‘Why didn’t you work the case after her remains were found?’
‘They were found on Mount Tamalpais thirteen months later in November 2003 and it was a Marin County case until fingerprints and clothing suggested it was her and DNA testing was done. Those results didn’t come back until April the following year. I went to the lieutenant and tried to get the case assigned to me, but he knew about the phone call I missed and was worried a defense attorney could make something of that later. That might have been true then though not now.’
He glanced over at her and said, ‘Hugh Neilley and Ray Alcott caught the case. Did you ever know Ray Alcott?’
‘No.’
‘Hugh and Ray Alcott worked it for six or seven months but it got stranded when Hugh left his homicide desk and transferred to the Southern Precinct. Hugh was going through a divorce and drinking hard and I don’t know how much work he put into it. He wouldn’t talk to me about it. Neither would Alcott after Hugh told him not to. Alcott got a new partner and the Coryell investigation went into the Cold Case closet.’
‘When did you first hear about followers of Coryell, this cult thing?’
‘I’m not sure it’s a cult. It’s definitely a following and it was academic at first and over the years I think it has grown into something else. But I wouldn’t really know any more, though now that we’re working this you should read her. It’s all still online. She had a blog and published a few papers. A small press put out a book with her writings and for awhile I think her disappearance made her more mysterious. Do you remember the media storm when Lash became a person of interest?’
‘Sure, but I’ve never read anything she wrote.’
‘She was against violence but wrote about a spiritual cleansing and acknowledging what we did to the Indian tribes as something we had to do. Her take was we were always going to defeat the tribes. Our force and numbers were far superior. We reneged on treaties and she believed there was genocide, though it wasn’t called that then. The word genocide didn’t come along until the twentieth century. Plenty of people in the nineteenth century knew that the reservation system was soul-destroying and amoral. She didn’t believe the truth was in America’s history books.’
‘I’m getting that. So where do we go with this now?’
‘We go back to the beginning of the case. We start with Hugh Neilley and Alcott. I’m going to call Hugh now.’
When Hugh answered, Raveneau said, ‘Ray Alcott says he doesn’t remember anything and you never forget anything, so it starts with you. We need at least a couple of hours to go through everything. We’d like to do that this afternoon. Are you good with coming upstairs?’
‘How long have we known each other? Almost thirty years, right? Does that mean anything to you?’
‘Sure, but this is the place to go through the files.’
‘I don’t ever want to set foot in the homicide office ever again. I’d rather sit down with you somewhere. Bring the files and you can brief your partner later.’
‘It needs to be here. Call me back with a time that works for you.’
Hugh hung up and Raveneau laid his phone down.
‘Did you just try to make him angry?’ la Rosa asked.
‘Yeah, I did. I know him. We need to get him talking. I think he knows things that aren’t in the files. He and Alcott didn’t do her justice and he knows I feel that way. It’s going to get ugly.’
‘Great.’
H
ugh Neilley was at his desk in the Southern Precinct on the first floor of the Hall of Justice and very aware of the time. His heart raced and he was dizzy with a tinny ringing in his ears. He tried the deep slow breathing that was supposed to lower his blood pressure. He didn’t expect this from Raveneau. Neither did he want to sit and dredge through the Coryell files. He delayed another fifteen minutes before crossing to the elevators and riding up.
Raveneau and la Rosa were waiting for him in their little Cold Case Unit office. Ben suggested they use the kitchen with its long table as a place to talk and Neilley shook his head. He started to point a finger and fought the impulse. He rested a hand on Raveneau’s desk.
‘No, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. Let’s talk in an interview room with the tape running and I want a copy of the tape afterwards. I want your word on that and I don’t want to get broadsided with questions about a case that’s eight or nine years old. Ben, I know what it was to you, but for me it was just another murder investigation. I don’t remember all the details of every case I worked and I don’t have anything on this one that’s not already in the files.’
‘No problem, Hugh, we’ll videotape you. We’ll do it in an interview room.’
Neilley glared at him but thought,
just calm down. You’re making too much of this
. He followed them to the interview box and Raveneau made a show of turning on the tape before they went in.
