Thrill Kill

by Brian Thiem

  It was getting dark outside when Braddock pushed away from her desk. She filled her coffee cup and stared at the office bulletin board. “This is where we’ll find the seventy-six-thousand-dollar annual salary,” she said.

  Sinclair got up to stretch and studied the OPD salary bulletin she was looking at. There were four different classifications for police officers, depending on date of hire, and five or six seniority steps for each one, equating to twenty-two different salaries for the officer rank alone. None was $76,100. Sinclair returned to his computer and entered $76,100 annual salary into Google. That was the median salary for lawyers in Iowa City and the median salary for physical therapists in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Another webpage showed it was the bottom step for teachers in the Moreland School District, wherever the hell that was. He added Oakland to his search. He scrolled down until an entry for the Contra Costa Times website caught his eye: Oakland City Council Members voted to give themselves a 2.4 percent raise Tuesday that brings their annual salary to $76,100 each.

  “Braddock!” he yelled.

  Braddock rushed over and looked at his screen. “Homicide investigators don’t believe in coincidences, do we?”

  “Hell no. What do you want to bet Councilmember Preston Yates is Dawn’s baby daddy?”

  *

  Later that evening, Sinclair was sitting at a table in a church hall in Walnut Creek, about fifteen miles from Oakland. His mind drifted back to the case while a woman read the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. His first instinct upon seeing the report about the city council’s salary a few hours ago was to rush out, grab Yates, and stuff him into an interview room, but this time he didn’t need Braddock to remind him that restraint was necessary. They would need more evidence before they went after someone in Yates’s position. The soonest he could request the account information from Charles Schwab was Monday, and it might take weeks to trace it to Yates. There wasn’t much he could do to build a connection between Yates and Dawn by sitting around the office on a Saturday night. Still, he’d considered calling the friend who’d asked him to speak at the meeting because it felt like he shouldn’t live life when the trail to Dawn’s killer was warming. Braddock convinced him that was stupid and that he needed a meeting. He hated when people close to him suggested he needed a meeting, because they were usually right.

  Sinclair looked out at the forty or so people sitting on folding chairs in front of him and said, “My name’s Matt and I’m an alcoholic.”

  When Sinclair was getting ready for his first speaker meeting a year ago, Walt had told him not to prepare, but to instead just speak from his heart, and whatever was meant to come out would be perfection. Unlike many public figures, Sinclair had little anonymity remaining to protect in AA meetings, because his drunk-driving accident and affair with the news reporter had been all over the print and TV news for days.

  The group replied with a chorus of “Hi, Matt,” and Sinclair recited his drinking story, beginning when drinking was fun and alcohol worked, as it did at one time for most alcoholics, until the end when it was destroying everything in his life he cared about, yet he couldn’t stop.

  “If I could still drink without the consequences, I would,” Sinclair said toward the end of his twenty-minute talk. “I loved how a few shots of bourbon quieted the voices in my head, took away the pain of what the world was throwing at me, and removed my feelings of fear and self-doubt. But today I know that a true alcoholic can’t ever drink responsibly, so I have to deal with life head on without numbing out. But it’s hard. My sponsor once told me that we alcoholics stopped maturing emotionally when we began drinking. In some ways, I agree. I’m trying to figure out how to do relationships at thirty-seven and often feel like I’m still seventeen. You who’ve been sober a lot longer than me say that if I don’t drink and keep coming to meetings, I’ll learn how to handle this kind of stuff. Thanks for asking me to speak.”

  People in the audience filled the remainder of the hour sharing bits of their own drinking stories or how their lives changed in sobriety. Sinclair was walking across the parking lot to his car when his phone rang.

  “I just got a call from patrol,” Braddock said. “They think they located where Dawn was actually living.”

