Thrill Kill (6 page)

A petite Chinese woman with wire-rimmed glasses perched on a beak-like nose leaned against the open doorway of the manager’s apartment. Sinclair and Braddock flashed their badges. “Do you have a tenant named Dawn Gustafson?” Sinclair asked.

“Unit two-oh-eight,” the gray-haired woman said. “Is there a problem?”

“She was killed yesterday. We need to take a look in her apartment.”

“Oh, my goodness.” She stepped into her apartment and returned with a key. “What happened?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Sinclair said as they walked to the elevator. “What kind of a tenant was she?”

“Quiet, always paid her rent on time. A nice, polite young lady.”

“Did she live alone?”

“Yes. She sometimes had friends visit, but it was never a problem.”

“Male or female?” Sinclair asked.

“I never paid attention,” the woman said, leading them to the elevator.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” Braddock asked.

“Maybe. She wasn’t here much, so she may have been spending nights with a man.”

“You didn’t pay attention if her guests were male or female, yet you know she wasn’t here much,” Sinclair said.

“If I came through the garage around nine or ten at night, her car was normally gone. When my husband left for work at six the next morning, it still wasn’t in her space.”

“Is her car here now?” Sinclair asked.

“We can check.” They took the elevator down one level. As soon as the door opened, she said, “Nope, it’s not here.”

“What kind of car did she drive?” he asked.

“A red sports car.”

“A Camaro?” Braddock asked.

“I think that’s what it was.” The manager pressed the button for the second floor, and the small elevator bucked upward. Sinclair and Braddock followed her down the hall to 208, where she stuck a key in the upper lock. “Huh, the deadbolt’s unlocked.”

“Is that unusual?” Braddock asked.

“We don’t have many problems here, but it is Oakland, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t use their deadbolt.”

After she turned the key, Sinclair said, “Wait out here, please,” and gently brushed past her.

Although he didn’t expect the killer to be there, the unlocked deadbolt raised the pucker factor a notch, so he swept his coat aside and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Braddock followed him inside and did the same. Sinclair scanned the combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The drapes were closed and the lights on. All the cabinets in the kitchen were open and cushions on the sofa were flipped over and askew. He glanced at Braddock. She nodded, understanding they would do a quick sweep of the apartment to ensure no one was present.

Sinclair opened a closet next to the front door. One coat on a hanger, a vacuum cleaner on the floor, and some shoe boxes on the shelf. He led the way down a hall and opened an accordion door to a linen closet. Sheets, towels, and a few rolls of toilet paper. The bathroom was empty. They stepped into the bedroom. A king-size bed was covered with a cherry-red
satin bedspread and a pile of red and pink pillows. Sinclair peeked under the bed and opened the closet. Hanging inside was an assortment of lingerie that looked like the back wall of a Victoria’s Secret store: lace teddies, satin slips, see-through bustiers, and cutout corsets.

“Looks like we found where she works,” Sinclair said to Braddock.

They returned to the front room and told the manager, who was patiently standing in the hallway, they would notify her at her apartment when they were finished. He jotted down some notes and opened the drapes. The view was the roof of a large, old house on the next lot and another apartment building beyond it. The windows were intact and locked. He went back to the front door and examined the lock and doorjamb. Nothing indicated forced entry—no scratches on the strike plate or the locks and no impressions in the wood door frame or the door itself.

The living-room furniture was arranged as a sitting area on one side and a desk, filing cabinet, and bookshelf on the other. It was nothing fancy. The desk could be bought for a few hundred dollars, and the living-room set would go for under a grand at a dozen Bay Area stores. On the desk was a computer keyboard and flat-screen monitor. Cords hung over the back of the desk to an imprint in the carpet where a computer tower had apparently been. The bottom drawer of the filing cabinet was open and empty.

“I wonder what was so important in the computer and paper files for someone to take them,” said Braddock.

“Maybe something they didn’t want us to see.”

“I don’t see any signs of a struggle.”

“Doesn’t look like she was killed here, but we’ll need to process the apartment anyway. If nothing else, we might find some prints of whoever searched the place.”

