by Brian Thiem
“When Jenny was released, her mother signed for one purse, containing, quote, one cell phone, miscellaneous personal items and ID, and twenty-two dollars in cash. Guess whose name is on the ID in the other purse?”
“By any chance is there a cell phone in that purse?” asked Sinclair.
“Yep.”
A few minutes later, Sinclair and Braddock were in their car surrounded by the morning downtown traffic. He told her about Lance Keller’s arrest.
“Let’s hit ACH first since they’re waiting for us,” Braddock said.
Sinclair agreed as his cell phone vibrated. The screen showed Liz.
“Did you see the interview?”
“No,” he said. “I was still working during the early broadcast and sound asleep by ten. Did you make me look good?”
“You looked very professional and incredibly yummy. Are you coming over tonight?”
“Might be a long day.”
“Any arrests imminent?”
“Not unless we get lucky.”
Sinclair put his phone away.
“I get it—I really do,” said Braddock. “She’s beyond beautiful, but she doesn’t seem like the settling-down type.”
Sinclair had never had a female partner before. He should’ve expected it would be different. He had known Phil’s favorite football teams, every car he ever owned, and what he paid for his house long before he knew his wife’s name. Phil never asked how Sinclair’s marriage was going, even when it was obviously falling apart, and never told him his opinion about his relationship with Liz.
“Who says I want to settle down?”
“At one time you did,” she said. “When you and that pretty DA got married, everyone talked about your being the perfect couple.”
Sinclair had thought a lot about his marriage over the last six months. He figured out that he had gotten married not because he was ready to settle down but because he thought marriage might make him settle down. He regretted that he ruined the life of a wonderful woman because he wasn’t capable of a being a husband and knew she was one of a long list of people he’d have to eventually make amends to.
“We know how that worked out.”
*
Highland Hospital, also known as Alameda County Hospital—ACH to cops—had one of the busiest trauma centers in the state. Its emergency room handled an average of two hundred patients per day, with two or more trauma activations every shift for life-threatening injuries—gunshots, stabbings, or major car accidents. After Vietnam and until Oak Knoll Naval Hospital closed in 1996, the Navy used to send its doctors to ACH to gain firsthand experience in treating gunshot wounds. Thanks to the Oakland criminals, the Navy doctors received plenty of training.
ACH’s ER was quiet as Sinclair and Braddock made their way down the long hallway, past the treatment rooms that contained only one or two patients, unlike most Saturday nights when every trauma room bustled and beds with patients overflowed into the hallway. They slipped past the nurse’s station, where three nurses sat behind stacks of medical charts, and into the break room.
A nurse dressed in green scrubs looked up from a chipped Formica-topped table where she was sitting. She was in her late forties, tall and thin, with a smoker’s wrinkled face. She gave Braddock a quick smile.
“Claire, this is my partner, Matt Sinclair,” said Braddock.
“Nice to see you again, Claire.” Sinclair knew most of the ER nurses and doctors, since homicide cases brought him there a few times a month, but he also knew Claire was among many of the older nurses who had begun eyeing him with disdain when he began dating several of the younger, single nurses at the hospital after his divorce. She smiled slightly at Sinclair, then pulled a black clutch purse and a chain of custody form from a plastic hospital bag and handed it to Braddock. “It wasn’t our screw up in ER,” she said. “When no cop picked it up by the end of the shift, we handled it according to protocol.”
“No problem. I’m just glad you found it.” Braddock signed her name on the form and opened the purse. The phone was inside.
Braddock said to Sinclair, “We should probably get this printed before we handle it.”
On their way back to the car, Sinclair said, “Jeez, if looks could kill.”
“Before Liz, you did have quite a reputation among the nurses.”
“Really, like what?”
“I overheard comments like slut and man-whore thrown around in the break room.”
“You’re messing with me.”
“I am.” She laughed. “But you’re easy.”
Fifteen minutes later, Sinclair and Braddock stood in a windowless room in the basement of Children’s Hospital staring at a bank of twenty video monitors. A uniformed security officer sat at one of three consoles, and Bob Daly, a mustached man in his midfifties wearing a brown suit, hovered over another.
“We have a state-of-the-art system,” said the hospital’s director of security. “Over one hundred cameras throughout the hospital complex, all recorded digitally and retained for three years. We have the capability to monitor any camera, but obviously, we can’t watch every camera simultaneously.”
Sinclair told Daley what he was looking for.
“It’s a long shot, since we only have a few external cameras. The incident from last August will be easier to locate because we have a precise time. I can check cameras, say . . . five minutes prior and five after for anything unusual. The other two incidents will take longer since we’ll have to search through hours of video.”
“If you make copies, I can get people at the department to view it.”
“This isn’t like looking at video of a liquor store holdup. You’d have to know how to navigate through a hundred camera views, and a desktop computer can’t do that. Besides, what you’re asking for is hundreds of hours of video.” Daly glanced at the security officer sitting at the computer console. “The hospital’s given me carte blanche on overtime for anything connected to these incidents. I can put a team on it around the clock and make you a copy of any incident the least bit suspicious.”
