Thrill Kill Page 2

  Sinclair had already examined the knots in the hope they would tell him something about the killer. If the knot at her neck was an authentic hangman’s noose or a properly tied bowline, it might tell him who he was looking for, but these were all sloppy granny knots. However, he also knew that rope was a great medium to collect skin cells that could contain the DNA of the person who handled it. “Let’s cut the rope.”

  Sinclair reached under his raincoat to his suit coat pocket, pulled out a Spyderco folding knife, and snapped it open with a flick of his wrist. Its four-inch blade was serrated at the base and designed to cut through seatbelts to extract people trapped in cars during traffic collisions. With its razor-sharp tip, the knife was also the perfect last-ditch weapon.

  Sinclair donned gloves and cut through the rope holding up the leg. Both coroner investigators hoisted the body, and Sinclair cut through the rope around her neck. Dawson arranged her on the sheet and wiped her wet, stringy hair from her face.

  “She’s in full rigor, so time of death was at least four hours ago,” Dawson said.

  The onset of rigor mortis was a very rough estimate, but it did tell Sinclair that she was likely killed last night rather than that morning.

  Dawson pointed at her forehead. “Looks like the cause of death might not be the hanging.”

  Sinclair stood over the body and saw a small hole surrounded by dried blood in her forehead. He looked more closely at her face. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Braddock said.

  “Our victim’s name is Dawn Gustafson.”

  Chapter 2

  Of all the hookers Sinclair had arrested in his early days in vice-narcotics, Dawn was one he would never forget. Ten years ago, he was the new guy in the unit and often got stuck as the undercover on street prostitution details, or “trolling,” as they called it. He was the bait the vice unit dragged around the city, hoping to get a bite from one of the hookers. He would drive along the streets where the prostitutes worked, called the “ho stro” (short for “whore stroll”), in an undercover car and pull over when a likely working girl waved at him or gave him “the look.” They would agree upon a sex act and an amount, normally around twenty for oral sex and thirty or more for a half-and-half, sex that began with oral sex and ended with intercourse. She’d jump in the car and direct him to an isolated spot for a car date or to a cheap motel for more involved acts. Two other undercover cars would follow him. Once he’d driven out of the area, he’d say a code word that the hidden microphone would transmit to the undercover officers in the follow cars, and they’d direct the arrest team to swoop in and arrest the prostitute. Sinclair would then drive to a different spot and troll through fresh waters. On a good night, he could land fifteen or twenty keepers.

  The night he met Dawn, Sinclair had just arrested a working girl who offered him a half-and-half for fifty dollars at her motel room. He was heading to West MacArthur when he spotted a tall, pretty white girl a block west of where the veteran street hookers normally operated. It was a warm evening, and she was wearing a tight miniskirt that barely covered her butt cheeks and a hot-pink halter-top. She smiled at him as he cruised slowly by, so he pulled to the curb. She leaned in the passenger window, displaying deep cleavage and a smile with perfect teeth, and swung her waist-length blonde hair over her shoulder.

  “Are you dating?” she asked.

  “Are you working?”

  “Girl’s gotta pay the rent. You’re not a cop, are you?”

  Sinclair laughed. “Do I look like a cop?” He’d only left uniform a month earlier, so his dark-brown hair was just beyond regulation, but he had grown a thick beard to blend in better on the streets.

  “You’re too cute to be a cop.” Her eyes were the color of deep water. “What’re you looking for?”

  “Whatever you’re offering.”

  “I can give you head in the car for fifty or plenty more if you have the time and money.”

  “The plenty more sounds good.”

  She got in and told him to make a right on Market Street. “How much money do you have?”

  Sinclair pulled a money clip from his pocket and showed her the hundred dollars his sergeant had given him earlier that night. “About eighty.”

  She counted it. “You’ve got a hundred there. Can you hit an ATM?”

  “Not until payday.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Have you ever been to the hot tubs?”

  “What are the hot tubs?”

