I'll Be Gone in the Dark(6)

He turned and stared at 35 Columbus. He flashed back to the first time he drove up to the house. He remembered what he’d thought as he sat in his car, preparing to go in.

My brother really has it made.

The tamped-down sob escaped, the fight to contain it over. Drew pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and wept.





Not a lump-in-the-throat cry but a tumult of brutal grief. Unselfconscious. Purging. His car smelled like ammonia. The blood under his fingernails wouldn’t come out for days.

Finally, he told himself he had to pull it together. He had in his possession a small object he had to give CSI. Something he’d found under the bed. Something they’d missed.

A piece of Manuela’s skull.

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, IRVINE PD INVESTIGATORS RON VEACH AND Paul Jessup, in search of further information from Manuela’s inner circle, rang the front door of her parents’ house on Loma Street, in the Greentree neighborhood. Horst Rohrbeck, her father, met them at the door. The day before, shortly after the house was cordoned off and declared a crime scene, Horst and his wife, Ruth, were taken to the station and interviewed separately by junior officers. This was the first time Jessup and Veach, who was the lead detective on the case, were meeting the Rohrbecks. Twenty years in the United States hadn’t softened Horst’s German comportment. He co-owned a local auto repair shop and, it was said, could take apart a Mercedes-Benz with a single wrench.

Manuela was the Rohrbecks’ only child. She had dinner with them every night. Her personal calendar had only two notations for the month of January, reminders about her parents’ birthdays. Mama. Papa.

“Somebody killed her,” Horst said in his first police interview. “I kill that guy.”

Horst stood at the front door holding a snifter of brandy. Veach and Jessup stepped inside the house. A half-dozen stricken friends and family were gathered in the living room. When the investigators identified themselves, Horst’s stony expression unclenched and he erupted. He wasn’t a big man, but fury doubled his size. He shouted in accented English about how disgusted he





was with the police department, how they needed to be doing more. About four minutes into the tirade, Veach and Jessup realized that their presence wasn’t necessary. Horst was heartbroken and conflict-starved. His rage was a projectile splintering in real time. There was nothing to do but put a business card on the foyer table and get out of his way.

Horst’s anguish was also tinged with a specific regret. The Rohrbecks were the owners of an enormous, military-grade trained German shepherd named Possum. Horst had suggested that Manuela keep Possum at her house for protection while David was in the hospital, but she declined. It was impossible not to hit rewind and imagine Possum’s gaping scissor bite, saliva dripping from his incisors, as he lunged at the intruder chipping at the lock, scaring him away.

Manuela’s funeral was Wednesday, February 11, at Saddleback Chapel in Tustin. Drew spotted officers across the street taking photographs. Afterward he returned to 35 Columbus with David. The brothers sat talking in the living room late into the night. David was drinking heavily.

“They think I killed her,” David said abruptly about the police. His expression was unreadable. Drew readied himself to hear a confession. He didn’t believe David was physically capable of Manuela’s murder; the question was whether he could have hired someone to do it. Drew felt his police training kicking in. The image of his brother sitting across from him narrowed to a pinhole. He figured he had one chance.

“Did you?” Drew asked.

David’s personality, always a bit diffident, had acquired an understandable tremble. Survivor’s guilt weighed on him. He’d been born with a hole in his heart; if anyone was going to die, it should have been him. Manuela’s parents’ grief roved in search of someone to blame. Their gaze had the increasing effect of a glancing





blow. But now, in response to Drew’s question, David bristled with certainty.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t kill my wife, Drew.”

Drew exhaled for what felt like the first time since news of Manuela’s murder. He’d needed to hear David say the words. Looking in his brother’s eyes, wounded but flashing with assurance, Drew knew he was telling the truth.

He wasn’t the only one who felt David was innocent. Criminalist Jim White of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department helped process the crime scene. Good criminalists are human scanners; they enter messy, unfamiliar rooms, isolate important trace evidence, and block out everything else. They work under pressure. A crime scene is time-sensitive and always on the verge of collapse. Every person who enters represents the possibility for contamination. Criminalists come laden with tools for collection and preservation—paper evidence bags, seals, measuring tape, swabs, bindle paper, plaster of paris. At the Witthuhn scene, White worked in collaboration with Investigator Veach, who instructed him on what to seize. He collected flaky pieces of mud next to the bed. He swabbed a diluted bloodstain on the toilet. He stood with Veach as Manuela’s body was rolled. They noted the massive head injury, ligature marks, and some bruising on her right hand. There was a mark on her left buttock that the coroner would later conclude was likely from a punch.

The second part of the criminalist’s job comes in the lab, analyzing the evidence that’s been collected. White tested the brown paint on the killer’s screwdriver against popular brands, concluding that the best match was a store-mixed Oxford Brown made by Behr. The lab is usually where the job ends. Criminalists aren’t investigators. They don’t conduct interviews or run down leads. But White was in a unique position. The individual police departments of Orange County investigated crimes in their own