Shallow Grave

by Brian Thiem

  People connected to homicide cases fled afterward for a variety of reasons. If they were a suspect in the killing, fleeing to someplace the police couldn’t find them made sense. If they were a witness, the reasons got more complicated. It could be they just didn’t want to get involved. Maybe they were a friend or business associate of the killer. Maybe they too were involved in some sort of illegal activity, which they wanted to conceal from the authorities. Or maybe they were hiding from the killer because the killer wanted to eliminate anyone who might testify against them. It was also possible the killer was out to murder other people for the same reason they’d killed the first victim, so they had to get out of Dodge to stay alive. Sinclair didn’t know into which category Sheila fell.

  Police fugitive apprehension units normally begin their search for perpetrators in locations where they had previously lived or visited because people felt comfortable in familiar places. Sinclair remembered a drive-by shooting case in West Oakland he’d investigated a few years ago. The shooter hid out at a cousin’s house in East Oakland because no one knew him on that side of town. The shooter had never been more than twenty miles from Oakland in his life, so the other side of town was a world away to him. Needless to say, it didn’t take Sinclair long to find him. Hiding out on the other side of the country was different. If he was still working and told Maloney he wanted to fly three thousand miles to look for a witness, the lieutenant would’ve kicked him out of his office. The department didn’t have the budget to fly somewhere on a hunch, and the truth was, the tiny pieces of information he had that pointed to Hilton Head didn’t amount to much more than that.

  Sinclair perused several websites about Hilton Head Island. A barrier island just north of Georgia, it was a popular beach and golf destination and was connected to the South Carolina mainland by a bridge. The island had a population of 40,000, but with hundreds of resorts, hotels, and timeshares, 2.5 million people a year visited the island. Although Sinclair didn’t know whether she was hiding out from the killer or from the police, if she was good at hiding her trail, she’d be hard to find on an island with that kind of transient population. If he were still a homicide investigator, he’d contact all the airlines and confirm she actually flew there. Then he’d contact the car rental agencies at the airport and check her name with alternate airport transportation, such as busses and shuttles. He’d then contact the local police for help. Police in tourist destinations often had contacts with the hotels and could send out a mass inquiry when they were looking for someone. They could also blanket the town with her photo in hopes that some waiter, hotel clerk, or bartender recognized her.

  He called Braddock. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “That was a great tip about the motorcycle shop. I called Jankowski, and he called a CHP buddy who works on a regional auto theft task force. There’s a law that allows them to inspect any vehicle repair facility for stolen vehicles or parts without a warrant. When we showed up, Irish Mike and a few bikers were drinking beer around the back, so we detained them and searched the place. The task force officers found a hot engine, transmission, and some other Harley parts, which was enough to haul everyone downtown. We also found a case of brand-new light-blue shop rags. Mike said he orders those because no real man would walk off with them like they do with regular red ones.”

  “Except for Tiny,” Sinclair said.

  “We’re taking a break in our interview right now, but Mike already said he’d gone to lunch with Tiny before in Tiny’s van, which always had a bunch of his rags on the floor.”

  “I don’t remember Tiny having a van.”

  “There’s none registered to him,” she said. “It’s supposed to be an old gray Ford. Jankowski figures he bought it for cash and never registered it.”

  “What about others who might have some of his shop rags?”

  “He says anyone who comes in the shop could pick one up, but why would they? My guess is, after our suspect killed Phil, he grabbed what was available to wipe the blood off his hands.”

  “Could the murder have happened at the motorcycle shop?”

  “Nothing to indicate it,” she said. “We have a few techs going through the place, so if there’s any evidence there, we’ll know.”

  “Which brings us back to Tiny.” He sighed.

  “Mike remembers Tiny getting a phone call sometime around eight Monday night and leaving all of a sudden in his van. That fits with when Phil was murdered.”

  “Do other Simbas hang out at his shop?”