‘Coffee, Hugh?’
‘Nothing for me but let me ask you a question before we get started.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Is it right for you to be on this investigation, Ben? You talked for years about how you let her down by missing that phone call. You were very affected and I can say that as your friend. I think you still are. If you ask me, you’re too close to the case. Why don’t you give it to somebody else? You’ve got a couple of other inspectors on your Cold Case Unit, right? What do you think about that?’
‘Time has gone by, Hugh.’
‘Not for you.’
But he was never going to rattle Raveneau, though Raveneau wouldn’t like that comment sitting there right at the start of the videotape, and Neilley stayed with it until Raveneau cut him off.
‘How did you get the demolition work at Lash’s house?’
‘Are you kidding, we’re going to talk about my side business?’
‘We’re not here for that but I’m curious.’
Neilley took a deep breath. ‘I bid for the work, Ben. That’s how it works out in the big world. You’re not that far away from retirement and you’re going to need something yourself because it’s guaranteed they’ll cut our pensions. Otherwise you’ll end up working part time as a bank security guard or worse. Do you want to greet people when they come in to make their deposits and chase away assholes parking in the bank lot while they do their other shopping?’
‘I want to know if you had any reservations about taking the job.’
‘None.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Don’t get sanctimonious with me. I got a call from the contractor. We’ve done other work for him and I wasn’t going to turn him down. If I do that, someone else gets the job. I recognized the address – of course I recognized the address – but it’s just a house now. I met him on-site and we walked the project on a Saturday when I wasn’t at Southern. I looked in the guest cottage and there was nothing in it but an old bed and some furniture. It’s just another remodeling project. There was nothing to say she ever lived there and obviously I didn’t know about the bomb shelter.’
‘Did you talk with your nephew?’
‘About what?’
‘About why he waited to report what he found in the bomb shelter.’
‘I talked to him and I’m going to talk to him more about it. He made a bad decision and I apologize for it. We’re behind on the job and the contractor is pressuring us. He’s threatening to backcharge us because his contract with the client has got a tight time frame. Matt didn’t want the guys getting distracted by a police investigation. He wanted to get done in that area and then call the police. That’s what he did. He finished with the garden shed and cottage and moved the crew back up to the house.’
‘He told me he didn’t touch anything when he was inside the bomb shelter.’
‘He’s got his issues but he doesn’t lie.’
‘He lied to me.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I saw his tracks. One of your crew was spraying water to keep down the dust and he tracked some mud.’
‘But he didn’t try to hide his tracks, did he? So he knew you’d see where he walked. I think he was curious and he walked around and when you questioned him he exaggerated a little. He wanted to please you and he was trying to tell you he didn’t take anything or touch any evidence. He knows better. But what did you expect him to do when he got down there and saw what was there? Anyone would have taken a closer look. I would have.’ Hugh sighed. ‘He’s not as bad as I make him out to be sometimes. You’ve heard me talk about the problems with trying to get him straightened out, and that’s probably colored your thinking. But what’s the big deal here? Do you think Matt took something?’
Hugh Neilley stared at Raveneau trying to figure out what this was really about. He couldn’t read anything in Raveneau’s eyes. Raveneau could be a cold sonofabitch when he wanted to be.
Raveneau slid the case files toward the center of the table. ‘OK, let’s move to yours and Alcott’s investigation. Why did you move off of Albert Lash? What cleared him?’
‘The answer is we didn’t have anything that connected him to her disappearance and he had a pretty good alibi – not airtight, but better than most. He liked to work in the early morning. He’d get up, make coffee, and his housekeeper would let herself in at six thirty and make his breakfast. We interviewed the housekeeper several times and she said Lash lived by that pattern. She said he was like a clock and we used her testimony and the cook and the gardeners and all the other little people who made the great man’s house work. We mapped out his days using them and decided it was very unlikely he abducted her, took her over to Mount Tamalpais and killed her in the time frame we were looking at. For a variety of reasons we came to that conclusion, but a lot of it was verifying his statements to us through the people who worked for him.
