Shallow Grave

by Brian Thiem

  The smile and facade of false confidence left her face, and tears began to well in her eyes. He read in her face the journey she’d been on, one that may have been more arduous than his own. “I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know what to do next and don’t know who to trust.”

  Until he got a better feel for who Sheila was and what she knew, he would stick with open-ended questions. He had the feeling he wouldn’t need to pry the truth out of her. “Why are you scared?”

  She dabbed her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “Phil’s dead. He was murdered. You, if anyone, should know that.”

  “When you first saw me, you said you’ve been expecting me. What did you mean by that?”

  “The more I got to know Phil, the more he talked about himself and the people close to him. He said you were the best homicide detective in the world. He joked about how sorry he felt for those poor crooks that committed a murder when you were on call. When I ran, I figured someone would come looking for me. I didn’t know if it would be the cops or . . . them. Then I read in the paper that you were assigned Phil’s murder. If you were everything Phil said you were, you’d figure out who I was and find me.”

  Sinclair didn’t know whether to feel flattered or be pissed that Phil was sharing things with his prostitute that he wouldn’t share with a brother officer who’d had his back for years. “Sheila, please believe I’m not judging you. I know about your employment with Special Ladies Escorts, so that’s where we need to start. Is that where you first met Phil?”

  She tilted her head sideways with a confused look. She then began laughing. “Oh, my! You don’t have a clue, do you?”

  He really hated when the person he was interviewing had the upper hand. And he hated it even more when they gloated about it. He sipped his Coke and waited for her to get over herself.

  “Phil wasn’t my client. We weren’t lovers. I was a source, his confidential informant, or, if you prefer, his snitch.”

  Sinclair did his best to conceal his relief. He felt like hugging Sheila and immediately calling Braddock to give her the good news. “Since I really don’t have a clue, why don’t you start from the beginning and fill me in.”

  She told him Phil showed up at her apartment, flashed his badge, and insisted they talk one evening just before Christmas. He had photos and records showing every client she’d serviced since working for the agency and how much money she’d made. He also knew everything about her, including her employment and family. He had enough evidence to prove numerous counts of prostitution and federal tax evasion; however, if she worked for him, he would forget all of it. She’d broken down. She wasn’t proud of what she did but saw it as an easy way to make extra money. She’d wanted to move her grandfather into a nicer assisted-living facility, but her stepmother said there wasn’t enough money in his estate to do so. Sheila’s father had the power of attorney, but he delegated all financial matters to his new wife, a woman Sheila didn’t trust at all. A friend introduced Sheila to the owner of the escort service, who assured her she could easily make two thousand dollars a month, the amount needed to move him into the Napa facility, with one or two calls a week.

  Sheila wasn’t naïve. She knew the men Phil was interested in were involved in criminal activity and could be dangerous, but she also knew she was in the unique position to provide him the information he needed, so she insisted she wanted more than immunity from prosecution. She wanted payment so she could keep her grandfather in his home. She insisted that Phil not reveal her identity to anyone at all, because she knew the men she was involved with had friends everywhere, including judges, prosecutors, and cops. She suggested they meet outside of the Bay Area, and when she told Phil she visited her grandfather every Saturday in Napa, they developed a plan where they could meet up there for a few hours every Friday and she could pass on everything she picked up the previous week.

  “So you met in a romantic restaurant and spent the night in a bed-and-breakfast?” Sinclair asked.

  “You would’ve preferred we sat in a parking lot for three hours eating McDonald’s?” she retorted. “I was providing what a bunch of cops had been trying to get for years but couldn’t. Phil’s bosses must’ve known that because they had no problem with the expenses. And it was a good cover if someone saw us. I had a legitimate reason to go to Napa every weekend, and I could’ve explained him away as just a friend or a rich boyfriend, depending on who saw me. We had dinner and talked. Sometimes we continued talking in the room for an hour or two, but nothing ever happened. Phil was a gentleman, and I could tell he loved his wife.”

  Her story answered most of the questions that had bothered him since he discovered the cigar box. “Did he say who he reported to? Who gave him the money he paid you?”

  She shrugged. “He was as worried as I was about who he could trust.”

  “So who were these clients of yours that Phil was so interested in?”

  “It wasn’t my clients. It was my day job. I was the office manager and executive assistant to the CEO and president of NorCal, Sergio Kozlov.”

  Chapter 45

  The band was getting ready to play and people were filling the tables in the beer garden, so Sinclair and Sheila strolled down the wide concrete pier that jutted a hundred yards into the water. Three aluminum gangways led down to an array of floating docks where a dozen powerboats and a few sailboats in the twenty- to thirty-foot range were docked. A man dressed in white linen shorts and a silk shirt stepped off a seventy-foot yacht that was tied up on the left side of the pier followed by a woman dressed all in white wearing oversized sunglasses.

  Sheila grinned. “Yachters love to mingle with us common folk.” She leaned against the railing and looked across the water at the sun, still an hour or two above the horizon. Sinclair recognized the closest land less than a half mile away as Pinckney Island, a four-thousand-acre national wildlife refuge, one of a string of them along the South Carolina and Georgia coast.

