Thrill Kill Read online

  “Not to City Hall,” Maloney replied. “To them, it sounds as if we’re not on the same team.”

  Sinclair and Braddock briefed him on what little they knew at this point. When they got up to leave, Maloney said, “Matt, hang on a minute?”

  Once Braddock left, Maloney leaned forward in his chair. “How are you doing?”

  Sinclair chuckled. “Fine, and how are you doing, Lieutenant?”

  “You know I’m not good at this, so I’ll come right out and say it. You don’t look so good. You came in late today, and that’s not like you.”

  “I told Braddock and I left you a note that I was pushing back my shift and working nine to five today because I needed to meet with my insurance adjuster.”

  Maloney paged through a stack of paper in his in-box. After a minute, he gave up. “Are they still denying stuff from your apartment?”

  “It’s working out; they just require more documentation.”

  “You’re still sober, aren’t you?”

  Sinclair had been subject to a last-chance contract, where he had to submit to random urinalyses for a year after the department reinstated him as a sergeant and returned him to homicide. “Even though the contract expired over two months ago, I know damn well I’m an alcoholic and if I drink I’ll risk losing everything again.”

  “I’m inquiring as a friend, not as a boss.”

  For years, Sinclair had butted heads with Maloney, but their relationship changed after the Bus Bench killings when Sinclair came to realize that Maloney had never been the enemy. “I’m still going to meetings and still have a sponsor.”

  “If there’s anything, you know you can talk to me.”

  “I know,” Sinclair said.

  *

  Sinclair swung his car into the Palms Motel parking lot and accelerated toward a mixed-race man standing out of the rain under the second-floor landing. The man was in his midthirties, five-foot-eight, and wore dirty black jeans and a black canvas jacket. Sinclair and Braddock jumped out of the car and triangulated on him.

  “Hands behind your back!” Sinclair shouted.

  The man complied. Sinclair handcuffed him, patted him down, and stuffed him in the backseat of his car. Sinclair turned the car around and sped out of the parking lot onto West MacArthur Boulevard.

  The man grinned from the backseat. “Thanks for the Starsky and Hutch move, Sinclair. Don’t want folks to think I’m snitching.”

  “How’ve you been, Jimmy?” Sinclair asked.

  “You know. Just trying to make a living. Who’s the lady, Sinclair?”

  “Jimmy, meet my partner, Sergeant Braddock.”

  “Nice to make your acquaintance, Braddock. You look like that lady detective on Castle. You watch that show?”

  “Hi, Jimmy,” she said. “No, I don’t watch cop shows.”

  Sinclair bought three coffees at the McDonald’s at Forty-Fifth and Telegraph, drove a block down Forty-Fifth, and parked under the 24 Freeway to get out of the rain. He pulled Jimmy out of the car, removed the handcuffs, and handed him a coffee. Sinclair watched as Jimmy emptied eight sugar packets into his cup—classic junkie.

  “Do you want to sit back in the car where it’s warm?” Sinclair asked.

  Jimmy bounced from one foot to the other, stopping only long enough to take small gulps of his coffee. “Been sitting too much. Can we talk out here?”

  Sinclair pulled up the collar of his raincoat. It was still in the low forties, and as long as the rain continued, they’d be lucky if it topped fifty today. Braddock buttoned her coat to her throat and thrust her hands into her pockets.

  “I guess you wanna know about Blondie.” Jimmy pulled a pack of Kools from his pocket and lit one with a plastic lighter.

  Sinclair set his coffee on the hood of the car, clipped the end of a small cigar, and lit it with his Zippo. “You heard what happened?”

  “It’s in the paper and all over the street.”

  “You know who did it?”

  “Shit, Sinclair. You get right to the point, don’t you?”

  Sinclair puffed on his cigar. Jimmy looked healthier and probably twenty pounds heavier than the last time Sinclair saw him, but three squares a day in the county jail and no drugs will do that for a man. Braddock picked her coffee up from the hood of the car, took a sip, and wrapped both hands around the paper cup.

