by Brian Thiem
“I’m sure he paid cash. We’ll probably only get a generic description out of Skye, if anything. But things are looking up.”
Chapter 27
Thirty minutes later, Sinclair and Braddock were sitting at a long table in the dining room of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity house. “The UC police told me you were in charge of fall recruitment last year,” said Sinclair to the college senior seated across from them.
“Yeah, I was the chair of our Rush Week committee.” With his short blond hair and blue eyes and wearing a loose tank top, shorts that fell below his knees, and flip-flops, Cameron looked like he’d stepped off a Southern California beach.
“And you were in charge of the party that Adrian showed up to with some young girls.”
“We don’t have anyone in the fraternity named Adrian, nor anyone by that name who rushed last year,” he said.
A manila file folder lay on the table in front of him.
“What’s in there?” asked Sinclair.
“Our roster of members and pledges from last year.”
Sinclair reached across the table.
Cameron placed his hands on the folder. “Don’t you need a search warrant or something?”
“You sure you want to mess with me?”
Cameron slid the folder across the table.
Sinclair scanned the names. No Adrian. “I’ll need a copy of this.”
“Take it,” said Cameron. “I can print another one.”
Sinclair slid two photos, snapshots of Samantha and Jenny, out of his portfolio and set them in front of Cameron. He glanced at them for a second and looked up at Sinclair and Braddock impassively.
“Recognize them?” After a few seconds of silence, Sinclair said, “My friends at the university tell me your fraternity’s on probation. One call from me and they shut down your house.”
“I recognize them.”
“Tell me what happened,” said Sinclair.
Cameron told them about the Saturday night before the first week of classes last year, the night when all fraternities had their first party of the school year. The active members screened guys at the door to keep nonstudents out but seldom checked student IDs on girls.
“A lot of girls at a frat house makes for great recruiting of new pledges,” said Sinclair.
“You got that right,” Cameron said and told them that a few hours after the party began, he spotted Brandon, a sophomore who had expressed interest in joining the fraternity. Brandon was drinking beer in one of the rooms with another kid and two girls. The girls definitely weren’t college age.
Sinclair scrolled down the names on the roster. “Brandon Shaw, is that the Brandon you’re talking about?”
“Yeah. He knew the rules. Absolutely no underage girls allowed, and no one under twenty-one is allowed to drink.”
“The girls?” asked Sinclair.
“The ones in your photos,” said Cameron. “They were totally wasted. I told Brandon to get them out of the house.”
“Did he?”
“I didn’t see them the rest of the night. He came by the house the next afternoon and apologized and said he still wanted to pledge, so we had a long talk.”
“Did he become a member?”
“We let him in as a pledge the fall semester, but it didn’t work out.”
“What happened?”
“Fraternities aren’t what they used to be. None of that Animal House stuff, but it’s not like we inspect our fraternity brothers’ rooms to make sure there’s no booze or females. If they’re not twenty-one and they drink, they have to be cool about it. Brandon wasn’t. There was also talk that he was dealing, and if this house got caught with drugs, we’d be shut down.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Party stuff, mostly X, pot, pharmies.”
“How about roofies or molly?”
“Maybe.”
“Where’s Brandon now?”
“Haven’t seen him since the end of that semester—just before Christmas.”
“What about the other boy?” Sinclair asked.
“Only time I saw him. Brandon was trying to get him to pledge, but the boy’s father wouldn’t let him live on campus or join a fraternity. I saw his student ID that night, so I know he was a Cal student.”
“Remember his name?”
“No.”
“Describe him.”
“Middle Eastern, maybe Indian or Pakistani. Freshman age, small kid, maybe five-eight, black hair.”
After Sinclair and Braddock took a taped statement from Cameron, they returned to their car on the shaded street three blocks from campus. Braddock called homicide to have someone run Shaw, while Sinclair called a detective at UCPD. The detective told him Brandon Shaw was a sophomore engineering major during fall semester last year when the party occurred. His grades dropped from As and Bs as a freshman to all Cs and Ds that semester. He was placed on academic probation and dropped out in March. The last address the university had for him was on Lee Street in Oakland.
