Thrill Kill

by Brian Thiem

  Sinclair filled him in and rang the doorbell. Buckner pulled out his baton and rapped on the door with it, the sound reverberating through the house. Still no response. Sinclair called Whitt’s cell and home phone, but no answer. The only visible window, which a curtain covered, was by the front door. The other windows were down the steep slopes on the sides of the house or faced the Oakland flatlands below and would require a helicopter to look into.

  An SUV drove into the driveway next door and slid into the garage. Sinclair told Buckner to stay at the door in case Whitt came out. He and Braddock walked next door and into the open garage just as a woman with two armloads of groceries slammed the passenger door of a white Audi Q7 with her hip.

  Sinclair stayed back to avoid startling the woman, and Braddock took the lead. “Ma’am, we’re with Oakland PD, can we ask you a few questions?”

  The woman looked up. Midfifties, white, brunette, wearing a tan raincoat over jeans and boots. “Sure,” she said. “Come on in so I can put this stuff down.”

  Braddock grabbed an eco-friendly reusable bag filled with produce and followed her through a laundry room into a kitchen.

  The woman set the bags on the counter. “I was waiting for the rain to let up before going to Safeway, but we’re out of everything.”

  “Do you know the Whitts next door?” Braddock asked.

  “Sure, we’ve lived here going on twenty years. He’s been here longer.”

  “Do you know if he’s home now?” Braddock asked.

  “I don’t have a clue. I mostly see him if we’re both going in or out at the same time. It’s not like we have a front yard to hang out in.” She looked at her watch. “He’s probably at work.”

  “His office said he’s home,” Sinclair said.

  She shrugged her shoulders and opened the refrigerator.

  “What about his son, Travis?” Sinclair asked.

  “If he’s home, you’d probably hear him.” She began unloading plastic bags full of vegetables and fruit into the refrigerator.

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “I saw him about an hour ago with a bunch of his weirdo friends. One of them was blocking my driveway, and I had to wait until he moved to go to the store.”

  “Can you describe him?” Sinclair asked.

  “The one driving?”

  Sinclair nodded.

  “Shaved head, in his late twenties, about Travis’s age. A few inches taller than you. Muscular.”

  “There were other friends of Travis’s with him?” Sinclair asked.

  “One that I saw. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he wasn’t as tall and a lot thinner.”

  “What were they wearing?”

  She closed the refrigerator and opened a cabinet next to the sink. “Black raincoats and black pants. Everything black. Travis, too.”

  “And the car?”

  “An old Bronco. The big truck-like ones. It looks like it was painted with cans of spray paint. An ugly mud-brown color.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “Travis came up to the muscular one, said something, and he got into the Bronco and pulled it into the Whitts’ driveway. That’s when I left for the store.”

  “Was Travis’s car there?” Sinclair asked.

  She put a jar of peanut butter and boxes of pasta into the cabinet. “His little green Prius was in the driveway when I left.”

  “When did you last see Travis before this morning?”

  “It’s not seeing him, it’s hearing him,” she said. “He’s been back home for the last two or three months. It’s better now that it’s raining, but when the weather was warm, he’d leave the slider open on the bottom level and blast his music. I don’t even know what people his age listen to these days. I though rap was bad, but this stuff . . .”

  “Have you talked to William?”

  “Several times, but it only goes on during the day when he’s at work.”

  Sinclair copied her name and numbers into his notebook, thanked her for her help, and returned to the Whitts’ front porch. Sinclair noticed Braddock adjusting her belt under her coat, unconsciously touching her holster and other gear. He didn’t have to tell her the trail to the killer was getting hot.

  While Braddock told Buckner and his rookie what the neighbor reported, Sinclair called Bianca. “I’m at William Whitt’s house. His office says he’s home but he won’t answer the door or his phones. Do you think he’ll answer for you?”

  “I can try,” she said. “What’s happening?”

  “I can’t get into it, but I need to talk to him and Travis now.”

