A Killing in China Basin - Kirk Russell [18]
As they cut her open he and la Rosa left the room. They’d get the rest from the report. They didn’t need to watch her liver weighed.
‘What do you make of the tattoo on her heel?’ he asked after they’d stripped off the suits and were outside in the cool breeze of the corridor leading back to the Hall.
‘I don’t make anything of it.’
‘Maybe we can track down her name through the tattoos.’
‘That seems like another goose chase.’
‘Another one?’
‘Well, like one.’
Their Jane Doe’s sketch had run in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, but how many people read the newspaper any more? Still, at Homicide they had new calls, new tips. In the late morning an email tip on a different case arrived via the ‘Contact Us’ link on the SFPD website. The tip named two kids who’d allegedly witnessed a stabbing outside a club in the Mission several weeks ago. Raveneau called the high school and confirmed that both young men were seniors and at school today. At noon they drove over, met with a dean first, and then one of the two young men, who immediately denied having been at the club that night.
La Rosa took the lead with the second young man and impressed Raveneau. She was soft spoken and easy with the boy, a sixteen-year-old named Robert Fuentes. She was more relaxed and confident than with Heilbron. She’d also changed her look, cut her hair short this weekend, turning her proud face more handsome and mannish, something she told Raveneau on the drive here that she regretted. She told him something else this morning, that her roots were upper middle class. Her father was a knee surgeon, her mother in marketing, and both tried and failed to talk her out of police work, arguing that she could do better for herself.
Raveneau spoke decent Spanish but la Rosa was fluent and hip to the language the kid used. Forty minutes into the interview Fuentes gave up a name, H Man, Hector Jimenez, a gangbanger, and told them where to look for him.
They picked Jimenez up off the street in the mid afternoon and brought him in. He was a big man, coffee-colored, half-Puerto Rican, half-Mexican and muscled, wearing a canary-yellow shirt that came down to mid thigh. Jimenez knew to say nothing and lawyer up but inexplicably did the opposite: confessed to the shooting, saying he was high and the victim had come on to the girl he was with so he had no choice. They were hours with him in the small interview room and after he signed a confession they booked him.
Then they went to see Heilbron who was hostile and unwilling to talk to them at all. The thrill of confessing had passed and he made no attempt to answer Raveneau’s questions. Instead, he said, ‘I made up the whole thing, I didn’t kill her. I got everything from one of the cops outside. He’ll remember me. Ask him.’
Raveneau and la Rosa knew they’d have to kick him loose, but that didn’t mean they weren’t conflicted about it. Then, as they were leaving, Heilbron called to la Rosa. She glanced at Raveneau and then went back, demanding as she got close, ‘What is it?’
‘I know you’re not married. I want to ask you out. I’d like to spend time with you.’
‘Would you?’
‘Last night I kept waking up thinking about you. We should get together.’
‘Let’s do that. Let’s do it in an interview room tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about San Jose. How does that sound?’
She didn’t wait for his answer. Outside, Raveneau turned and said, ‘Let’s get a drink and celebrate our first week on-call together and you getting the Jimenez confession today.’
In the old days Raveneau drank Scotch and when somebody wanted to buy the homicide inspector a drink he usually accepted. He’d get warmed up and entertain a small crowd with stories as Angie waited at home. That was back when he thought it meant something to appear on TV answering questions about a homicide investigation at a press conference. It was also when he thought an eighteen-year-old Scotch meant the whiskey had been in a barrel for eighteen years, as opposed to the truth, which was that just