Shallow Grave Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY BRIAN THIEM:

  Thrill Kill

  Red Line

  SHALLOW GRAVE

  A MATT SINCLAIR MYSTERY

  Brian Thiem

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Brian Thiem.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-143-0

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-145-4

  ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-68331-146-1

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-147-8

  Cover design by Andy Ruggirello

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First edition: July 2017

  For

  The fifty-one Oakland Police Officers who have given their lives in the line of duty.

  And

  For the thousands of officers in Oakland and around the country who do the job every day with the knowledge they may do the same.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  The radio in Oakland homicide sergeant Matt Sinclair’s unmarked Crown Vic crackled. “Tactical commander to all teams. Execute.”

  Sinclair pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and his car rocketed down the block. He slammed on the brakes one house shy of their target, flung open his door, and rolled out, pulling a Remington 870 pump shotgun behind him. He racked a round into the chamber, the sound echoing through the early-morning quiet of the residential neighborhood.

  He paused a few seconds to allow the officers in the next two cars to catch up. He then jogged down the street and up the house’s cracked cement walkway. His partner, Sergeant Cathy Braddock, Officer Kurt Fletcher of the intelligence unit, and four other homicide investigators on the team followed. His eyes scanned the house and yard, looking for movement or something as insignificant as the flutter of a curtain in a window. Nothing.

  Two of the investigators peeled off and ran down the side of the house, heading for the backyard where they’d establish a perimeter. Sinclair glanced back and saw Sergeant Jankowski, a huge man of nearly three hundred pounds, cradling a twenty-pound battering ram and jogging to catch up.

  The street was quiet. No pedestrians. Morning newspapers were still lying in driveways. Although the sun had risen more than an hour ago, it was still fighting to penetrate the typical morning fog that blanketed the city.

  Braddock and Fletcher followed Sinclair up four rotting wooden steps to the small porch and stacked behind him to the side of the door. Sinclair tried the doorknob of the metal security door on the off chance that Animal’s wife was careless. She wasn’t.

  Sinclair pounded on the door with his fist and yelled, “Police! Search warrant. Open the door!”

  He heard raised voices. A chair or table screeched across the floor. The radio bud in Sinclair’s right ear clicked. “Bathroom light came on in the rear. Toilet flushing.”

  Although seizing narcotics was not the primary purpose of their warrant, Sinclair wasn’t about to let them flush their stash. “Hook—key,” he ordered to the two men at the bottom of the stairs.

  Jankowski’s partner, Lou Sanchez, climbed onto the porch and jammed a pry bar between the steel door and frame. He yanked and the metal cage sprang open. Sanchez pulled it to the side, and Jankowski swung the battering ram, affectionately referred to as “the key to the city,” at the doorknob. The door splintered and flew open.

  Sinclair followed the battering ram through the door into a tiny living room crammed full with a couch, coffee table, TV, and two occasional chairs. A man about Sinclair’s height, dressed in plaid boxer shorts and a wife-beater undershirt stretched tight over a huge belly, shuffled his feet in the doorway of the hallway, unsure if he should retreat or attack.

  Sinclair leveled the shotgun at his chest. “On the floor,” he yelled. “Now!” The man dropped to his knees, and Braddock rushed forward and shoved him to the ground.

  While she was handcuffing the first suspect, Sinclair headed into the hallway. There was a closed door on his right. He grabbed the knob. Locked. Stepping back, he kicked the door. A rail-thin woman in her twenties hovered over the toilet, tearing apart plastic-wrapped bundles of white powder and dropping them in the toilet. Gripping the shotgun with his right hand, he grabbed the woman’s arm with his left and pulled her away from her task. She glared at him with bloodshot eyes, grabbed a butcher knife from atop the toilet tank, and slashed at Sinclair.

  Sinclair released his grip on the woman. He stepped back as the knife blade swept past his neck, missing by inches. Sinclair grabbed the foregrip of the shotgun with his left hand, pivoted, and swung the butt of the shotgun at her head. The knife clattered to the tile floor, and the woman dropped in a heap beside it.

  Chapter 2

  Sinclair signed the bottom of the statement form and handed it to the patrol lieutenant. In addition to the three unmarked cars belonging to homicide, a marked patrol SUV and a semimarked lieutenant’s car were parked in front of the small, pale-yellow stucco house. They were in a working-class neighborhood in the Melrose District of Oakland, which was seeing revitalization thanks to the booming Bay Area, pricing many people out of San Francisco and into the sketchier parts of Oakland.

  “It’s not like I don’t have enough use-of-force paperwork to handle with my own guys,” the lieutenant said.

