by Brian Thiem
“Is she out there much?” Sinclair asked.
“These days just to visit. I remember when she was fresh off the farm in Iowa. She comes out here, watches the pros, and in a week, she’s got the walk and the talk down. Then she’s gone for a year, then back a few months. After a while, we girls figure out she’s mostly doing regulars and calls.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know—a while ago. I just remembers she was working the stro more nights than not. Sometimes for just an hour, then her phone rings and she says she gotta go—she got an appointment, gots to go home and freshen up for some real money.”
Sinclair puffed on his cigar and blew the smoke out the window. “You think she got those calls from regulars?”
“Oh, yeah, she had regulars. Sometimes tricks pull up and I think they want some of Tanya’s sweet chocolate bubble butt, but they ask for Blondie.”
“It’s been a while since I worked the girls and dope, but do johns call you all for dates these days?”
“You know, Sinclair, some girls just like the street. I pick my hours and pick my johns. Don’t nobody call me to suck his dick when I’m off duty. But most girls dream of being escorts or call girls. They give out their numbers to tricks all the time, hoping to score enough regulars so they don’t need to work the corner.”
“You think that’s what happened with Blondie?”
“I think she so movie-star pretty that some john paid to keep her, like Richard Gere did with Julia Roberts. But that movie’s a fairy tale. Rich men might pay to keep a ho for a while. But pretty soon, she stop being a ho for the man and think she a lady. If a rich man wants a lady, he don’t come to the stro looking for one or dial one up from an escort service.”
“How long’s it been since she worked the corner?”
“Four, five years, maybe more.” Tanya stuffed the last bite of cheeseburger in her mouth, wadded up the wrapper, and threw it on the floor. “Blondie was always chirpy happy. Never a bad day. A sweetie pie. Always get along with everybody. I think that even when she had lots of regulars and was making plenty of money, she came out here for fun. You know—the thrill of a new dick. Just like with you, Sinclair. I bet when they make you chief of police, you still get in your po-lize car and come out here.”
“You don’t have to worry about me making police chief,” Sinclair said with a grin. “Who else might know what she’s been up to recently?”
“Talk with your friend Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah, you know. Sheila’s old man.”
“I thought Jimmy was still in Santa Rita.”
“He been out at least a month.”
“Where’s he hanging?”
“Down here or maybe at the Palms.”
“What will Jimmy tell me when I talk to him?”
“He might tell you that he knows Blondie ever since she got off the bus. He watched over her back then. When Blondie stopped working the corner and she still come out here, most the time it was to check on him. Couple years back, Jimmy was tweaking bad, shooting a hundred dollars a day. Blondie makes some calls and gets him into a thirty-day program in Napa. People say she paid for it.”
“So Jimmy was her pimp back in the day?”
“Maybe at first, but she probably went independent quick.”
“Did she have any problems with anyone, anyone who would want to hurt her?”
“All the girls loved her. There was no competition. Some men like her Barbie look, some like full-figured dark meat. Never heard a trick say she didn’t treat him good. But you know, Sinclair, sometimes a john can go off.”
“Have there been any weird or rough tricks around lately?”
“No more than usual.” Tanya loudly sucked the last of her milkshake through the straw and threw the cup on the floor next to the wrapper. “I didn’t ask because I know you homicide, and if you asking about Blondie, it means she dead. How’d she die?”
“Someone shot her and hung her from a tree out in East Oakland.”
“Honey, that’s some cold shit. You gonna get whoever did that?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m gonna get him.”
They dropped Tanya off on her corner and headed up Market Street. “You were awful quiet,” Sinclair said to Braddock.
“I know better than to interfere when you’re working your Sinclair charm with the ladies.”
“Yup, buy a girl dinner and they put out for you.”
“Is the Jimmy she mentioned the famous CI I’ve heard so much about?”
“Jimmy Davis, confidential informant extraordinaire. I popped him for a two-eleven strong arm when I worked robbery. He was a tennis-shoe pimp, running two or three old worn-out whores at Thirtieth and Market and supplementing his income by robbing tricks. I had three robbery cases on him. Needless to say, none of his victims were too thrilled about testifying. Who’d want to admit that when you’re getting head from some skanky whore, a guy yanks open the car door and rips your wallet out of your pants? But I told Jimmy he was looking at five to ten with his past record. He came up with the names of the crew that was responsible for twenty bank jobs in the Bay Area. I had one of the cases—three guys all wearing masks who hit the Wells Fargo. The FBI coordinated the cases from eight different cities. They had no leads, but Jimmy’s info was enough for me to get a search warrant. From there, I had enough evidence to arrest the suspects and clear all the cases. Of course, the FBI tried to take credit for it.”
“Did Jimmy walk on the strong-arm robberies he committed?”
“I could have gotten him a pass, but he was out of control and needed to go away for a while, so I asked the DA to offer him six months.”
Braddock smiled. “And thus the relationship was formed.”
“He’s called me with tips ever since, and helped me solve three murders. If anything’s happening along West Mac or the San Pablo stroll, Jimmy knows about it. But it’s a tradeoff between the info he provides and his menace to society. He was all coked up last year and nearly beat some tweaker to death. It wasn’t a strong case, but everyone knew Jimmy needed to do some time, so they let him plead to a bullet in Santa Rita.”
