Red Line

by Brian Thiem

  Sinclair stood there, hoping to hear Moore’s footsteps racing through the house and out the front door or to see his face in a window looking for an escape. The smell of rotting garbage piled outside the door filled his nostrils. The silence in the house told him that Moore was still inside, possibly lying in wait for someone fool enough to come in after him. Or he could be quietly moving toward the front, hoping to slip out and escape before more officers arrived.

  Sinclair was not about to let Moore get away. There was a fine line separating courage and stupidity with cops, and Sinclair knew he was straddling it. He pulled a small Surefire flashlight from his pocket and slid it onto the accessory rails below the barrel of his pistol. He slowly opened the door and slipped inside the dark house.

  He flicked the light on and swept his gun and the light beam around the small kitchen and then turned it off and moved against a wall. The kitchen opened into a small dining room with a closed door to the left. Sinclair had been inside old houses like this in Oakland many times and knew the door probably led to a short hallway and two bedrooms.

  The stale air smelled of mold and cat urine. He stood there and listened. The sirens were getting closer, but the house was silent except for Sinclair’s breathing and his heart still pounding in his chest.

  He took a deep, slow breath, held it for three counts, and slowly let it out, as he’d been taught years ago in the SWAT operator’s course. The slow, full breaths lowered his racing heartbeat. He repeated the combat breathing technique several more times and felt the calming effect.

  The floor in the dining room creaked.

  Sinclair crept forward, shifting his weight softly from foot to foot. He held his gun with both hands at a low ready with the light off. Defused light came in through the windows—enough to see the doorway and walls now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

  Standing to the side of the doorway, he took three more slow, deep breaths and then moved quickly through the doorway, his gun up and sweeping across the room, the small flashlight mounted on his pistol illuminating the dining room.

  A gunshot went off, its blast deafening due to the small room and its muzzle flash nearly blinding. Time slowed. Sinclair felt he was moving in slow motion.

  He brought his gun up in the direction of the muzzle flash. Moore stood no more than five steps away and leveled his gun for a second shot.

  Sinclair thrust his gun toward Moore and fired a double-tap, two shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

  The roar of his .45 was even louder than Moore’s gun, and the muzzle flashes lit up the small room like a strobe light.

  The gun bucked twice in Sinclair’s hands from the recoil. He released the switch on his gun-mounted flashlight and the room became pitch dark.

  He quietly moved across the room in the darkness and took another slow and deep breath. He awaited the onrush of pain, expecting to feel the warm, sticky, and wet sensation of blood oozing from his body.

  Sinclair had been shot before and knew the adrenaline from the fight could mask the pain temporarily. Pain that would eventually come like a red-hot poker thrust deep into his body, every nerve ending screaming simultaneously, followed by a wave of overpowering weakness, and then unconsciousness as his body goes into shock.

  He stood there for several counts, waiting for it.

  It didn’t come. He felt nothing.

  Moore’s bullet had missed.

  Sinclair’s eyes scanned the far wall for movement, but he felt blind in the darkness after the muzzle flashes. He wanted to turn on his light again to see where Moore was, but he dared not give away his position.

  Although he knew Moore might be right in front of him in the darkness, lining up his gun for another shot, he also felt safe surrounded by the darkness.

  Slowly his night vision returned, and the shapes of a dining table, a hutch, and a five-foot-wide opening that led to the living room materialized.

  “You muthafucka. You shot me.” The high-pitched voice came from the living room on the other side of the doorway.

  “Alonzo, you shot at me first,” said Sinclair. “I would have been, what—the sixth person you killed?”

  “Sinclair, it’s you who’s the killer. The Tribune say you killed two dudes before. You gonna kill me too?”

  “Throw out your gun and you’ll live.”

  “You shot it out of my hand. I ain’t got it.”

  “You’re lying. Throw the gun toward me.”

  “I ain’t fuckin’ with ya, man. The gat’s on the floor somewhere. It’s dark. I can’t see shit. I’m bleeding.”