  Sinclair leaned against his car and took a few puffs on his cigar. “My LT would’ve handled it, but he’s tied up at the Simbas’ clubhouse,” he said, referring to the Savage Simbas Motorcycle Club, the primary target of the three search warrants the department’s SWAT team and homicide unit had just
executed. The house Sinclair’s team hit and another private residence were secondary targets suspected of containing evidence of the murder and ties to the club.

  The uniformed lieutenant turned and said to Jankowski, “Are you finished with your supplemental?”

  Jankowski, the oldest investigator in the unit with more than thirty years in the department, handed him a sheet of paper. “Not much to it. I stepped into the bathroom, saw the lady meth head swing a knife at Sinclair. He ducked and buttstroked her before she could take another swipe at him. Me—I would’ve shot the cranked-up bitch.”

  The lieutenant slid the papers into his notebook and opened his car door. “Hell, ignore my griping. I’m just glad you guys are okay.”

  The patrol lieutenant drove off with the other marked car behind him, leaving the three homicide cars parked in front of the house. An ambulance had taken the woman Sinclair butt-stroked with his shotgun to the hospital an hour ago, where a patrol officer would guard her until she could be transferred to the city jail. She was the wife of the Savage Simba sergeant-at-arms known as Animal, the man who killed a fellow club member in a biker bar last night. Two other patrol cars had transported a club prospect that they’d found hiding in a closet and Animal’s brother-in-law, the man Sinclair encountered in the living room, to homicide.

  Braddock and Fletcher came out the front door and walked to their cars carrying armfuls of paper bags. They were dressed in the department’s dark-blue utility uniform instead of their normal plain clothes, as was Sinclair. They both wore Kevlar vests, leather boots, and their duty gunbelts. Long-haired and bearded, Officer Kurt Fletcher had been assigned to OPD’s intelligence unit for ten years, where he was responsible for tracking gangs and had become one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Hells Angels.

  “I’m guessing we have close to a kilo of meth,” Braddock said. “No telling how much they flushed. And eight handguns. Maybe one of them’s the murder weapon.”

  “I hate giving you the shit work,” Jankowski said to Braddock, “but do you mind turning all that stuff in? I need to get over to the clubhouse. They’ve got Animal and about twenty bikers in custody there and a shitload of evidence.”

  “No problem,” she said, then turned to Fletcher. “Any word from Phil?”

  Despite numerous calls last night and this morning to Phil Roberts, the Intel unit sergeant, no one could reach him. Roberts had been both Sinclair’s and Braddock’s training officer when they came to homicide. He and Sinclair had been partners for four years until Sinclair’s drinking caused him to self-destruct and get booted out of the unit. When Sinclair got his sergeant stripes back two years ago, he returned to homicide and took over as Braddock’s training officer, and Roberts was given the coveted Intel supervisor job.

  “Nothing,” Fletcher said. “This ain’t like him. He always answers his phone and would never miss out on something like this. If nothing else, he should’ve figured out something was up when he got to the office this morning and no one was there.”

  Sinclair grunted. At one time, Phil had probably been his best friend in the world, a man who had his back no matter what. But when Sinclair was tasked with the Thrill Kill Murders six months ago, Phil sided with the Feds to keep an escort service’s client list from him. The list was the key to solving his case, and Sinclair still couldn’t understand how someone like Phil, the man who taught him there was no cause more noble than investigating the death of a human being, would protect a bunch of wealthy businessmen and politicians over taking down a killer. He wondered what happened to make his old partner change so drastically.

  While Jankowski and Fletcher drove to the clubhouse, Sinclair and the other homicide investigators returned to the Police Administration Building, known as the PAB to those who worked there. After cataloging and turning in the guns to the property section and the drugs to criminalistics, he changed out of his uniform in the basement locker room and headed up to the homicide office on the second floor of the nine-story building.

  Sinclair hung up his suitcoat and grabbed his coffee cup, which had an outline of a corpse on one side and Homicide, Our Day Begins When Someone Else’s Ends on the other, weaving through the throngs of plainclothes and uniformed officers who were assisting in one way or another with the motorcycle gang murder. Jerry O’Connor, one of the two homicide sergeants who had covered the back of the house when Sinclair and the others made entry through the front, stood by the coffee station. Sinclair held out his cup, and O’Connor filled it.

