by Brian Thiem
“I don’t know nothing about those drugs and guns.”
“That’s fine,” Sinclair said. “And I’ll take a statement to that effect, but first you need to agree to talk to us.”
“I’ll talk, but I ain’t admitting to nothing.”
“That’s fine.” Sinclair wrote T-bone’s responses on the form and slid it in front of him. “I need your initials here and here and your signature here, saying you agree to talk.”
T-bone signed the form, and Sinclair slid it into his folio. Out of sight and out of mind. “Let’s first get the stuff about the drugs and guns out of the way. We found quite a bit of methamphetamine in the house. What do you know about that?”
“Look at me. Do I look like someone who snorts crank?”
Meth addicts were usually skinny, but casual users could maintain their weight and health as long as they controlled their usage. “No, you don’t. But that doesn’t mean you don’t sell it.”
“Look, man, this is my best clothes,” he said, referring to the pair of baggy department store jeans and worn sneakers that the officers permitted him to put on before they transported him. “All I get is six hundred a month for disability. I give most of that to my sister to let me sleep on the couch.”
“Your sister looks like a tweaker,” Sinclair said. “No disrespect meant, but she’s skinny as shit and looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks. Are the drugs hers?”
“I won’t say nothing about my sister.”
“How about Animal? You know, Reggie Clement, your sister’s husband. The quantity of drugs tells me someone’s selling.”
“They’re not married. And I won’t say nothing bad about him either. For the record, I don’t know nothing about no drugs or guns.”
Sinclair looked at Braddock. She shrugged. “Actually, I don’t care much about the drugs,” Sinclair said. “What I’m investigating is a shooting that happened last night. We know that a Simba club member named Shane Gibbs was shot in a bar last night. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we know Animal was there, and after the shooting, he came to your sister’s house. My guess is he might’ve ditched a gun there and said something about what happened in the bar.”
“What’s Animal say happened?”
“Some other detectives are talking to him. I’m thinking that Shane must’ve done something to get himself shot. If Animal said something that you heard about what Shane did, it might help him.”
“I don’t know nothing about any shooting, and I don’t want to talk about any of this shit anymore.”
If Sinclair were only concerned with getting T-bone to confess to possession of narcotics or firearms, he would’ve stopped the interview, since T-bone’s statement would probably be ruled as an invocation of his Miranda rights. But they needed to know what Animal said and did when he came to the house, and Miranda rights only applied to suspects, not witnesses. For the next half hour, he and Braddock worked on T-bone, trying to get him to divulge anything they could use against Animal, but got nowhere.
Sinclair handed him his business card. “Sorry, but the boss says I have to send you to jail. If you change your mind and want to talk, give me a call.”
They took him back to the lineup room and brought in a second suspect, a thirty-year-old man with a shaved head, wearing black jeans and a Savage Simba leather vest. The vest displayed the club’s patch on the back, an embroidered lion’s face with its mouth wide open as if it were roaring. Above the patch was a banner that read, Savage Simbas, and underneath was a rocker that read, Oakland. Outlaw motorcycle gangs were highly territorial, and Oakland had been Hells Angels territory for decades, so other gangs needed their permission to open a charter in or around Oakland. For years, the Eastbay Dragons, another black gang, was the only motorcycle club the Angels allowed, so when Savage Simbas started a club five years ago, everyone assumed the Hells Angels had blessed it.
As soon as Sinclair read the club member his Miranda rights, he said lawyer. Since this man might’ve been involved in the murder, either as a principal or accessory, that ended the conversation. The same thing happened with their third interview.
Sinclair and Braddock returned him to the lineup room and were preparing to grab another gang member to interview when one of the officers told them the homicide section commander wanted to see them. Lieutenant Carl Maloney was sitting behind his desk in a glass-walled office that overlooked the homicide room. Dressed in a white shirt and red-and-blue-striped tie, Maloney was in his late forties. He had thinning hair and carried about thirty pounds more than when he was a fit street cop more than two decades earlier.