  Sinclair heard two sirens getting louder and then go silent. He knew that meant two patrol cars were pulling up. He switched on the flashlight attached to his Sig Sauer and approached the living room doorway.

  Sinclair crept across the opening, his light illuminating the room in small slices as he moved. First he saw two feet with black tennis shoes. He inched forward and saw blue jeans and the bottoms of Moore’s legs on the filthy shag carpet.

  Sinclair moved farther toward the center of the doorway.

  At any second he expected to see the gun in Moore’s hand pointing at him. As he shuffled to his right, he saw Moore’s left hand resting on his belly, blood oozing through his fingers. Moore sat on the floor, leaning against a brown plaid sofa. The pistol was on the floor near his right knee. His right hand was on the floor an inch away.

  “Don’t move,” ordered Sinclair as he stepped toward him, pointing his gun at the center of his chest.

  Sinclair knew Moore could grab for the gun and get off a quick shot at him, maybe even before Sinclair could react. Moore lay only two or three steps away. For a moment, Sinclair thought about taking those steps, reaching in with his left foot and sweeping the gun away. However, Moore could kick him as he moved, distracting him as he went for his gun, or just go straight for his gun as Sinclair moved and was off balance. Moore’s eyes bored into his, and Sinclair sensed the wheels turning in his head.

  “Don’t move, Alonzo, it’s over,” said Sinclair, keeping the gun light trained on Moore’s chest.

  “Shit, Sinclair. You got nothing on me.”

  “How about attempted murder of a police officer and attempted murder of those two workers of yours you were about to kill?”

  “Them boys ain’t gonna testify. And you ain’t in no police uniform. I tell the judge I think you some gangbanger trying to cap me. It’s self-defense.”

  Sinclair kept his eyes on Moore’s right hand as it slowly inched toward the gun. “It’s over. Get your hands up.”

  “Sinclair, you got no proof I killed nobody. But you—you the killer. Even the papers and TV news say so.”

  Moore’s fingers continued to inch toward the gun. “Maybe I take a plea, do one, two years. But that’s all.”

  Moore’s fingers stiffened—touched the gun. Sinclair waited for him to wrap his fingers around the gun but pulled the trigger before Moore could raise his gun.

  *

  Sinclair got up from his chair and walked to the hotel room window. The morning sun’s rays hit his face. The sky was clear, not a trace of morning fog. He felt his heartbeat slow.

  Walt said nothing until Sinclair finally turned around and looked at him.

  “I take it the department did a full investigation,” said Walt.

  “The department and the DA’s office both ruled my shooting justifiable.”

  Although the shooting was determined to be in self-defense, Sinclair’s superiors reprimanded him for his unauthorized surveillance of Moore and pursuing him into the yards and the abandoned house at night alone. They said it was stupid, foolish, and dangerous. Sinclair couldn’t disagree. If the media hadn’t gotten hold of the story and made Sinclair out as a hero, he knew he would have faced major disciplinary action; however, it would have been a PR nightmare for the department to do anything other than accept the accolades from the community for taking a vicious killer off the streets.

  “If you d
idn’t shoot, he would’ve shot you,” said Walt.

  “I know.”

  “Yet you feel enormous guilt.” Walt said it as a fact, as if he could read Sinclair’s mind.

  “What I feel guilty about is that I don’t feel any guilt over it. Ever since that night, I’ve been asking myself whether I killed him because I had to or because I wanted to.”

  Chapter 53

  Sinclair pushed open the office door and saw Braddock, Jankowski, and Sanchez sitting in a circle of desk chairs drinking coffee.

  “I guess I’m late,” said Sinclair.

  “I think we can let you slide today,” said Braddock. “How’re you feeling?”

  “My feet and knees are damn sore, and these new shoes don’t help, but other than that, I’m great.”

  “SFPD called and gave us names of two people who might have seen the abduction of Melissa Mathis,” said Braddock. “So I thought that once we finish our coffee, Dan and I could head over there and handle it.”