“CORPUS shows a Brandon Shaw,” said Braddock, referring to the county criminal history system, “age twenty, former address the same as the fraternity house, current address on Lee. Arrested in March for possession of methamphetamine and narcotics paraphernalia, probably a crystal meth pipe, and then last month for possession for sales of crack cocaine. FTAed on his last court date, so there’s a warrant in the system.”
“From engineering student to crack dealer,” said Sinclair.
“And of course, he ends up in Oakland,” said Braddock.
Chapter 28
Twenty minutes later, Sinclair and Braddock pulled up to a gray apartment building in the Adams Point district of Oakland, a few blocks from Lake Merritt. The patrol squad working that district had weekends off, so to draw that squad on day shift required at least twenty years of seniority. The tall, lean uniformed officer who stood in front of the building was at least ten years older than Sinclair.
“I talked to the apartment manager,” the officer said. “Shaw lives in two-twelve, a two-bedroom unit with three other men. We ran them out. They’ve got a bunch of arrests for property crimes, drugs, and misdemeanors, but no violence or weapons. Sometimes they get loud, but otherwise, the manager says they’re not bad tenants. He gave me a key so we don’t kick down the door.”
The officer radioed another officer who was watching the back in case someone jumped out the window and then led the way inside and up the stairs.
They stacked alongside the door and Sinclair rapped loudly. “Police. Arrest warrant. Open the door.”
In most departments, an arrest for a possession-for-sales warrant would require a tactical entry. Crack sales and guns go hand-in-hand, and since most crack dealers are also users, they can be unpredictable. But in Oakland, such arrests were routine, and the average patrol officer had more experience making felony arrests than SWAT cops in other departments. Besides, Shaw didn’t fit the profile of an armed crack dealer, and the apartment wasn’t a fortified crack house. Nevertheless, each officer’s hand rested on the butt of his pistol.
Sinclair was leaning across the door to knock again, when the door squeaked open. “Show me your hands,” he ordered.
Two hands protruded into the hallway. Sinclair grabbed a wrist and pulled a young blond man dressed in baggy jeans and T-shirt out of the apartment and shoved him toward Braddock, who cuffed him. Sinclair continued watching the open door.
“What’s your name?” asked Braddock.
“Brandon Shaw.”
“Anyone else in the apartment?”
“No.”
While Braddock handcuffed Shaw, Sinclair drew his gun and entered. The uniformed officer followed. Sinclair and the officer walked through the front room, a combination living room and kitchen, and started down the hallway. They swept through the bedrooms and bathrooms, checking closets, shower stalls, and under beds. Once satisfied there was no one else in the apartment, the officer radioed his partner to come around the front.
> Braddock was waiting with Shaw in the living room. She patted him down and removed a wallet and cell phone from his pockets. Then she reached deep into a front pocket and pulled out a small glassine zip-lock baggie containing four small white rocks.
“Looks like you’ve got a new charge on top of the warrant,” Braddock said to Shaw.
“That’s not mine,” Shaw said.
“I guess someone must’ve put those drugs in your pocket,” said Braddock.
“Or maybe you’re wearing someone else’s pants,” said Sinclair.
Shaw shrugged.
Sinclair pulled a sheet of paper from his coat pocket and unfolded it. “Brandon, this is a consent to search form. If you don’t sign it, we’ll get a search warrant. That’ll piss these officers off, because they’ll have to sit around for hours while we type it up and find a judge to sign it, and then when they search your place, they’ll probably make a terrible mess. But if you give us your voluntary consent, we’ll be real neat and out of here in a few minutes.”
Shaw nodded. Braddock removed his right handcuff so Shaw could sign the form.
“Which bedroom’s yours?”
“First one on the left.”