“Are you two having any luck?” he asked.
“We struck out with the first three,” Braddock said.
“Knowing the biker code, I doubt we’ll get much,” Maloney said. “Have you seen your old partner yet?”
“No,” she replied. “When we left the scene of our warrant, the Intel guys still hadn’t heard from him.”
“I hope he surfaces soon. The media’s going crazy over this, and it would sure be nice to have Phil around to talk about the history of the Simbas and other biker gangs.” Maloney got up and pulled a slip of paper out of the suitcoat that was hanging on a rack in the corner of his office. “I just got a call from the radio room. Patrol’s standing by on a DOA in the Oakland hills. A hiker or someone came across a body in a shallow grave on the road into the PAL camp,” he said, referring to the Police Activities League. “I hate to dump this kind of case on you guys when you’re not on standby, but with all the attention on this biker murder, I don’t want to divert Jankowski’s and Sanchez’s full attention from what they’re doing.”
Investigators in homicide usually prided themselves on handling every callout during their standby week, but sometimes it wasn’t possible. Although a body dump in the hills had all the markings of a whodunit that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve, Jankowski and Sanchez had picked up the slack for them on more than one occasion.
“No problem, boss,” Sinclair said. “What’s another open case on my desk?”
“Here’re the details.” Maloney handed him the note. “And Matt, let’s hear some optimism. You might go to the vic’s house to make a notification and find a spouse just waiting to confess.”
Chapter 4
Sinclair stepped out of his car with his notebook in hand. He wrote, Tue, June 3, 1006 hrs. 10100 Skyline Blvd, approx. 50 yds. from gate to PAL Camp. Clear, dry, sunny, warm, approx. 70°.
The PAL camp was located high in the redwood forest of Joaquin Miller Park, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Oakland and a world apart. The Oakland Police Activities League was the brainchild of a forward-thinking police captain who commanded the department’s youth services division in the early eighties, along with a group of officers and community and business volunteers. With a motto of “Getting to the kids before they get into trouble,” the organization reached thousands of youth annually through after-school programs and sports and at the rustic camp in the hills, where inner-city youth often got their first experience with the outdoors.
Several marked patrol vehicles were lined up on the road leading into the camp. A fortysomething blond-haired man with sergeant strips on his short-sleeve shirt approached Sinclair and Braddock. Sergeant Shumaker had come on the department five years prior to Sinclair and had spent all his twenty years in uniform.
“The call came in at nine eighteen,” Shumaker said in his best imitation of Joe Friday’s just-the-facts-ma’am voice. “A citizen riding his mountain bike down the road from the archery range startled a pack of wild dogs or coyotes in the brush just off the road. He investigated further and observed they had partially dug up a body buried in a shallow grave. He called nine-one-one on his cell.”
“Is he still at the scene?” asked Sinclair, noticing a bicycle parked between two police cars.
“Yeah, one of my officers is getting his statement down at one of the camp buildings. We’ll transport him back if you want to talk
to him.”
Sinclair looked at the two single-pole gates, swung open alongside the road. “Was the gate locked when you got here?”
“Yeah, one of the PAL officers showed up with a key. But as you can see, it’s not a far walk for someone, even carrying a body. They could’ve parked right on the other side of the gate at night or even driven into the archery range and walked down a trail or just through the woods. This place is pretty isolated at night, except for occasional security checks by the rangers.”
Sinclair and Braddock followed Shumaker and a civilian evidence tech across a soft carpet of pine needles and wood bark that reminded him of the mulch in well-kept suburban neighborhoods. Dirt and debris had been sprayed ten feet from the hole where the body lay, consistent with the reported digging by wild animals. The corpse was lying in a prone position, a heavy-duty green garbage bag covering most of its upper torso. Dirt partially covered the legs, and the flesh of one leg had been ripped apart and partially eaten. The victim wore dark-blue jeans, which appeared to be more expensive than the Levi’s Sinclair typically wore off duty, and new-looking Nike sneakers. A two-tone gold-and-stainless-steel watch was on the dark-skinned wrist hanging outside the garbage bag. Sinclair squatted down and examined the watch.