“Should we get a warrant?”

Normally, a search warrant wasn’t required at a homicide victim’s residence, the assumption being the only person whose privacy was being invaded was the victim. A murder victim would want the police to find her killer. If the suspect also lived there, courts might determine he had a right to privacy, and any evidence the police found that connected him to the crime could be thrown out if they didn’t get a warrant. Braddock had a more conservative take on the rules of search and seizure. Sinclair appreciated that. During their time working together, she had kept him from making rash decisions more than once. “The manager says she lives alone, and we didn’t see any clothing that would indicate another person lived here,” he said, verbalizing his justification for forgoing a warrant.

“You’re assuming the lingerie was hers,” Braddock said. “What if other girls used the bedroom and one of them is our suspect?”

“Possible, but unlikely. What do you make of the office setup?”

Braddock’s fingers traced the books on the shelf. “These are mostly school books, subjects like business management, accounting, and taxation. She’s got a thick user’s manual for QuickBooks, and a copy of
QuickBooks for Dummies
. Maybe she really is an accountant. What if we discover evidence when we search that she worked with someone else here and he’s the killer?”

“So to be on the safe side, we should get a warrant?”

“If it were my case, I would,” Braddock said.

*

Three hours later, Sinclair returned to the apartment with a copy of the warrant. It hadn’t been a difficult affidavit to prepare, but to Sinclair, it was nothing more than a legally mandated waste of time. The four-page affidavit summarized his training and experience, the crime and his investigation, the evidence he was looking for, and the legal justification for the search, to include identifying the suspect, the motive,
and the location of the murder. It took Sinclair an hour of roaming the courthouse to find an available judge so he could watch her read his documents before he was asked to raise his right hand and swear to their truthfulness.

Since Sinclair had called Braddock as soon as he had the warrant, the crime scene processing was well under way by the time he returned to the apartment. One evidence technician was twirling a brush and spraying fine black graphite powder on the file cabinet. The other, a woman dressed in the same dark-blue utility uniform, was taking a photo of a latent print on the desk. She then applied tape to it and placed it on a card.

“They’ve already photoed all the rooms,” Braddock said. “I figured I’d have them start with the office area since that’s where we probably want to look first.”

“Good idea,” Sinclair said.

“I had a uniform secure the apartment, and I started a canvass of the building when you were gone.” She opened her notebook and paged through a legal pad. “No answer at half the doors. I left my card with a note to call. None of the other tenants really knew Dawn. Those who did knew her by first name only. The consensus was she was a very nice, quiet tenant. They mostly saw her afternoons and early evenings. I couldn’t find anyone who saw her leaving for work in the morning, so everyone figured she went to school and worked irregular hours or that she slept somewhere else. She had occasional guests, normally men, but no one could remember anyone specifically or provide a description. The officer’s continuing to knock on doors on the first floor.”

“All finished here,” the male tech said. “We’ll do the bedroom next.”

Sinclair pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened each drawer of the file cabinet. Empty. “No reason to have a file cabinet if you have no files.”

“So whoever took her computer grabbed the files as well,” Braddock said.

Sinclair sat at the desk. Brass desk lamp, electronic calculator, a two-hole punch, computer monitor, and a wireless keyboard and mouse on a leather desk blotter. Very neat and organized. The desk drawers were filled with typical supplies: ruler, paperclips, scissors, tape, an assortment of pens and markers, pads of paper, and envelopes. Two small boxes of business cards were in the top drawer behind an assortment of power cords.

Sinclair placed the boxes on the desk and removed a card from the first one. A headshot of Dawn wearing a conservative blouse and “Dawn Gustafson, Business and Personal Bookkeeping” followed by a phone number and Gmail address.

Braddock leaned over his shoulder. “It’s looking more and more like she’s a bookkeeper. Did you have this number and e-mail for her?”

“I had nothing.” Sinclair pulled out his phone, hit speaker, and called the number.

It went immediately to voicemail: “You’ve reached the number for Dawn Gustafson. Please leave your name and number and I’ll return your call.”

“No landline here,” Sinclair said.

