Red Line (11 page)

In the homicide office, a tech brushed silver powder on Samantha’s phone. He shined a flashlight on it from several angles before announcing there were smudges but no usable latent prints.

Sanchez plugged the phone into a power cord. “Battery’s long dead. Service has been disconnected for over a year.”

Jankowski meanwhile spread several pages of printouts across Sinclair’s desk and leaned over him. “Here’s what I’ve found out about Lance Keller so far. No arrests anywhere before last night. One car, a two-year-old Volvo registered to him at the same address as on his driver’s license. Two moving violations on his DMV history—stop sign in the Volvo and speeding in a Chrysler.”

Sinclair paged through the papers Children’s Hospital had given him. The home address in Keller’s employment file matched the DMV records. He handed Jankowski the entire package.

“The paperwork shows he was working in ER the night Samantha came in,” said Sinclair. “Run his references and see if anything jumps out. If you can be discreet, go to his house, shake some trees. See if anything falls out.”

“Why don’t we just drag his junkie ass in and squeeze him?”

Sinclair knew that a murder suspect was tough to crack under the best circumstances, but to conduct an interrogation with nothing to confront the suspect with and nothing to use as leverage was a recipe for failure.

“What have we got on him, besides being a nurse at Children’s?”

“He stole drugs and was trying to score smack on the streets of Oaktown,” said Jankowski. “And the boy died from an overdose.”

Sinclair wished he could reveal what the coroner told him—that Zachary was injected with heroin—but he gave his word. “That’s not much. We don’t have any connection between Keller and the girls from last year or Susan Hammond.

“We need a hammer. Find something I can jam him up on when he denies. If you find something, then I might be willing to drop everything else and focus on Keller.”

“Okay.” Jankowski gathered up the papers and returned to his desk.

Sanchez handed Sinclair a sheet of paper with the last ten numbers from Samantha’s call log. Sinclair shuffled through the case packet looking for a match with the numbers. The last call from Samantha’s phone was to her mother’s cell phone, which was consistent with what her mother had said about receiving a call from a man who used Samantha’s phone. There were eight other calls, seven of them incoming missed calls. That made sense too. Her mother had said she called Samantha numerous times that night after Samantha failed to make it back to San Francisco. The remaining call, one that
lasted four minutes, was at 8:04 p.m. to a 646 area code, the same area code as Samantha and her mother’s phone.

“The complete call log covers the previous thirty days,” Sanchez said. “There are also seventy-four contacts, mostly just first names and phone numbers. Anything else would be on the service provider’s computers, and we need a search warrant to get that.”

“Is there any way to expedite?”

“Not without telling them we have a hostage situation or something. Otherwise, expect five to ten days.”

“Do it,” he said to Sanchez and then turned to Braddock. “You ready to make a cold call?”

They both knew the advantage female officers had when blindly calling a phone number. If the person on the other end were a man, he’d more readily talk to a woman, out of curiosity, if for no other reason. If it were a woman, she wouldn’t feel as threatened by a female caller. Furthermore, even crooks didn’t immediately think “cop” when hearing a female voice.

Braddock pressed the speaker button on her desk phone and dialed the number.

“Hello.” The voice was female and sounded young.

“Hi,” said Braddock. “Are you a friend of Samantha?”

“Who’s this?”

“My name’s Cathy. I’m calling numbers from Samantha’s phone, hoping to connect with some of her friends.”

A long pause. “Sam’s gone.”

“I know. It’s so sad. What’s your name?”

“Madison.”

“Hi, Madison. Were you and Sam friends?”

Hesitancy filled her voice. “Yeah, like best friends.”

“Please don’t hang up, but I’m a detective in California and we’re working to find out what happened to Sam. You talked to her that night.”

“You’re from California . . . where the car hit her?”

“That’s right, Oakland. What did you talk about that night?”

“She was worried her mom would be pissed because she was supposed to be home already. Well . . . not home, but, like, where she was staying with her mom’s friend in Frisco. She was with an older girl. The girl’s mom’s house was where Sam was staying.”

“Jenny?” suggested Braddock.

“Yeah, Jenny. Sam was really excited. She and Jenny hooked up with some boys at a frat party in Berkeley.”

“Really?”

“I told Sam to be careful ’cause the boys were older.”

“Did she mention any names?”

“She said the boy she was with was Adrian.”

“How about the fraternity?”

