A Killing in China Basin - By Kirk Russell Page 0,90
Lafaye.
‘Was the meeting today with her?’
‘You’ve asked that so many times! I don’t know how Cody knew to go to Lake Merced. I have no idea. I wasn’t meeting anybody.’
Raveneau nodded. He went back through her statement about the abduction today and then took her downstairs. In the elevator he said, ‘We need you to stay in town for a few days. The department will pay for lodging.’
‘I really don’t want to do that.’
‘We need you to do that. I’ve got to ask you to. You’re our best link to several open cases.’
‘Is that a standard procedure?’
‘This is a very unusual situation. I can make you a reservation at a motel we use on Lombard Street. It’s not the swankiest but it’s clean and fairly nice.’
‘You’re not really answering my question.’
‘And you haven’t answered mine about the meeting at Lake Merced.’
She held his gaze now, none of the furtive glances he’d seen when they’d first met. She didn’t want to stay in San Francisco and he knew she was debating telling him she was leaving. Raveneau pulled out his cell.
‘I’ll call the motel. It’s a good place and I’ll lead you over there.’
She watched him as he talked to the motel. Then he led her over, and after she’d checked in, he drove to the hospital and learned that one of the two bullets had severed Stoltz’s spinal cord, and that if he lived he’d be a quadriplegic.
The doctor Raveneau spoke to said, ‘There’s absolutely no way he’ll ever walk or use his arms again. I doubt he’ll be able to move his head or even talk, and I’d only give him a fifty-fifty chance of living. He’s got a helluva fight ahead of him. Was he the cop killer?’
The question had a hard ring to it.
‘It looks that way.’
When he left the hospital it was dusk. He called la Rosa.
‘How soon before you get back?’ she asked. ‘The techs are through the third firewall. They’re ready for us.’
‘I’m going to make one stop.’
‘Don’t you want to see what they found?’
‘Yeah, I can’t wait to see it, but I’m going to stop by the Reinert’s old apartment first.’
‘What are you going out there for?’
‘Go see what the techs found and I’ll catch up to you.’
‘They want me to handle a press conference. I’ll probably be doing that when you get back.’
‘No sweat.’
When he got to the apartment building he saw they’d stripped a lot of the exterior skin, removed windows and gutted several of the units in the last two weeks. Much of the pink stucco and rococo style ornamentation along the roofline was gone. Unit 5, where the Reinerts had lived, was one of those that had been completely gutted. He figured a way to get around the construction fencing and walked up the stairs with a flashlight. The exterior walls were stripped so all he had to do was squeeze between the two-by-four studs. Once in the Reinerts’ unit he found where the kitchen had been by looking at the plumbing pipes in the wall.
Then he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, someone who knew how to walk quietly and that turned out to be a security guard who clicked his flashlight on Raveneau’s face. Then he moved the beam to the homicide star Raveneau held up for him to see. He told the guard the story of what had happened here.
‘You’re talking about the man the police shot today, had the woman in back?’
‘Yeah, and there wasn’t much choice but to shoot him.’
‘Never is.’
Some social comment there but Raveneau let it slide. He looked through the hole in the exterior wall where a kitchen window had been centered above the sink and figured this must have been the window where Quinn had told Whitacre and Bates that she’d seen the shooting from. He studied what you could see. The parking lot in back, but it was small. Some cars, but not all. Part of the stairs. Less of everything at night and you’d have a real hard time identifying anybody or what they were doing in the lot. Yet Whitacre and Bates had accepted her version.
He’d have to go back and reread the file yet again. Maybe she’d only claimed to have seen muzzle flashes, though what he remembered was her stating she’d seen Cody Stoltz shoot her husband. Or maybe the lighting was better in those days, but he doubted that, and it was certain the parking lot hadn’t been any closer.