  “Because I’m still confined to the office per the chief’s order.”

  “Sorry, Matt.”

  “I just got off the phone with an NYPD detective before you walked in,” said Jankowski.

  Sinclair dropped into his desk chair and spun it around to face Jankowski.

  “The detective sat in on the interview with Jane’s common-law after she killed herself. He was the one who found her.”

  “The common-law husband wasn’t a suspect?” asked Sinclair.

  “No, he was at work and it was no doubt a suicide. Anyway, they weren’t married but had been in a long-term relationship. Says his name was Chris Olsen. Remembers him as being forty or forty-five, between six and six-two, and well-built, maybe one ninety or two hundred, with sandy blond hair and a beard.”

  “The same size as the guy who visited my apartment.”

  “Exactly my thought,” said Jankowski.

  “Is Olsen Samantha’s father?”

  “I asked, but the detective said he didn’t know. He wasn’t the primary on the case; he was just helping on the interview.”

  “Or he knew but wouldn’t tell you. What did he admit knowing?”

  “He told me an s-o-n spelling in Olson means the person could be from any Scandinavian country or the name was Americanized when the family immigrated. An s-e-n spelling means the name’s Norwegian.”

  “So NYPD’s an expert on Scandinavian surnames?”

  “The guy they interviewed was Norwegian. It’s why he remembers his name’s spelled O-L-S-E-N.”

  Sinclair poked the on button to his computer and pushed the papers on his desk to the side. He pounded the enter key, even though he knew that wouldn’t make the computer start quicker. Although he was a long ways from proving Olsen was the killer, everything felt right about him. Sinclair knew he was on the right track for the first time since he stood over Zachary Caldwell’s lifeless body on the bus bench.

  “What else did that detective say about Olsen?” asked Sinclair.

  “He said that the case packet on Jane’s suicide isn’t in the unit files or archived, even though it should be closed, and he was told he had to get approval from his boss or partner before he said anything else.”

  “More secrecy,” said Sinclair. “Who are they protecting?” Once the screen came up, Sinclair punched in his user name and password and clicked the icon to open RMS. If Olsen had any contact with OPD, he’d be in the department’s record management system. It could be as insignificant as making a report for vandalism or witnessing a car break-in. He typed in Chris Olsen and searched from the date of Samantha’s rape forward.

  He got three hits. The first one was for a man twenty-six years old. Too young. The next one was a woman—Christine. The last record was for a Christopher Olsen who was forty-six. He brought up the report. A hit-and-run driver struck Olsen’s car in East Oakland last month. Sinclair toggled to the DMV system and entered the name and the date of birth from the hit-and-run report.

  The driver’s license information popped onto the screen. Five-foot-eight and two-thirty. Not even close.

  “Jankowski,” Sinclair yelled. “You know anyone else at NYPD?”

  “I got the cards of a couple of Polack detectives from the Bronx that I drank beer with at the last homicide conference in Reno.”

  “Dan, you can’t . . . oh, never mind,” said Braddock.

  “I’m a Polack and proud—”

  Sinclair said, “Can you get them to run Olsen in their version of RMS or DMV out there?”

  “I doubt they’re working on Sunday, but I’ll give it a shot.”

  Sinclair turned back to his computer and pulled up the screen for CORPUS, the county arrest and criminal history system, and typed Olsen’s name. Four pages of hits. He printed them out and scanned down the list, crossing out those younger than thirty-five and older than fifty. That left him ten entries on four different people. The first three didn’t match the age or physical. The fourth one was six-one and two hundred pounds. He ran him out. This Olsen had a local arrest record going back twenty years with his first arrest in Fremont for disturbing the peace, followed by a succession of drug charges. It didn’t look favorable. Sinclair couldn’t imagine the killer spending time in the Bay Area until recently. The last arrest was six months ago. Sinclair scrolled through the entry and found the subject had remained in custody with a parole hold until his last court date when he pled guilty to a two-year sentence. Definitely not him.