“Alpha Kappa Lambda. I even Googled it and thought it would be cool to go to a fraternity party by the time I was sixteen,” said Madison. “I don’t want to anymore, you know, after what happened.”

Sinclair slid his car behind a marked Berkeley PD car parked in a yellow zone on Telegraph Avenue and strolled with Braddock toward the University of California campus three blocks north. The sun baked the sidewalk, the thermometer already above eighty. Sinclair could tell it was heading toward a record high. Two bicycle officers, both with beards and dressed in blue shorts, utility shirts, gun belts, and bicycle helmets, stood astride their bikes talking to a twentysomething woman with long, stringy hair, who was sitting on the sidewalk in the shade. Wearing an ankle-length, flowing dress, she had an old backpack beside her and a metal cup and a cardboard sign that read,
Food Laundry,
in front of her. A skinny white man in his thirties with dreadlocks and no shirt, baggy brown pants, and sandals stood nearby.

“That’s a whole different kind of police work from Oakland,” Sinclair said as they checked out the street vendors that lined the sidewalk. They passed carts with incense sticks, flowers, patches to sew on clothes, and crocheted hats in the green, black, and gold colors of the Jamaican flag. They stopped at a table with handmade jewelry. There
were bead necklaces, a hundred different rings, and a dozen peace sign medallions. The vendor sported hair halfway down his back and John Lennon glasses.

“Wearing peace next to your heart allows you to feel it in your heart,” he said.

“I’m looking for one more like this.” Sinclair removed a photo from his pocket and showed it to the man.

The vendor looked at the cropped enlargement of the medallion. “Mine are handmade by local craftsmen.”

“Yeah, but my niece likes this one,” said Sinclair.

“Try Berzerkeley Boutique, just up the street.”

Sinclair and Braddock continued up the sidewalk, past People’s Park, and through the throngs of pedestrians, a mix of college kids, street people, homeless, and hippies who looked as if they were still living in 1968. Sweat broke out on Sinclair, sticking his shirt to his back. He wished he could ditch his coat in the car, but with a gun, handcuffs, spare ammo, and a badge on his belt, taking off his jacket while strolling in public wasn’t an option.

A blast of air conditioning hit them when they pushed through the door into Berzerkeley Boutique. Racks of T-shirts, peasant blouses, and hippie dresses covered most of the store. Sinclair weaved through the clothes to a glass display counter, behind which sat a woman with dusty cornrows and piercings in her lip, eyebrows, and nose.

Braddock spotted it first. “May we see that?” she asked the clerk.

The woman removed a peace medallion from the case and handed it to Braddock. “These have become quite popular recently.” A silver stud protruding from the tip of her tongue clicked against her teeth as she spoke.

Sinclair held the medallion alongside the photo. They were the same. “What do you mean?”

“All we have left is the display model, and it’s not for sale. There were twelve underneath the counter for months, until some guy bought them all last week. We should be getting in more—”

“This man,” Sinclair said, “can you describe him?”

“Are you
the
man?”

Sinclair showed his badge. “Oakland Homicide.”

“Homicide?” she echoed. “I wasn’t here that day. I normally work Thursdays and Fridays.”

“Do you keep sales receipts?”

“Not that far back. The owner takes them home every few days. She does the books there.”

“I’ll need the owner’s name and that of the employee who was working when that man came in.”

“Skye—she’s the owner—was the one who told me about the man buying them all.”

“Skye?” said Sinclair. “Skye what?”

“Just Skye.” She wrote on the back of a business card and handed it to Sinclair. “Here’s her phone number, but she’s not there.”

“If she’s not at that number, where is she?”

“She left Wednesday night for her spiritual commune, somewhere on the Russian River. She’ll be back Monday to open the shop at ten.”

“What if there’s an emergency, how would you reach her?”

“What kind of emergency?”

“Like if you had a heart attack.”

“I’d ask the paramedics to lock the door, and Skye would open up on Monday. If I’m not here, the store doesn’t open. If I’m here, I handle whatever needs handling.”

Sinclair left his card and returned to the heat outside. He pulled his sunglasses from his pocket and slid them on, dulling the blazing sun to a tolerable level. He dialed the number and listened to a recording, hitting the speaker button so Braddock could hear.
Hello, this is Skye. Have a beautiful day. You may leave a message if you’d like. Peace and love.

“That’s got to be our guy,” said Braddock.

“I’m sure he paid cash. We’ll probably only get a generic description out of Skye, if anything. But things are looking up.”

