Thrill Kill (9 page)

Braddock crossed the room and sat on the desk beside him. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sinclair thought for a minute. “I guess I knew my relationship with her wasn’t fully professional. I couldn’t really call her an informant because she never provided any info, yet I was helping her out.”

Braddock laughed. “So you felt ashamed because you helped out a citizen for no reason other than she needed help? Jeez, Matt, isn’t that what police are supposed to do? Not every interaction with a citizen has to lead to the arrest of a bad guy. Maybe you’re afraid you’re reputation as a tough, law-and-order-only cop would get tarnished.”

“There’s also what she was.”

“In this city, just about everyone we come across is involved in some kind of crime. As long as you’re not banging her and then looking the other way when she robs banks or something, what’s the big deal?”

“Just the same, I’d prefer you keep what I told you between us.”

“Mum’s the word. Not that you don’t take every case personal, but I’ve had the feeling this one was more personal than most.”

Sinclair nodded in agreement.

“What do you say we call it a night?” Braddock said. “We’re still on standby, and the city’s overdue for another killing.”

The mansion was quiet as Sinclair wrote a note and left it with his dirty suit and raincoat in the butler’s pantry. When he had first moved into the guesthouse, it felt strange having Walt and his wife handling everything from grocery shopping to housekeeping, but Walt insisted it was part of their responsibilities as the caretakers of Frederick Towers’s estate.

Walt had first met Fred Towers six years ago when Walt was working a second job as a limo driver and was assigned to pick up Fred at his Oakland office, where he was the CEO of one of the largest corporations in the city, and drive him home every day because he had lost his license after a DUI arrest. Over several weeks, Walt shared with Fred how booze had destroyed his own life fifteen years earlier, and eventually drove him to his first AA meeting and became his sponsor. When Fred’s wife and daughter died in a drunk-driving accident a year later, he asked Walt to move into his house to manage the estate and his personal affairs. Walt and Sinclair’s friendship had started in a similar way—at Sinclair’s first AA meeting.

Sinclair hadn’t been too happy about having to attend AA meetings when he got out of rehab nearly two years ago, and seeing people such as Walt, who talked at every meeting about serenity and gratitude, drove him crazy. But when he almost picked up a drink while investigating the Bus Bench murders,
Walt was there with support and needed words of wisdom. Fred and Walt invited Sinclair to stay in their guesthouse after his apartment was firebombed, and what was intended to be a month or so stay turned into more than a yearlong residency. Whenever he looked at the cost of rent for a decent apartment in a halfway decent area, he realized how good he had it here. Still, he dreamed of buying a house again someday, and hoped the escalating home prices in the East Bay didn’t outpace what he was able to save while living rent-free.

Sinclair walked through the commercial-grade kitchen and breakfast room onto a rear stone patio. The rain had stopped, but heavy clouds shadowed the light from the full moon above. He made his way down a flagstone path through the lush yard, around the pool, and into the guesthouse through the French doors. Originally a pool house with changing rooms and a large open space filled with pool tables and ping-pong tables, Fred had it converted to a one-bedroom apartment for his daughter when she turned twenty. By default, it became a guesthouse after she died.

Sinclair took a cigar from a drawer in the rolltop desk that sat in one corner of his living room. He grabbed a towel from the linen closet and a down jacket from the closet and returned to the pool area. After wiping down a chair, he sparked his lighter and puffed on the A. Flores Habano until it was evenly lit.

When he’d first recognized Dawn in the park yesterday morning, the first thought that jumped into his mind was that he had failed her—that if he had somehow said the right thing to her when she came to him several years earlier, she would have walked away from her life of prostitution. Maybe if he hadn’t been so focused on his own needs and problems. Although he hadn’t mentioned it to Dr. Elliott that morning, Dawn’s face was one of those that flashed through his mind as he was reliving the shooting on Telegraph Avenue. Dawn was one of those he couldn’t save.

As he savored the hint of vanilla and cocoa in the Dominican cigar, he knew the thought that he was somehow responsible for saving everyone was irrational. Nevertheless, it remained. He heard a door slam in the main house and turned to see a man walking toward him.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” Sinclair said.

Walt Cooper set two mugs on the patio table and wiped the rain from a chair with Sinclair’s towel. He was in his midsixties, short and wiry, with snow-white hair. “I was upstairs reading and heard your car come in. When I looked out and saw you here, I thought you might like some company.”

Sinclair picked up one of the cups. “Decaf?”

“Of course.”

Sinclair brought the cup to his lips, watching the steam rise into the cold evening air. He puffed on his cigar as they both sat there silently for a few minutes.