  “Not according to Mike,” she said. “The Simbas are all pretty much Oakland guys, so unless you work there like Tiny did, there wouldn’t be much reason to come out to Concord.”

  “Did Mike say anything about what happened Monday night?”

  “I don’t know if he’s telling the truth or if it’s his way of keeping himself out of it, but Mike said everyone heard about the bar shooting. When he saw Tiny the next day, he reminded him to keep all club business out of his shop.”

  “How convenient.”

  “He’s pissed at Tiny right now,” she said. “He hasn’t seen him since the police chased him and Tiny dumped his bike. He thinks Tiny got into it with the Hells Angels or some other rival gang. It seems that Irish Mike thinks Fletcher is affiliated with the Angels, and we didn’t let on any differently.”

  “He’ll be happy to know his cover’s still intact.”

  “We’re gonna have another go at Mike, press him on the murder. If we get nothing, we’ll probably call it a night.”

  “You find anything more on Sheila?”

  “Been busy with this. I hope to get some time tomorrow to try to track her down,” Braddock said. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Nothing much. Right now, I’m looking at vacation destinations on my computer. Have you ever been to Hilton Head?”

  “No, if I wanted sun and sand, I think I’d go to Hawaii. It’s an easier flight, and the weather’s better.”

  “I wish I was with you guys right now.”

  “Me too, Matt. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Sinclair hung up and called his mother. After the Hi, how are yous and I’m fines, he bit his tongue and asked how his father was doing.

  “We’re in a cardiac rehab facility now. He’s sitting up in his chair watching TV.”

  “That’s good. Are you getting rest yourself, Mom?”

  “They kick me out of here early every night and only let me visit for an hour or two at a time. They want him either resting or doing his exercises and say I’m an interference. Can you believe that? I’m an interference to his recovery!”

  Sinclair heard a bark and saw Amber sitting outside the door. He opened the door, and she ran in with her tail wagging, then dropped to the ground and rolled onto her back. He crouched down and rubbed her belly. “It’s probably good for both of you.”

  “Do you think you’ll have time to come up and see your father?”

  “I’m still pretty busy with work,” he lied. “But I’ll try.”

  He hung up and sat on the floor. Amber rested her head in his lap, and he thought about the puppy he had for too short of a time as a kid. A few months after his little brother, Billy, had died, his mother brought home a little black puppy from the shelter. Although Lucky was supposed to be for both him and his brother, Jimmy, Sinclair took on the responsibility of feeding and training him. His father made it clear that if he ended up having to feed him or pick up one piece of dog poop, Lucky was gone. That was no problem for Sinclair. Lucky filled a void left by his brother’s death. The dog was his shadow from the moment he got home from school until he went to bed. They were always together, playing, going for walks, or just sitting together in his room while he did his homework.

  Sinclair had checked out books from the library about dog training, and by the time Lucky was nine months old, he knew a dozen commands and walked at heel without pulling on the leash or straying from Sinclair’s side. One night, he overheard his father
and mother in one of their many arguments. This time it was over Lucky. His father scolded his mother for having spent money required by the shelter for shots and neutering, yelling angrily that a dog couldn’t replace the son they had lost. His mother, in one of her rare moments of standing up to him, replied that she didn’t get Lucky to replace Billy. Instead Lucky was someone Matt and Jimmy could love that would love them back in return, something their father never did. The louder the arguing became, the tighter Sinclair hugged Lucky.

  One day, just after Lucky turned a year old, Sinclair came home from school, but Lucky didn’t meet him at the door. He found him lying on his bedroom floor with barely enough energy to raise his head and wag his tail. Lucky didn’t touch his food that night or the next morning. His mother agreed they needed to take him to the vet, but when his father found out they were about to spend more money on a dog, his anger erupted. When he was a kid, his father said, they didn’t waste money on sick or old dogs. They put them down and got new ones. Sinclair and his brother scrounged what money they had saved from mowing lawns in the neighborhood and promised they would pay their father back no matter what it cost to make Lucky better. Finally, his father relented, and Sinclair wrapped Lucky in an old beach towel and carried him to the car.

