Red Line (8 page)

Sinclair was at his desk digesting reports when Sergeant Lou Sanchez walked in the door at ten to seven. Sanchez was in his midforties and had been in homicide for eight years. He had short, curly black hair and wore the plastic-framed prescription glasses with shatterproof lenses the department was required to offer for safety reasons but that most officers declined. Sanchez spoke slowly and deliberately, and although others thought he translated his thoughts from Spanish to English before he uttered a word, Sinclair knew it was part of his disciplined personality, unlike Sinclair, who often spoke before thinking.

Sanchez hung up his coat, filled his coffee cup, and stared at the bulletin board where the fresh number hung. “I see you had another one.” He looked deeply into both interview rooms and bent down to look under the tables. “I see no witnesses here. Have you already booked your suspect?”

“You got it, Lou,” said Sinclair. “Five eyewitnesses—all pointed out dude. Dude surrendered, cracked after five
minutes, confessed to this murder as well as every unsolved from the last decade.”

Braddock joined in. “Dude insisted he didn’t want a trial—waste of time, he said, with me and Sinclair doing the investigation—so we drove him straight to San Quentin. Already settled into his new bunk on death row.”

Dan Jankowski, Sanchez’s partner, burst through the door. A big, red-faced man, weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Jankowski’s booming voice knew only one volume. “Sinclair,” he bellowed, “what the fuck are you and Lady Braddock doing here so early? You don’t start ’til eight. No, don’t tell me, another fine citizen of Oakland met his maker last night.”

“Look at the board, Dan,” said Sanchez, mimicking a heavy Spanish accent. “Two numbers, neither with red lines.”

“You know what that means, amigo,” said Jankowski.

“I think I do, partner. The coach might be getting the A-team warmed up in the bullpen.”

Sanchez and Jankowski took their coffee to their desks and continued their banter as they fired up their computers and checked voicemail.

When Sinclair returned to homicide two days ago, the other guys welcomed him back but still kept their distance. He was tainted. Just like cops would be suspicious of a man who claimed he was a law-abiding citizen yet hung around with convicted felons, the other investigators were afraid of becoming sullied by getting too chummy with him. However, as Jankowski and Sanchez laughed and joked about his open murder cases, Sinclair knew they were no longer concerned with what the brass might think. The camaraderie
of the unit was stronger. He was starting to feel like part of the family again.

After they had their laughs, Jankowski and Sanchez crowded around Sinclair and Braddock’s desks. Sinclair gave a brief rundown of the three murders. When he showed them the photo of the medallion around Samantha’s neck, they raised their eyebrows.

“What can we do?” asked Jankowski.

Sinclair explained his plan to copy contact and calendar events from each victim’s phone or computer and look for commonalities.

“I’d help, but my fingers are too fat to work those new smartphones,” said Jankowski. “Besides, they’re smarter than me.”

The oldest investigator in the unit, Jankowski was on his second tour in homicide. When he first came to homicide in the early nineties, they still typed investigative reports on IBM Selectrics. If he had his way, he still would. Sanchez, on the other hand, was the computer whiz of the unit. After high school, he joined the Marine Corps with visions of becoming a recon sniper, but instead, they trained him in computer technology and communications. Whenever investigators had a computer problem, they turned to Sanchez, who could solve it in minutes, instead of having to wait days for someone from the city’s IT department to venture out of City Hall.

“It’ll take you forever to do this by hand,” Sanchez said. “Give me the phones and computers. I’ll set up an Access database, download the computer and phone data into it, and have it automatically search for matches.”

Jankowski said, “Last month, my nerd partner cracked a case by finding our suspect doing some Facebook thingy
right next to where our victim was withdrawing money from an ATM. All that with his computer.”

The rest of the unit flowed into the office, stopped at the coffee pot, and made their way to Sinclair’s desk to inquire about the latest murder. At eight sharp, Lieutenant Maloney rolled through the door, and Sinclair and Braddock met him with a copy of the press release.

Maloney looked up from the paper, his face more haggard than earlier. Sinclair told him about the peace sign necklace in the Samantha Arquette photos.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “You’re telling me we have a maniac out there killing people and hanging peace signs around their necks?”

Maloney picked up his phone and called the chief’s secretary, asking to get a meeting with him and the deputy chief for the Bureau of Investigations. When he hung up, he said, “I’m pulling you off standby.”