“One year with no good time?”
“That’s what it was supposed to be, but it sounds like he got out early.”
“Do you believe what Tanya said about him being Dawn’s pimp when she first arrived in Oakland?”
“Jimmy was different before he started shooting heroin and smoking crack. He was smooth and quite the charmer, even when high, so I guess it’s possible.”
Sinclair pulled into the parking lot of the Palms Motel. The Palms had been around before the 580 Freeway existed, when MacArthur Boulevard was the main thoroughfare from the San Francisco Bay Bridge through Oakland and to cities beyond. It was among a dozen motels where travelers stayed back then, but for the last forty years, the Palms and other motels along West MacArthur mostly catered to prostitutes, drug dealers, and occasional out-of-towners who didn’t know any better.
Sinclair flashed his badge to the elderly Indian man on the other side of the bulletproof partition that separated the tiny lobby from the office. He handed Sinclair the registration cards. Sinclair shuffled through them but didn’t see Jimmy or Sheila’s name. “Do you know who Jimmy Davis is?” Sinclair asked.
“Yes, I know Jimmy. He’s not registered here now.”
“I see that,” said Sinclair. “But has he been around?”
“I haven’t seen him. And if he’s not registered here, he’s not staying here.”
“Of course not.”
Sinclair and Braddock walked through the parking lot and up and down the sidewalk in front of the motel, asking people about Jimmy and passing out their cards. A few admitted to knowing him, but no one said they’d seen him recently, which didn’t surprise Sinclair. He knew no one would call, but the word would get back to Jimmy that Sinclair was looking for him.
Chapter 5
Sinclair leaned back in the recliner,
adjusted his earphones, and closed his eyes. The memory came slowly at first, bits and pieces. Then he was there.
“What do you see?” Dr. Jeanne Elliott asked.
He screeched to a stop in the middle of the street seconds after the gunshots. Rolled out of his patrol car, gun in hand. Screams, people running, smoke, the smell of burning gunpowder hanging in the air. The Sig Sauer .45 caliber pistol heavy and slippery in his sweaty hand.
“Bodies,” Sinclair replied. “Three of them. Blood.”
“Any sounds or smells?”
“People yelling: That way—he went that way. I smell the blood. And sweat—my sweat. I smell my fear.”
The words poured from Sinclair’s mouth, uncensored, as if someone else were speaking. He felt as if he were in two places at once, part of him sitting in the plush chair in the therapist’s office, the other on Telegraph Avenue twelve years earlier. The tones sounded in his ears at one-second intervals. Beep, beep, left, right, left, right. The beeps acted like a sort of audible pendulum.
“What’s happening now?” Jeanne asked.
“I’m running. People point into the theater. I run into the theater.”
Sinclair’s breathing was ragged, his heart ready to leap out of his chest.
“Slow down,” she said. “What are you feeling?”
He didn’t need to search for the words; they rolled off his tongue. “Anger. Sadness. Fear.”
“Should we stop?”
“I need to go on.”
“Okay, but slowly,” Jeanne whispered.
At the theater door, he rushes inside. It’s pitch dark. His left hand reaches for his belt, feeling for his flashlight. He touches the leather holder. Empty. He freezes.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“My flashlight . . . I left it in the car. He’s there. In the dark. Waiting. I have to get him.” Sinclair’s voice quaked as tears squeezed through his closed eyes and down his face. He tasted the salt as they rolled over his lip. “But I can’t move. I’m too scared. I’m a coward.”
“That’s enough,” Jeanne said. “I want you to return to your safe place.” She described the mountain lake, the birds singing, and the smell of pine trees.
Sinclair felt his breathing level out. The image of the dark X-rated-movie theater where the murderer had fled slowly dissolved.
“When you’re ready,” she said, “I want you to open your eyes.”
Sinclair opened his eyes and removed the headphones.
Jeanne leaned back in her chair. “You did very well today. I can tell you’re beginning to trust the process.”
The process she referred to was called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. When Sinclair had first met with her two weeks ago, she explained how patients can bring up memories of traumatic experiences and then process them through EMDR, which reduces the emotional intensity of the feelings and the lingering symptoms. For at least a year, Sinclair had suspected he had PTSD to some degree. He’d known many police officers and soldiers who’d experienced a fraction of what he had over the years who had been diagnosed with it. But much like his alcoholism, which he hadn’t dealt with until the department forced him into treatment after he crashed his unmarked police car two years ago while driving drunk, he didn’t do anything about his PTSD until it smacked him across the head.
A month ago, he’d stayed late one night to return several phone calls. The final call was to a Napa Valley phone number. The man told Sinclair that he and his wife had adopted a baby boy from Alameda County foster care after the boy’s family was murdered. Ben was to turn thirteen in January, and the family was planning his bar mitzvah celebration. The man hoped Sinclair would attend, but especially hoped he would join the family for dinner the night before. That was when his parents intended to tell Ben about his life before they adopted him. Sinclair knew the story all too well.
