Shallow Grave

by Brian Thiem

  Patrol officers didn’t have a desk, and their patrol cars were shared with officers who worked the beat on other shifts, so their lockers were the only personal space they had and were often used to keep whatever was of value to them. Sinclair still kept his passport and personal papers in an accordion folder next to his boots on the bottom shelf instead of paying a monthly bank fee for a safety deposit box. He knew fellow officers who kept cash from off-duty jobs in their lockers, as well as expensive watches, jewelry, and boxed handguns they’d bought but never fired.

  Sinclair arranged three empty boxes on the bench. Into one, he placed Phil’s duty gun, ammunition, gun belt, Kevlar vest, and other safety equipment. He pulled a box for a Glock Model 27 from the top shelf. Empty. That was the gun Phil carried when in plain clothes, the one that normally resided in the empty holster they found strapped to his body. He pushed a uniform and the dress jacket to the side. He would keep that in the locker for Officer Kelly, the family liaison, to deliver to the mortuary for Phil’s funeral. He folded the other uniforms and a few items of civilian clothes that hung in the locker and put them in the box destined for his wife.

  Sinclair couldn’t figure out why Phil hadn’t removed his name from the emergency form. On his own form, Sinclair kept Phil as his family liaison for a year after they were no longer partners. Phil was his closest friend and one person who had never let him down. But after their falling out last year, Sinclair changed it to Braddock—someone he could trust.

  Sinclair removed three cigar boxes stacked on the top shelf. The first one contained hundreds of mug shots—suspects that were wanted for a variety of offenses ranging from burglary to robbery and murder. Some dated back more than twenty years, when Phil worked patrol. Phil had written notes on the back, documenting dates and locations where he searched for the suspects and car license numbers associated with them. Many had notations of the date and location he had arrested them. Sinclair had a stack of similar mug shots in his locker—trophies of criminals he’d bagged in the urban jungle.

  The second box contained dozens of pocket-sized spiral notebooks filled with notes from when Phil was in uniform. The most recent was fifteen years ago, when he made sergeant and transferred to CID. Sinclair recognized the last box from the day they solved the murder of a twelve-year-old boy who’d been killed by a stray bullet fired by a drug dealer in a drive-by shooting. Phil had splurged on that three-hundred-dollar box of Padrón cigars to celebrate.

  Sinclair opened it. A stack of hundred-dollar bills lay on top. He counted eight thousand dollars. Sinclair removed a spiral notebook from the cigar box and paged through it. It was some sort of ledger, an accounting of money spent and received that went back five months. Weekly entries showed a thousand-dollar payment to Sheila, and other payments included Hotel and Meal. On the first of every month, entries marked simply as In were followed by dollar amounts in the thousands. The last entry showed five thousand dollars on June 1.

  A sheet of paper lay at the bottom of the box. Sinclair unfolded a color picture printed from a computer of a gorgeous woman wearing a thong bikini, her skin the color of the lattes Braddock drank. She had straight, black shoulder-length hair and looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Scrolled lettering at the top of the page read, Special Ladies Escorts—Sheila.

  Chapter 30

  Sinclair and Braddock sat in the passenger seat of their Crown Vic in a parking lot on Embarcadero overlooking the Oakland Estuary. Sailboats and small fishing boats bobbed at the dock in the wake of a passing powerboat. Sinclair took a swig of his Diet Coke.

  Braddock stared at the stack of cash in the cigar box and the photo of Sheila. “We have to report this.”

  “And say what? That Sergeant Roberts, the head of OPD’s intelligence unit, was having an illicit affair with a call girl and paying her through some sort of bribery or protection scheme? That he was probably murdered by an organized crime syndicate or maybe by a pissed-off former lover of his hooker? Or maybe by his wife when she discovered his extracurricular activities?”

