A Killing in China Basin - Kirk Russell [55]
‘Donny’s body washed up on the Marin side and I was the one to identify it. It tore me apart for a long time, so I know something of what you’re feeling.’
When she lowered a hand he took it in his, something he never would have done a decade ago. Her body shook and Raveneau sat next to her as she wept for the way things had turned out, for the sister she’d lost, for everything that hadn’t been the way she had dreamed it would be.
THIRTY-NINE
When they left Gloria Jurika, la Rosa and Raveneau were talking. They were getting somewhere. A theft ring inside an elderly care business, Alex Jurika with a history of credit theft and a sudden need for substantial money from her sister – more things were going together if not fitting together. It felt like they were brushing along the edge of solving this case.
As they got back to the Hall, Raveneau fielded a call from Deborah Lafaye, the woman with the charity foundation. She wanted to go to lunch with him and him alone, pointedly saying, ‘Without your partner.’
He talked that over with la Rosa; then he met Lafaye at Slanted Door in the Ferry Building. She had already sat down at a booth. He slid in on the other side. From the booth they could look out across the bay. With the clouds the water was a gray-green and then bright again where the sun broke through.
‘I wanted to have lunch with you because I didn’t get the impression you understand how much information is out there and how easily it moves around now.’
‘Will that help us solve Alex Jurika’s murder?’
‘It might. She was very tuned into the online world, and I don’t mean to offend you but I got the impression when we met that you might not realize how easily information about other people can be gathered now. So to make a point I’ve learned some things about you. I spent half an hour alone on a computer to do this. Do you want to hear what I learned?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Your ex-wife lives in New York and has severe osteoporosis. I know some of the drugs she’s taking, and you do as well. You’ve paid over twenty thousand in the last eighteen months for drugs for her. I found that out searching medical resources we’re dialed into at the foundation.
‘I know you like wine. You belong to two local wine clubs. It turns out certain types of wine drinkers tend to donate to foundations like mine so we track the club lists. We pay a fee and get their lists.’
The waiter arrived and after they ordered she started on the interconnectivity of the Internet again. She was accustomed to having people listen to her, but Raveneau wasn’t that interested in a lecture today. He glanced out of the windows and followed the gray suspension span of the Bay Bridge.
‘I’m boring you.’
‘There’s a lot going on today.’
‘And you think I’m full of myself. You don’t know why I’m going on about Internet connectivity. You think I suggested lunch to make sure you don’t suspect me.’
‘I think you’re smarter than that.’
Raveneau ate Vietnamese rice cakes with rock shrimp and mung beans. Other than a glass of a Sauvignon blanc, Lafaye had ordered next to nothing.
‘I invited you to lunch because I’ve known Alex longer and better than the impression I left you with. When she worked for me she was on the computer looking for that connectivity I was boring you with. I didn’t know it at the time but Alex was already looking for that same connectivity in the market for identity theft.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Actually, it came up in a joking way one night when I said that I needed another identity, including a passport for traveling in countries where my real name could put me in danger. I’ve been very active trying to shut down illegal trade in human organs and other things like aid dollars that end up buying Mercedes instead of medicine for poor children. Things that could get me killed. My name is known some places and combined with the foundation website and the growth of the Internet I wasn’t as anonymous traveling as