  “I’m gonna find out for ya,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m sure you will, but in the meantime I need to know where she was living and who she was hanging with.”

  “She was private.”

  “She have an old man?” Sinclair asked.

  “Old man, as in pimp? Come on, Sinclair, you know girls out here don’t really have no pimps. You don’t see no Cadillacs with fancy-dressed assholes driving around Oaktown, do ya?”

  “How’s Shelia and the kids, Jimmy?”

  “Doing good. That apartment is sweet. She really appreciate you pulling strings to get her Section Eight.”

  “And how was her Thanksgiving?” Sinclair sipped his coffee and stared at Jimmy.

  “I should’ve told you I was out.” Jimmy looked at his brown sneakers. “What you did was real nice.”

  Sheila had four kids, and although Sinclair had never asked, he assumed Jimmy was the father of at least a few of them. Sheila had worked the streets off and on ever since she was sixteen. When Sinclair found out Jimmy was in jail last Christmas, he submitted Sheila’s name with the ages of her kids to the police officer’s association to have a food basket and toys delivered to her a few days before Christmas. He did the same for Thanksgiving two weeks ago, so Sheila received a turkey and all the other trimmings, more than enough for a family twice the size of hers.

  “I help Sheila because I feel sorry for her,” Sinclair said. “And because she deserves a man who takes care of her and the kids. I don’t do it in exchange for your information. So I don’t like you talking to me like I’m a chump.”

  Jimmy studied his shoes again while he took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Sorry, man. A black man’s not used to having cop friends. I known Blondie since she left the farm in Nebraska. In no time, she finds some rich regulars. One even buys her a condo and takes care of her. She’d come by the stro and visit, showing off new cars and nice clothes. But after a year or two, she leaves him and disappears. When she come back, she’s working for some escort services. Make lots of money, but she still come out here. Sometimes she helps me out. I haven’t seen her since I went to Santa Rita.”

  “Is she still living in that condo?” Braddock asked. “Where is it?”

  “That was like a 007 pad. She never tells no one where it was. She takes me to her apartment a while ago. Different than her condo. She makes me dinner and helps me do tax returns. Never did that before.” Jimmy took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Did you know that for people who got no job and no income, the government gives you money for just sending in tax forms?”

  “Was that apartment in Hayward?” Sinclair asked.

  Jimmy finished his cigarette, flicked it to the street, and lit another one. “She says she just moved from Hayward, but this place is in Oakland.”

  “You know the address?”

  “No, but I can show you.”

  Jimmy directed them down MacArthur Boulevard and around the east side of Lake Merritt.

  “I’m having trouble picturing you and Dawn as BFFs, Jimmy,” said Braddock.

  “It wasn’t like that. In all that time, I never touched that girl. When she first come to Oakland, she was like one of them little deer with the big eyes—nice, trusting. I watched over her so she didn’t get eaten by the big bad wolves. But she was smart. The vice squad got her once early on, sent her to juvie, then home to Nebraska. When she come back, she was smarter and had big plans.”

  “What plans?” asked Sinclair.

  “You know, get off the street, make some real money, invest it, and live happy ever after.”

  Jimmy pointed out a three-story tan stucco build
ing on Athol Avenue, about three blocks from the lake.

  “You know her apartment number?” Sinclair asked.

  “No, but I can show you. Second floor, go right out the elevator, third door on the right.”

  “We need to handle it alone from here,” Sinclair said. “Let’s run you back to the Palms first.”

  “I can walk. You do what you gotta do here.”

  Sinclair pulled two twenties out of his wallet and handed them to Jimmy.

  Jimmy stuffed the bills in his pocket. “I ain’t doing this for no snitch money. Blondie didn’t deserve this. You get the motherfucker who killed her.”

  “I will. You keep in touch and call me if you hear anything.”

  “You know it.” Jimmy bounced out of the car and sauntered down the hill in the rain.

