A Killing in China Basin - Kirk Russell [4]
She answered sharply. ‘I don’t need the old school jokes.’
They moved to the back door and Raveneau was last in, turning to look at the line of moonlight on the bay and the gray rocks before entering. The room was stacked with office furniture. Down a hallway a light shone at the bottom of stairs. He let Deschutes lead. Behind him, la Rosa muttered, ‘He shouldn’t be in here with us.’
They went upstairs to the second floor and walked past rooms that looked like former offices, though ransacked, some even missing their doors. In the room where the victim was, the lights brought from the fire station not only lit the space, but were also heating it. The warming air smelled of urine, mold, and dust, the floor littered with needles and fast food wrappers. In the doorway, the medical examiner stood to one side writing notes.
Deschutes described what he’d seen and confirmed again that he didn’t touch her. Raveneau took him back downstairs and la Rosa stayed with the ME. When Raveneau returned he opened his notebook. The victim appeared to be of mixed race, Asian and white, possibly in her early thirties, and was lying on her right side on a mattress on the concrete floor.
White cotton rope, what appeared to be clothesline, was pulled tightly around her neck, the knot surrounded by bruising. The rope extended three feet beyond the mattress, and looked as if it was dropped after she was strangled. Orange ties bound her wrists behind her and held her ankles pressed together. From the position of her body, and that she was dressed, he made a guess that he had no right to make yet, that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. But that didn’t mean this wasn’t someone’s sexual fantasy.
The medical examiner had commented as they arrived that death was probably within the last two hours, so Jimmy Deschutes was either here when she died or very shortly after. Deschutes’s reward for flagging down the patrol car was that he became their first suspect.
Drool ran from the victim’s mouth. Where it reached the mattress, the mattress was still wet. He followed the marks on her neck to the purple-colored silk top, the pants, belt, her shoes – the right off her foot and lying on the floor. No coat, no purse, no apparent reason to be here. He saw scuff marks where her shoes had rubbed back and forth on the mattress. He saw struggle. He guessed she was conscious and it looked from how her make-up ran that she had cried. She knew what was happening.
CSI arrived, lugged in their gear, their baggy cargo pants floating around them. The photographer showed up. La Rosa stayed near the CSI team; that’s what her generation believed in.
Raveneau walked back outside, walked China Basin Street looking at vehicles, taking down plate numbers in case one of these cars was hers. He studied the handful of spectators, and saw the medical examiner come out and go to his wagon. Raveneau went over to talk to him. In San Francisco the medical examiners were all doctors. This ME would take their victim the distance, doing the autopsy and toxicology.
‘Think you can get to her before Monday?’
‘I can tell you tomorrow. I don’t know tonight.’
After CSI had vacuumed and gone, the photographer finished, and the victim was in the thin white bag that the ME had put his seal on, Raveneau and la Rosa spent another forty minutes in the building before driving back to the Hall of Justice. They rode the elevator up and were quiet for the moment. They ate the egg croissants they picked up on the drive back and made coffee, and went downstairs to the morgue and rolled her prints, putting on latex gloves and inking her fingers with the ME looking over them.
Shortly after nine that morning they ran her prints through the local AFIS system. When they didn’t get a hit, they ran them through both the state and the western states systems. Nothing there either and Raveneau suggested they return to China Basin and start knocking on doors.
But