  He and Braddock had gotten a call from Jankowski at 2:00 AM to assist O’Connor and Sanchez with interviewing witnesses to the shooting in the Iron Horse Bar. Although most club members who were present at the time were long gone by the time the police arrived, investigators were able to get three eyewitness statements from other patrons who saw what had happened. The bar owner gave a statement as well—his establishment may have catered to bikers, but retaining his business license and alcohol permit required his cooperation with the police. Jankowski had also reviewed footage from two surveillance cameras in the bar that corroborated what the witnesses said. According to what they knew so far, Shane Gibbs, a full-patch Savage Simba club member, walked into the West Oakland biker bar with another member nicknamed Tiny. Gibbs got into an argument with the club’s sergeant-at-arms, known as Animal, who had pulled out a gun and killed him.

  “Here’s the game plan from Jankowski,” O’Connor said. “They brought about twenty people from the clubhouse, four more from the crash pad the homicide suppression team hit, and our two dudes, all in custody for the drugs and guns that were found. Any who don’t cooperate and give a statement get booked.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Sinclair said. He knew the DA wouldn’t file charges on people just because narcotics were found in a house they happened to be in, but holding that hammer over their heads might motivate them to talk about the murder or some other illegal activity the club was involved in.

  “The guys from HST are guarding the prisoners and keeping them separate in the lineup room,” O’Connor said, referring to the homicide suppression team, a squad of officers that located witnesses and suspects and put pressure on hot spots to prevent retaliatory murders from occurring. “When you’re ready, grab one, take him into an interview room, and see what he says. If it’s ‘Fuck you’ or ‘I don’t know shit,’ take him back to the lineup room and have HST take him to the jail and book him.”

  “Anyone in particular we should start with?” Sinclair asked.

  “When Jankowski gets back, he might have a different plan, but for now, anyone but Animal and Pops, the club president. We’ll save them for Jankowski.”

  Chapter 3

  Sinclair and Braddock wove through the property crimes section and down a hallway to a large room with a one-way mirror along one wall. On the other side of the mirror was a stage where investigators could line up six people to see if witnesses seated on the other side of the mirror could pick out the person who robbed, raped, or assaulted them. But in the sixty-year-old PAB, space was at a premium, so the lineup room was also used for staff meetings, training classes, briefings, file storage, and at times like this, a witness and suspect holding area. Sinclair and Braddock escorted Animal’s brother-in-law to an empty interview room.

  Sinclair removed the suspect’s handcuffs, pulled out a chair, and said, “Have a seat.” Sinclair and Braddock sat in chairs on opposite sides of him. Braddock smoothed her chestnut-colored hair, which she wore in a short bob; opened her notebook; and wrote the date and time on the top of her legal pad. She was five foot six and had an athletic build, which she fought hard to maintain at the gym between the hours they worked and her family obligations. Although she came on the department about the same time as Sinclair, she was only promoted to sergeant five years ago, which made her the junior investigator in the homicide section.

  Sinclair pulled a legal pad and statement form from his leather folio and asked, “Last name?”

  The man gl
ared at Sinclair. Then he said, “Hammond.”

  Sinclair wrote on the legal pad and then asked, “First name?”

  “Tyrone.”

  “Middle name?” Sinclair asked.

  “Ain’t got none.”

  Sinclair glanced at Braddock, who sat there expressionless, jotting down the same information on her legal pad as Sinclair. “What about a nickname—something people call you?”

  “T-bone.” He smiled.

  Sinclair grinned. “Okay, you’re obviously a male. What race are you?”

  T-bone glared at Sinclair again. “Why the fuck you asking me that? Do I look Chinese or something?”

  “Hey, it’s just a box I have to fill out on the form,” Sinclair said, playing the role of an overly efficient bureaucrat. “I have to ask.”

  “I’m black, man.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Five–thirty–seventy-six.”

  “You just had a birthday, huh?”

  “Yeah,” T-bone said.

  “How tall are you?”

  “Six foot.”

  “Same as me,” Sinclair said. “Your weight?”

  “About two hundred.”

  “Really?” Sinclair asked. “I weigh one-seventy. You seem to be quite a bit more than that.”

  “Okay, maybe two-forty or two-fifty.”

  “I’ll put down two-forty,” Sinclair offered. “Is that okay?”

  These pieces of information were needed for the statement and arrest report, but Sinclair had learned over the years that they helped with getting a suspect used to answering his questions, which was paramount once he began asking about more difficult topics. He continued with address, phone numbers, occupation, and other identifying information, and then said, “I want to talk with you about what happened today, but before I do, I have to read you your rights, okay?”

  T-bone shrugged, and Sinclair read the Miranda rights verbatim from the statement form. “Do you understand each of these rights I’ve read to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?”