Sinclair told one officer to transport Shaw downtown. Once Shaw was gone, Sinclair gave the other officer instructions on what to look for in the front room while he and Braddock went to the bedroom. Two mattresses, heaped with a tangle of sheets and blankets, lay on the floor, and a dresser with a broken leg leaned against a wall under the window. Piles of dirty clothes lay around the room, which smelled like the inside of a gym bag. Braddock took the closet and went through the pockets of all the clothes. Sinclair did the same with the clothes on the floor and then went through each drawer of the dresser. There were papers and photos in the top drawer. Although nothing appeared related to the murders, Sinclair stuck it all in a bag.
When they were finished, the officer was sitting at the kitchen table. “Found a few pipes in a box by the TV, but the kitchen and bathroom turned up nothing.”
Sinclair pulled off his gloves and washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “Nothing in the bedroom but dirty clothes and cockroaches and some papers we’ll look through downtown.”
“Did you include his phone on the consent to search form?” asked Braddock.
“Electronic devices,” he said. “Cell phones fall under that.”
Braddock scrolled through the phone. “Looks like over a hundred contacts, his recent call history, and a bunch of texts. Maybe we should have Sanchez do a dump on the phone so he can sort it on the computer.”
“Makes sense. There’s too much data for us to sort through unless we know what we’re looking for.”
“The call history only goes back six months,” said Braddock. “So there wouldn’t be anything from when Samantha and Jenny were raped.”
“What about photos?”
Braddock handed Sinclair the phone. He swiped through scores of photographs and then stopped. “Cathy,” he said, holding up the phone so that she could see. Sprawled out on a large bed with burgundy sheets, her long, blonde hair splayed across a pillow, was Samantha Arquette. Her eyes were closed. Between her breasts rested a silver peace medallion on a shiny chain.
Chapter 29
Back at the office, Sinclair and Braddock gathered around Sanchez’s computer after he had plugged the phone into his computer with a USB cord and, using a special program, dumped all the phone’s data onto his hard drive.
Sinclair felt Braddock’s fingers digging into his forearm. He turned to face her, expecting to see tears in her eyes. Instead, he saw rage. He placed his hand over hers, and she relaxed her grip.
“There’s more,” said Sanchez as he clicked to the next photo.
Bare-chested and grinning, Shaw sat in a bed next to a naked Jenny Fitzgerald. She was obviously older than Samantha, her body more developed. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. The next photo showed a dark-haired boy in a similar pose, sitting in bed next to Samantha, who had a zombie-like stare fixed on her face.
“Looks like we have the lineup.” said Sinclair. “Jenny with Shaw and Samantha with this boy, who might be Adrian, if Madison is right.”
“That would be Adrian Nadeiri,” said Sanchez. “He’s the only Adrian I saw in Shaw’s contact list.”
Sinclair entered the name into CORPUS. No matches. He tried DMV. The computer spit out an Adrian Nadeiri, nineteen years old, with a Berkeley address. Sinclair brought up the record and looked at the photograph. A definite match with the picture in Shaw’s phone.
“What’s his address?” asked Jankowski. “I’ll go snatch the little fucker out of his house.”
“Let’s do this right,” said Sinclair. “I don’t want some judge to throw out a confession because we acted without a warrant.”
“I’ll ask him to come voluntarily,” said Jankowski. “They never refuse.”
“And no judge would ever consider he was coerced,” added Braddock.
Jankowski gave them a sly smile.
Sinclair called UC, Berkeley, and gave them Nadeiri’s info. The UCPD detective said, “Junior, engineer major, same address as his DMV record. His class schedule puts him in calculus right now.”
“We’ve got enough to arrest him on probable cause for rape, and as long as he’s in a public place, we don’t need a warrant,” said Sinclair.
“I’ll send a unit there pronto and head over myself.”
“Call me if you get him,” said Sinclair. “I’ll send an OPD car to bring him back.”
“Hell, we’ll bring him to you. It’s not like we get to work a murder every day.”
