“Isaiah sees this guy at seven thirty, give or take,” she said. “Twelve hours till the uniform finds her.”
Was it possible Winnie’s body had lain in the shed that entire time, while the party swirled on, oblivious? Daylight made the white nub of the ChapStick hard to miss.
I said, “Nighttime. Folks were drunk.”
Nwodo conceded with a shrug. An abrupt break in the cloud cover loosed a torrent of perpendicular noonday sun. She stepped past the shed, coming abreast of the trash cans. Shading her eyes, she rotated at the waist, trying to regain lost perspective.
At the heart of Rhiannon Cooke’s tirade lurked a kernel of truth: the scene had been gone over, extensively.
I said, “You happen to recall if Forensics found a flip-flop? White foam.”
Nwodo didn’t answer. She was squinting into the space between two of the cans. She seized the burgundy can and drew it away from the house. Her eyes went huge.
“Clay.”
I came over to look.
A panel, two and a half feet on a side, was cut into the siding.
The fit was snug. Only the faintest score line at top and sides—invisible in anything less than direct light. The bottom of the panel, like the exterior wall adjacent in either direction, sat an inch above ground level. The gap enabled a person to worm a hand in, grasp the bottom edge, and pull, which is what I did.
The panel popped free with a soft thunk, revealing the entrance to a crawl space.
Nwodo clicked on her penlight and crouched down.
Just past the opening, the crawl space widened and deepened considerably. Bare earth sloped down to mazy dimness, defined by soffits and joists and shot through with listing spars of timber and corroded pipe. Not hitting your head would require constant vigilance. But if you could get used to that; if you could tolerate the filth, and the dust, and the droppings; if you could stomach the dreariness and beady-eyed vermin fleeing the light—if all you cared about was getting out of the elements—it would make a fine place to shelter.
Someone had thought so.
On the ground, like a carcass, was a single tube sock. From around a bend, the end of a mattress jutted.
The city garbage cans had plastic wheels on an exposed rear axle, making it easy to tip the can back for rolling. Once inside the crawl space, you could lie on the slope, reach through the opening, and grab the axle, using it to tug the can just about into line.
On the reverse of the cutout panel was a short handle, enterprisingly fashioned from seatbelt nylon and secured with heavy-duty staples. You could use this handle to seal the opening, leaving not a soul the wiser.
One nowhere space, tucked within another.
I said, “Isaiah said he appeared from the dirt.”
Nwodo snapped off her penlight. “Let’s hear what our cheerful owner has to say.”
* * *
—
RHIANNON COOKE SAID, “I’ve never seen it before.”
Her complexion had acquired a greenish pallor, and she was staring at the mouth of the opening, her head cocked as though recoiling from a foul odor.
She said, “I swear to God. I have no idea how it got there.”
“It’s always been there,” I said. “You just never noticed it.”
“You didn’t see it when you took the trash out?” Nwodo said.
“I don’t…” Cooke said, distressed. “My landscaper. He puts the trash out for me.”
Nwodo made a disgusted face.
Of course, part of that anger was directed at herself.
How could she have overlooked it?
Not her fault. Or mine. Or the techs’.
We don’t really see most things, and the panel was made to be ignored.
Nwodo said, “You’ve been here how long?”
“Two years.”
“All that time you never heard anything?”
Rhiannon Cooke bit her lip. “We thought it was rats.”
Nwodo threw up her hands and began walking in a tight tense circle.
I asked if there was a way to access the crawl space from inside the house.
“So we don’t have to squeeze through,” I said. “Ruin my colleague’s nice clean shirt.”
Rhiannon Cooke remained transfixed, staring at the ground. Reliving nights at the dinner table, kale Caesar salad and Chardonnay, whispery scratches eking up through the floorboards, exchanging a look of mutual admonishment with her boyfriend.
We should really call an exterminator.
“Ms. Cooke,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Is there a basement?”
“Huh?”
“Do you have a basement?”
“It’s sealed,” she said. “They found mold during the inspection. I had the entrance walled over.”
“Convenient for him,” I said.
At the mention of him she shuddered.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How is this possible?”
“It’s your house,” Nwodo said. “You tell us.”
* * *
—
NO EVIDENCE TEAM available till the afternoon. Neither Nwodo nor I wanted to wait that long. Neither of us wanted to be the one to climb in there, either, so we played rock, paper, scissors.
I lost.
* * *
—
I GOT DOWN on my stomach, wriggling backward, feet-first. It was a tight fit, but once I cleared the mouth of the opening I slipped easily down the cold dirt, raising a choking cloud. I straightened up slowly, wary of cracking my head. My pants and jacket-front were smeared brown.
“Good?” Nwodo called.
“So much fun.”
Despite the lack of insulation, the space retained an unclean whiff of human being. I crept forward, clawing at cobwebs, high-stepping over the beams, playing the penlight into the crevices. I didn’t know how far back the space went. If there was one homeless guy living there, why not two? Or five? Or ten?