  The connection to Special Ladies Escorts had caused Sinclair’s stomach to tighten the moment he saw the photo in Phil’s locker. It took him back to the Thrill Kill Murders last December. Dawn Gustafson, a former prostitute who was shot and hanged naked from a tree, had worked for that same escort service. It was on this same case that the rift between him and Phil began when his former partner sided with the Feds and police chief to keep the extensive client list and database of escorts from him. Even after Sinclair ended the lives of the killers during a shootout at a school, the police chief and Feds continued to withhold the information about the escort service’s clients. Although Sinclair still held city Councilmember Preston Yates and business CEO Sergio Kozlov partly to blame for Dawn’s death and had strong evidence showing political corruption ties between them, the chief had ordered him to drop it.

  “We don’t know any of that,” Braddock said.

  “What’s another explanation?”

  “Maybe she’s a source.”

  “It takes an act of god to get a couple of hundred bucks from the department for an informant. And why would he hide the money in his locker? If you’re running a confidential source, you document everything in a file, which you lock up in your office. The Intel unit is about the most secure place in the PAB. Not even his officers had keys to his file cabinets. No, whatever he was doing with this woman didn’t involve police work.”

  Braddock glared at him. “I wouldn’t expect you, of all people, to be so judgmental about someone’s sex life.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit about the affair. That’s between a husband and his wife. It’s the money. Women like this Sheila don’t give it away for free, and Phil wasn’t paying her from his sergeant’s salary. He had to be doing something else to get the money, and I’m sure there’s no shortage of crooks who’d pay big bucks to have the head of Intel in their pocket.”

  It wasn’t entirely true when he said he didn’t care about Phil having an affair. He had looked up to Phil. When Sinclair was struggling with a marriage that wasn’t working, dating a TV reporter everyone knew wasn’t right for him, and going out with a succession of women in search of something that was missing inside him, Phil was going home each night to his wife and kids. His family life seemed perfect, unlike the family Sinclair had grown up with.

  Booze, broads, and bills. According to the academy, those were the reasons cops went bad. In Phil’s situation, it appeared sex was the catalyst and created a need for money. Officers working vice, narcotics, or intelligence had plenty of ways to make extra money, and none of them were good.

  “So you’re in agreement that we need to tell the lieutenant,” Braddock said.

  A sea gull landed a few feet from Sinclair’s open window and looked up at him as if asking for a handout. “This could be the worst scandal to rock the department in decades. They won’t go through with a line-of-duty funeral if this comes to light.”

  “I loved Phil as much as you did, Matt. He dedicated his life to the city and department. I want to see him get the hero’s funeral he deserves, but we’ll all look like fools if it comes out that Phil died because of some off-duty love triangle or as a result of corruption and graft.”

  The last Oakland officer funeral Sinclair attended was for the four officers killed in one tragic day seven years ago, the year Sinclair transferred to homicide. Two motorcycle officers had stopped a man for a routine traffic violation when the guy, who was a parolee at large, shot them both. A few hours later, the parolee emptied an AK-47 into two SWAT officers as they entered the apartment where he was holed up. At the time, it was deadliest incident for the police since 9/11, and ten thousand law enforcement officers from across the country and more than twenty thousand people total filled the Oracle Arena, the home of the Golden State Warriors, for the memorial. Although Phil’s funeral wouldn’t be that large, thousands of police from across the state and many more thousands of citizens would cer
tainly flood whatever venue the city selected for the memorial.

  “Then we better get to the bottom of this before the funeral is set in stone and impossible to stop,” Sinclair said.

  Sinclair put his phone on speaker, called Fletcher, and asked how their unit tracked confidential informants.

  “We’ve formalized the procedure since the NSA’s been around,” he said, referring to the federal negotiated settlement agreement, which stemmed from a series of lawsuits for false arrest, excessive force, and misconduct against the department fifteen years ago. “We have to initiate a CI file on anyone who we pay for information or who we use as a CI in a search warrant affidavit. Sergeant Roberts maintains the files in his office, so he knows the identity of all the informants in the unit.”

  “I take it those files are in one of the locked file cabinets that only Farrington has access to,” Sinclair said.