“Lieutenant,” Sinclair objected, “we’ve only got two more days. If we get another one, Cathy can handle it. She hasn’t had one yet.”

A homicide team worked standby for a week, during which time they handled every new murder that occurred. Occasionally, too many cases or a high-profile murder would overwhelm the team, requiring the next team in the rotation to take over. But it was a matter of pride for investigators to handle every murder during their standby week, so Sinclair had to make his pitch.

“I need your full attention on this. Jankowski and Sanchez will take over standby. Until they get something, they’ll assist you. This latest development will certainly get City Hall jacked up.”

Sinclair headed straight to Jankowski and Sanchez to apologize and take their jabs. Jankowski’s chair squealed as he leaned back. “I was thinking about telling you how the coach benched you ’cause you couldn’t hit the pitching. Truth is, the boss made the right call. I’ll enjoy helping catch this asshole.”

Sinclair entered the morgue as Dr. Gorman was pulling the stomach out of the body cavity.

“I started without you.” Gorman set the organ on a cutting board that rested on the corpse’s thighs. “We have a fit, healthy woman who did not die of natural causes. The external shows marks consistent with a stun gun, just as with the Caldwell subject, located on her left, frontal chest region at rib number ten. The distance between the probes is the same as on the previous subject, which indicates the same device may have been used.”

Sinclair looked at the marks as Gorman continued. “Superficial lacerations and abrasions present on both wrists and ankles, similar to what we saw on Caldwell yesterday. If the DA were to ask me in court, I would say they are consistent with a victim struggling against flex-cuff restraints. We also have some bruising on the left arm. My guess is someone grabbed her arm very tightly. The nail on her left-hand ring finger is broken, so I took scrapings and clippings of all nails. It’s always a long shot, but you might get some DNA.”

“Did your people tell you about the peace medallion?” Sinclair asked.

“Yes, they did, and that’s the reason I’m paying special attention to those areas I’ve mentioned. However, I’m not allowing that commonality between these two victims to influence my findings.”

“Did you find any syringe injection marks?”

“No, and I closely examined obvious locations. Now we come to what is the probable cause of death. Both wrists show deep lacerations longitudinally along the radial artery, severing it in several places in each arm. The instrument was a very sharp, thin-bladed cutting instrument.”

“Scalpel?” asked Sinclair.

“The cuts are consistent with a scalpel incision; however, I cannot exclude an extremely sharp knife. Suffice it to say that the nature of these cuts would likely cause sufficient hypovolemia to result in death unless direct pressure or other methods were applied to stop the hemorrhage.”

“Meaning?”

“A state of decreased blood volume. The average body has about five liters of blood. If a hemorrhage results in a thirty to forty percent blood loss, we call that a Class Three Hemorrhage. That is the critical stage, where if life-saving measures are not initiated, unconsciousness and death will likely occur. Above forty percent, a loss of about two liters of blood volume, is fatal. I’ll know more once I complete the autopsy and run some tests; however, I suspect the cause of death will be as a result of hemorrhage from the severed arteries.”

She bled to death, thought Sinclair. “Anything else I need to know?”

“The cuts are clean and precise. No hesitation marks as are common in suicides. I can’t imagine a victim remaining still while someone cuts her wrists, and based on the other
autopsy, I intend to do a full tox to see if she was sedated before the cuts occurred.”

“Do you have some tox info from the boy’s autopsy?”

“Sergeant Sinclair, as you know, tox results take six to eight weeks,” he said and picked up his scalpel. As Sinclair was walking out the door, Gorman asked, “Have you checked your voicemail lately?”

Sinclair looked at his watch. Eleven-fifteen. “Not for two hours.”

“You may wish to do so.”

*

Connie handed Sinclair several phone messages when he passed her desk. “They announced a press conference for noon, and five minutes later, everybody started calling to get the scoop. I told them that’s why we have press conferences—so we don’t have to talk to every reporter one at a time.”

“Thanks,” said Sinclair, shuffling through the messages.

“One man insisted he had a vital tip and would only leave it on your voicemail, so I connected him.”

Sinclair filled his coffee mug, picked up his desk phone, and entered four numbers. He recognized the voice immediately. “Sergeant, this is a confidential source who cannot reveal his identity. Please keep this to yourself and wait for the official results before you use it. Caldwell’s blood and urine contained a concentration of morphine at least five times the level necessary to cause death. Since heroin is metabolically converted to morphine in the body, there is no way to distinguish between pharmaceutical morphine and heroin entering his system; however, using chromatographic processes, additional substances that are the
by-product of heroin were identified. This is preliminary and not conclusive, but it appears the boy was injected with heroin, which as we both know is not available medically in the US.”