  “Is Travis there?”

  Sinclair hated being the one answering questions right now, but he needed her help. “He was here, but I think he’s gone off with some friends who are about to get into major trouble. They may have a gun.”

  The phone was silent, and Sinclair looked at it to ensure there was still a connection. “Bianca, are you there?” Sinclair switched the phone to speaker so Braddock could hear.

  “Matt, when William and I were seeing each other, I took an interest in Travis. He was a troubled young man who needed a mother figure. He would talk and I would listen. I hadn’t heard from him in a year or more until maybe a month ago. He called me and said he knew his mother didn’t die by accident and that his father was screwing whores again. I talked to William about it, and he, of course, denied it. He said he’d talk to Travis but everything was fine. Let me call him. He’ll pick up for me.”

  A few minutes later, the deadbolt retracted and the door opened. William Whitt appeared, dressed in gray slacks with a white shirt and tie. Sinclair’s hand rested on his Sig Sauer, holstered under his coat.

  “Put your hands up and turn around,” he ordered.

  “What’s going on?” Whitt asked.

  “Do it!” Sinclair barked.

  Whitt complied and Sinclair guided him into the living room and patted him down. “You can put your hands down. Where’s Travis?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?” Sinclair asked.

  Whitt was sweating profusely. “I don’t know.”

  Sinclair’s phone vibrated. He looked at the screen. It was Uppy. “Watch him,” he said to Buckner as he stepped into the kitchen with Braddock to answer the call.

  “We identified Anarchist Soldier. His name’s Andrew Pearson, male, white, twenty-eight, six-two, two hundred, shaved head. He’s active in the Occupy protests, busting windows and throwing firebombs. He’s usually masked, but we IDed him by some distinctive tattoos. We linked him to Garvin and Pratt through cell phone records and Internet messages on the gaming websites.”

  “Have you got a location on him?” Sinclair asked.

  “Not yet. The bureau’s surveillance team’s set up on the addresses we have for him, but he’s a no-show so far. His phone’s off. But get this, Matt, he was in the Marines and got kicked out with a bad conduct discharge after six months. Until a month ago, he worked for JB Construction doing road work in the Sierras.”

  “Let me guess,” Sinclair said. “He had access to explosives.”

  “The company said it was highly likely.”

  “A guy fitting his description was seen with Travis Whitt at the Whitt’s house less than an hour ago. Can you do your magic with Travis’s cell phone?”

  “Sarge,” shouted Officer Buckner from the living room.

  “Let me call you back,” Sinclair said to Uppy as he returned to the living room.

  “I heard you mention it on the phone,” said Buckner, “so I asked Mr. Whitt if he had any guns in the house, and he said he has a Walther PPK in his study.”

  “Show me,” Sinclair said, and he followed Whitt down a set of stairs and through a door into a large wood-paneled office. Beyond the window stretched a balcony with the same view of the city as the living room ten feet above. Whitt moved around to the back of a black lacquered desk and opened a drawer.

  “Hang on,” Sinclair said, grabbi
ng Whitt and pulling him aside. “I’ll get it.”

  “The key’s in the drawer. It opens a cabinet where the gun is.”

  Sinclair slid the desk drawer out and removed a brass key from the pen tray. He followed Whitt across the room to a solid wood cabinet situated between two matching bookshelves. Sinclair unlocked the sliding panels in the middle of the cabinet and slid them open. On the shelf were several binders, boxes of checks, and three bound journals, two black and one pink and yellow. “Where’s the gun?” Sinclair asked.

  Whitt looked inside. “It’s gone.” The surprise in his voice was genuine.

  “When did you last see it?” Sinclair asked.

  “It was here the first of the month. I went in here to get a new book of checks for Dawn.”

  “That was two days before she was killed,” Sinclair said.

  “Yeah, she came over to drop off some spreadsheets and pick up the checkbook and some bills that came to the house.”

  “And you’re just mentioning this now?”