Coming around the bend I encountered a heap of items not visible from the outside. There was a men’s shirt on a wire hanger, dangling from a wrapped pipe. There was a small pile of paperbacks. There were food wrappers and scraps of toilet paper.
He liked to eat Funyuns.
He liked to read action thrillers.
He was, it appeared, a tinkerer. There were several radios in various states of disembowelment, spare parts sorted by type atop a flattened cardboard box. I got the impression that he had vacated in a hurry.
The mattress was soiled, and thin, like those used on pullout couches.
At one edge, nestled in the stitching, was a syringe.
Needle missing. Residue in the chamber.
* * *
—
TO BE ON the safe side, the evidence team also took the shirt, the food wrappers, the books, the electronics parts, and the sock. They left the mattress, but not without blacklighting it first and swabbing for organic material. Taping off the crawl space, they cautioned Rhiannon Cooke not to enter or remove any items that might remain.
“Like I’d do that,” she said.
It turned out not to matter. The syringe yielded a hit. Nwodo must’ve leaned on the lab pretty hard, because a week later I was looking at a mugshot on my computer.
Lawrence Lee Vinson. A.k.a. Larry, a.k.a. Dickfish.
White male, fifty-nine years of age, though his face begged to differ. Basset hound cheeks, long earlobes—he appeared to be melting, vacant blue eyes struggling to stay afloat in the downward cascade of tissue. A tattoo wrapped around the left side of his neck. The intention, I think, was a shark. The artist had botched the job, making the body too wide and the snout too rounded. What resulted was a h
ilariously unnatural mongrel that evoked nothing so much as an enraged penis with teeth.
Hence the nickname.
Or maybe the moniker had preceded the artwork, and the tattoo had come out precisely as Larry had hoped for.
The eternal question: which came first, the Dickfish or the dick-fish?
A Wisconsin native, Vinson had surfaced in California six or seven years back. Our system mostly had him down for minor offenses.
Public intoxication. Resisting arrest. Misdemeanor possession. Misdemeanor assault.
Until fifteen months ago, a conviction for PC 647.6.
Annoying or Molesting a Child.
A third-grade teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley called 911 to report a suspicious man hanging around on the sidewalk during recess. He’d been there several days in a row. When she approached him, he walked away.
Shortly thereafter, the same man was spotted talking with a girl through the fence. Officers were dispatched but he left before their arrival.
Next call came from the principal. The man was back. This time, however, he wasn’t talking to the girl. He had his pants around his knees and was masturbating in front of her.
Right there, broad daylight.
Within the hour they’d picked him up near Ashby BART, three hundred yards away.
Larry Vinson had engaged in similar behavior throughout the late eighties and early nineties, back in Milwaukee. His MO was well established. Always underaged girls, always acts of public sexual gratification that stopped short of physical contact. Nevertheless the judge treated the California conviction as a first offense. I would guess the rationale went along the lines of: Vinson didn’t enter school grounds, didn’t touch the girl. In an area of Berkeley with its fair share of oddballs, the Dickfish was simply one example—and, frankly, not an extreme one. He received minimal jail time and no fine.
As a transient, he was required to register with the authorities every thirty days following his release.
He failed to do so.
No one checked. He dissolved into the streets.
A warrant for his arrest had been languishing ever since.
I called Nwodo. “Congratulations.”
“Don’t jinx me,” she said.
“How hard could it be to find a guy with a giant swimming dick on his neck?”
She allowed a self-pitying laugh. Larry Vinson had managed to evade capture this long. Nothing prevented him from leaving the city, region, state. Nwodo had to hope the powers-that-be now deemed him worrying enough to make him an operational priority.
I meant to wish her luck but she spoke again: “One thing: he’s not a total match. It’s his DNA in the syringe but the skin under Winnie’s nails belongs to someone else.”
I felt the air starting to hiss out of me.
She said, “It doesn’t mean he’s not our guy.”
“Sure,” I said.
I meant it. The presence of third-party DNA by no means excluded Larry Vinson. I could think of a million explanations.
Winnie was a back-scratcher in bed.
She’d danced at the party, hanging on some guy’s neck.
Giving a friend a massage.
Another scenario, horrific: Larry had an accomplice who’d held Winnie Ozawa’s throat closed while Vinson did his thing.
“He was there, in that exact spot, on that exact night,” Nwodo said. “We have an eyewitness places him by the shed. I sent Isaiah a photo array and he picked him out straightaway. He’s a convicted sex offender.”
“Sure,” I said again.
Even if Nwodo was unable to account for the second DNA profile, it was ultimately the prosecutor’s problem, not hers. Larry Vinson was starting with many strikes against him, and convictions had been secured under far shakier circumstances.
“I don’t know, though,” she said. “All these years, he’s a flasher. Now he changes his MO totally? There’s no evidence of sexual assault. No semen left behind.”
“He could’ve used a condom,” I said.