  “A place in Berkeley where you rent a hot tub for fifty an hour.”

  “That’s a lot of money to sit around in a hot tub with a bunch of strangers.”

  “No, silly. You get your own hot tub in a private room. People go there to fuck.”

  “This is all the money I got.”

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. “No problem.”

  “That would only leave you fifty. You can make that much with a five-minute blowjob.”

  “Like I said, I think you’re cute. Do you wanna go or not?”

  Flashing red-and-blue lights filled his rearview mirror. Sinclair pulled to the side of the road. One officer came to Sinclair’s door and asked for his license and registration—all part of the ruse—while another officer ordered Dawn from the car, handcuffed her, and put her in the backseat of their marked unit. That officer returned Sinclair’s money clip with the hundred dollars and said, “Sarge told us to make the arrest even though you didn’t give the signal yet. I think he was afraid you were falling in love and forgot you were working.”

  He never saw Dawn again—until she called him three years ago.

  *

  “How do you know her?” asked Braddock, crouching down to get a better look at the bullet hole.

  “I arrested her for six-forty-seven-B when I was working vice. Seventeen-year-old kid who ran away from somewhere in the Midwest to find fame and fortune in San Francisco. That would make her around twenty-seven now.” The same age he was when he’d arrested her on that warm summer night.

  “You’ve got a great memory for names, Sarge,” Dawson remarked.

  “It’s hard to tell looking at her right now,” said Braddock, “but I’ll bet she was a darn pretty girl.”

  Sinclair watched as the coroner investigators wrapped her in the sheet and lifted her into the body bag laid out on the gurney. Sinclair walked through the wet grass alongside the path as the others made their way to the parking lot. He spotted a pair of black leggings at the base of a tree. Behind it was a soggy nude-colored bra and lace panties. He crouched down to see if there was anything under the clothes.

  Talbert walked up the path. “Find something?”

  “The witness said his dog had grabbed some item of clothes around here. Probably this stuff.”

  “I’ll photo everything and collect it.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “You okay, Sarge?”

  Sinclair straightened up. He hadn’t slept well in weeks, and his nerves felt ragged. Stuff that used to roll off his back was now weighing him down. “I wish she would’ve stayed in Minnesota and had a normal life.”

  “You can’t save them all,” Talbert said.

  “It just seems like we hardly save any of them anymore.”

  Back at the parking lot, a heavyset man was loading camera equipment into the hatchback of a Honda CRV. Sinclair recognized him as a stringer who often showed up at fires, accidents, and crime scenes. He sold his photos and video to whichever news organization would pay.

  The man slammed the trunk. “Sergeant Sinclair, what can you tell me about this one?”

  “Nothing much,” Sinclair said. “Woman found dead in the park.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “That will have to wait until the autopsy.”

  “Hanging by her neck from a tree. I can guess she didn’t die from drowning.”

  “But if you guess wrong . . .” Sinclair let him ponder the repercussions to his reputation. “Did you get any good shots?”

&
nbsp; “Got some good stills of her silhouette hanging there. Can’t tell she’s naked, especially in black and white, so the papers could use it. The video didn’t turn out as well, but who knows, maybe it’ll be a slow news day. Is she anyone famous?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s a hooker, right?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s Oakland, man. In this town, the odds are a man gunned down in a drive-by is a drug dealer and woman stripped of her clothes and hung from a tree is a hooker. Looks like it’s just another number in Oakland and nobody cares.”

  “I do,” Sinclair said as he turned and walked to his car.

  The rain had stopped, and Sinclair threw his hat in the back seat. He remembered the words from his first homicide partner, Phil Roberts, when they stood over the body of a young drug dealer killed in a drive-by, one of Sinclair’s first murder cases: You and I are the only two people in the world who care about avenging the death of this young man. Phil said it was their job to speak for the dead, but to Sinclair, investigating the death of a human being had an even higher purpose—to bring the killer to justice. If people were allowed to kill with impunity, the fragile sense of civilization that existed in urban communities like Oakland would collapse. It was his duty to prevent that from occurring.

