go through it on Monday. La Rosa wrote out a receipt for the address book and computer they bagged to take with them. She left the receipt in the kitchen on an ancient Formica counter trimmed in chrome. On the ride back she seemed frustrated.
Raveneau pulled in behind her car outside the Hall of Injustice, as his defense lawyer friends were so fond of saying. He got out as she did.
‘Where are you going?’ la Rosa asked. ‘I thought you were going home.’
‘I’m going upstairs for a few minutes first.’
‘Is that so you can be the last to leave?’
He didn’t pick up on her seriousness and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve always got to be the one to turn the lights out.’
‘Not with me.’
‘Come, again?’
‘I said, not with me. That might have been your style with former partners, but that’s not the way it’s going down with us. You’re not going to paint me as always first out the door.’
This really sideswiped him and he heard his voice rising as he answered, ‘Look, I’ll leave when I’m ready. I don’t need you to tell me when.’
He walked away angry, and upstairs in the office tried to push it aside and studied a sketch of the China Basin crime scene CSI had dropped off. La Rosa’s comment surprised him enough to make him lose focus. He was ready to call it a night, ready to leave when water started dripping on to one of the desks nearby. That would be the prisoners on the sixth floor plugging up the toilets.
He phoned upstairs. He found a wastebasket to catch the water and on the way out he took a seat at one of the computers up front and replayed the last part of the interview with Heilbron. He did one final check of his messages before turning out the lights.
There was one new message and he thought it might be la Rosa. But it wasn’t. The message began with traffic noise and what sounded like a large truck downshifting on a freeway. A muffled voice, as though speaking with the phone held at a distance, said quietly, ‘So you found her.’
Raveneau sat at his desk and listened to it half a dozen times. ‘So you found her.’ He listened to it again from his car before driving away from the Hall. He swallowed his pride and called la Rosa, but she didn’t pick up. It went to voice mail.
EIGHT
La Rosa was at dinner with Deputy-chief Edith Grainer at an Italian place near Grainer’s house, so she didn’t take Raveneau’s call. Part of her irritation with Raveneau going back up to the office tonight was that she was meeting her mentor and didn’t want to tell him. And she didn’t like keeping secrets, but that’s the way Grainer had steered her from the start, saying that if word got out about their friendship, it would give the appearance she was playing favorites. She could call Raveneau back on the way home.
There’d been a period there when la Rosa had wondered if Grainer was hitting on her, but fortunately nothing like that had happened and Grainer’s career advice had been sound. She also knew Grainer was in the background when her name had come up on a list of women eligible to make the bump to Homicide.
‘Would you like a drink, Elizabeth?’ Grainer asked as the waiter returned. Grainer had a vodka martini and preferred not to drink alone. ‘I know your regulation about being on-call, but I think you can have one drink with me tonight.’
La Rosa knew Grainer would have a single drink before and then one glass of wine with dinner.
‘Sure, I’ll have a drink.’
La Rosa felt tired. She rested her elbows on the blue and white checkered tablecloth and looked around. Total retro as a restaurant and she didn’t really feel like doing this tonight. She wanted to go home, shower, and think about the China Basin case.
Deputy-chief Grainer’s father had been a small-town cop and when they first met la Rosa had told her about her grandfather, a county deputy in Minnesota. They’d found common ground through the memories of the two men. Both had liked to drink after their shifts and la Rosa thought this cocktail together before dinner was Grainer’s way of incorporating that.
Grainer kept her brown hair cut short and neat, as though it needed to be that way to avoid interfering with her work. She had a pleasant if unmemorable face and an iron work ethic. She