  Chapter 7

  A petite Chinese woman with wire-rimmed glasses perched on a beak-like nose leaned against the open doorway of the manager’s apartment. Sinclair and Braddock flashed their badges. “Do you have a tenant named Dawn Gustafson?” Sinclair asked.

  “Unit two-oh-eight,” the gray-haired woman said. “Is there a problem?”

  “She was killed yesterday. We need to take a look in her apartment.”

  “Oh, my goodness.” She stepped into her apartment and returned with a key. “What happened?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Sinclair said as they walked to the elevator. “What kind of a tenant was she?”

  “Quiet, always paid her rent on time. A nice, polite young lady.”

  “Did she live alone?”

  “Yes. She sometimes had friends visit, but it was never a problem.”

  “Male or female?” Sinclair asked.

  “I never paid attention,” the woman said, leading them to the elevator.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” Braddock asked.

  “Maybe. She wasn’t here much, so she may have been spending nights with a man.”

  “You didn’t pay attention if her guests were male or female, yet you know she wasn’t here much,” Sinclair said.

  “If I came through the garage around nine or ten at night, her car was normally gone. When my husband left for work at six the next morning, it still wasn’t in her space.”

  “Is her car here now?” Sinclair asked.

  “We can check.” They took the elevator down one level. As soon as the door opened, she said, “Nope, it’s not here.”

  “What kind of car did she drive?” he asked.

  “A red sports car.”

  “A Camaro?” Braddock asked.

  “I think that’s what it was.” The manager pressed the button for the second floor, and the small elevator bucked upward. Sinclair and Braddock followed her down the hall to 208, where she stuck a key in the upper lock. “Huh, the deadbolt’s unlocked.”

  “Is that unusual?” Braddock asked.

  “We don’t have many problems here, but it is Oakland, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use their deadbolt.”

  After she turned the key, Sinclair said, “Wait out here, please,” and gently brushed past her.

  Although he didn’t expect the killer to be there, the unlocked deadbolt raised the pucker factor a notch, so he swept his coat aside and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Braddock followed him inside and did the same. Sinclair scanned the combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The drapes were closed and the lights on. All the cabinets in the kitchen were open and cushions on the sofa were flipped over and askew. He glanced at Braddock. She nodded, understanding they would do a quick sweep of the apartment to ensure no one was present.

  Sinclair opened a closet next to the front door. One coat on a hanger, a vacuum cleaner on the floor, and some shoe boxes on the shelf. He led the way down a hall and opened an accordion door to a linen closet. Sheets, towels, and a few rolls of toilet paper. The bathroom was empty. They stepped into the bedroom. A king-size bed was covered with a cherry-red satin bedspread and a pile of red and pink pillows. Sinclair peeked under the bed and opened the closet. Hanging inside was an assortment of lingerie that looked like the back wall of a Victoria’s Secret store: lace teddies, satin slips, see-through bustiers, and cutout corsets.

  “Looks like we found where she works,” Sinclair said to Braddock.

  They returned to the front room and told the manager, who was patiently standing in the hallway, they would notify her at her apartment when they were finished. He jotted down some notes and opened the drapes. The view was the roof of a large, old house on the next lot and another apartment building beyond it. The windows were intact and locked. He went back to the front door and examined the lock and doorjamb. Nothing indicated forced entry—no scratches on the strike plate or the locks and no impressions in the wood door frame or the door itself.

  The living-room furniture was arranged as a sitting area on one side and a desk, filing cabinet, and bookshelf on the other. It was nothing fancy. The desk could be bought for a few hundred dollars, and the living-room set would go for under a grand at a dozen Bay Area stores. On the desk was a computer keyboard and flat-screen monitor. Cords hung over the back of the desk to an imprint in the carpet where a computer tower had apparently been. The bottom drawer of the filing cabinet was open and empty.

  “I wonder what was so important in the computer and paper files for someone to take them,” said Braddock.

  “Maybe something they didn’t want us to see.”