Thirty minutes later, Sinclair and Braddock were sitting at a long table in the dining room of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity house. “The UC police told me you were in charge of fall recruitment last year,” said Sinclair to the college senior seated across from them.

“Yeah, I was the chair of our Rush Week committee.” With his short blond hair and blue eyes and wearing a loose tank top, shorts that fell below his knees, and flip-flops, Cameron looked like he’d stepped off a Southern California beach.

“And you were in charge of the party that Adrian showed up to with some young girls.”

“We don’t have anyone in the fraternity named Adrian, nor anyone by that name who rushed last year,” he said.

A manila file folder lay on the table in front of him.

“What’s in there?” asked Sinclair.

“Our roster of members and pledges from last year.”

Sinclair reached across the table.

Cameron placed his hands on the folder. “Don’t you need a search warrant or something?”

“You sure you want to mess with me?”

Cameron slid the folder across the table.

Sinclair scanned the names. No Adrian. “I’ll need a copy of this.”

“Take it,” said Cameron. “I can print another one.”

Sinclair slid two photos, snapshots of Samantha and Jenny, out of his portfolio and set them in front of Cameron. He glanced at them for a second and looked up at Sinclair and Braddock impassively.

“Recognize them?” After a few seconds of silence, Sinclair said, “My friends at the university tell me your fraternity’s on probation. One call from me and they shut down your house.”

“I recognize them.”

“Tell me what happened,” said Sinclair.

Cameron told them about the Saturday night before the first week of classes last year, the night when all fraternities had their first party of the school year. The active members screened guys at the door to keep nonstudents out but seldom checked student IDs on girls.

“A lot of girls at a frat house makes for great recruiting of new pledges,” said Sinclair.

“You got that right,” Cameron said and told them that a few hours after the party began, he spotted Brandon, a sophomore who had expressed interest in joining the fraternity. Brandon was drinking beer in one of the rooms with another kid and two girls. The girls definitely weren’t college age.

Sinclair scrolled down the names on the roster. “Brandon Shaw, is that the Brandon you’re talking about?”

“Yeah. He knew the rules. Absolutely no underage girls allowed, and no one under twenty-one is allowed to drink.”

“The girls?” asked Sinclair.

“The ones in your photos,” said Cameron. “They were totally wasted. I told Brandon to get them out of the house.”

“Did he?”

“I didn’t see them the rest of the night. He came by the house the next afternoon and apologized and said he still wanted to pledge, so we had a long talk.”

“Did he become a member?”

“We let him in as a pledge the fall semester, but it didn’t work out.”

“What happened?”

“Fraternities aren’t what they used to be. None of that
Animal House
stuff, but it’s not like we inspect our fraternity brothers’ rooms to make sure there’s no booze or females. If they’re not twenty-one and they drink, they have to be cool about it. Brandon wasn’t. There was also talk that he was dealing, and if this house got caught with drugs, we’d be shut down.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Party stuff, mostly X, pot, pharmies.”

“How about roofies or molly?”

“Maybe.”

“Where’s Brandon now?”

“Haven’t seen him since the end of that semester—just before Christmas.”

“What about the other boy?” Sinclair asked.

“Only time I saw him. Brandon was trying to get him to pledge, but the boy’s father wouldn’t let him live on campus or join a fraternity. I saw his student ID that night, so I know he was a Cal student.”

“Remember his name?”

“No.”

“Describe him.”

“Middle Eastern, maybe Indian or Pakistani. Freshman age, small kid, maybe five-eight, black hair.”

After Sinclair and Braddock took a taped statement from Cameron, they returned to their car on the shaded street three blocks from campus. Braddock called homicide to have someone run Shaw, while Sinclair called a detective at UCPD. The detective told him Brandon Shaw was a sophomore engineering major during fall semester last year when the party occurred. His grades dropped from As and Bs as a freshman to all Cs and Ds that semester. He was placed on academic probation and dropped out in March. The last address the university had for him was on Lee Street in Oakland.

“CORPUS shows a Brandon Shaw,” said Braddock, referring to the county criminal history system, “age twenty, former address the same as the fraternity house, current address on Lee. Arrested in March for possession of methamphetamine and narcotics paraphernalia, probably a crystal meth pipe, and then last month for possession for sales of crack cocaine. FTAed on his last court date, so there’s a warrant in the system.”

“From engineering student to crack dealer,” said Sinclair.

“And of course, he ends up in Oakland,” said Braddock.