  ‘Look, Raveneau, I understand it’s a terrible situation, but I talked to another homicide inspector an hour ago. Don’t you people talk to each other? I gave him the name of the driver and his cell number. The driver’s name is John Drury. Tomorrow is his day off, so I’m not sure where he is.’

  ‘I’ve called the number you gave Inspector Ortega and I get voicemail. Will Drury answer if you call him?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘Put me on hold and try.’

  Drury didn’t answer the call from his boss either, but Raveneau had a home address from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He was still talking to the owner as he started driving toward the Bay Bridge. The owner was explaining his system.

  ‘I have them report in when they reach a delivery site and as they leave. That way if there are any problems I know about it immediately.’

  ‘Do you record the time?’

  ‘It gets recorded automatically.’

  ‘Will you check and tell me what time he got to the cabinet shop and what time he left? Also, the deliveries that came after, you said he made two more and then he was off. Is that correct?’

  ‘It is. Hold on, while I get that for you.’

  A few minutes later he gave Raveneau 1:19 p.m. as the time the driver left the cabinet shop.

  ‘So when he makes that call he’s on the road.’

  ‘Yes, or just starting to the next stop. My rule is don’t call me when you’re about to leave. Call me after you’ve made the delivery and are rolling toward your next one. I don’t care if you’re going one mile per hour, I just want to know you are done with the one behind you, you’ve got a signature for the delivery, and what the problems were, if any.’

  ‘Where does he usually go when his shift ends?’

  ‘Their personal lives are their own. Drury has a girlfriend. I’m not sure where she lives. He goes there nowadays, I think. Or he goes home. But when he gets off work it’s his life. I expect them to relax.’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘No, I understand, Inspector, and I’ll keep trying him.’

  ‘He’s a critical link in our timeline. It’s important that we get to sit and talk with him while the day is still fresh in his memory.’

  Raveneau gave the trucking company owner his cell number and thanked him several times before hanging up. By the time he reached the bridge and crawled up the onramp in traffic it was dusk. The bridge was slow and traffic heavier still as he worked his way south on 880. Drury’s address was in San Leandro. It was well after dark when Raveneau stopped down the street from a small stucco house with an asphalt roof and a bare front yard. Six or seven years ago it would have sold for half a million dollars. That seemed unbelievable now.

  A window at the front threw yellow light from around the corners of the curtains. The delivery truck sat at the curb tilting slightly toward the gutter, its bed empty, the truck a large presence in the neighborhood. Raveneau watched the front curtains as he called Drury’s cell again. This time a man answered and sounded both suspicious and cautious. After Raveneau identified himself, Drury’s tone changed. He apologized.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t have my phone with me. My boss just called and said you’re trying to get a hold of me, but all I did was drop a load of plywood and leave.’

  ‘Yeah, but we need to sit with you and go through the timeline.’

  ‘I’m with my girlfriend and on our way to her house in Santa Cruz so it’s going to have to be tomorrow, guy.’

  ‘It can’t wait.’

  ‘It’s going to have to. It’s like my one day off and I don’t know anything anyway. I’m not going to be able to tell you anything. I was there and gone, man. It was like one unit of plywood and the older dude there unloaded it. You got the delivery time from my boss, right? He said he gave it to you.’

  ‘I need to sit and talk with you tonight.’

  ‘Not going to happen, and besides, whoever wasted them did it after I left.’

  ‘Where’
s the truck you delivered the plywood with?’

  ‘Parked in front of my house.’

  ‘Where are the keys to it?’

  ‘With me, and what’s with the truck? What do you need the truck for?’

  ‘Where are you in Santa Cruz? I’ll come to you and we can talk and I’ll get the keys to the truck from you then.’

  ‘This is getting weird. It’s like you’re suspicious of me or something.’

  ‘Four people were murdered and other than the killer you may have been the last person to see them alive, but you don’t think it’s important for you to let us interview you today. It’s more important that you spend time with your girlfriend.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You’re avoiding us, and yeah, that makes me wonder about you.’