  Sinclair and his brother were getting in the car when his father told them they couldn’t come—he couldn’t stand having two little boys crying in the car all the way to the vet. His father left with Lucky alone. He came back a few hours later without Lucky. He had said that Lucky was too sick to save and that the vet had to put him to sleep. Jimmy cried himself to sleep that night, but Sinclair never shed a tear. He was angry. Angry that he’d abandoned Lucky. If he’d been there, he could’ve convinced the vet to save him. The following day, he went to the family car to get the old beach towel and Lucky’s leash. When he popped the trunk, he saw the towel, the leash, and a shovel caked with mud from down by the river where he used to take Lucky for long walks. At that moment, he knew his father never took Lucky to the vet. He took Lucky down to the river, killed him, and buried him there.

  Chapter 41

  The main cabin lights came on, and the flight attendant announced it was five o’clock, but Sinclair’s watch and his body said it was two o’clock in the morning. Sinclair didn’t like flying under the best of circumstances. Being stuck in a middle seat between an overweight man, whose bulk spread into Sinclair’s already cramped space, and a young mother cradling an infant in her lap who cried continually from the time they took off made the flight even more miserable.

  His back, neck, and shoulders were on fire from being crammed into a seat designed for people six inches shorter and with shoulders six inches narrower. When he tried to sleep, his head extended over the headrest. When he slouched down in his seat enough to support his head, his back ached within thirty minutes. When he actually dozed off for a few minutes, a six-year-old kid in the seat behind him kicked his seat and jarred him awake. Unable to sleep, he spent most of the flight signed onto the free Wi-Fi researching Hilton Head Island—where tourists stayed, what they did for recreation, and where they ate, drank, and shopped. He looked at hundreds of photos, trying to identify the buildings in the background of Sheila’s photograph. Even though his laptop was small, when he opened the lid enough to see the screen, with the seat in front of him reclined, the laptop’s keyboard was resting against his sternum. He didn’t know how people actually typed on a computer in coach seats.

  *

  He breezed through the ultraclean Savannah airport terminal with his leather carry-on and out to pick up his rental car. His sunglasses immediately fogged over when he stepped into the humid air, which he tried to think of as tropical rather than sauna-like. He threw the leather duffle bag onto the passenger seat, dug out a portable GPS, and entered an address in the heart of Hilton Head Island. Traveling north on I-95, a huge sign welcomed him to South Carolina. He wondered where the industrial and commercial blight and sketchy neighborhoods he’d seen in every other city were. All he saw were lush green trees, flowering shrubs, new developments, and golf courses.

  His stomach was growling so he scrolled through restaurants on the GPS. He saw a Cracker Barrel on the list and hit enter. He wasn’t familiar with the chain—it wasn’t a California restaurant—but figured it had to be better than Wendy’s, which had also come up in the search. He passed a sign for Sun City Hilton Head, one of the many gated golf communities in the Bluffton and Hilton Head area he had read about. With seven thousand homes, three golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and other amenities on five thousand acres, it was one of the largest communities in the area. Sinclair couldn’t imagine himself living in a place like that. He pictured thousands of old people dressed in plaid shorts getting around on walkers, playing shuffleboard and bridge, and engaging in hour-long discussions about their medical ailments.

  Every breakfast combination at Cracker Barrel seemed to include grits, so he ordered the one with scrambled eggs, bacon, and biscuits and told the waitress she could keep the grits. He was sipping his coffee and studying one of the tourist maps of Hilton Head Island he’d grabbed at the airport when the waitress returned with his food. “There ya go, honey,” she said. “Visiting here for the first time?”

  “Is it obvious?”

  “I don’t recognize you.” She grinned. “And you dress like someone still working for a living.”

  He was dressed in khaki pants, a green polo, and sneakers among a crowd wearing shorts and sandals. Four men in their sixties and seventies wearing golf shirts and shorts sat at the table next to him. They were tan and looked fitter than most people Sinclair knew twenty years younger. On the other side of them sat six women about the same age dressed in tennis outfits.