  *

  It took less than twenty minutes to drive to the address on Tennyson Road in Hayward where the DMV showed Dawn Gustafson living as of two years ago. The rain had started again, speckling the surface of the apartment-complex swimming pool like hundreds of tiny bullets being fired from the sky. Sinclair and Braddock walked through the courtyard and up the stairs to apartment 238. A twenty-something Hispanic woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt opened the door. Sinclair swept his open raincoat aside to show the badge clipped to his belt. “We’re with Oakland police. Does Dawn Gustafson live here?”

  “I think that’s the name of a previous tenant,” she said. “My husband and I have lived here for over a year, but we still get mail for her.”

  “What kind of mail?”

  “Bills, junk mail.”

  “Any idea where she went?”

  “The rental office is open at noon today. Maybe they can tell you, but I heard she was asked to leave.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “I don’t pay attention to rumors, but Rachel in two-thirty-two might be able to tell you. I think they were friends.”

  Rachel answered her door wearing a tank top and yoga pants, wiping sleep from her eyes. Sinclair introduced himself and said, “Can we talk to you about Dawn Gustafson?”

  Rachel was in her midthirties, with a jet-black pixie cut and tattoos of Chinese characters on both pale shoulders. “I haven’t seen her since she moved out two summers ago.”

  “May we come in?” Braddock asked.

  She opened the door and walked into the living room. “I just woke up. I’ll be a minute.” She disappeared into a bedroom, and Sinclair and Braddock took off their raincoats and draped them over a chair in the dining nook. A minute later, the toilet flushed and Rachel reappeared wearing a cobalt-blue velour robe. “I’ll be glad when this rain stops and the sun comes out.”

  She sat in a chair in the living room, and Sinclair and Braddock sat on a sofa across from her. “Did you know Dawn well?” Sinclair asked.

  “Not really. She lived here maybe two years and I’d run into her and chat. Sometimes we’d be at the pool together and talk about boys and stuff.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Not just one. She was a party girl. I saw all kind of men coming and going from her apartment. And I mean all kinds.”

  “How’s that?” Sinclair asked.

  “Young, old, black, white, some in jeans and T-shirts, others in suits.”

  “Did you two ever talk about that?”

  “She said she liked men. Said most of them were her clients. She was an accountant and worked out of her apartment doing people’s business books and taxes and stuff.”

  “But you had your doubts,” Sinclair said.

  “We’d be out at the pool. She had a killer body and gorgeous long hair. Guys were always coming on to her. Really cute guys. But she just ignored them. Said they weren’t her type.”

  “These clients of hers, did you ever catch any of their names?”

  “No, they didn’t hang around once they left her apartment. A neighbor once said they recognized a really muscular black man who used to visit. They said he was an Oakland Raider who was on the kick-off return team or something like that.”

  “How about any other friends?”

  “I never saw any of her girlfriends, assuming she had any.”

  “Why’d she leave?”

  “She said the manager found out she was using her apartment for commercial purposes, you know, running her bookkeeping business there, and that was a zoning violation.” Rachel tucked her legs under herself on the chair. “What did she do?”

  “She got herself killed last night in Oakland,” said Sinclair.

  “That’s too bad,” Rachel said.

  He copied Rachel’s full name and contact information, the last phone number she had for Dawn, and the phone numbers for the manager. He handed Rachel his card as he left.

  On their return drive to Oakland, Braddock said, “It looks like Dawn was operating an in-call business out of her apartment. I think Rachel knew it, too, but didn’t want to come out and say Dawn was a call-girl.”

  “At least it gives us a direction.”

  “And a few hundred possible johns who might have killed her.”

  “Piece of cake,” Sinclair said. “All we have to do is find the last trick she was with.”

  Sinclair dropped Braddock off at her car at Burckhalter, and while she headed back to the station, he drove to the coroner’s office.