“Don’t tell him what he’s wanted for. And take his phone. I don’t want him tipping off someone at his house.”
Sinclair asked Jankowski to type up an affidavit and search warrant for the house and told him how to interrupt the interview with Shaw and what to say. Sinclair pulled a DNA sample collection kit from the locker, opened the interview room door, and stepped inside. Braddock followed.
Room 201 was six feet by eight with a stained linoleum floor and blue painted wood panels four feet up the walls. Above that, acoustical tiles covered the walls and ceiling. A metal table sat against one wall surrounded by three chairs. Shaw stood in the back corner, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, apparently full of nervous energy.
“I thought I was arrested over drugs,” said Shaw. “The sign on the door says homicide.”
“We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but first, we need to do this,” said Sinclair as he ripped open the package and donned a pair of plastic gloves. He grasped the first cotton swab, which looked like a Q-tip with a long handle.
“Open your mouth,” Sinclair ordered.
Sinclair rubbed the cotton tip against the inside of Shaw’s cheek, rotating it as he moved it in and out several times. He placed the swab on the packaging to air dry.
“What’s this for?”
“DNA sample.”
“What for?”
“We’ll talk about it in a little bit. Open again.”
Sinclair took the second swab from its sterile package and swabbed the other cheek. Braddock stood by the door with her notebook in hand.
“Time of test?” asked Braddock.
Sinclair glanced at his watch. “Fourteen-thirty-eight.”
“Shaw, Brandon,” Braddock said as she filled out the form. “Date of birth?”
Shaw started to speak, but Sinclair interrupted. “I have all that in his file.”
“You have a file on me?” asked Shaw.
Sinclair smiled as Jankowski rapped on the door and stuck his head inside. “The crime lab’s on the phone. They pulled the DNA evidence on the two girls and are waiting on you.”
“Tell ’em I’ll be right up with the samples,” said Sinclair.
“What girls? What’s this all about?”
“We’ll talk about it.” Sinclair and Braddock gathered up the DNA kit and left the room.
; Once outside, Sinclair grinned at Jankowski and Braddock. “You both should get academy awards for your acting.”
“Did he buy it?” asked Jankowski.
“I’ll bet Shaw’s having visions of rows of test tubes and swirling lab machines getting ready to spit out a DNA match,” said Braddock.
“I just hope he doesn’t know that the lab has a backlog of over a thousand DNA cases, and even if they dropped everything, we couldn’t see test results before Monday,” said Sinclair.
“What now?” asked Braddock.
“We let him stew and grab a sandwich.”
Ten minutes later, they were back at their desks, a turkey sandwich on whole wheat in front of Braddock and roast beef on a hard roll with chips and a diet coke in front of Sinclair. Connie told them the UC police called and were en route with Adrian Nadeiri.
Sinclair was three bites into his sandwich when Lieutenant Maloney stopped in front of his desk, his arms folded across this chest. “I feel like something’s going on and everyone’s in on it but me.”
Sinclair brought Maloney up to date and added, “We need an admission from both to make a chargeable case on the rapes. If they don’t talk, no DA will file on them without a DNA match.”
“You think they’re good for the murders too?” asked Maloney.
Sinclair had been asking himself that question ever since they learned Brandon Shaw’s name at the fraternity house. The murders of Zachary and Susan felt bigger than Shaw and Nadeiri, but Sinclair had learned never to underestimate even the most normal person’s capacity to kill.
“I’ll know better once we talk with them,” said Sinclair.
“I need to inform the chief.”
“Can you hold off? We don’t know where this’ll lead, and if it leaks, evidence and other suspects might disappear.”
“I’ll mention the importance of confidentiality,” said Maloney.
Sinclair and Braddock discussed their interview strategy as they finished their sandwiches. Then they entered the interview room for the next round. Shaw sat slumped in the chair farthest from the door.
“I’ll trade you,” said Sinclair, pulling out the chair in the middle of the table for him. “Can I get you some coffee, water, or a soda?”