One Through the Heart (11 page)

‘I blamed you for missing her call, but it was always me. I wouldn’t let her come home. I’m so sorry for things I’ve said, for what I’ve done.’

She shook her head, wiped her cheeks and tried to breathe and then couldn’t stop the tears. She couldn’t control herself anymore. She tried for so long. She carried it for so long. She couldn’t any longer.

A
s Raveneau drove through the toll plaza and back into San Francisco the Missouri sheriff called and pulled his thoughts from Marion Coryell’s anguish.

‘Sending out bone samples to you made its way into the local newspaper here. I’m getting some blowback. I don’t know who leaked it. I never try to find out anymore, but safe to say some people don’t like the idea we kept DNA samples and are now shipping them to San Francisco, of all the degenerate places in the world. So I need two questions answered. Did your crime lab get what we sent and how soon can we get them back? Well, three questions. The third is, when do you expect results?’

‘I know the guy that runs the lab and he left me a message earlier that they arrived and he took samples. I’ll ask him to ship the rest back to you tomorrow morning.’

‘What about results?’

‘I’m pushing and I can tell you they think the skeletal decay is similar between what we have and what you sent. Of the leads we’ve got, and we’ve got five or six, yours is most promising.’

‘I feel like a contestant.’

‘I’m with you and I hope you win. I’d like to get it answered, and if they are yours, how did they get from Cagdill to a bomb shelter in San Francisco?’

Some of the bounce was gone from her voice when she answered that saying, ‘I’ve got a story I should have told you before now, but I was waiting to see if this panned out as anything first.’

Raveneau listened as he drove along the Marina Green. He turned into the lot looking for a place to park and with the warm weather not expecting to find one but got lucky.

‘The caskets washed up on both sides of the highway and we put markers on them. I think I told you that. We couldn’t drive to all of them. We had to walk through the river mud and we sure weren’t going to be able to move them until a backhoe got the muck off the highway, but the hoes were all working on levee breaks. The river was still up and we had a basketful of other problems and taking care of the caskets didn’t happen as fast as it should have. We taped off the area and blocked access and made sure they weren’t going to get damaged, but let’s face it, caskets sit six feet under in mud, so what the heck.

‘Very early the next morning a scraper was due to clean the road, and Jacobs, the farmer I told you about who owns the fields alongside the highway, saw a light. Did I tell you all of this already?’

‘You told me there was a farmer who saw someone but keep going.’

‘He saw a light and went out to investigate and it didn’t take him long to figure it was someone looking at the caskets. His guess was that it was somebody wondering if they had a relative washed up on the side of a road. He worked his way down to the edge of his property. It was a cold morning, it was early and the highway was muddied up, so old Jacobs was curious that anyone would be out there at that hour. He got close enough to figure it was a man but not close enough to give us a good description. He thought the vehicle was a either a Jeep Cherokee or something similar in shape. He didn’t have his cellphone with him and had to go all the way back to his house before he could call us, and he did some chores on the way back, so by the time we got out there all we found were tire tracks and footprints. I have plaster casts of those.

‘It’s been a hard one to have unsolved. If it was grave robbing and this individual stole jewelry and watches and such, well, that would have been one thing. But stealing skulls made it very emotional for people. I’ve had a lot of pressure to get it solved and some crank calls because of it, not all of them friendly. It’s why I put you on speakerphone the first time we talked.’

‘I figured it was something like that.’

‘I’ve been made a fool of once on this already. A handful of high school kids tricked me. One of them reported skulls out on a bluff overlooking the river and I raced out with my siren on. They took videos of me with their cellphones and posted them to Facebook, but not one would rat out who made the call to the Sheriff’s Office. So when you called that went through my head before anything else.’

‘But I told you who I was.’

‘You also told me you were from California.’

Raveneau got out of the car still talking to her, easing back to just exactly where they were at number-wise with the samples sent and also asking how serious her concern about the blowback was. He didn’t want anything to derail these DNA tests.