“Rolex,” he said. “And it doesn’t look like a knock-off.”
“Same thing I noticed,” said the tall, bearded civilian tech. “Maybe I’ve been doing this too long, but when I see a black man wearing a Rolex taking a dirt nap in the Oakland Hills, my first thought is some drug gang is wiping out the leadership of its rivals.”
Sinclair said nothing, but as hard as he tried to avoid jumping to conclusions before he had the facts, he had to admit that had been his first thought too. The garbage bag was ripped at the bottom, probably by the animals trying to get to their meal, and part of the victim’s head was visible. Sinclair walked around the body, looking carefully where he put his feet to ensure he wasn’t trampling any evidence, and leaned over to get a closer look. Dried blood surrounded a small hole on the man’s shaved head.
“Looks like an entrance wound,” said the tech, scrolling through his digital camera photos. “I got good close-ups of it, and I’ll get more once the coroner uncovers the rest of the body.”
“Any reports of gunshots or suspicious activity out here last night?” Braddock asked Shumaker.
“The dispatcher checked the last twenty-four hours and found nothing,” Shumaker said. “Are you ready for the coroner? I already gave them a heads-up that they’d need some shovels and stuff, so they might already be on their way.”
“Have them respond and get an ETA,” Sinclair said. “Meanwhile, Braddock and I’ll go down to the camp and talk with the witness.”
They bounced down the narrow, treelined road in their car to a few simple wooden buildings around the perimeter of a clearing. Farther into the trees were the elevated cabins where the kids bunked overnight. A basketball court was at one end of the clearing, which had been a swimming pool badly in need of repair before it was filled in and paved over years ago. Sinclair had been to the camp several times in his first few years in the department, and as much as he loved the mountain setting and programs that kept kids off the street, he’d felt nothing but disdain for the police officers working there. To him, cops were supposed to fight crime and lock up bad guys. If they wanted to be social workers, they should’ve picked that career. But after fifteen years of banging heads with the worst elements of society in a career that took him from patrol to special operations to vice narcotics to robbery and finally to homicide seven years ago, he was beginning to think there might be more to policing than just arresting crooks. He also wondered how many more years he could endure seeing the most depraved acts people could do to one another before a job spending summers at a camp in this redwood forest would look enticing.
Sinclair parked his car in front of the reporting officer’s cabin. The RO was the primary officer on a call and responsible for writing the crime report. Over the years, it became a slang term for any police officer. The RO’s cabin was where the PAL officer or the substitute stayed overnight when camp was in session. A heavyset white officer wearing the short-sleeve uniform and a tall, athletic-looking, black female officer dressed in jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt with the PAL patch came out of the cabin, followed by a thirtysomething man dressed in a T-shirt and cargo shorts with black spandex bike shorts poking out the legs.
The uniformed officer handed Sinclair a two-page handwritten statement that didn’t say much more than the summary Shumaker had already provided him. After skimming the document, Sinclair asked the citizen, “Do you ride your bike up here often?”
“I ride every day, weather depending, but there’s like a hundred miles of trails up here, so I mix it up.”
“When were you last up here?”
“Maybe a week or ten days ago.”
“Tell me about the wild dogs or coyotes,” Sinclair said.
“I didn’t really get a good look at them. Just shapes running away, but I’ve seen packs of dogs and coyotes in these hills before.”
Sinclair removed his sunglasses and peered into the dark forest just beyond the cabin. The warm sun coupled with a light breeze carrying the rich scent of the pine trees distracted him for a second. “How can you tell the difference?”