  Chapter 24

  A half hour later, Sinclair and Braddock were standing just inside the front door of a modern two-bedroom condo at the corner of Twelfth Street and M. L. King Jr. Way in Oakland. Sergeant Carter, a patrol sergeant who recently returned to uniform from a stint in IAD, briefed them. “We got a call from a neighbor who saw two men going into this unit. She was friends with the tenant, who she knew as Dawn Gustafson. That was your murder victim, right?”

  Sinclair nodded.

  Carter continued, “The neighbor hadn’t seen Gustafson in a while and thought it was strange, so she knocked at the door. One of the men came out and told her they were surveying the place because they were supposed to start work there on Monday to move the old tenant’s property out and clean and paint the place for the next tenant. The story didn’t sit right with her. She called nine-one-one, but by the time the units got here, the men were gone. She let the officers in with a key—she and Gustafson had traded keys in case of an emergency—and they saw the blood stain and recognized the name of your murder victim.”

  “Did your officers search the place?” Sinclair asked.

  “Just a protective sweep. Everything else seems to be in order. No signs of a struggle. Looks like the place was lived in. Neat and nicely decorated.”

  Sinclair looked around the room. What had once been a large pool of blood was now dried and soaked into the Pergo floor next to a round dining table. A sofa and two chairs surrounded a dark-wood coffee table. A matching stand held a fifty-inch TV. A shiny brass cartridge casing lay on the hardwood floor against a wall. Sinclair dropped to his hands and knees and twisted his head to view the head stamp without handling it. It was a .380.

  “I’ll go back to the office and type up a warrant,” said Braddock.

  Sinclair started to argue, but she insisted it was her turn and he should be at the scene. Carter pointed to the door of the neighbor, and Sinclair rang the doorbell.

  The woman invited Sinclair into a unit identical to Dawn’s. She introduced herself as Angela Porter and said she was thirty-eight and worked at the federal building two blocks away in the civilian personnel office. She had bought her condominium three years ago, at which time Dawn was already living here. Sinclair pulled a photo from his portfolio and showed it to Porter.

  “That’s Dawn,” she said. “I saw the blood in there. Is it hers?”

  Sinclair nodded, figuring Porter already knew the answer. “She was murdered last Saturday night. Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

  “I was visiting my parents for the weekend. I talked to Dawn Friday afternoon. Everything was fine then.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “We’d have dinner together, you know, two single gals in the big city, once or twice a month. She was really busy with school and work.”

  “Did you ever see any people visit her, maybe a boyfriend?”

  Angela wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “She kept to herself. When home, she was usually studying. She said she’d sworn off men until she got her degree and had the time to commit to a relationship. The only person I ever saw at her place was her ex-boyfriend, who came by once a month or so. Dawn said she had to remain civil with him.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “She introduced me once, just in passing. A weird name, something like Les or Jess—no, it was Press.”

  “Describe him.”

  “He was a mousy-looking guy, not at all the kind of man I’d expect Dawn to be with. A few years older than me, a little bit shorter than you, skinny, with light-brown hair. Not ugly looking, just not very manly.”

  Sinclair made a quick call to Braddock and asked her to make up a photo lineup containing Yates’s photo and bring it
back when she returned with the warrant. “Did she ever talk about him?”

  “Only that it was complicated and she was trying to put it behind her.”

  “Is there a manager in the building?”

  “Not on site.” She handed him a card for NorCal Property Management with a twenty-four hour number. Sinclair copied it into his notebook and said he’d return later to show her photos.

  When Sinclair returned to Dawn’s unit, Carter was still at the front door. “My two officers are canvassing the building. That leaves the highly paid sergeant to guard the scene.”

  “Did anyone check the garage for her car?” Sinclair asked.

  “They’re working their way down, but I doubt they got that far.” He stepped inside, grabbed a key ring from the kitchen counter, and tried a key in the door. It fit. “I’m guessing these are hers. Looks like some other door keys and one to a Chevy.”