Sinclair left his card and made his way to human resources. An obese sixty-year-old woman with ultrashort hair listened to their request, made three phone calls, and peered at the two detectives over reading glasses perched on her nose. “Lance Keller resigned last week in lieu of termination. He was caught stealing narcotics for his own use.”
“Did he work around Doctor Caldwell by any chance?” asked Sinclair.
“Nurse Keller worked in emergency. It seems he had been shorting patients their painkillers and using it himself. The mother of a patient saw him inject half a syringe of Demerol into her child’s IV and then drop the syringe in his pocket. She reported it to the ER physician who went into the nurse’s break room and found Keller with the needle in his arm.”
“Any idea where he’s working now?” asked Braddock.
“He was escorted out that night. The nursing department sent a report to the state the next day to suspend his license. There’s a long process including drug treatment and probation before he’ll ever work as a nurse again.”
The woman handed Braddock a stack of papers from her computer printer. “I’ve included his employment application, a print version of our electronic personnel file, and the report of the incident with the Demerol.”
“Looks like Keller’s got a reason to be pissed off at Children’s Hospital,” said Sinclair, as they walked down the corridor to the elevator. “But is it enough to kill for?”
Chapter 25
In the homicide office, a tech brushed silver powder on Samantha’s phone. He shined a flashlight on it from several angles before announcing there were smudges but no usable latent prints.
Sanchez plugged the phone into a power cord. “Battery’s long dead. Service has been disconnected for over a year.”
Jankowski meanwhile spread several pages of printouts across Sinclair’s desk and leaned over him. “Here’s what I’ve found out about Lance Keller so f
ar. No arrests anywhere before last night. One car, a two-year-old Volvo registered to him at the same address as on his driver’s license. Two moving violations on his DMV history—stop sign in the Volvo and speeding in a Chrysler.”
Sinclair paged through the papers Children’s Hospital had given him. The home address in Keller’s employment file matched the DMV records. He handed Jankowski the entire package.
“The paperwork shows he was working in ER the night Samantha came in,” said Sinclair. “Run his references and see if anything jumps out. If you can be discreet, go to his house, shake some trees. See if anything falls out.”
“Why don’t we just drag his junkie ass in and squeeze him?”
Sinclair knew that a murder suspect was tough to crack under the best circumstances, but to conduct an interrogation with nothing to confront the suspect with and nothing to use as leverage was a recipe for failure.
“What have we got on him, besides being a nurse at Children’s?”
“He stole drugs and was trying to score smack on the streets of Oaktown,” said Jankowski. “And the boy died from an overdose.”
Sinclair wished he could reveal what the coroner told him—that Zachary was injected with heroin—but he gave his word. “That’s not much. We don’t have any connection between Keller and the girls from last year or Susan Hammond.
“We need a hammer. Find something I can jam him up on when he denies. If you find something, then I might be willing to drop everything else and focus on Keller.”
“Okay.” Jankowski gathered up the papers and returned to his desk.
Sanchez handed Sinclair a sheet of paper with the last ten numbers from Samantha’s call log. Sinclair shuffled through the case packet looking for a match with the numbers. The last call from Samantha’s phone was to her mother’s cell phone, which was consistent with what her mother had said about receiving a call from a man who used Samantha’s phone. There were eight other calls, seven of them incoming missed calls. That made sense too. Her mother had said she called Samantha numerous times that night after Samantha failed to make it back to San Francisco. The remaining call, one that lasted four minutes, was at 8:04 p.m. to a 646 area code, the same area code as Samantha and her mother’s phone.
“The complete call log covers the previous thirty days,” Sanchez said. “There are also seventy-four contacts, mostly just first names and phone numbers. Anything else would be on the service provider’s computers, and we need a search warrant to get that.”
“Is there any way to expedite?”
“Not without telling them we have a hostage situation or something. Otherwise, expect five to ten days.”
“Do it,” he said to Sanchez and then turned to Braddock. “You ready to make a cold call?”
They both knew the advantage female officers had when blindly calling a phone number. If the person on the other end were a man, he’d more readily talk to a woman, out of curiosity, if for no other reason. If it were a woman, she wouldn’t feel as threatened by a female caller. Furthermore, even crooks didn’t immediately think “cop” when hearing a female voice.
Braddock pressed the speaker button on her desk phone and dialed the number.
“Hello.” The voice was female and sounded young.
“Hi,” said Braddock. “Are you a friend of Samantha?”
“Who’s this?”
“My name’s Cathy. I’m calling numbers from Samantha’s phone, hoping to connect with some of her friends.”
A long pause. “Sam’s gone.”
“I know. It’s so sad. What’s your name?”
“Madison.”
“Hi, Madison. Were you and Sam friends?”
Hesitancy filled her voice. “Yeah, like best friends.”
“Please don’t hang up, but I’m a detective in California and we’re working to find out what happened to Sam. You talked to her that night.”