  “What kind of stuff about Kozlov did you pass along to Phil?” Sinclair asked.

  “Everything. From payoffs to politicians to money laundering. I had to be careful to avoid getting caught when I downloaded documents and financials, but as long as I had a legitimate reason for accessing a file, I could copy it and upload it to my cloud and transfer it to Phil.”

  “Did you give him paper copies of documents or copy stuff to a flash drive for him?” Sinclair asked.

  She chuckled. “You remind me so much of Phil. I thought he was going to give me a little spy camera like the CIA used during the Cold War. Do you understand cloud storage?”

  A steady breeze ruffled an American flag atop a flagpole at the end of the pier. “Sure. I have my home documents, photos, and such on a cloud, so if I lose my computer in a fire or something, my files are still there.”

  “You’re way ahead of Phil. All he knew was what his coworkers taught him, and that was mostly about the department’s system. I helped him create a Google account under his fake name and set up Google Drive for him. I did the same for myself and set it up to share everything with him. When I download files at work to my drive, Phil could upload them to his own drive, which only he had access to.”

  “What kind of stuff did you give him?”

  “As an example, I keep track of our corporate sports team seats. We have four seats for the Golden State Warriors three rows from the court. They’re supposed to be worth about two thousand dollars per game. I keep track of who Sergio gives them to. It’s done all the time, but you know someone on the Oakland city council can’t legally accept a gift worth over a few hundred dollars. I gave Phil the list of everyone who received free game tickets for the Warriors, the Raiders, and the Oakland A’s. When certain people appear over and over, you can be sure Sergio’s getting something in return.”

  A blue heron walked along the mud flats at the water’s edge and stopped occasionally to jab its beak into the water. “What else?”

  “Cash; use of a house in
St. Thomas; money contributed to nonprofits, which the nonprofits then turn into campaign contributions; the names of political action committees set up by Sergio for specific politicians; copies of e-mails between Sergio and political candidates discussing how that money would be spent. I managed all these executive accounts and perks, as he called them, and kept track of who got what. Sergio was anal about knowing exactly what he was giving so that whenever he needed something, he could remind the person how generous he’d been.”

  “Where’d he get the money for this stuff?”

  “I’m not the CFO or an accountant, but he has a number of companies incorporated in Nevada with bank accounts in the Caribbean that aren’t part of the official accounting. I remember when Sergio had me draw cash from the bank every day for a month. Always under ten thousand. The account I drew the money from was set up with a half million dollars, which, according to rumor, came from a kickback on a land deal that Sergio knowingly overpaid on.”

  “Did Phil have enough to take down Kozlov and the politicians?”

  “Phil wanted the accounting for the entire company, including the shell corporations and Caribbean bank accounts. Although I knew Sergio’s password, I had no legitimate reason to access that stuff, and Sergio would know about it the next time he logged in. The IT security people would confirm it came from my computer, and I’d be in big trouble. Phil’s plan was that as soon as the lawyers said they had enough evidence, I’d download everything, and Phil would get me into witness protection. Then Phil would swoop in and arrest everybody.”

  It sounded as if Phil might’ve been exaggerating what he could do. Getting someone into witness protection was no easy feat, and taking down so many people at that level would require resources well above what the police department had. “Any idea when that was going to happen?”

  “He kept saying it would be well before November.”

  If Phil was close to making a case, what he’d intended to ask Sheila to do would’ve been the coup de grace. But she got spooked after Phil was murdered. Kozlov would never trust her again, so whatever she could’ve provided was now lost. “I don’t blame you at all for taking off,” Sinclair said. “I guess I’ll have to look at what you already gave Phil to see if there’s enough.”

  “When Phil was murdered, I knew it was because he got too close, so I initiated our exit plan. I downloaded everything onto my cloud drive, left the office, packed, and flew here.”

  Professionalism be damned, Sinclair hugged her. “Phil would be proud,” he said.

  “I did it for him.” She pulled her phone from her pocket. “What’s your phone number?”

  He gave it to her, and a few seconds later, his phone buzzed with a text message.

  “That’s my Google Drive account name and password along with Phil’s account name. I don’t know his password.”

  “What’s ChloeLily539 stand for?” he asked.

  “Chloe and Lily were my cats. My two best friends when I was a kid.”

  Sinclair pulled a sheath of folded papers from his pocket. He paged through the copies of Phil’s spiral notebook. On the last page, he saw Sheila’s account name and password written in Phil’s handwriting. Below it was Phil’s undercover name written as one word, followed by MattCathy187. The number 187 was the California penal code section for murder.

  Everything he’d been thinking about Phil for the last six months was wrong. Although he didn’t yet know who they might be, he had to get this information to the right people, people who wouldn’t try to sweep it under the rug as Chief Brown did last year. Phil wasn’t working this alone. The visit by Campbell, Archard, and Uppy was beginning to make sense.

  “You thought you were in danger once Phil was dead. What makes you think Kozlov was involved in his murder?”