The boy’s parents had been pushing him down the street in a stroller when a crazy man ran out of the back door of a theater, shot both of his parents in the head, and snatched Ben out of the stroller. The man ran through the streets, cradling Ben like a football, and holed up in his small room in a transient hotel. The hostage negotiators reported the man had no grasp of reality and was going off on a tirade about having killed the devil’s disciples. Next, he had to sacrifice the devil’s child. A police sniper team had eyes on the man pressing a pistol against the infant’s head through a window, but didn’t have a clear shot.
The police incident commander ordered an immediate SWAT entry to save the infant, giving the four-man SWAT team that was stacked outside the door the green light. Sinclair was first in the stack. He stepped through the door and saw the man holding the baby in his arms and a gun in his hand. Sinclair snapped his M4 rifle up, and when the red dot of the close-combat optics was within the imaginary triangle formed by the man’s two eyes and nose, he pulled the trigger. The man collapsed in a heap to the floor as Sinclair rushed forward and caught the baby before he hit the ground. News photographers and videographers swarmed him as he stepped into the sunlight. Within twenty-four hours, his picture—a serious-looking man decked out in body armor, ballistic helmet, and goggles, holding a small infant in his arms alongside an M4 carbine—graced the front page of every newspaper in the country.
Sinclair had told Ben’s father he would call him back with his answer. He then sat at his desk with rivulets of sweat rolling down his armpits and tears welling in his eyes. His whole body shook and his breaths came fast and shallow. He hardly slept that night as memories of that day came back to him, followed by other memories—dead and injured people, times when he pulled the trigger and took lives, times when he faced death but evaded it. A few days later, he called the department’s employee-assistance program, and they referred him to Jeanne Elliott, PhD, Clinical Psychologist.
“I’d like to explore one of the last things you mentioned,” Jeanne said. “Your feelings are valid, and I don’t intend to challenge them; however, you said you were a coward because you didn’t chase a killer into a dark building without a flashlight.”
“I know that’s illogical,” Sinclair said. “But the man got away because I was afraid to pursue him, and he killed two more people.”
“And you blame yourself for that?”
Sinclair shrugged his shoulders.
“Did you ever consider that Ben is alive today because of you?”
“He’s probably traumatized, even more screwed up than I am.”
“If you decide to attend the bar mitzvah, you might learn that’s not so.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you realize that millions of people who heard the story thought you were a hero?”
“That was the media’s spin.”
“I suspect Ben’s adoptive father thinks you were responsible for his son seeing his thirteenth birthday.”
“I wish that day never happened.”
“Burying traumatic incidents might work for a while, but eventually, as you’ve experienced, they come bubbling up at the most inopportune times.”
Sinclair looked at his watch.
Jeanne continued. “How’s your medication working?”
“I’m on homicide standby this week and have to be available when the phone rings, so I haven’t been taking the trazodone at night.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Not well.”
“I’m not a medical doctor, so I don’t want to give you medical advice. However, you know you’re not the only police officer I treat, and my experience is that trazodone will not prevent you from waking up and functioning when you need to. It’s not a sedative or depressant.”
“Okay.”
“And as I offered previously, I can work with your department and get you time off that won’t count as vacation or sick time.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Sinclair said. “People will know.”
“Your department is prohibited from taking any adverse actions against you.”
; The way the city’s employee assistance was administered ensured that no one, not even the police chief, knew the names of those who used it. But the moment he hit off sick or with a so-called on-duty injury diagnosed as PTSD, the word would be out that he was mentally and emotionally incapable of handling the job, and he’d find himself at a desk.
“I’ll let you know,” he said.
Chapter 6
When Sinclair entered the office, the other nine homicide investigators in the unit were at their desks, busy pounding away at their computers, talking on phones, or reading reports. Braddock looked up. “How’d it go with your insurance agent?”
Sinclair hated lying to his partner, but he had told her he was meeting with his insurance agent about reimbursement for when the Bus Bench Killer firebombed his apartment last year and destroyed everything he owned. “I just had to sign a bunch more forms.”
“The lieutenant wants to see us when you’re ready.”
Sinclair filled his dark-blue coffee mug, which had an outline of a dead body on one side and “Homicide: Our Day Begins When Someone Else’s Ends” on the other. Lieutenant Carl Maloney was in his late forties with thinning hair and a flabby middle. Sinclair and his fellow investigators had had their doubts about Maloney when he was assigned to command the unit, fearing that he had gotten the coveted job because of his previous position as one of the chief’s hatchet men in Internal Affairs, but Maloney turned out to be a good boss. He had never investigated a homicide, and although that didn’t stop most command officers from micromanaging their subordinates, Maloney never pretended he knew more about murder investigations than the sergeants under him. In addition, despite the fact that he could be reassigned in the blink of an eye, he still stood up to the chief and defended his investigators even if it was politically expedient to do otherwise.
Maloney dug out the Oakland Tribune from under an assortment of papers. “I’m sure the chief will have some choice words to say about her being a ‘sweet girl’ when I see him later this morning. Is there anything else I should know?”
Braddock said, “The unnamed source the Trib quotes, who we all know is the PIO, said she was a prostitute, which should balance out Matt’s attempt to humanize her.”