  “That would be right, but we each keep records of our own CIs.”

  “What about if you pay a CI for info? How’s that handled?”

  “The same as with you guys in homicide or in narcotics. We fill out the little slip when we want money, take it to Sarge, and he gives us the cash. At the end of the month, Sergeant Roberts hands out the little slips, and we fill out the big one-page form, which he then turns in to accounting with his paperwork to re-up our cash. We don’t put the CI’s name on it because it goes to accounting and too many people have access. Instead we just list our CI number and case number.”

  Since Sinclair was sure Farrington wouldn’t allow him to see the CI files, he asked, “So accounting would have copies of the monthly reports?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you think you could get copies of those reports for the last six months? Tell them some bullshit like you’ll be handling this until the unit gets a new sergeant.” Sinclair thought for a moment. “I’m trying to find out if Roberts was paying any informants. I’m looking for significant money, not just twenty or thirty dollars here and there.”

  “I’ll ask to look at the reports we submitted, saying I can’t remember if I claimed an expense or if Sergeant Roberts did. I’ll jot down any CI payments he claimed for, let’s say, fifty or more.”

  “Sounds good,” Sinclair said. “Does that cute little Asian girl still work weekends in accounting?”

  “Susie, yeah, I think so. I’m in the office working on a project for your partner. You want me to do this now?”

  “No time like the present.”

  “Okay, and tell Sergeant Braddock the other stuff she asked for just came in. I’ll print it out and sort it as soon as I get back from accounting.”

  Sinclair hung up and turned to Braddock.

  “I was looking into Phil’s financials yesterday on the off chance that he was killed over something in his personal life,” Braddock said. “One thing stuck out, so I asked Fletcher to do a little research for me. I figured it was probably nothing, but with what we just discovered, it’s all starting to make sense.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In addition to his deferred comp, Phil has close to a hundred thousand in a family of mutual funds and money market. Any money that went into the funds came out of his checking account, so everything appeared on the up and up. Unless he has some secret account somewhere.”

  “He always struck me as a saver rather than a spender.”

  “I used his bank password, went online, and downloaded his checking account transactions for the past year. His OPD paycheck was deposited into his account every two weeks. Once a month, there was an automated transfer of five grand into their joint account. Assuming Abby matched that, I’d think ten grand a month could easily handle their living expenses, especially without a mortgage. Six hundred dollars went to the credit union for a car payment, probably on his Corvette. There were a bunch of small miscellaneous checks, electronic transfers, and an ATM withdrawal every few weeks for a few hundred dollars, probably just spending money.”

  “No big cash deposits or withdrawals?” Sinclair pushed, hoping there’d be something that explained the cash he found in his locker or the money to pay for his weekly visit with Sheila.

  “One monthly electronic payment had me baffled. He made a payment to Wells Fargo on a Visa account every month. Sometimes it was only for fifty or so, but recently it’s been for more than a thousand. Just before the payment, there was a cash deposit and a deposit of another city of Oakland check, much smaller than his paychecks. When added together, it was the exact amount of his Visa payment.”

  Sinclair was tempted to interrupt Braddock and explain what was obvious to any officer who’d worked an undercover assignment, but he wanted to see if she came to the same conclusion.

  “I had a hunch and called Fletcher,” she said. “As I guessed, their undercover credit cards are issued by Wells Fargo, and most of the guys submit their undercover expenses in time to get paid just before their credit card bill is due.”

  “That’s a lot of money to put on your UC credit card,” Sinclair said. “When I was in vice narcotics, some guys used their cards when their personal cards were maxed out or to hide expenses from their wives.”

  “Was that permitted?”

  “As long as we paid off our balance every month, no one cared what we used the card for.”

  Braddock’s cell phone chimed. She looked at the screen and quickly typed a message with her thumbs. Sinclair had resisted texting for years and still hated it except for quick messages he could peck out with his index finger. “That’s Fletcher,” she said. “He has the last year of Phil’s UC credit card statements and wants to meet us away from the PAB.”