  Whitt lowered his head. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Was Travis here at the time?” Sinclair asked.

  “He was downstairs in his room.”

  “Does he know you keep the key—oh hell, never mind. He’d have to be a moron not to know there’s a key in your desk drawer. Is anything else missing?”

  “Oh my god!” Whitt said.

  “What is it?” Sinclair asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Whitt, what is it?” Sinclair asked again.

  “Nothing.”

  Travis had obviously seen Dawn that night in his father’s study. Sinclair pictured Travis listening outside the door when William and Dawn talked about their past. Or maybe he was conveniently in the living room when William walked her to the front door, forcing an introduction. Or maybe Travis waited by her car, where he could talk to her alone. It might have been a casual, polite conversation, one where he did nothing more than gather information about her to use later. Or maybe Travis didn’t meet her at all that night, but followed her to her apartment so he could visit her later with the gun.

  “Show me his room,” Sinclair ordered.

  Whitt led them down the stairs to the lower level. Three doors faced them at the bottom of the stairs. Whitt pointed at one door. “He keeps it locked. To show I trust him, I don’t go in.”

  Sinclair didn’t waste his breath telling Whitt what a fool he was for ignoring all the warning signs. Sinclair turned his back to the door, looked over his shoulder, and using a mule kick, smashed his right heel into the doorknob. The door splintered. He felt a stabbing pain where the hospital had stitched him up, but nothing wet rolled down his leg, so he probably hadn’t ripped out the stitches. Sinclair shoved the door open and entered. Braddock, Whitt, Buckner, and his rookie followed.

  The room’s blueprint was a copy of Whitt’s study a level above, twenty by thirty, with a balcony that overlooked the city. A bed and dresser were in one corner. A door on that wall led to a bathroom. Buckner and his partner swept through it to ensure no one was there. In the opposite corner were two leather couches facing a seventy-inch flat screen, a gaming console, and several handheld controllers lying on the floor.

  Photos printed with a home printer on letter-size paper were taped to the wall. Sinclair stepped over two empty pizza boxes to get a closer look. One photo was of Dawn in a lace negligee, the same image Sinclair saw a few days earlier on the Special Ladies Escorts website. Another was of Lisa Harper in a ballet pose similar to what he saw in her classroom. Whitt stood beside Sinclair with his mouth gaping open.

  “There were things in that cabinet more dangerous than the gun,” Whitt said. “Susan’s diary, where she described my affair with Lisa in detail and my use of escorts. Her last entry talked about taking her own life. If Travis read it . . .”

  Sinclair wanted to slam him against the wall, first for lying to him, and second to knock every ounce of truth out of him. But he took a deep breath. “What else?”

  “Journals that my therapist told me to write.” Whitt looked down at his wingtips. “About my feelings and my struggles with . . . you know.”

  “Your struggles with sex addiction?” Sinclair said.

  Whitt nodded.

  “Sinclair!” Braddock yelled from the other side of the room, where she was crouched inside a closet.

  Sinclair crossed the room and looked over Braddock’s shoulder: a dozen empty black-powder containers and empty ammunition boxes labeled 7.62x39—the rifle cartridge designed for the Russian and Chinese AK-47 and SKS rifles.

  Sinclair’s phone rang. It was Uppy. “We located Travis Whitt’s cell phone. It shows at an address on Thornhill Drive, not far from his father’s house. Get a pen and I’ll give you the numbers.”

  Sinclair reached in his pocket as Uppy continued, “We just brought the address up in the mapping program. It’s a school by the name of Caldecott Academy.”

  Chapter 40

  “We found bomb-making materials and empty boxes of ammo,” Sinclair said to Uppy. “They’re planning a school massacre. Get your SWAT people and every agent you can muster there.”

  Sinclair hung up before Uppy could respond. He turned to Buckner’s police trainee. “Detain Whitt and secure this room. No one touches anything until an OPD command officer tells you different.”