  “That day, Sergio was going through the redevelopment proposal for the Howard Terminal, the abandoned shipping terminal that some businessmen and politicians want to develop into a new stadium. He added a meeting to his calendar for seven o’clock that night. My computer has a master calendar including all his events and appointments, so I spotted it. It didn’t list names other than show CC-two, which stands for two city councilmembers; CS-one, which means one city staffer; and B-four, which means four people from the business community.”

  “He probably has meetings with people all the time.” Sinclair was skeptical.

  “But seldom at his house. He also had me get money from the safe to put five thousand dollars each into four envelopes. Phil told me before that he needed ways to corroborate the stuff I sent him, so I texted him about the meeting. Maybe he went there and got caught.”

  The entire time they had been talking, Sinclair was watching people come and go. Couples strolled to the end of the pier, hand in hand, looked at the water, turned around, and strolled back. Parents with kids running ahead of them came down the concrete pier, pointed at the shore birds, and admired the boats. Sheila’s two girlfriends walked halfway down the pier, saw Sheila was okay, and sauntered back to the bar.

  Two men walking toward them along the right side of the pier caught his eye. Their heads swiveled side to side as they checked out everyone around them. While everyone else wore beach-casual clothes, these men were dressed in long pants and button-front shirts with the shirttails out. Both were taller and more muscular than Sinclair, probably outweighing him by thirty or forty pounds. Both had dark hair, and one had the kind of scruffy look achieved by four or five days without shaving. But when Sinclair noticed one small detail about their appearance, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his heart rate jumped. They were both carrying guns.

  Chapter 46

  The right pants legs of both men hung about an inch lower than the left, signaling that both men wore heavy guns supported by thin belts that didn’t properly carry the weight. It was the mark of an amateur, but one that Sinclair had also seen among off-duty cops who weren’t used to carrying a gun in plain clothes.

  “We need to go.” He put his hand on the small of Sheila’s back and gently pushed her toward the left side of the pier, away from the men and toward land.

  The men turned toward them, blocking their path. They stopped ten feet away. The clean-shaven man looked at Sheila and said, “Sheila Harris, you will come with us.” He had an accent that sounded Eastern European.

  “Who are you?” Sinclair demanded. “Are you the police?”

  The clean-shaven man stepped toward Sheila, stopping an arm’s length away. The other people on the pier recognized trouble and began walking away. A few ran. “Ha ha, yes, police,” the man said. “That is funny.”

  “You have this lady mistaken for someone else,” Sinclair said. “So we’ll just be on our way.”

  The man put his hand against Sheila’s shoulder. “Come with us, now.”

  Sinclair stepped toward him, but before he could do anything, the other man grabbed him from behind in a bear hug, pinning both of his arms to his sides.

  “This not your business.” The clean-cut man glared at Sinclair. “You do not want our trouble.” He grabbed Sheila by the arm and pulled her down the pier.

  He couldn’t allow them to take her. A brutal interrogation of Sheila flashed through his mind. Once she revealed what she did with the files, her body would be dumped in one of the many marshes in the area. They obviously didn’t know who Sinclair was; otherwise, he’d be dead already. He stomped on the right instep of the man holding him, feeling the crunch of the small bones in the top of his foot. He then bent his legs, as if he were dropping into a squat, while simultaneously clutching his hands together and thrusting them above his head to break the hold.

  The man wasn’t prepared to hold up Sinclair’s weight, especially after the raging pain in his foot. He released his grip, and Sinclair spun around and faced him. The man’s face grimaced in pain and rage. He spread his legs apart into a balanced wrestler’s stance. Without hesitation, Sinclair kicked him between the legs with his right foot as hard as he could. The
man doubled over. When he looked up, Sinclair stepped forward and punched the man in the center of his face with his left fist, turning his hips to give it as much power as he could. The man collapsed in a heap onto the concrete.

  The clean-shaven man stopped dragging Sheila down the pier when he saw Sinclair take down his partner. Sinclair covered the distance between them in six giant steps. The man pushed Sheila away and raised his fists like a boxer. She fell onto the pier, banging her head on the concrete. She lay there and looked up at them. Sinclair feinted with his left hand to the man’s face. The clean-shaven man raised an arm to block it, opening up his body. Sinclair buried his right fist into the man’s solar plexus.

  He knew immediately his punch lacked the needed power to end the fight. But it knocked the wind out of his opponent and staggered him back a step. He quickly straightened and rushed at Sinclair, throwing a powerful roundhouse with his right fist toward his face. Off balance, Sinclair was unable to step back quickly enough to get out of range of the man’s punch. Instead, he tucked his chin into his chest and leaned farther forward, raising his arm to try to deflect the blow. The man’s huge fist struck Sinclair’s forearm and glanced off the back of his head.

  Dazed but still on his feet, Sinclair twisted to his right to allow the momentum from the man’s punch to carry his opponent past him. The man quickly regained his balance and pulled up his shirttail with his left hand.

  Once Sinclair saw the butt of the handgun, he pounced.

  Sinclair had practiced drawing a handgun thousands of times on the range. Instructors had drummed into him the necessity of keeping your eyes on the target. You know where your gun is on your belt. You don’t need to look at it. It’s your opponent that will kill you. That’s what you need to watch.