“You think he’s capable of planning that far ahead? Plus Winnie was dressed and arranged. I’m having a tough time squaring it with the mope who jerks off in front of schoolkids.”
Her ambivalence was striking. At this point, not too many detectives would miss an opportunity to clear a pain-in-the-ass case off the board.
I strained to imagine how it had happened.
Dickfish Vinson, tweaked and ravenous, peering out from his demon hidey-hole, waiting for a woman he liked the look of.
Bursting to the surface to ambush her.
The stuff of nightmares.
Arguments and counterarguments went pinging around my head, too.
Vinson’s history indicated a taste for preteens, rather than grown women.
But: Winnie Ozawa had a baby face, small breasts, slim hips.
But: she hadn’t been sexually assaulted.
Vinson had never dared to lay a finger on his victims.
But: everybody starts somewhere.
But: he was nearing sixty, an age when bad guys tend to burn out, not accelerate.
Isaiah Branch had seen him wielding a knife.
But: Winnie Ozawa hadn’t been stabbed.
But: a knife could coax compliance from a terrified woman.
A new question popped into my head: why would Winnie be near the shed in the first place, with the party happening elsewhere?
I remembered the track marks on her arms, the drugs in her blood.
Perhaps she’d sneaked out back to shoot up.
A rogue thought occurred to me: Winnie Ozawa wasn’t at the party as a guest. She was, rather, living under the house with Larry. They were meth buddies, lovers, partners banded together for survival. The crime wasn’t random, it was the tragic conclusion to a psycho relationship gone sour.
Fighting over their last hit, the way other couples bicker about the remote.
Manual throttling is vicious and relatively rare. You look your victim in the face and watch them die in half-second increments.
Did Larry Vinson have that kind of dedication in him?
I told Nwodo my relationship hypothesis.
She said, “I thought of that. I had them test the rest of the crap in that hellhole to see if they could find a sign of her or anyone else. Plenty of semen there. Saliva, too. All his. Again, doesn’t rule anything out. For the moment, he’s our guy.”
It was, I noticed, the second time she’d referred to the killer as “ours”—not hers.
I said, “Speaking with him will help.”
“Got to find him first.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Please do,” she said.
I said, “How hard could it be?”
CHAPTER 24
Saturday, March 16
“She was right,” I said to Shupfer. “I jinxed her.”
Shoops rolled her eyes.
A month had gone by without a sighting of Larry Vinson, despite a countywide Be On the Lookout. But that’s theory. Most people put their heads down and do their jobs.
I, on the other hand, had looked for Dickfish with special focus.
Interacting with the homeless is a front-line duty for any Bay Area law enforcement officer, and we at the Coroner’s see more than our share of people at their least fortunate. In the tent cities, beneath overpasses, along MLK and West Grand, death is a familiar visitor, manifesting in all its sudden and strange forms: exposure, overdose, cirrhosis, sepsis, violence.
Each time one of these calls came in, I would take a quick refresher peek at Vinson’s mugshot before going out. Whenever the body fell to other team members, I would remind them, as they were suiting up, about the guy with the u
gly-ass neck tattoo.
I had become a one-man BOLO.
That morning’s call came from OPD, near start of shift. I was at the coffee station, shaking out a sugar packet, when I overheard Bagoyo starting to take down information, repeating it back to the officer on scene for confirmation.
Sherrice Day. Black female, mid-fifties, DOB undetermined. No fixed address. At present residing at Market and 5th.
I knew that particular encampment. We all did. It had existed, on and off, for years. In response to a litany of neighbor complaints—trash, sewage, belligerent panhandling—the city had more than once attempted to dismantle it. It kept popping back up. Eventually, shifting political winds prompted the council to adopt a new strategy: they voted to provide Porta Pottys and install running water. It was a move not without controversy. Depending on your stance, you could view it as a gesture of compassion, pragmatism, or surrender.
What was inarguable was that the camp had continued to grow. Around fifty people lived there full-time. Rumor had it you could get your mail delivered. Last spring a fire had broken out, ripping through the cardboard and tent nylon, killing two people.
Market and 5th was a mile and a half from the house on Almond Street.
OPD was reporting the death as an apparent homicide.
Sherrice Day had been stabbed in the neck.
He had a knife.
Bagoyo hung up, and she and Zaragoza got ready to depart.
I said, “While you’re out there—”
“We know,” Bagoyo said, slipping on her vest. “Beware the Cockshark.”
“It’s Dickfish.”
“Oh, well,” Zaragoza said. “That changes everything.”
* * *
—
MIDMORNING, SHUPFER AND I drove out to Dublin. White male, early forties, slumped against the wheel of his car in the Target parking lot. He’d been there overnight. Shopping bags in the backseat; a carton of milk, warm. Loose fentanyl tablets on the passenger seat, in the cup holder, in his crotch. It was our seventh opioid-related death of the year. Nothing compared with some parts of the state, and a drop in the bucket overall. But a disturbing trend for Alameda County.
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