“Some dogs look a lot like coyotes, but when it’s a pack of wild dogs, there’re all shapes and sizes in the pack. Most look like they have some pit bull in them, but sometimes shepherd mixes too. Coyotes all look the same. You hear them baying and yipping most nights up here.”
“Have you come this close to them before?”
“Normally I see them in the distance. Coyotes aren’t out much during the day. They’re pretty skittish and take off when they see people.”
“You know quite a bit about them,” Sinclair said.
“I ride in the winter when there aren’t many people hiking the trails, and I’ve run across all kinds of animals, including bears, up here. I try to make plenty of noise when I’m coming around corners to let hikers or animals know I’m around.”
Sinclair looked at the man’s address on the statement form. “Castle Drive’s not far away, is it?”
“About a mile. There’s a trail that runs through the woods so I don’t have to ride on Skyline Boulevard to get to the park.”
“That’s your business address also.”
“I’m a financial planner, so I work out of my house and see my clients at their offices or homes. I set my own schedule, so I usually ride in the mornings.”
“Did you see any suspicious people or activity today?”
He shook his head.
Sinclair turned to the PAL officer. “Doesn’t look like much going on at the camp.”
“Our first session of the season isn’t until next week,” she said. “There will be a few dozen volunteers here this weekend to get everything ready. That will be the first real activity since last summer.”
Sinclair thanked the citizen and officers and drove back down the bumpy road with Braddock. The coroner’s van sat behind the patrol vehicles, and two men dressed in the dark-blue utility uniform of the coroner’s investigators were crouched over the body. They were from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which had taken over the administration of the coroner’s office years ago, and it was only recently that the last of the civilian coroner’s investigators had retired. Sheriff’s deputies now assumed the role of coroner investigator on all scenes. Although handling dead bodies didn’t seem like a glamorous duty assignment, Sinclair figured it beat working at one of the two jails and being locked behind bars with prisoners all day.
The older deputy of the two straightened up when Sinclair and Braddock approached. “Preliminarily, I’d say the victim was killed within the last twenty-four hours,” he said. “The body still shows signs of rigor.”
“Pretty sloppy burial,” Sinclair mused. “Any ID on him?”
“We were just startin
g when you pulled up.” The deputy brushed dirt from the victim’s left back pocket with a gloved hand. “This feels like a wallet. I can remove it now if you want to see who he is.”
Sinclair moved behind the deputy as he removed a brown leather wallet. He flipped it open and pulled the top card from its slot.
The ID card had the Oakland Police Department logo in the upper left corner. Underneath it read, Phillip Roberts, Sergeant of Police.
Chapter 5
Sinclair was no stranger to death. Still, it took every bit of self-control he possessed to maintain his composure when they realized the victim was Phil. Braddock crumbled. He helped her to her feet and walked her to their car with his arm around her waist. He left her there, returned to the body, and rallied the officers and coroner’s deputies. “You don’t need me to tell you that we need to do this right. If you need a few minutes to get your game faces on, do it now.”
Sinclair didn’t agree with what psychologists considered the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. He’d observed people too many times to believe there was one normal response when they learned of a loved one’s death. Everyone at the scene displayed a degree of shock—surprise that one of their own was dead. Maybe if Phil’s body wasn’t right in front of them, there might have been some degree of denial. Looking at the grim faces in front of him, Sinclair saw only pain and sadness. He allowed himself to feel that way for the minute it took to help Braddock to their car, a safe place where she could feel how she needed to for as long as necessary. But now, all he felt was anger—a simmering rage. But he knew from past experience that anger must be controlled and focused. His entire focus had to be finding the killer. Nothing else mattered.
Sinclair looked at the coroner’s deputies. “Call your boss on your phone—no radio—and get whatever resources necessary to exhume the body properly. Tell your boss that Sergeant Roberts used to work homicide. And if anyone leaks his name to the media or to anyone who doesn’t need to know, I’ll have his ass.”