  Chapter 3

  Sinclair dressed in a cloth gown, paper cap, safety glasses, and booties and pushed through the double doors into the morgue. The ventilation system in the ceiling hummed, but the smells of decaying flesh and disinfectant still hung in the air. Three bodies lay on stainless-steel tables, and Dr. Gorman, one of the pathologists, hovered over the body of an elderly man.

  Gorman looked through his plastic splash-protective visor. “Good morning, Sergeant Sinclair. This gentleman can wait. I’ll return to Ms. Gustafson for you.”

  Sinclair gestured to the elderly corpse. “What’s his story, Doc?”

  “He lived alone and was found dead by his son. He hadn’t seen a doctor in years, so there was no one to sign off on the death certificate. I’ll probably discover his death is of natural causes resulting from one or more undiagnosed medical conditions.”

  “As long as you don’t find a bullet in him.”

  “If I do, it belongs to Fremont PD, so today will be your lucky day.”

  “I’ll see if that’s true after I hear what you have to say about my victim.”

  Gorman moved to a flat-screen illuminator mounted on the wall and attached several x-ray films. “You can see here,” he said, pointing to a dark object at the base of the skull in the image, “we have a single projectile that passed through the anterior portion of the skull, the thick frontal bone, and came to rest at the back of the skull without penetrating the parietal bone. I see no fragments, so it appears the projectile remained intact, which should aid in the ballistics examination by your crime lab.”

  Gorman flipped off the light of the x-ray viewer and walked to the table where Dawn’s body lay. Her skin was pale white except for black soot and charred skin on her upper legs and abdomen. Her hands rested alongside the torso, the manicured fingernails short and covered with clear nail polish. The head was propped on a hard plastic rest. “I’ve already done the external, but I wanted to point some things out to you before I proceed.” He pointed to a white line running through the lightly charred flesh on her stomach. “This is a Caesarian scar.”

  “She had a baby?”

  “T
here’s no way to know if she gave live birth or not, only that she had the surgery,” Gorman said, as if it were obvious. “It’s well healed, so her pregnancy could have been a number of years ago. If you look at the neck, you can see some abrasion of the skin, apparently caused by the rough fibers of the rope that was used to suspend her from the tree. But what you don’t see is more interesting.”

  “The absence of ligature marks?”

  “Precisely. The abrasion marks might appear to be ligature marks to the uninitiated, but they are clearly postmortem. She was hung after she was dead. There is some bruising on the neck, which is consistent with manual strangulation, but it’s doubtful that was the cause of death. I’ll know more when I open her up. I also examined the burn marks on her body and concluded they occurred after she was dead as well. They occurred when the body was in an upright position, as indicated by the rising flame marks in the skin that are pointing toward the head. Therefore, my preliminary assumption is there was some degree of struggle, at which time she was manually choked. She was then shot in the head, which caused her death. Next, her body was suspended from the neck, and finally, it was burned.”

  Sinclair watched as Gorman opened the chest cavity with a Y-shaped incision across the chest. He stepped aside to let his assistant move in and cut through the ribs and breastbone with long-handled pruning shears. Even though Sinclair had attended countless autopsies, the crunch of bone still made him wince. Gorman lifted off the breastplate, took blood samples from the thoracic cavity, and removed the organs. He examined each one carefully before cutting off pieces and placing them in marked containers. He used the shears to cut through the pelvic bone and spent several minutes examining that area.

  He recorded long medical descriptions into a recorder that hung on a swivel above the table, then turned to Sinclair and summarized. “She was in excellent physical condition. Excellent muscle tone and low body fat indicates a healthy diet and some sort of vigorous exercise program. Liver, heart, and lungs appear healthy. There’s no damage to the outer layer of the vaginal canal or mucosa, despite the insertion of the piece of clothing several inches into the canal. I conclude that no instrument was likely used, because if one had been, some tearing would have been likely. I found no indication of semen, but I’ll collect samples for examination. The burns in the pubic region definitely occurred postmortem.”