Counterfeit Road (8 page)

‘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

O
rtega 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.’

‘If there’s a box, doesn’t everybody mark urgent?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

She laughed and he filled out the form, sent it back to her. He was still in the office when the call came to verify he worked as a homicide inspector for SFPD. That she was able to find a Jim Frank made him hopeful. He was on the phone when Cynthia buzzed from the front desk to tell him a San Leandro police officer was holding.

Raveneau picked up and the officer said, ‘He just got on the freeway headed north in the truck.’

FIFTEEN

L
a Rosa rode with him to the Branson Trucking Company yard in Martinez. She was rested and relaxed and looked a lot better than she sounded after the meeting with the elderly woman in Santa Rosa. Marsha Fairchild had rocked back and forth with her eyes closed and arms wrapped around her chest as sobs racked her. When it was over, La Rosa left feeling that she had done nothing for the woman other than to destroy her hope.

But now, la Rosa seemed to be rebounding, taking it on herself to determine whether he was helping Celeste enough.

‘What are you doing to help her get it open?’

‘The floor out in the bar is reclaimed wood that got refinished. That’s done and we’re moving chairs and tables around tonight. She finally passed inspection with the Health Department. That’s the one she’s been sweating.’

‘What about the thing with the flue? Weren’t you going to do something?’

‘No, with the flue she was forced to use the landlord’s contractor. He ripped her off but it got done.’

‘So she’s going to make it.’

‘There’s still a lot to happen, but it’s looking better.’

‘I’m sure she needs your help.’ When Raveneau didn’t answer that, she moved on. ‘So what about this Drury? Tell me again what he delivered.’

‘Forty-two pieces of finish-grade larch plywood.’

‘Larch?’

‘Type of tree.’

The delivery time was on the receipt. The receipt was in the second drawer down on the left side of Khan’s desk, though now it was in the Homicide office.

‘We know when he got there,’ Raveneau said. ‘We know when he left. Today we want details about the rest of his day. We want to know about his other deliveries. We want everything about what he did yesterday.’