Finally, Walt said, “I saw today’s paper. The murder of that girl in the park is yours?”

“Yeah.” Sinclair didn’t want to talk about the murder, and Walt knew enough not to pry. Walt would continue to toss out other topics like a man blindly throwing darts at a board until one stuck.

“How’s it going with your therapy?” Walt asked.

Walt had been one of the top psychologists in the Bay Area until his drinking and prescription-drug abuse decimated his life when he was in his forties. He had lost everything and served time in prison for insurance fraud. Now sober for more than twenty years, he could never be licensed to practice again, but he remained well-versed in the field.

“Slower than I hoped,” Sinclair said. “This morning, we were into the shooting that got me started with the shrink and I flashed on other incidents.”

“That’s how EMDR works. Those are repressed memories, and during future sessions you’ll deal with them, too.”

“I’m worried about how much shit I have buried inside me.”

“It’ll all come out as long as you don’t fight it. Then you can be free from all the barriers that are holding you back emotionally. Has any childhood stuff come up?”

“Sort of, but I know the heavy shit I need to work through is from my Army and police work.”

Walt took a long drink of his coffee and turned his chair to face Sinclair. “You might want to mention those early life memories to Dr. Elliott. Sometimes incidents from our childhood form the foundation for how we think and deal with the world. If that foundation was based on invalid principles, it can skew how we function today and in the worst cases, even our moral code.”

“There’s nothing from those days that I didn’t get over.”

“The problem is we don’t know what we don’t know. I had a patient when I worked with the VA who suffered from PTSD. He had plenty of wartime trauma, but one thing that struck me was a report from his wife that he never cried and appeared to be emotionally dead. During a year of weekly sessions, we pealed back the layers. We finally reached an incident from when he was in the first grade—something he had long ago forgotten. He had fallen on the playground and skinned his knee badly. The school nurse was putting tincture of iodine—or whatever they used back then—on his scrape. Of course, he was balling his eyes out. The nurse said to him, ‘Stop crying and act like a man.’ That was the last time he ever cried. To ensure he never again cried, he stopped feeling. I gave him permission to feel, even if it led to his crying, and his recovery was miraculous.”

“The stuff I flashed on was when my little brother was killed,” Sinclair said.

“You never told me about that.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

Walt smiled, took another drink of his coffee, and gazed across the pool at the mansion.

Sinclair puffed on his cigar. “I was twelve when my two brothers and I were going to the zoo with our church youth
group. My parents told me to watch over my little brother, but you know how it is when you’re a sixth grader and you want to hang out with those your age. I boarded the first bus with my friends, leaving Billy to wait for the next bus with the other little kids. A woman drove up and let two boys out of her car. A man, who I later learned was her estranged husband, got out of his car and started yelling at her. I watched through the bus window as he pulled a gun and emptied it at the woman. One of the bullets hit Billy. I ran off the bus and held him in my arms as the life drained out of him. Although my parents never came right out and said it, I knew they held me responsible for Billy’s death.”

Walt sat there quietly staring at the pool and sipping his coffee for a few moments. Finally he asked, “Has the issue of being responsible for the life and death of other people come up again in your life?”

“What do you think?” Sinclair said. “I’m a cop. It’s my job to save lives.”

“Saving lives and holding yourself responsible when they die are two different things.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Sinclair said.

“I’m sorry, Matthew. I didn’t mean to tread into an area that best belongs to Dr. Elliott. Any time you want to talk, I’m here.”

“You’ve been a great friend. Maybe we can talk about this when it’s not so late.”

“I was at a meeting tonight. People were asking about you.”

“It’s hard to hit meetings when I’m on standby. Maybe tomorrow if I get off on time.”

“Let me know and I’ll go with you,” Walt said. “Oh, and Betty will take your stuff to the dry cleaners tomorrow, but even with a rush, it won’t be back until Thursday. Is that your only raincoat?”

“Yeah, I’ll just have to stay out of the rain.”

“Fred has an old Burberry trench coat, one of the classic ones. I’ve been trying to donate it for years, but Fred thinks he’ll
lose enough weight to wear it again someday. It should fit you perfectly. I’ll leave it hanging on the kitchen door.”

“Thanks, Walt.” Sinclair watched as Walt gathered up the coffee cups and wet towel and made his way back to the mansion to the small apartment on the second floor where he and Betty lived.

At ten o’clock the following morning, Sinclair and Braddock waited for the elevator on the second-floor balcony of the PAB. “Still not sleeping?” Braddock asked.

She was surely seeing the same the dark circles under his eyes that Sinclair had seen in the mirror this morning. “Woke up early thinking about the case,” he said.