  Sinclair took the elevator to the underground garage and walked to the stall with 419 painted on the wall. He pressed the key fob and the red Camaro in the parking space beeped. It was the LS model with a V6 and automatic. Even though it wasn’t the high-performance SS, it was still a sharp car that would leave his department Crown Vic in the dust. Sinclair gloved up and popped the trunk. Empty except for a fleece jacket and a pair of sneakers. He sat in the driver’s seat and went through the door cubby and center console: tissues, lip balm, an old receipt from Safeway, and some fast-food napkins. The glove box held the owner’s manual and vehicle registration. He peered under the seats, found nothing, and locked the car.

  At Dawn’s apartment, he returned the keys to Carter and asked him to have one of his officers order up a tow with a hold for a technician.

  “Will do,” Carter said. “One of my guys is taking a statement from a neighbor who might know something. Number four-ten.”

  A stocky female officer was sitting at a dinette table across from a slightly built man wearing tight black pants and a pink polo shirt in 410. She handed Sinclair a handwritten statement as soon as he entered. “I’m almost done,” she said.

  The statement said James Dubois heard a loud pop about 10 PM last Saturday night. He thought it might be a gunshot, but since he wasn’t sure, he ignored it. A few hours later, he heard commotion in the hallway. He cracked his door and saw two young white men, both dressed in black, pushing a handcart with a tall metal box on it toward the elevator. One was also carrying a heavy cardboard box about the size that would hold files. They were having difficulty keeping the metal box stabilized on the handcart. When they saw him, they said, “Movers,” and continued toward the elevator. Dubois didn’t get a good look at the men, but they appeared to be in their twenties and were both thin to medium built and average height. That’s all he recalled.

  “Mr. Dubois, I’m Sergeant Sinclair with the homicide section. This box, how tall was it?”

  “Five or six feet. It was like those storage containers you see in the marinas that boaters put all their lines and boat cleaning supplies in.”

  “Was it big enough to hold a body?”

  “Oh, yeah. Lots better than rolling it in a carpet like they always do in the movies.”

  “I know you told the officer the standard line about you not being able to recognize them. I know that no one wants to go to court and testify, but be honest with me. You did see their faces, right?”

  “Look officer, I’m cooperating as much as I can. I’m trying to help you out, but I only saw those men for a second. I didn’t look them in the face. This is a nice building, real nice, but it’s still Oakland, and in Oakland, you don’t look a man in the eye.”

  “They said they were movers. Did they look like movers?”

  “You see all kinds of people working as movers these days, but those boys didn’t know anything about moving. They couldn’t even keep the dolly going straight. The box almost fell off a couple times.”

  “If they weren’t movers, what did you think they were doing?”

  Dubois shrugged his shoulders. “It’s Oakland, man. They could’ve been doing anything.”

  Sinclair returned to Dawn’s apartment, called the number to NorCal, and got an answering service. He told the woman on the phone three times that he was the police and needed to speak to someone from the management company, but she kept asking him what his emergency maintenance issue was and why it couldn’t wait until Monday. She said the only other twenty-four hour number she had was for security and agreed to call them.

  Fifteen minutes later, a middle-aged, heavyset white man in a navy-blue BDU uniform with captain bars on the collar showed up. Security guards loved their rank. Sinclair gave him a run down. The security officer told Sinclair they had a security camera in the lobby. He made a phone call, and a moment later, he showed Sinclair a video on his phone from earlier in the evening of two men leaving the elevator and walking out of the building.

  “I recognize them,” the security officer said. “They work maintenance for NorCal, but they shouldn’t be doing a cleanout and painting of an individual unit. Each condo is privately owned and would be the owner’s responsibility.”

  “How do we find out who owns unit four-nineteen?” Sinclair asked.

  The security officer’s dispatch had a number for NorCal. Sinclair called it and told the woman who answered he was investigating a murder and needed the owner’s information for that condominium unit. He spent ten minutes attempting to convince her to locate someone in the corporate office who could get him the information. The best she could do, she said, was to try to reach her supervisor and pass on Sinclair’s request. Sinclair wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for a callback.