  Chapter 31

  They sat at one of the classic red vinyl booths in the back of the Claremont Diner, a fifties retro building not far from the Berkeley border. “I hope you guys don’t mind coming way up here,” Fletcher said. “I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be seen together by any of the IA rats that scurry around all the downtown eating joints.”

  “I appreciate the risk you’re taking,” Sinclair said.

  “Hell, I think we’re all in deep shit if they find out what we’re doing. First of all, I checked in accounting, and Sergeant Roberts didn’t claim any CI expenses in the last six months.”

  With that, what little hope Sinclair had held onto that the payments Phil had made to Sheila were legit had vanished. The waitress brought coffee for them, and Fletcher ordered breakfast. After she sashayed across the black-and-white tile floor to the kitchen with their order, Fletcher slid a file across the table.

  Sinclair pulled the stack of credit card statements from the folder, and as he and Braddock scanned the top one, Fletcher explained, “Everything looked normal until about mid-January. Beginning then, a dinner charge for fifty or sixty dollars started showing up every Friday night for different restaurants in Napa and a hotel charge for the same night. Beginning in March, there was only the hotel charge, but it was higher than before and varied by ten or twenty dollars.”

  “He probably ate at the hotel and charged the meal to his room,” Braddock said.

  “My thought exactly,” Fletcher said. “Ever since March, he stayed at the same place, the Chardonnay Spa and Resort in St. Helena. Their website lists their cheapest room at two-sixty a night, which would explain a charge for close to four Benjamins after taxes and meals.”

  “Unless you’re willing to stay at a Motel 6, that’s not all that expensive for Napa Valley,” Sinclair said. “I spent twice that for a room during a weekend last year.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Braddock’s furrowed eyebrows. He was about to add that it was before Alyssa but then decided to leave his partner guessing.

  “It looked nice in the photos,” Fletcher said. “A few blocks off the main drag, so it would be a good place to stay if you’re looking for privacy from the tourists and San Francisco weekenders.”

  Or a good place for a clandestine affair, Sinclair thought as the waitress brought a huge plate of corned
beef hash, eggs, toast, and fruit, placed it in front of Fletcher, and filled their coffee cups. He took a sip of his coffee and explained Braddock’s discovery of Phil’s cash deposits and city check that matched his credit card bills.

  “Guys handle their bills different,” Fletcher said between bites. “When I first came to the unit, I did everything by cash to avoid comingling my UC expenses with my personal money. When I received my reimbursement check, I’d cash it at Citibank, where the city check was drawn. I’d then assume my undercover identity, walk over to Wells Fargo, and pay my UC credit card bill. After a while, I realized how ridiculous that was.”

  “Do guys still sometimes use their UC credit card for personal stuff?” Sinclair asked.

  “I never did. Too confusing trying to keep everything straight, but I know some guys do.”

  “How’d you get copies of Roberts’s credit card statements?”

  “I called the guy at bank security that we deal with. He already heard about Sergeant Roberts and was glad to e-mail the statements so we could take care of his affairs.” Fletcher put his fork down and stared beyond Sinclair and Braddock, obviously trying to come up with a way to ask the obvious. Finally, he said, “I have no idea why Sarge was at that hotel every Friday night. He claimed overtime for Friday nights, but I doubt whoever signed off on his overtime questioned what he was doing. If it was for a case he was working, why didn’t he request reimbursement from the department?”

  The obvious answer was that Phil was submitting overtime that he didn’t work, which wouldn’t be the first time an Oakland officer did so, and the logical reason to hide dinner and hotel charges on his UC credit card was to hide an illicit affair from his wife. Fletcher surely had the same suspicion, even though he wasn’t privy to what Sinclair had found in Phil’s locker.

  Braddock pushed her coffee aside. Looking across the table at Fletcher, she said, “I know things look plenty suspicious right now, but I’ll bet once we find the answers to this, everything will make total sense.”