  ‘You’ve got everything already.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  Now the lights went off in the front room of the house and Raveneau watched the front door open. He couldn’t read the face of the man coming out of the house until he passed under a street light. Then he knew it was Drury. Raveneau watched him climb into an old green Honda Accord parked in front of the delivery truck and pull away with his lights off. He didn’t turn his headlights on until he reached the end of the block. But before that he told Raveneau he would come to the Homicide office at noon tomorrow and hung up.

  Raveneau followed him to a rundown strip mall across the freeway and north where Drury parked his car away from the light poles and walked across a broken asphalt lot to a bar called Pete’s Corner. He went through the door beneath the red neon sign and Raveneau waited five minutes before following. Inside, he moved to the long dark bar and ordered a beer. It smelled like beer and the cleaner they used to wash the linoleum floor. John Drury was in the back near a pool table talking with two other men. A moment later Raveneau’s phone buzzed.

  ‘Where are you?’ la Rosa asked.

  ‘At a place called Pete’s Corner. I’m watching the driver who delivered plywood to the cabinet shop this afternoon. I drove to his house looking for him and he took off while he was on the phone to me.’

  ‘Should I come there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then so what are you going to do?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’

  ‘But you’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘It’s him.’

  ‘If he’s trying to avoid us, you need me with you.’

  ‘I’ll call you back. He’s watching me now.’

  The bartender was at the far end of the bar talking with a couple of women and Raveneau had taken a table so he could talk to la Rosa. But now he moved back up to the bar. He sipped the beer and texted Ortega as Drury moved in on the two women and the bartender navigated very full cocktails to a safe landing in front of the women. Before turning to his next order the bartender asked Drury, ‘Do you want another?’

  ‘Only if they buy,’ Drury said, meaning the women and the one nearest him laughed and said she would. They all laughed and Drury said, ‘I’ll be right back. I’m going out for a quick smoke.’

  A couple of minutes passed and Raveneau felt like a fool when he saw the headlights come on. By the time he came out the door Drury was already pulling on to the road, and he hustled toward his car keeping an eye on Drury’s tail lights, watching him pass through one light then another, growing smaller as he accelerated away.

  FOURTEEN

  Ortega listened to Raveneau’s account of getting burned by John Drury and then asked, ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I’ve gone back to his house. I’ve got a tow truck on the way and the police here are going to help. The tow driver will get the delivery truck open.’

  The San Leandro police sent two units and with Raveneau’s urging kept their lights off and the residue test and subsequent search went down with a low profile and fairly fast. When the steering wheel didn’t have any gunpowder residue Raveneau doubted they would find residue anywhere. He pulled an old coat out of his trunk and put that on before crawling under the delivery truck with a Maglite.

  Despite the trucking business owner’s rap about running a tight ship, the truck didn’t look well maintained mechanically. In several places the asphalt and curb were dark with oil. That said Drury parked here regularly. Raveneau couldn’t avoid getting oil on the back of his coat and pants as he worked his way along with the flashlight beam. He snagged and tore the coat as he crawled back out, and there was Ortega standing above him in a suit and long raincoat.

  ‘You’re getting a full day in, Raveneau.’

  ‘I’m trying to figure out if there’s another reason he’s avoiding us.’

  ‘Anything in the cab?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  If anything, the truck was suspiciously clean, the rubber mats scoured, carpet shampooed and vacuumed, as groomed as Drury who at the bar wore a neatly ironed black hoodie. Raveneau carried an image of the lanky pushback from the bar, the casual pulling of his cigarettes from the pocket of the hoodie, wagging them at the women without once glancing at him. Drury worked at it.

  But now it was 3:00 a.m. Raveneau and Ortega were in Raveneau’s car, and Ortega was tapping away on his laptop writing a search warrant.

  ‘Give me some help here, Raveneau.’

  ‘We’re not going to get in his house.’

  ‘Sure, we are.’

  Ortega was intent on trying the on-call judge.

  ‘It’s one thing to get into a truck that was at the crime scene in or around the time of the murders, but a judge isn’t going to give you the house. All we can say is that he delivered plywood.’