  “How do I view the security feed from last Saturday night?” Sinclair asked the security officer, who was patiently waiting while Sinclair was on the phone.

  “It’s gone.” The man twirled the cord of his radio microphone around his finger. “It’s on a seventy-two hour loop.”

  “And the only camera’s in the lobby?”

  “You ask me, they only put that one in so they could advertise they had a security system in the building.”

  By the time Braddock returned with the search warrant, Sinclair had two evidence techs waiting with him at the door. He and Braddock followed the techs through the condo as they took initial integrity photographs of the rooms—to record the way it was before they began searching. Kitchen cabinets and drawers were open, and spices and boxes of food were lying on their sides. Someone had done a haphazard search. The king-size bed in the master bedroom was still neatly made, but drawers were open, and clothes, probably once neatly folded, were pushed into piles. The clothes in the closet had been shoved to one side, and the contents of two plastic bins were scattered on the floor.

  Braddock studied the clothes and touched several items, as if she could feel the fabric through her latex gloves. “Nice stuff. A few items are from major designers, but most of it’s the kind of clothes I can afford. Nothing vampy. Lots of jeans and casual wear.” Braddock turned toward Sinclair. “This was where Dawn lived her normal life.”

  Both nightstands were covered with baby photos. Sinclair followed a chronology of photographs, many from holidays and birthdays and ranging from a tiny baby with squinty eyes held by a smiling Dawn to the most recent one of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in a wading pool on a bright summer day.

  “She didn’t bring men here,” Sinclair said.

  “Definitely not,” Braddock said. “This was her sanctuary. Her daughter was her life.”

  Braddock stepped out of the bathroom. “Normal women’s stuff in the drawers and under the sink. Drugstore makeup. Nothing exotic. No prescription medications other than a container of birth control pills dated a year ago. Only one month’s been used, so my guess is she wasn’t having sex and had no immediate plans to.”

  The second bedroom was small. A desk stacked with accounting textbooks was against one wall, and the cord to a laptop’s charger hung empty over the desk. A twin bed with a Cinderel
la bedspread and covered with stuffed animals was against the other wall. “Dawn’s parents were pretty clear that Madison had never been out here,” Sinclair said.

  “Even though Madison never visited, it was still her room.” Braddock picked up a pink rabbit, squeezed it, and held it to her face. “This room represented Dawn’s dream for the future.”

  Chapter 25

  The morning’s first light was appearing in the sky by the time Sinclair and Braddock got back to the office. While the techs had processed Dawn’s condo for trace evidence and dusted the printable surfaces, they went through every piece of paper they could find, hoping to find something with Preston Yates’s name on it. But much as with Dawn’s working apartment by the lake, this one had also been stripped of all incriminating documents. There was no computer and no paper files.

  Sinclair made a fresh pot of coffee and began researching NorCal on the Internet, hoping to find someone he could talk to that day who could tell him why Dawn was living rent-free in a condo they owned or at least maintained. NorCal was a major commercial real estate developer in the East Bay. They owned a number of Oakland office buildings, including a twenty-four story building in the city center. Sinclair found an article about NorCal winning the city council bid to develop the huge tract of land that was once the Oakland Army Base. Another article from eight years ago contained a photo of Sergio Kozlov, the president and CEO of NorCal, posing with a past mayor. The article touted the huge contribution NorCal had made to Oakland’s redevelopment efforts and how the city gave NorCal a full city block, land valued at more than twenty million dollars, along with tax breaks, to build a commercial office building.

  The only corporate officer mentioned on NorCal’s website was Sergio Kozlov. There were photos of Kozlov with various members of Oakland’s city council, including one where he had his arm around Preston Yates’s shoulder while he cut the ribbon that opened the road from the Port of Oakland’s shipping terminal to the redevelopment area, which would turn the old army base into a warehouse and logistics center for the port. There were older photos with him next to Jerry Brown when he was the mayor of Oakland and a more recent one with him next to an older Jerry Brown as the state’s governor.