He looked out on a dark blue bay and an orange-red light along the western horizon behind the Golden Gate Bridge as he talked with her. He gathered she was at home and that her house was small and up on a bluff over the Mississippi. She could see the river from her porch. She told him she had a ten-year-old daughter she was raising and said nothing about her ex-husband. He thought he heard the clink of ice in a glass just before he hung up with her. Now he walked out the path to the anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge. When his cellphone rang again it was Celeste.

‘Hey, are you still coming here or should I bring some food from the bar and meet you up on your roof? How long until you’re home?’

‘An hour.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Walking.’

‘Thinking?’

‘Quit thinking so much, it’s a beautiful evening.’

‘I’ll see you soon.’

W
hen Raveneau had negotiated the lease for the one-bedroom rooftop apartment, the wood deck off the sliding door was much smaller and several of the redwood deck boards had rotted through. His landlord, a tough Vietnamese immigrant, shook off repairing the deck, but they kept the conversation going and over time Raveneau cut a deal with him. Now the deck was lined with potted citrus trees whose fragrance floated in through the open slider most nights. He often slept with the door and windows open. Up here, he didn’t worry much about intruders.

Tonight in the warm still air he and Celeste sat outside at the deck table eating crostini she’d brought from M33 along with salad and red wine. Raveneau rarely talked about an ongoing case, almost never when he was on-call, but cold cases were different and this one different again and when she prompted him he said, ‘In our office for a long time there was a feeling that Albert Lash knew more and may have killed her. One of the two inspectors who caught the case was a good friend of mine – not so much anymore – but definitely then and for a long time. We joined the force together, came through the police academy in the same class and both of us wanted to make it to homicide someday. He got there first.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Hugh Neilley. Hugh worked the Coryell murder with another inspector now retired named Ray Alcott. I’ve combed through the murder files. They did their best, but it’s all a big zero if you don’t solve it, and Hugh left the Homicide Detail not long after the investigation files ended up in our cold case closet.’

Raveneau saw Celeste start to ask and answered it first. ‘Hugh had a drinking problem and his marriage had ended so there was no one waiting for him to get home at night. No one will ever acknowledge this, but it got worked out so that the Southern precinct made him an offer and Hugh promised to get his drinking under control. They took him in there so he didn’t have to resign and he worked out a story he could live with. He’s a Lieutenant now at Southern, has been since January 2005.

‘Her remains were found in 2003 but we didn’t get DNA confirmation until early April, which is a fairly normal lag. It was a Marin case, and when the suspicion came that it might be her the investigation became joint, and once it was joint and we knew it was her we took over the investigation. We wanted it. We wanted to solve it.

‘Now in all this Lash was very helpful and we did a kind of dance with him. He was working on a book where he needed police interviews and we wanted to know everything we could about him. Hugh spent time with him during the active investigation and I know he was up at Lash’s house regularly even after he moved to Southern. Lash poured some expensive liquor and wine and had a cook and started a poker thing with some of the officers. The book was about San Francisco as seen through the eyes of the SFPD, so he was especially interested in the career officers who’d been around for awhile. Hugh fit.’

‘What about you? Did you go there?’

‘I did and Lash is a charming guy. He’s generous. He’s quick and fun and has a lot of stories of his own. It was easy to accept his invitations and drink his twenty-five-year-old single malts and his top-flight wines and tell ourselves we were getting closer to him to learn more about him.’ Raveneau paused. ‘If Hugh was sitting here and I said this, he’d punch me, but I’ll tell you I think Lash got the better of him. He drew him in and compromised him with his generosity. Hugh would go there on a Saturday night when he was off shift and call me Sunday in a froggy hung-over voice to tell me something suspicious he’d learned about Lash the night before. He knew my interest in the case and that made him feel better, but it was all bullshit.’

Celeste studied him, her dark eyes filled with curiosity. ‘I’ve never heard Hugh Neilley’s name before.’