‘The housekeeper got off by two thirty in the afternoon and had a son in elementary school that she was able to pick up after school every day, so she liked the early hours. She could always tell how long he’d been up by the coffee pot, how much coffee was left, how dried out the grounds were. He told us he was up a little before five that morning and working. She guessed about the same time when we asked her, and his editor in New York got an email at five fifty-seven Pacific Time.’
He looked from Raveneau to la Rosa. He didn’t know much about her, knew she was at Vice before she came here. He didn’t particularly like the way she watched him and sat silent.
‘Of course, we didn’t know about a bomb shelter with a bloody cot in it back then. We were imagining her being incapacitated and then moved. The Marin coroner thought she was shot on the mountain and that’s where our ME came down too. We couldn’t see little leprechaun Lash carrying her very far so we ruled him out of moving her on the mountain. He wasn’t big enough.
‘We also had other reasons to believe the killing happened on the mountain. Remember, the dogs scented on a spot where the soil had residue that may have been her blood and that was after thirteen months and a winter. It wasn’t conclusive but it was corroborative from the angle we were looking at. And Lash was cooperative. You were at the house for the search, Ben. You remember the garden shed. You looked in there too, didn’t you? Did you see a hatch cover to a bomb shelter? You missed it too and you were looking for anything that would tie him in. She may have been alive on that cot underneath you when you missed a three-foot wide metal hatch covered by boards. How do you feel about that now?’
Now Neilley felt more confident. He thought Raveneau didn’t really know what he was doing here. He obviously didn’t have any real questions about his and Alcott’s investigation.
‘At the time we concluded it wasn’t possible that he stored her body and moved it later. Some of that’s in the file but in notes that might be hard to read, but you’ll interview Alcott also, right?’
‘If we can get him in here. He doesn’t seem interested.’
‘That’s because we already went the extra mile. There’s nothing more to say and he knows you’ve been going over these files for years. You probably know them better than me. I don’t have the Coryell murder hanging over me like you.’
‘That’s true, and you don’t seem to care much about solving it now.’
‘Fuck you.’ Neilley felt anger surge, heat rise in his face. He flipped open the top file and found his summary notes and shoved them at Raveneau. ‘Where do you get off saying that?’ he asked. ‘Who are you to say what I feel or care about? I mean, you of all people.’ He turned to la Rosa. ‘If you want to go through the timeline and how we got to where we did, that’s fine. We can do that. But I’m not here to take shit because Alcott and I didn’t solve this one or all of us missed a bomb shelter.’
La Rosa didn’t say anything and he was close to asking her if she spoke English. But he didn’t do it. He went somewhere else instead.
‘I’ll tell you what’s really not in the file, and Alcott will back me up on this. When we didn’t get anywhere, Alcott wanted to question you. He didn’t understand why you took so much interest in her. He wanted to pull you in and really grill you. That’s no bullshit. He’ll say the same thing and that’s probably why he doesn’t want to come in now. I’ve never told you that before have I, Ben? That’s out of respect for our friendship, but now you have it on tape. You were pretty close to becoming a suspect. Probably wouldn’t have helped your career here, and I kept that from happening.’
Raveneau looked at him wondering if that was true, then asked, ‘Did the Marin detectives make that same connection to me?’
‘They didn’t make any connections. That pair couldn’t connect their car keys to their car.’
‘How did you get a warrant to get into Lash’s house if you had nothing on him?’
‘You already know that answer.’
‘It’s not in the file.’
‘Lash gave us access. We didn’t need a warrant and, for that matter, he wanted to be our friend. You know that too and you know the answers to everything you’ve asked so far and all I’m getting out of this meeting is a waste of time. Lash was working on a book where he wanted interviews with SFPD officers. Not only did he not want to alienate us, he wanted to charm us. He wanted to get to know us. Of course, once we got in there we went through everything. But you were there too. You know all that. You did the same thing with him. Lash’s big mistake was he slept with her. If he hadn’t we still would have looked at him in the same way. And the press fueled that too. They liked the love affair gone bad angle. The media really got on him yet he still cooperated with us in every way.’