Sinclair leaned back in his chair and took another gulp of coffee. Gorman’s information was interesting, but he’d have to find a way to use it without revealing its origin. The kid was no junkie, and nothing else pointed toward a typical drug-related murder. The question was, who would want to shoot Caldwell up with heroin and why?

Sinclair stepped over to Sanchez’s desk. Cell phones and a laptop were arrayed among a rat’s nest of cords on his desk.

“This will take some time,” said Sanchez. He pulled a flash drive from a laptop and inserted it into his computer. “I have all relevant information from the phones. Once I convert it to a format compatible with the PC, I’ll populate the correct fields in the—”

“Sinclair,” Lieutenant Maloney yelled from his office.

Glad to escape the computer gibberish, Sinclair left Sanchez’s desk and stuck his head into Maloney’s office.

“I know—press conference,” Sinclair said. “Whose brilliant idea was that?”

“The PIO recommended it to the chief. Said we should, quote,
get out ahead of this
, and the chief agreed.”

“I think the PIO found a justification to put his head in front of a bunch of cameras.”

Sinclair saw Maloney looking at his hands as he kneaded his left hand with his right.

“Let me see that,” Maloney said.

Sinclair held out his hand, showing two swollen knuckles. “From my little fight last night.”

“Should you get X-rays, be sure it’s not broken?”

“It’s just bruised. I’ll be fine.”

“That’s another reason we don’t punch people in the face.”

“I know, their heads are harder than our hands.”

“Talk with the PIO and make sure he knows what
not
to say.” Maloney went back to his computer screen, signaling the conversation was over.

Sinclair trudged down the service stairs into the PAB basement and into the locker room, where he shaved and washed his face. He pulled his shoeshine kit from the bottom shelf and polished his wingtips, removing the debris and scuffs from the fight with Tyrone Hayes. He took a pale blue shirt from its plastic dry-cleaner bag and a burgundy tie from the top shelf of his locker. Sinclair had planned to leave Liz’s place early enough to change clothes in the locker room before work, but the call-out disrupted that. He hated wearing the same clothes two days in a row, especially when he ended up on camera both days, since doing so signaled he spent the night some place other than his home.

Ten minutes later, Sinclair stood beside a podium with the Oakland PD logo. A dozen microphones, each with the name of a radio or television network in letters or numbers, were arrayed on top of the podium. The pressroom on the seventh floor buzzed with the conversations of thirty reporters and camera technicians. Sinclair recognized many of them. Liz, with her cameraman Eric at her side, chatted with a male reporter from Channel 4, the NBC affiliate. She flashed him a smile and returned to her conversation.

The only other department representative in the room was George Thomas, the public information officer.
Thomas was pretty-boy handsome. A light-skinned black man with shiny black hair, he wore a bright blue tie and a dark suit that was tailored too closely for someone who carried a gun, which Thomas seldom did. He looked more like a newscaster than a cop. The chief of police was absent along with any other ranking members of the department.

Thomas stepped behind the podium. “Good afternoon,” he said, pausing until the room quieted. “I regret that the chief and mayor are not available for this press conference because they are engaged in a marathon planning session with other law enforcement agencies and city staff to coordinate resources to address the recent violence and to ensure the safety of our citizens. I will begin with an overview of the murders and the crime prevention strategies the department has planned so far. I will then turn the briefing over to Sergeant Sinclair, the lead investigator from our Homicide Division, to discuss the status of the investigation.”

Thomas placed a poster board with photos of Zachary Caldwell and Susan Hammond on an easel adjacent to the podium and read a prepared statement. Standing behind Thomas, Sinclair wore his best poker face as he watched the cameras zoom in on the photographs and back to him and Thomas. After Thomas answered a few questions about the victims’ backgrounds, he said, “I will now turn it over to Sergeant Sinclair.”

Sinclair slid behind the podium and scanned the crowd. A baritone-voiced reporter for KCBS, the top news radio station in the Bay Area, shouted above the others. “Are these murders related? Is the same person responsible for both killings?”