  “As I suspected, no one’s in,” said Jankowski. “But I talked to a precinct desk sergeant who said he’d try to call one of my old drinking buddies at home. While we’re waiting, Braddock and I might as well head over to the city and do those interviews. Maybe we’ll find someone who saw someone fitting the description of Olsen.”

  Sinclair went back to his computer and ran out all Chris Olsens with an Oakland address in DMV. He was ready to expand his search to surrounding cities, but he knew he was wasting his time. It was a long shot anyway. The Chris Olsen he was looking for wouldn’t have a California driver’s license, and if Olsen was the killer, as meticulously as he had planned the murders, he’d certainly be able to avoid police contact. He tried several websites and found more than a hundred Chris Olsens in New York. He eliminated some. It was appearing hopeless. Even if he were looking at the right Chris Olsen on the computer, he might not know it. He needed a birth date, a social security number, or some other identifier to bring up a driver’s license, a criminal history, or some other record to be sure the Olsen he was viewing was the Chris Olsen he was looking for.

  Chapter 54

  The man sat at his hand-me-down desk in the windowless office scanning the Channel 6 breaking news on his desktop computer. The big news so far was the heat. Not yet noon and San Francisco was already in the mideighties, and Oakland was poised to tie the record high of ninety-nine degrees for the date, set in 1978. It showed one news team was in Marin County filming sailboats on the bay with the skyline of San Francisco in the background and another was interviewing a fire chief in southeast Alameda County about the risk of a wildfire. He pulled his smartphone from his jeans pocket, looked at the e-mails in the draft folder that he had previously prepared, and reviewed the first e-mail in the sequence:

  To: Elizabeth.Schueller@channelsixnews.org

  From: Oakland-BBK@gmail.com

  Subject: Bus Bench Killer Interview

  Hello Ms. Schueller:

  I understand you were interested in interviewing the man whom you refer to as the Bus Bench Killer. If you are still interested in doing so, please advise.

  Best regards

  He pressed send.

  Chapter 55

  As he paced the homicide office in his stocking feet, Sinclair felt like the inmates he’d seen walking prison yards. He’d given up trying to find the right Chris Olsen among the hundreds on the Internet and spent the last hour reading reports from Melissa Mathis’s murder, hoping for something that would tell him Olsen was the man respo
nsible. But there were no witnesses to her abduction and none of the witnesses on the freeway got a look at the driver’s face. He called the crime lab, and a criminalist in the fingerprint unit answered the phone.

  “This is Sinclair down in homicide. What’re you doing here on a Sunday?”

  “Working your murder cases, Sergeant,” she said.

  “Any luck?”

  “No, but I’m relooking at the evidence in all the cases to see if there’s anything we can examine for fingerprints again, maybe through fuming.”

  “If you find anything—”

  “You’ll be the first one I call,” she said.

  Sinclair dialed the home phone number he had for Donna Fitzgerald and was surprised when she answered.

  “I’m not calling about Jenny,” he said before she could hang up. “What can you tell me about Chris Olsen?”

  “I need to put this behind me, not only for Jenny’s benefit, but for mine too,” she said. “Please don’t call me again.”

  At least she didn’t slam the phone in his ear, he thought, as he called the phone number the woman at Berzerkeley Boutique had given him for the owner. Skye was the only person who had seen Olsen, assuming the man who bought all the medallions was Olsen. He got her voicemail and left another message. He entered her phone number into the computer, and it showed to be a landline with a Berkeley address. He called Berkeley PD and requested they send an officer by the address to see if Skye was there.

  Ten minutes later, the Berkeley officer called. “The address is a big, old house filled with big, old hippies. Her housemates said she’s away this weekend but should be home by around five this afternoon.”

  “Any way to locate her now?”

  “They said she doesn’t believe in cell phones, and the rumor is she’s at a lesbian camp or commune somewhere near Guerneville.”