La Rosa was in her car on her way to Santa Rosa to sit next to an elderly woman and take her cold arthritic hand with its misshapen and swollen knuckles into her warm hands. Then she would tell her bones found during a construction excavation seven months ago were a positive DNA match for her daughter who had disappeared forty-two years ago. The daughter was a fifteen year old runaway in 1969 and though the rest of the world forgot about the girl long ago, her mother couldn’t.
The last time la Rosa saw her she revealed the fantasy world she had constructed. Her daughter had fallen in love with an Australian and lived in an unnamed remote area of the Outback without a phone. Marsha Fairchild had an answer for all the reasons why her daughter had never contacted her.
From a distance it was an inability to face the probable truth, but for all her toughness, la Rosa dreaded this meeting. She was in her car north of the Bay Area driving through hills south of Santa Rosa where the cell reception was poor. Her focus was on what she was going to say to convince the woman when Raveneau called.
‘Govich was right. There’s something there.’
‘Did you get anything we can use?’
‘Not yet. Hold on, I’ve got a call coming in from the lieutenant.’
Raveneau knew immediately from the lieutenant’s tone that something had happened.
‘Inspector, where are you?’
‘Vallejo.’
‘I need you here.’
Traffic was lightening. He was moving at fifty miles per hour and it was picking up.
‘There’s been a shooting at a cabinet shop on Sixteenth Street, three dead and one dying. I need you and la Rosa to help secure the scene.’
‘Where’s the one who is still alive?’
‘With paramedics on his way to the hospital, but you go straight to Sixteenth. Where’s your partner?’
‘On her way to Santa Rosa.’
‘Oh, that’s right.’
‘Tell her to come to Sixteenth when she’s done there. I’m going to tell Inspector Ortega you’re on your way.’
Ortega and Hagen were on-call, so caught the case. Raveneau still checked the board. He kept track of who was on-call and who was backup, but he and la Rosa no longer were. Unless something like this happened, they stayed on the cold cases.
Becker hung up. Raveneau told la Rosa.
‘Disgruntled employee?’ she asked.
‘Becker doesn’t know.’
A few minutes later he was talking to Bruce Ortega.
‘The saws were still running when we got here. The owner of the shop returned from measuring a kitchen cabinet job, found one of his employees lying in a pool of blood and called 911. That call came in at 1:47. He had left to go to his appointment for the kitchen project at 12:15 and according to him all four employees were here and working when he left. The employees agreed to come in early today and not break for lunch until two, and then work until seven tonight because they were late on a delivery. He says measuring for a new project was his only appointment today. Otherwise he was there to help finish this one. Are you with me so far?’
‘Sure. He left at 12:15 and called 911 at 1:47.’
‘That’s right, and the window is even narrower because there was a plywood delivery signed for by one of the victims at 1:07. The delivery time is on the receipt. We haven’t verified anything yet, but it appears the victims were shot between 1:07 and when the owner got back, so call it a twenty-five minute window.’
‘What’s the owner’s name?’
‘David Khan. Khan’s Cabinets. We’ve got him here.’
‘What about the one that went to the hospital?’
‘He was dead when he left here. It looks as if the shooter walked through from one end of the building to the other. It’s a mess. How far away are you?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘See you here.’
When Raveneau arrived he was the fifth homicide inspector on the scene and Ortega didn’t need him. He walked the building. It was long, rectangular, an old wood frame resting on a concrete slab foundation. Two rolling doors opened on to trucking bays on Sixteenth Street. The truck that delivered the plywood backed into one of these bays just after one o’clock this afternoon. They needed to find the driver of the delivery truck.
One victim, possibly the first, was a young man who looked like he was shot while cutting a piece of plywood on a table saw. Two CSI teams were here but they hadn’t gotten to him yet. Raveneau saw the spray of blood along the length of plywood. His body lay on the gray concrete near the metal table legs of the saw. A pool of blood darkened near his head. The pool had spread and mixed with sawdust. He wore a black long-sleeved T-shirt with the sleeves slid up to the elbows. On his inside left forearm was a tattoo of a martini glass. His black hair was on the long side and tied. He wore jeans as did the next victim.
That victim was older, forty to forty-five, short hair, thick neck, thick shoulders, and looked like he’d worked with his hands all his life. The entry wounds at the back of his skull were close together. Raveneau guessed the shooter came right up behind him, and like the previous victim he was shot in the chest, then in the head, and probably in the chest first, Raveneau thought, one in the heart, one in the head. He had pitched forward on to the cabinet he was working on then slid down. A cordless drill lay nearby.
Raveneau checked out the space again, a long rectangle with rooms divided according to the work being done. At one end was the owner’s office. In the bay nearest it finished cabinets were stacked ready to deliver. Adjacent to that was the bay where this victim was. His name was Dan Oliver. He was the one who had signed for delivery of the finish-grade plywood. That meant he used the forklift to unload the plywood and then drove it down to the far end of the building where materials were stored and where the forklift was parked now. After parking the forklift he made it back to here and started work on the cabinet. All that must have taken several minutes and Raveneau turned to Ortega.
‘Where’s the delivery truck driver? Where are we at on him?’
‘We’re trying to locate him. He did his last delivery before we called his boss.’
‘He would know whether Oliver signed first.’
Ortega didn’t respond, instead asked, ‘What else do you see?’
The third victim was a woman in her early thirties named Amber Diaz. She was about five foot four, one hundred thirty pounds, a masculine look to her, and a bloody trail. After being shot she tried to escape and the shooter had stepped on blood droplets as he moved in. She was also chest shot and Raveneau wondered if she had then ducked her head. She made it halfway across the room and by then was bleeding badly from the trough a bullet plowed through her scalp. When the shooter caught up to her he put one through her skull, and yet it appeared from blood smears that after that she convulsed on the floor. Hers was the most affecting for Raveneau because though wounded she fought to live.
‘He shot all four but didn’t wait for the owner,’ Ortega said. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘I don’t know.’
What struck Raveneau most was the narrow window of time the shooter was operating with and the improbability of the coincidental timing. He talked with Ortega about that as they moved to where the last victim fell and the paramedics worked on him before taking him to the hospital. Pieces of alder trim were scattered. Ortega pointed at the bloody concrete where they worked on him.
‘He was sixteen, a boy. Wrong place, wrong time, should have listened to his mother and stayed in school. She arrived as they were loading him. They don’t live far from here.’
‘Where’s the owner?’
‘In his office down there at the end and his wife and lawyer are on the way.’
‘Let’s get him out of here. Let’s see if we can get him to go in with us right now.’
Raveneau knew Ortega didn’t really want his help. It was Ortega’s to solve with Hagen, Gibbs, and Montoya. With the new way of doing things they would all work as one team, and Raveneau had a reputation of liking to work alone. No one really believed that he and la Rosa got on as well as they did.
‘Why don’t I go find the plywood delivery guy and bring him in,’ Raveneau offered.
‘We’ve already talked to his employer. We’re working on that.’
‘But we should have heard something more by now.’
Ortega stopped on that. He wanted to say no, but knew it was true, and in the end Ortega probably liked the idea of getting him out of the building.
‘OK, Raveneau, go find him.’