  The kid’s eyes lit up. “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s go,” Sinclair yelled to Braddock and Buckner as he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  As Sinclair rushed out the front door, he looked over his shoulder to see Braddock and Buckner on his heels. He yelled to Buckner, “You know the fastest way to the school?”

  “It’s my beat, I should.”

  “Lead the way,” Sinclair said as he jumped in his Crown Vic and cranked the engine.

  Buckner spun a U-turn and sped up Skyline Boulevard. Braddock fastened her seat belt and reached for the radio microphone as Sinclair took off after the black-and-white SUV. Buckner and Sinclair had both been around long enough to know they didn’t want to alert the suspects they were coming. Straight-line distance, the school was only a mile away, twice as far via the winding mountain roads, so neither turned on their sirens—not that there was any traffic ahead of them to clear.

  “Thirteen-Adam-Five, code thirty-three,” Braddock said into the mic.

  “You have the air, Thirteen-Adam-Five,” the dispatcher replied.

  “We’re responding to Caldecott Academy on Thornhill with the FTO half of One-John-Thirteen on a possible school shooting in progress.”

  The dispatcher echoed the information for all units, “Thirteen-Adam-Five and half of One-John-Thirteen are responding to a possible school shooting in progress at the Caldecott Academy on Thornhill Drive. Any further details, Thirteen-Adam-Five?”

  Buckner made a sharp left onto Elverton Drive, the Police Interceptor Utility taking the corner without a hint of body sway while Sinclair’s big sedan fishtailed on the wet road at the same speed. In the background, he heard Braddock providing a description of the suspects and the likelihood that three or more men were armed with AK-47-type weapons and one or more bombs similar to what detonated on Lakeshore Drive two days ago. Sinclair took a quick left switchback, which normal drivers would take at ten miles an hour, at twice that, throwing Braddock against the passenger door. He accelerated down a straightaway, trying to keep Buckner in sight and praying no one would pull out of a driveway in front of him.

  The radio screamed in Sinclair’s ears with units advising they were en route to the school. The nearest one was coming from Forty-First and Telegraph, which would probably take just under ten minutes at code-three speed. The Oakland Hills were blessed with the lowest crime rate in the city, which meant their police coverage was bare bones, but when they did have a significant crime in progress, the nearest officer was often a long way off and his nearest cover officer even farther.

  “Advise all responding units,” Braddock said ov
er the radio, “to shut down lights and sirens at least a mile away.”

  The dispatcher relayed the instructions for all other units on the channel.

  When Buckner crossed Beauforest Drive, the Caldecott Academy appeared ahead. Sinclair and every officer in Oakland had been trained how to respond to active shooter incidents. Traditional police tactics that included a slow, methodical, cautious approach and waiting for SWAT teams did nothing but give these kind of shooters more time to kill. Even though the risk to responding officers was great, the only way to stop an active shooter was to rush through the scene toward the gunfire and engage him.

  Buckner stopped his vehicle at the far end of the parking lot. Sinclair pulled alongside and popped the trunk. He and Braddock stripped off their coats, threw them in the trunk, and pulled out their Kevlar vests. Although Sinclair wished for a heavy tactical vest—one that would stop 7.62x39 rounds—and the M4 rifle he had when he was on the SWAT team, they only had two choices. They could wait for more officers with the right equipment to gain a tactical advantage or rush toward the sound of gunfire and screaming children to eliminate the threat with what they had.

  Buckner held a Remington 870, the standard shotgun mounted in every marked Oakland police car. He worked the pump action and racked a round into the chamber. He then slid another 12-gauge round from the carrier on the shotgun’s stock and fed it into the gun’s magazine, giving him five rounds of double-ought buckshot in the gun and four more rounds in the carrier. Sinclair and Braddock gave him a thumbs-up to indicate they were ready. There was no need to discuss who would take point—the officer in uniform with the biggest gun was the logical choice. Buckner took off on a slow jog toward the front door, with Sinclair falling in behind him and Braddock taking up the rear.