  “I don’t see any signs of a struggle.”

  “Doesn’t look like she was killed here, but we’ll need to process the apartment anyway. If nothing else, we might find some prints of whoever searched the place.”

  “Should we get a warrant?”

  Normally, a search warrant wasn’t required at a homicide victim’s residence, the assumption being the only person whose privacy was being invaded was the victim. A murder victim would want the police to find her killer. If the suspect also lived there, courts might determine he had a right to privacy, and any evidence the police found that connected him to the crime could be thrown out if they didn’t get a warrant. Braddock had a more conservative take on the rules of search and seizure. Sinclair appreciated that. During their time working together, she had kept him from making rash decisions more than once. “The manager says she lives alone, and we didn’t see any clothing that would indicate another person lived here,” he said, verbalizing his justification for forgoing a warrant.

  “You’re assuming the lingerie was hers,” Braddock said. “What if other girls used the bedroom and one of them is our suspect?”

  “Possible, but unlikely. What do you make of the office setup?”

  Braddock’s fingers traced the books on the shelf. “These are mostly school books, subjects like business management, accounting, and taxation. She’s got a thick user’s manual for QuickBooks, and a copy of QuickBooks for Dummies. Maybe she really is an accountant. What if we discover evidence when we search that she worked with someone else here and he’s the killer?”

  “So to be on the safe side, we should get a warrant?”

  “If it were my case, I would,” Braddock said.

  *

  Three hours later, Sinclair returned to the apartment with a copy of the warrant. It hadn’t been a difficult affidavit to prepare, but to Sinclair, it was nothing more than a legally mandated waste of time. The four-page affidavit summarized his training and experience, the crime and his investigation, the evidence he was looking for, and the legal justification for the search, to include identifying the suspect, the motive, and the location of the murder. It took Sinclair an hour of roaming the courthouse to find an available judge so he could watch her read his documents before he was asked to raise his right hand and swear to their truthfulness.

  Since Sinclair had called Braddock as soon as he had the warrant, the crime scene processing was well under way by the time he returned to the apartment. One evidence technician was twirling a brush and spraying fine black graph
ite powder on the file cabinet. The other, a woman dressed in the same dark-blue utility uniform, was taking a photo of a latent print on the desk. She then applied tape to it and placed it on a card.

  “They’ve already photoed all the rooms,” Braddock said. “I figured I’d have them start with the office area since that’s where we probably want to look first.”

  “Good idea,” Sinclair said.

  “I had a uniform secure the apartment, and I started a canvass of the building when you were gone.” She opened her notebook and paged through a legal pad. “No answer at half the doors. I left my card with a note to call. None of the other tenants really knew Dawn. Those who did knew her by first name only. The consensus was she was a very nice, quiet tenant. They mostly saw her afternoons and early evenings. I couldn’t find anyone who saw her leaving for work in the morning, so everyone figured she went to school and worked irregular hours or that she slept somewhere else. She had occasional guests, normally men, but no one could remember anyone specifically or provide a description. The officer’s continuing to knock on doors on the first floor.”

  “All finished here,” the male tech said. “We’ll do the bedroom next.”

  Sinclair pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened each drawer of the file cabinet. Empty. “No reason to have a file cabinet if you have no files.”

  “So whoever took her computer grabbed the files as well,” Braddock said.

  Sinclair sat at the desk. Brass desk lamp, electronic calculator, a two-hole punch, computer monitor, and a wireless keyboard and mouse on a leather desk blotter. Very neat and organized. The desk drawers were filled with typical supplies: ruler, paperclips, scissors, tape, an assortment of pens and markers, pads of paper, and envelopes. Two small boxes of business cards were in the top drawer behind an assortment of power cords.

  Sinclair placed the boxes on the desk and removed a card from the first one. A headshot of Dawn wearing a conservative blouse and “Dawn Gustafson, Business and Personal Bookkeeping” followed by a phone number and Gmail address.