“You’re from California . . . where the car hit her?”
“That’s right, Oakland. What did you talk about that night?”
“She was worried her mom would be pissed because she was supposed to be home already. Well . . . not home, but, like, where she was staying with her mom’s friend in Frisco. She was with an older girl. The girl’s mom’s house was where Sam was staying.”
“Jenny?” suggested Braddock.
“Yeah, Jenny. Sam was really excited. She and Jenny hooked up with some boys at a frat party in Berkeley.”
“Really?”
“I told Sam to be careful ’cause the boys were older.”
“Did she mention any names?”
“She said the boy she was with was Adrian.”
“How about the fraternity?”
“Alpha Kappa Lambda. I even Googled it and thought it would be cool to go to a fraternity party by the time I was sixteen,” said Madison. “I don’t want to anymore, you know, after what happened.”
Chapter 26
Sinclair slid his car behind a marked Berkeley PD car parked in a yellow zone on Telegraph Avenue and strolled with Braddock toward the University of California campus three blocks north. The sun baked the sidewalk, the thermometer already above eighty. Sinclair could tell it was heading toward a record high. Two bicycle officers, both with beards and dressed in blue shorts, utility shirts, gun belts, and bicycle helmets, stood astride their bikes talking to a twentysomething woman with long, stringy hair, who was sitting on the sidewalk in the shade. Wearing an ankle-length, flowing dress, she had an old backpack beside her and a metal cup and a cardboard sign that read, Food Laundry, in front of her. A skinny white man in his thirties with dreadlocks and no shirt, baggy brown pants, and sandals stood nearby.
“That’s a whole different kind of police work from Oakland,” Sinclair said as they checked out the street vendors that lined the sidewalk. They passed carts with incense sticks, flowers, patches to sew on clothes, and crocheted hats in the green, black, and gold colors of the Jamaican flag. They stopped at a table with handmade jewelry. There were bead necklaces, a hundred different rings, and a dozen peace sign medallions. The vendor sported hair halfway down his back and John Lennon glasses.
“Wearing peace next to your heart allows you to feel it in your heart,” he said.
“I’m looking for one more like this.” Sinclair removed a photo from his pocket and showed it to the man.
The vendor looked at the cropped enlargement of the medallion. “Mine are handmade by local craftsmen.”
“Yeah, but my niece likes this one,” said Sinclair.
“Try Berzerkeley Boutique, just up the street.”
Sinclair and Braddock continued up the sidewalk, past People’s Park, and through the throngs of pedestrians, a mix of college kids, street people, homeless, and hippies who looked as if they were still living in 1968. Sweat broke out on Sinclair, sticking his shirt to his back. He wished he could ditch his coat in the car, but with a gun, handcuffs, spare ammo, and a badge on his belt, taking off his jacket while strolling in public wasn’t an option.
A blast of air conditioning hit them when they pushed through the door into Berzerkeley Boutique. Racks of T-shirts, peasant blouses, and hippie dresses covered most of the store. Sinclair weaved through the clothes to a glass display counter, behind which sat a woman with dusty cornrows and piercings in her lip, eyebrows, and nose.
Braddock spotted it first. “May we see that?” she asked the clerk.
The woman removed a peace medallion from the case and handed it to Braddock. “These have become quite popular recently.” A silver stud protruding from the tip of her tongue clicked against her teeth as she spoke.
Sinclair held the medallion alongside the photo. They were the same. “What do you mean?”
“All we have left is the display model, and it’s not for sale. There were twelve underneath the counter for months, until some guy bought them all last week. We should be getting in more—”
“This man,” Sinclair said, “can you describe him?”
&n
bsp; “Are you the man?”
Sinclair showed his badge. “Oakland Homicide.”
“Homicide?” she echoed. “I wasn’t here that day. I normally work Thursdays and Fridays.”
“Do you keep sales receipts?”
“Not that far back. The owner takes them home every few days. She does the books there.”
“I’ll need the owner’s name and that of the employee who was working when that man came in.”
“Skye—she’s the owner—was the one who told me about the man buying them all.”
“Skye?” said Sinclair. “Skye what?”
“Just Skye.” She wrote on the back of a business card and handed it to Sinclair. “Here’s her phone number, but she’s not there.”
“If she’s not at that number, where is she?”
“She left Wednesday night for her spiritual commune, somewhere on the Russian River. She’ll be back Monday to open the shop at ten.”
“What if there’s an emergency, how would you reach her?”
“What kind of emergency?”
“Like if you had a heart attack.”
“I’d ask the paramedics to lock the door, and Skye would open up on Monday. If I’m not here, the store doesn’t open. If I’m here, I handle whatever needs handling.”
Sinclair left his card and returned to the heat outside. He pulled his sunglasses from his pocket and slid them on, dulling the blazing sun to a tolerable level. He dialed the number and listened to a recording, hitting the speaker button so Braddock could hear. Hello, this is Skye. Have a beautiful day. You may leave a message if you’d like. Peace and love.
“That’s got to be our guy,” said Braddock.