  ‘Four dead and Drury was the last guy to see them alive. He’s evading us.’

  ‘That’s legal.’

  But Ortega was juiced. He wanted to try. He finished the search warrant app, emailed it back to the Southern precinct station, and it got faxed to the on-call judge at 4:30 as Raveneau stood outside in the cold wind. He listened to Ortega talk to the judge now. Ortega’s voice got louder when he got nervous and judges made him nervous. Raveneau listened and then his mind drifted to the country and something he had read about birthers going after the President today. What was that really about? It wasn’t about a birth certificate. More like they needed to make Obama an outsider. But why did they need to do that? Why was that so important to them? What scared him about the birthers was the quiet encouragement they got from people who carefully avoided acknowledging the birth issue was false.

  Dark thoughts. He had to shake them off. He heard Ortega still talking too loudly, repeating a phone number back to the judge. He listened and then walked away from the car. He was stiff from crawling under the truck. He was cold and tired and the late night wore on him in a way it didn’t when he was younger.

  When he walked back Ortega was on a call from a New York Times reporter. His door was open and his face had relaxed. Raveneau looked from Ortega to Drury’s house aware that they might be completely spinning their wheels here. He’d known truckers who moved drugs and in truth that’s what he was looking for underneath the vehicle, the storage compartment, the welded-on container. Drury getting out of his house fast after a call from a cop could have as easily been that as anything to do with the murders.

  He was close to telling Ortega to take his interview outside or to his own car, and pictured driving from here to Celeste’s and having breakfast with her. He was hungry. He was tired and agitated to the point of anger. He had disliked listening to Ortega laugh at the reporter’s jokes.

  He could reheat Celeste’s bread soup for breakfast, chicken broth, vegetables, and chunks of bread, olive oil, and good coffee. Good coffee was what he wanted now, and to focus on Krueger or have the room to run with this aspect of the cabinet shop shootings. He didn’t need Ortega’s help. He still didn’t get why Ortega drove down here.

  From behind him, Ortega said, ‘You were right, the judge said no.’

  ‘Well, you tried.’

  ‘Yeah, it was worth
it.’

  Was it? Raveneau glanced at Ortega but saw bodies on the cold concrete of the cabinet shop floor. The shooter came up from behind. The shooter liked the feeling of getting close. Raveneau could sense that.

  ‘I’ll ask the locals to drive by every hour or so,’ Raveneau said. ‘Drury will come home. He’s supposed to drop the truck back at the yard tomorrow afternoon.’

  Ortega said nothing and Raveneau knew he’d head back to the Homicide office. It was without question the biggest investigation he’d ever run. Raveneau drove slowly back up a quiet freeway and across the bridge to San Francisco. He didn’t wake until after nine that morning and stood at the roof parapet with his coffee and his phone, looking at the city and the bay, a habit. A cool wind blew this morning and the sky was a pale blue when he drove to the Hall.

  He knew the captain and Lieutenant Becker would sit with Ortega this morning and decide who stayed on the Khan Cabinets murders and who didn’t. And that’s what happened. Ortega came to him and said they would work the Drury angle together, but that the rest of the investigation was covered and he could focus on his cold cases.

  He was on the phone later in the morning with the storage company in Arizona that held United Airlines’ long term corporate records when the San Leandro police called. Drury was home but hadn’t gone into the house. He’d gotten out of his car and was in the truck and the engine was on. Raveneau asked if they could have an officer follow him and call if he got on the freeway and let him know what direction he was headed.

  He had to apologize to the woman at the storage company for the interruption, but she was fine with it and he asked, ‘When was Jim Frank employed?’

  ‘1978 to 1995. He retired in 1995.’

  ‘I’m looking for contact information. Do your records show any supervisors or people he worked with?’

  ‘I don’t have any of that but there might be a way I could get it for you. To do that you’ll need to fill out a form we use with law enforcement and the IRS. I can fax it to you. You want to mark it urgent. There’s a box on the form that you need to check.’