The truth was he had woken with a jolt and sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. The clock on his nightstand read 4:38
AM
. He went into the bathroom, stripped off his wet T-shirt and shorts and climbed into the shower. The dream was one of several different ones that took turns rotating through his subconscious every few nights. In this one, a faceless man appeared in front of him with a gun. Sinclair drew his sidearm and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger again, harder, and continued pulling it repeatedly until he finally woke up with a cramp in his forearm. After the shower, he dressed, made coffee, and drove to a 6
AM
AA meeting in Lafayette, a meeting he had attended regularly in his early sobriety but hadn’t been to in months.

“Is there something wrong with your arm?” Braddock asked.

He hadn’t realized he was massaging the muscles of his right forearm, which felt like a taut rope. “Too many reverse curls in the gym the other day,” he said.

The elevator took them to the fourth floor. Sinclair pressed the button alongside a door marked only by a room number. The intelligence unit consisted of one sergeant and four officers, each of whom had a specialty such as outlaw motorcycle gangs, terrorism, Asian gangs, or organized crime. Officers who were assigned to intelligence seldom took a promotional exam, because Intel had more freedom and perks than any other assignment in the department. A white man in his midforties with shoulder-length hair, wearing jeans and a leather vest, opened the door. Sinclair knew this officer as one of the foremost experts on the Hells Angels in the state. The main office had four workstations, each with double computer monitors. Heavy file cabinets with combination locks lined a wall. Tiny red lights blinked from a motion detection sensor in the corner of the room. The intelligence unit was the only office in the PAB that had a separate intrusion alarm.

A door to their right opened, and a smooth-faced black man wearing a golf shirt, khaki pants, and a huge smile stepped out. Phil Roberts was the sergeant in charge of intelligence and had been Sinclair’s partner for his first four years in homicide and Braddock’s for her first six months. Roberts had grown up as an Air Force brat, living on different military bases in the United States and England. He attended Boston College for two years until he was accepted to the University of Oxford, from which he graduated with a degree in English Literature. Upon graduation, Roberts got a job as a grant writer for a consortium of nonprofits in the Bay Area, but he hated it within a year. He took the test for police officer at OPD twenty-three years ago and never regretted his decision.

Roberts and Sinclair did the handshake/half-hug routine. Roberts went for a full hug with Braddock.

“Isn’t that prohibited in the workplace these days?” Sinclair said.

“We in Intel operate in a covert status and aren’t subject to the sexual harassment regs you mere mortals are,” Roberts said.

“Do you still like it up here?” asked Braddock.

“What’s not to like? Unlimited overtime, no one watching over me, and we’re privy to all the secrets.”

“Like who’s running the escorts services in the Bay Area?” Sinclair asked.

Roberts ushered them into his office and shut the door. The windowless room was twice the size of the homicide lieutenant’s office. Two guest chairs faced a large wooden desk. A matching bookshelf filled with three-ring binders and a row of file cabinets covered one wall. A brown tweed couch backed against the other wall. Seated on it was a slim man in his fifties, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a white shirt with too much starch.

“Mark Cummings, IRS,” Roberts said. “My old homicide partners, Matt Sinclair and Cathy Braddock.”

Cummings rose slowly and shook hands with Sinclair and Braddock.

“CI special agent?” Sinclair asked, knowing there was a huge difference between an IRS agent and a criminal investigation special agent, whose qualifications and authority were similar to those of an FBI agent.

“That’s right,” Cummings said.

Sinclair and Braddock sat in the guest chairs and Roberts sat in his high-backed desk chair. Roberts looked at Sinclair and said, “When you left me the message about Special Ladies Escorts, I gave Mark a call. We’ve discussed them and a number of other escort services over the last year or so.”

“What do you know about them?” asked Sinclair.

“I need you to agree to some rules,” said Roberts. “No notes about our conversation and nothing in your case file attributed to us. IRS isn’t permitted to disclose anything about an active investigation to anyone not sworn in federally, and I don’t want to be called in to court to testify about what files we do or do not maintain.”

Sinclair and Braddock looked at each other and nodded.

“Helena Decker is the owner of Special Ladies Escorts as well as another four or five named escort agencies that operate from San Jose to Sausalito,” Roberts said. “The names come and go. Old ones shut down when police scrutinize them too closely or a customer causes problems. New ones with new phone numbers open up, but all of the phone lines go to one answering service. From there, requests are taken and girls dispatched. Money comes in through a number of different credit card accounts. It’s really just one company, SLE Services, Inc., which Decker owns. She reports income and pays taxes on it.”

“What’s the company bring in?” Sinclair asked.