Braddock removed an iPad from her handbag, powered it up, and entered the phone number into the Safari search engine. “It’s a Verizon cell phone. Nothing else comes up, so she probably doesn’t list it on a website or anywhere else on the web.”

“We should eventually do a warrant on it,” Sinclair said. “I’d like to see all of her call and text records and any locator data the account shows.”

“Verizon will take at least a week to return info unless we can justify exigent circumstances.”

“Yeah, and another half a day wasted typing when we should be investigating. I’ll put it on my to-do list along with writing a warrant on Google to get her e-mail info.” Sinclair slid a few of her business cards into his pocket and opened the other box. Sadly, he wasn’t surprised at what he saw. A photo of Dawn wearing a lace negligee and a provocative come-hither smile
took up the left half of the card. On the right, it read,
Blondie, Special Ladies Escorts, San Francisco & Bay Area, www.specialladies.com
, followed by a 415 area code phone number.

“She was such a pretty girl.” Braddock sighed. “It’s so sad she allowed herself to be exploited like this.”

Sinclair put a few of the cards into his pocket. “It’s not like someone shanghaied her, dragged her to California, and forced her into a life of prostitution.”

“The coercion and influence that lead girls into this life is more subtle than that—abuse in their childhood, lack of opportunities,” Braddock said.

Sinclair didn’t buy the bad-childhood and no-job excuses for crime. He and Braddock had had this discussion before. Her stepfather was an ultraliberal professor at UC Berkeley whose worldview was the polar opposite of Sinclair’s. Sinclair had quipped with Braddock many times, only half-joking, that after four years at UC Berkeley, the Peace Corps, and social work jobs, her leftist brainwashing was nearly complete, and even with the harsh realities of the real world she saw as a cop, she had a tendency to slip toward the dark side when he wasn’t watching.

“Even if some of those factors got her into the life, she had plenty of opportunities to get out,” Sinclair said. “Don’t forget, when I busted her the first time, she was sent home. But she came back. On her own. She got out of the business a few years after that, but here she was again.”

“She got off the streets a second time?” Braddock asked. “When did that happen?”

Sinclair hesitated for a moment and then said, “I’m just assuming that, based on what Jimmy said and the rough timeline I have in my head about her life.”

Braddock studied him. He wondered if she was trying to read his mind or trying to get him to say more. “Okay then,” she said, obviously willing to let it drop. “Maybe that’s why she was studying to be an accountant—to change her life. And it
looks like she was paying her bills—at least some of them—with her bookkeeping business.”

“So she might’ve been in the process of changing,” Sinclair said. “All I’m saying is most people don’t commit crimes because they have no alternative. They make a choice to sling dope or sell their bodies on the corner because it’s easier than getting up every morning, working at an entry-level job, and busting your ass to move up to something better.”

“I still feel sorry for Dawn.”

“So do I,” he said. “She didn’t deserve this, and the only person I blame for her death is the one who killed her.”

Braddock returned to her iPad while Sinclair went through the bookshelf, fanning each book and hoping a piece of paper with something relevant would drop out. Nothing did. When he was finished, he looked over Braddock’s shoulder as she swiped through the pages of the Special Ladies Escorts website. Dawn was one of about fifty women advertised. Each had a short bio designed to play into men’s fantasies.

The techs returned from the bedroom. The female tech said, “We’re done in here, if you want to have a look. We went through all the clothes and checked them with the ultraviolet light. We didn’t find any blood, semen, or other secretions, so they were probably washed before being put away. We went through all the boxes in the closet, photographed the contents, and put them back for you. When you’re done, we’ll collect them as evidence in case you want to have the lab examine them for DNA later.”

“What’s in the boxes?” Sinclair asked.

The female tech grinned. “You’ll see.”

The bedroom furniture was made of honey-colored oak, heavy and sturdy. The top of the dresser was clear. The top drawer contained some bras and panties, sexy, but the kind of underwear any twenty-something woman would wear. Two conservative sweaters and two sweat suits were in the next drawer—clothes
someone would wear lounging around their home. The other drawers were empty, as were the drawers in both nightstands.