He could feel every camera on him and knew he would be on every local news show and likely network news nationwide. “The killings are similar and may be the work of the same suspect.”

“Well, are they or aren’t they?” shouted an Asian man from the
San Jose Mercury News.

“If I knew for sure, I would’ve said so.”

Sinclair could never cut it as a PIO. A departmental spokesperson would never admit not knowing something, and Sinclair couldn’t talk in circles and say nothing as he’d seen the PIO do. Sinclair paused as reporters yelled over each other. Then he calmly pointed to a tall brunette reporter from Channel 7 with her hand up.

“Sergeant, can you tell us if the victims have anything in common? Did Mrs. Hammond know Zachary?”

“We’re looking into it. If any citizens know of a relationship, I’d appreciate a call.”

Sinclair ignored the two reporters who yelled out questions and called on a middle-aged man from Channel 5, the CBS station. “You’ve neglected to say how they were killed.”

“In an active investigation, it’s necessary to withhold certain evidence. The murderer might be reading the newspapers and watching the news, so I don’t want to tell him everything I know. What I will say is, both victims were likely killed elsewhere and then deposited on the same bus bench. We call this kind of murder a
body dump
.” Sinclair saw the print reporters writing in their notebooks. He visualized “body dump” in the headlines tomorrow and was pleased he could give them a bone that wouldn’t jeopardize his investigation. “I will say, however, that neither died from gunshots.”

More hands shot up, but before Sinclair could call on one, a reporter from the
San Francisco Chronicle
shouted, “It sounds like you’re withholding evidence that shows the incompetence of your department. You’re asking the public to trust you, yet you won’t provide any information that allows the people to make their own judgment. Don’t you think the public has the right to know?”

Sinclair had learned the hard way how some reporters try to provoke investigators into saying something spontaneously. It might look good on the front page, but responses to that kind of provocation would land him in front of the chief’s desk—the last thing Sinclair needed. If he uttered one stupid comment in a fifteen-minute interview, the dumb comment was the ten-second sound bite that made the air or the lead of the newspaper article.

“Mr. Nesbit,” Sinclair addressed the reporter by name. “The public’s right to know covers public safety issues, not ongoing criminal investigations. After we arrest and charge a suspect, our investigation becomes public record. You’ll have to wait until then to judge the competence of our work.”

The room was silent for several seconds. Sinclair knew that most of the journalists in the crowd didn’t like Nesbit much more than the cops did and enjoyed seeing him spanked. Nevertheless, many secretly admired his brashness. He saw Liz’s hand among the sea of raised hands and called on her.

“Elizabeth Schueller, Channel Six News,” she said in her on-the-air TV voice. “Can you tell us what the department is planning on doing to protect the citizens in the Bay Area?”

Sinclair looked at her for two counts, wishing he could thank her for the softball she tossed him. “I cannot speak for the rest of the department, but what I’ll be doing is real simple—I’m going to find the man responsible and put him behind bars. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got murders to investigate.”

Two minutes after Sinclair sat down at his desk, John Johnson pulled up a chair beside him. Johnson had worked the crime beat for the
Oakland Tribune
for forty years and was the only reporter who had free access to the homicide office. The investigators considered him as much a much a part of the homicide family as their fellow detectives.

“You handled the vultures well,” said Johnson. “Nesbit’s always been a prick, but you need to watch him. Some of the TV types were miffed that Channel 6 splashed the victims’ pictures in little teaser shots a few hours ago, yet no one else got them until the press conference. They all know about you and Liz, so you best be careful. If she’s the only one who gets exclusives, it’ll give Nesbit even more reason to trash you in the
Chronicle
.”

“I appreciate the warning. The San Francisco liberals love his antipolice stance.”

Nesbit had written every dirty detail about his shooting, drunk driving accident, and demotion and even wrote about Sinclair’s divorce as if he were one of Hollywood’s bad boys. One article he wrote for the
Chronicle
, “Rising Homicide Star Falls,” belonged in one of the rags displayed in grocery store checkout aisles.

“Don’t be surprised to see your past rehashed in articles Nesbit writes about these murders. He’ll disguise it as background and the editors will probably let it in.”

“Will they ever forget?” Sinclair asked, not expecting an answer.

“I’ll try to slip in the good stuff you’ve done in my articles. Most of the TV reporters like you. They want to keep communication open, so they won’t screw with you. But you can’t hold the wolves at bay forever.”