Cummings looked at him blankly. Then he said, “I can’t divulge information that’s reported to the IRS.”

Roberts raised an eyebrow at Cummings. “Let’s just say she reports about a half million in income,” Roberts said. “But we suspect she nets ten times that.”

“Do you have phone and bank records?” Braddock asked.

Cummings shifted on the couch and crossed his legs. “We would need to have initiated a criminal case to subpoena that, and I’m not acknowledging the existence of any ongoing criminal cases.”

“Look,” said Sinclair. “I don’t need all this
Secret Squirrel
shit. I just need to know where I can find this Helena Decker and make her talk to me about a dead hooker.”

“That’s where we can help each other,” Roberts said. “You know how these organizations are. Decker is not going to disclose anything about your murder victim or her clients. Not unless you have a hammer on her. You don’t have the resources to mount an operation to get to her, but together we do.”

“And why would the Feds want to help us out?” Sinclair said, looking at Cummings.

Roberts said, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement along with the FBI have a loose-knit human trafficking task force. Because a woman was possibly murdered as a result of organized prostitution, the task force can get involved. The IRS
has been looking for a criminal nexus to SLE Services for years, and if we can show Decker receives money from illegal activity, it allows the Feds to grab all of her records and bank accounts. They’ll then subpoena everyone connected in front of a federal grand jury. Without the criminal nexus, they’ll spend years trying to make a case.”

Sinclair summarized, “So, we’re going to pretend that we’re mounting an operation to solve my homicide case, and if it opens up the huge IRS tax fraud case, we just lucked into it?”

Cummings sat there stone-faced.

“Exactly,” said Roberts.

“Okay,” Sinclair said. “I worked these kinds of operations back in the old vice days. We’d get a few undercovers, set them up in different hotel rooms, call up the escort services, and order up girls. They’d solicit the undercover officers, we’d arrest the escorts, and try to get them to turn on the owner.”

“We’re way ahead of you,” Roberts said. “There’s a similar meeting going on in San Jose right now. Their vice squad’s providing the undercover officer down there.”

“Who are you planning to use for the one we’re doing in Oakland?” Sinclair asked.

Roberts slid a manila envelope across the desk. Sinclair opened it and took out the contents: an expired driver’s license, credit cards, and other identification in the name of Carlos Gutierrez, Sinclair’s undercover name when he worked narcotics.

“Whoa there,” Sinclair said. “I haven’t worked undercover in almost ten years, and in case you haven’t noticed, my mug’s been plastered all over the TV and newspapers for years now.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” Roberts said. “You were one of the best back then, and it’s not like we’re going to parade you around the city. This isn’t a deep cover. One woman will come to your hotel room. Even if she saw you on the news at some point, the chances of her recognizing you and putting two and two together is negligible. There’s no one else that we can get up to speed in time and who can play the part we need to make this work.”

“Convincing a woman to have sex with you,” Braddock remarked. “This is right up your alley.”

Sinclair gave Braddock a wry smile and turned his attention back to Roberts. “My old ID is expired.”

“The law enforcement section at DMV has agreed to a rush for a new driver’s license. You have an appointment at the DMV on Claremont at two to pick it up. Our contact in security at Wells Fargo Bank is issuing you a new Visa card right now. I’ll pick it up this afternoon. The Feds are working on a clean cell and the backstop of your identity. Everything will be in place by close of business.”

The last time he carried the ID of Carlos Gutierrez had been when he was part of a deep-cover operation into a Mexican cartel that was establishing a foothold in Oakland. He was making his third controlled buy, handing over a briefcase with forty thousand dollars in exchange for a duffle bag with two kilos of powder. After the exchange, everyone was supposed to walk away, and surveillance teams from OPD and DEA were to follow the money. But it didn’t work out that way. The two cartel henchmen decided to kill Sinclair, take the money, and keep the drugs. They pulled guns and ordered him to his knees. Sinclair knew the surveillance teams couldn’t get there in time, so he drew a compact Kimber .45 from under his shirt. When the firefight was over, one cartel member was dead, the other was wounded, and Sinclair had suffered a bullet wound in his left shoulder that would require three surgeries and continued to nag him to this day.

Sinclair thought his undercover days were long over. But this wasn’t like infiltrating a drug gang or buying illegal guns from Chinese Triads. All it involved was pretending he was someone else, something he’d been doing most of his life. He was sure Dawn’s murder was connected to her work as an escort, and the key to solving the murder was getting into the organization. “When do we do this?”

“We’ll meet right here at five to brief and then head to the hotel. Wear your best suit—you’re going to be a high roller.”