Hugh Neilley was one of the two SF homicide inspectors who worked the Coryell killing. He was also the uncle Baylor mentioned and an old friend of Raveneau’s, which was a lot of coincidence if Raveneau believed in coincidence. Hugh was still with SFPD though not with the Homicide Detail. His homicide career ended in 2004 when he volunteered to leave after his drinking became an open problem. Friends arranged for a transfer to the Southern Precinct, and he had been there ever since though was due to retire at the end of this year. That was less than three months away.
Hugh sounded as if he’d just been laughing at something as he picked up the phone and asked Raveneau, ‘Where the hell have you been? I thought I’d be back at Homicide trying to figure out what happened to you. I’ve left you two messages in the last two weeks. Don’t I rate at all anymore?’
‘I’ve been swamped. We cleared another old one with a DNA match and I was in New Mexico finding our guy when you left the first message.’
‘What about the second?’
‘I’m calling you right now. I’m out at Albert Lash’s house. I just met your nephew. His crew demolished a garden shed yesterday morning and found an old bomb shelter with skulls and two partial skeletons in it. Stop me if you already know this. Did your nephew tell you this last night? He didn’t call us until this morning.’
‘No, he didn’t tell me, but we’ve been arguing. Is her skull in there?’
‘I don’t know yet. There are fourteen skulls.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, that’s the count, and we’ve got everybody on their way here. The hatch cover was under a lattice of deck boards inside the garden shed.’
‘And we missed that when we searched Lash’s place?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t believe that. I’m driving out there right now. I need to see this.’
‘Don’t come out yet. It’s going to be a zoo here the rest of today and into tonight. I just want to know if your nephew told anybody yesterday what he found. The demo crew here, these four young Hispanic guys, claim he didn’t say anything to them.’
‘Those guys are all scared of police. They’re all going to say they don’t know anything.’
‘We separated them. We talked to them. La Rosa is very fluent and she doesn’t think he said a word to them. I’m not reading anything into it, but it’s odd. Why don’t you ask him about it?’
‘You know I will. I’ll let you know.’
Raveneau was willing to leave it at that. He knew plenty about Hugh’s saga with his nephew. He knew Hugh would question him hard.
‘I’ve got to come out there, Ben. I can’t take this. I was in that garden shed when we searched his place. Well, you know that, you were there, but I was in that garden shed. I stood on those boards. I remember that, and I was there last Saturday. It’s not on the plans. The architect missed it. That garden shed was full of old pesticide bottles. The contractor got a hazardous waste company out there to clean it out.’
Raveneau wasn’t close enough to Hugh anymore or, more to the point, Hugh wasn’t close enough to the homicide office anymore for Raveneau to say much more, yet Hugh was one of the two original homicide inspectors, so he would be briefed. He was going to be in on the investigation and Raveneau decided to tell him about the cellphone.
‘We’ve found an iPhone with the skulls that wasn’t even manufactured until after Lash was in a wheelchair. Someone else has been in there. The phone number is an active account.’
‘I’ll see you there. I’m coming out now.’
‘No, you’re not.’
Raveneau listened to Hugh a little longer then broke off the call. He spent the next two hours with the coroner, the Chief Medical Examiner, and a forensic anthropologist. The ME, Hayes, decided to tag the skulls with numbers and then bring them out individually in body bags after the CSI crew finished. The fire station over on Grove Street brought in more lights for the CSI pair. The iPhone, the glass face of which Raveneau’s flashlight beam had caught, went into a clear plastic bag and then into Raveneau’s trunk. The phone was going with him.
A sheet was slid under each partial skeleton to lift them away from the floor. The rotted blankets, the clothing, shoes, all the personal effects came out, then the cot and mattress. The leaking batteries were left and the swollen cans of food, as well as the rest of the furniture and kitchen utensils and supplies. The candles were bagged individually with the hope there might be touch DNA.
The iPhone was on a trajectory of its own now. It got checked first for trace DNA and turned out to be wiped clean. Raveneau plugged it in and charged it and la Rosa started chasing down the Verizon account. It was registered to a corporation with a Belmont apartment building address though the phone had a New York prefix. A single phone number was in Contacts and before calling it they talked it through.
‘Someone knew the construction was coming,’ Raveneau said, ‘and the phone is there for us. Let’s call it. It’s what we’re expected to do.’
They moved into an interview room and put the iPhone on speakerphone so they could tape the conversation. La Rosa went quickly through it once more. No apps, photos, email accounts, nothing but a single name under Contacts. The name input was Call Me.
‘Ready?’ she asked and without waiting tapped the phone number. The phone rang four times, followed by a click followed by a humming, and they heard static and a recording started to play.
‘Old school,’ la Rosa whispered, meaning the outdated answering machine, and Raveneau nodded. The voice was male, disguised but not muffled, the tone matter of fact.
‘Money borrowed is repaid with money. Lives taken must be repaid with lives. America owes for the genocide of the western expansion. A first payment will be made very soon in San Francisco.’
It ended there, clicked off, and the connection broke. They listened to it twice more and then la Rosa looked up with puzzlement, asking, ‘Why do we get all the freaks? Why don’t they stay on the east coast or Texas or wherever they’re from? The genocide of the western expansion, I have no clue what that means. Did he mean the Western Addition? Is this a racial deal?’
‘I get it.’
‘You know what he’s talking about?’
‘Yeah, it’s how we dealt with the Native American tribes. It’s about the Indian Wars. Ann Coryell, the woman who lived in Lash’s guest house, wrote about unreconciled genocide and what it does to our collective psyche.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘She wrote about what genocide does to a society.’
La Rosa sat on that for a little bit then asked, ‘We’re supposed to pay now for something that happened in the nineteenth century?’
‘That’s what he’s saying, that’s what I hear. Ann Coryell’s thesis was that if genocide isn’t acknowledged and answered it never goes away. A society carries it and its culture is stunted.’
‘What are we getting into here?’
‘Right now we need to get a search warrant to get into an apartment in Belmont.’