  “I guess I should be glad you didn’t say I dress like a northerner,” Sinclair said.

  “‘Visitor’ is code for ‘Yankee.’” She grinned again. “Truth is, there are probably more northerners living in the Hilton Head area than most places up north.”

  He pulled the beach photo of Sheila from his pocket. “I’m trying to find this beach.”

  She studied the photo. “I guess it could be South Beach down in Sea Pines, but I’ve never seen no buildings like that down there. Maybe Folly Field. That’s where most locals go. There’s lots of timeshares, hotels, and condos you can see from the beach. If you go down the beach to the left, you’ll hit the Westin and some other resorts. The other way, you’ll see more and eventually run into Palmetto Dunes.”

  “How long’s the beach?”

  “They say there’s sixteen miles of beach on the island, but you find most of the people right next to the public access areas. If not Folly, try Coligny. That’s where most tourists go.”

  Sinclair finished his breakfast and returned to his car. It wasn’t quite eleven o’clock and the thermometer in his rental car showed it was eighty-eight. With the humidity, it felt like a hundred. He followed the divided highway past more gated communities, shopping plazas, and golf courses and over a bridge that crossed the Intracoastal Waterway, which separated the mainland from Hilton Head Island.

  Sinclair couldn’t get over how lush, green, and colorful Hilton Head was compared to the brown dryness of the Bay Area. Magnolia trees bloomed with white flowers, and Crape Myrtles with vivid red and pink flowers lined the road. Spanish moss hung from giant live oaks that were hundreds of years old. After walking more than three miles along Folly Field Beach, his pants and shirt were soaked with his sweat and he had no luck finding a building that matched his photograph. The light breeze had done little to cool the blazing heat.

  Coligny Plaza was fifteen minutes down the road, past more golf courses, high-end resorts, and restaurants. He bought a pair of overpriced cargo shorts; a T-shirt that read, Hilton Head Island, Laid Back Since Way Back; a baseball cap; and a small backpack in a store that also sold surfboards and boogie boards.

  He stripped off his hot, sweat-soaked clothes in a public restroom, stuffed them
in the pack, and trudged across the street toward the beach. He passed a large splash pad, where laughing and screaming kids were running through giant sprays of water, and walked down a wooden boardwalk bordered by shaded arbors where people sat on porch swings.

  This beach was a lot more crowded than the last one. People sat in beach chairs under umbrellas and lay on towels in the sun, while others waded and swam in the shallow water. Carrying his sneakers, Sinclair made his way toward the water. The coconut fragrance coming from sunscreen covering the mass of tanned female bodies in skimpy swimsuits distracted him for a few seconds. He turned right and walked along the water’s edge. A small wave lapped over his feet. Warm water, unlike Northern California. A slender fortysomething woman wearing gym shorts, a bikini top, and wide-rimmed floppy hat walking the opposite way on the beach smiled at him. Her long, sun-bleached hair looked like it was styled by the salt water, sun, and wind. He wondered how Alyssa would look with sandy feet and wind-blown beach hair.

  He looked across the sand toward a string of buildings, pulled out the photo, and studied it. Sheila stood in fluffy white sand wearing a conservative two-piece swimsuit. A few other people in swimsuits were in the distance. Past small sand dunes covered with wisps of sea grass was a large, brown stucco building with darker brown shingles on the sides. There were three rows of balconies, meaning it was probably a four-story building. On the right side of the roof was a raised structure, possibly some sort of penthouse. The corner of another building showed in the far right of the frame. It looked like a motel with rooms facing perpendicular to the beach. In the foreground of the motel-looking building was some sort of structure with a thatched roof that resembled a fake Polynesian hut.

  He walked away from the water across the wet, packed sand and stopped to look at the scene in front of him. He was standing in the exact spot where Sheila’s picture was taken.