‘We meet for a drink now and then, but he’s got plenty of friends he’s closer to. Hugh and I make a point of an occasional drink, but we don’t have much to say to each other anymore.’

‘I understand about the drinking but I thought once you made it on to the Homicide Detail you stayed there.’

‘Yes and no, but there was also a rumor that someone well up in the brass saw him at Moose’s deadass drunk and talking about a case to somebody he didn’t know. There was that rumor and there were other rumors, and eventually it got to be too much.’

After a beat, Raveneau added, ‘If he and Joan hadn’t gotten divorced I think it would have been different. They were high school sweethearts and there’s probably no one else for either one of them. I shouldn’t say that but that’s how it seems to me. Hugh took on a lot of debt in the divorce because he wanted to hang on to the house which had been his parents’ house. His dad built it. He was a builder. That’s how he got into this thing now where he’s going to run a demolition company when he retires. He’s got his nephew working as a foreman.’

‘At Lash’s old house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Seems a little weird.’

‘It’s something.’

Raveneau poured her more wine and picked up his glass. One good thing about working cold cases and no longer being in the on-call rotation was he could drink at night. He told Celeste more about the skulls stacked against the wall in the bomb shelter. None of it was secret anymore. The media had found a way in and the department elected to reveal the phone threat, calling it ‘as yet unsubstantiated, but being treated seriously.’ Raveneau read that as don’t try to sue us later because we let know you ahead of time.

‘What do you think of this threat?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t there always somebody threatening something?’

‘Sure, and this may not be any different, but it ties to the bomb shelter. We’ve got some people we’re looking at, but I’ve also got a bad feeling about it. It’s a self-righteous threat, somebody who has assigned themselves the job of making us all pay for a wrong, in this case what we did to the Native American tribes. It connects with what Ann Coryell wrote about. I haven’t told you this, but I met Ann Coryell the night she disappeared. I was two streets over re-interviewing a witness in a murder case and when I left I saw three police cruisers out in front of Albert Lash’s house.’

‘Did you know it was his house?’

‘Yeah, he was a popular writer by then and always trying to get media attention. I’d seen his house on TV and if you’re a cop long enough you come to know who lives where. I stopped to see what was going on and that led to walking through a eucalyptus grove just over a low stone wall and in the Presidio. I walked it with Ann Coryell. She had called nine one one twice that week claiming to hear a woman in pain screaming. The responding officers got there fast the first time, but they were more skeptical after the second and third calls. When I was with her she was both distraught and embarrassed. I thought there was a pretty good chance she wouldn’t call nine one one if she heard the screaming again, but she might call me. So I gave her my cell number. She called me that night and I missed the call. I slept through it.’

‘What did you do before you went to bed?’

‘I made a sandwich, watched TV, and drank a couple glasses of red wine. If not for the wine I would have heard the phone vibrating.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I would have heard it.’

‘You can’t do that, Ben.’

‘I’m pretty sure, and the way it worked out I was the last known person to see her alive. Most of her remains were found thirteen months later up on the western slope of Mount Tam.’

‘I’ve heard and it’s still awful.’

It was, and now he lay awake near Celeste and the heart-calming warmth of her skin and soft breathing. At five o’clock he was out of bed making coffee and reading Ann Coryell again, a section titled, ‘
Suppression of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
.’

Coryell’s style in her earlier writings was to lay out the facts with few adjectives. Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, December 29, 1890, US Army Seventh Calvary intercepts five hundred Lakota Sioux under the leadership of Chief Bigfoot. Calvary officers later claim the soldiers fired in self defense but of the three hundred dead almost two hundred were women and children and cavalry dead and wounded are almost entirely victims of friendly fire. So again, Coryell style, no judgment and the facts speak for themselves.

Raveneau read until dawn and then showered, brewed fresh coffee and he and Celeste left together. He took an unexpected early morning call as he got in his car.

‘Hugh, what’s up?’