for us in Los Altos.’
‘We can leave from here.’
‘OK, but we’re tight for time and I’m not sure I need to see a break-in. I worked Burglary for three years and I’m looking at the photos you sent. I’ll go by her house, call you, and if she’s home, I’ll drive down to Los Altos ahead of you.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. One of us should be on time.’
He was forty minutes behind la Rosa when he left for Los Altos. La Rosa was inside with Mrs Stoltz and had already let her know that they had new evidence, and that her son could be facing multiple murder charges. That was a pretty big exaggeration given where they were right now. But it was the way they had agreed to play it.
As Raveneau arrived and sat down, he realized Mrs Stoltz didn’t know any more than they did about where to look for Cody. Neither did the SID team. SID guessed that after dumping the car and crawling into the storm drainage pipe he’d exited through some fallback escape route.
Stoltz’s mother looked much older this morning. She rose now from her chair and asked her housekeeper for a coat. When she returned she said, ‘He was a gifted child, really very, very gifted, the kind of child everyone marvels at. He had the gift of music as well as math.’ She turned to Raveneau. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Not of everything, but enough to put out an All Points Bulletin and make an arrest. We’re going to charge him, Mrs Stoltz.’
She nodded and said, ‘I want to go alone to the guest house.’
‘We can’t let you do that,’ la Rosa said and Raveneau added, ‘We should go with you.’
‘It means a great deal to me to go alone. I’m seventy-five years old. If what you’re telling me is true, I won’t see him again outside a jail or prison.’
La Rosa shook her head but Raveneau knew there was almost no chance Stoltz was home. He touched la Rosa, said, ‘I think we can do this.’
Mrs Stoltz had already stood. Along the back of her house was a wall of eight glass doors that folded open to expose the garden. They allowed Raveneau and la Rosa to watch her follow the brick path through hundreds of roses to the portico and entry at the guest house. She unlocked the front door and went in. Fifteen minutes passed before she came out and then invited them to search.
He wasn’t home and a broader search was underway in the hills behind. By the time he and la Rosa got there, they’d lowered a handler and a dog into the storm drainage system and were snaking video cameras down the smaller pipes.
Now Raveneau’s cell rang and he learned that half a mile away one of the SID team and a Public Works foreman had found sheared bolts on a storm drain grate. When he and la Rosa got there, he ran his thumb over the cut thread and drew blood.
‘You could use a battery-powered Sawzall and a metal cutting blade,’ the foreman said.
‘How big is that tool?’
The foreman held his hands apart maybe a foot and a half, and said, ‘That’s with the blade.’
‘How often do you inspect these?’
The man smiled as if Raveneau had just told a good joke. ‘We do fire drills, not inspections. You only see us when there’s a problem.’
An hour later Lafaye’s car was found in the lot adjacent to the marina where Stoltz’s boat was berthed, and then someone put that together with a report of an unidentified naked Caucasian woman suffering from hypothermia found by two fishermen early this morning along a stretch of rocky shoreline east of the Richmond Bridge. That woman was airlifted to John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek, where apparently she was now in a stable condition. Raveneau called John Muir. He gave a description of Lafaye and waited for the head nurse to finish telling him for the third time that they didn’t have any way to identify the unknown woman.
‘You said she’s middle-aged.’
‘Yes, I would guess early fifties.’
‘Is she able to talk?’
‘She’s not coherent.’
‘Do you have a phone with a camera?’
‘Of course, do you want me to take her picture?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not sure that’s allowed. I’ll have to call you back.’
‘How about if you transfer me to who it is you’re going to ask?’
‘I’m sorry, Inspector, our privacy policies are very strict.’
He was driving back up the peninsula toward San Francisco behind la Rosa when