Red Line (22 page)

“If you didn’t shoot, he would’ve shot you,” said Walt.

“I know.”

“Yet you feel enormous guilt.” Walt said it as a fact, as if he could read Sinclair’s mind.

“What I feel guilty about is that I don’t feel any guilt over it. Ever since that night, I’ve been asking myself whether I killed him because I had to or because I wanted to.”

Sinclair pushed open the office door and saw Braddock, Jankowski, and Sanchez sitting in a circle of desk chairs drinking coffee.

“I guess I’m late,” said Sinclair.

“I think we can let you slide today,” said Braddock. “How’re you feeling?”

“My feet and knees are damn sore, and these new shoes don’t help, but other than that, I’m great.”

“SFPD called and gave us names of two people who might have seen the abduction of Melissa Mathis,” said Braddock. “So I thought that once we finish our coffee, Dan and I could head over there and handle it.”

“Because I’m still confined to the office per the chief’s order.”

“Sorry, Matt.”

“I just got off the phone with an NYPD detective before you walked in,” said Jankowski.

Sinclair dropped into his desk chair and spun it around to face Jankowski.

“The detective sat in on the interview with Jane’s common-law after she killed herself. He was the one who found her.”

“The common-law husband wasn’t a suspect?” asked Sinclair.

“No, he was at work and it was no doubt a suicide. Anyway, they weren’t married but had been in a long-term relationship. Says his name was Chris Olsen. Remembers him as being forty or forty-five, between six and six-two, and well-built, maybe one ninety or two hundred, with sandy blond hair and a beard.”

“The same size as the guy who visited my apartment.”

“Exactly my thought,” said Jankowski.

“Is Olsen Samantha’s father?”

“I asked, but the detective said he didn’t know. He wasn’t the primary on the case; he was just helping on the interview.”

“Or he knew but wouldn’t tell you. What did he admit knowing?”

“He told me an
s-o-n
spelling in Olson means the person could be from any Scandinavian country or the name was Americanized when the family immigrated. An
s-e-n
spelling means the name’s Norwegian.”

“So NYPD’s an expert on Scandinavian surnames?”

“The guy they interviewed was Norwegian. It’s why he remembers his name’s spelled O-L-S-E-N.”

Sinclair poked the on button to his computer and pushed the papers on his desk to the side. He pounded the enter key, even though he knew that wouldn’t make the computer start quicker. Although he was a long ways from proving Olsen was the killer, everything felt right about him. Sinclair knew he was on the right track for the first time since he stood over Zachary Caldwell’s lifeless body on the bus bench.

“What else did that detective say about Olsen?” asked Sinclair.

“He said that the case packet on Jane’s suicide isn’t in the unit files or archived, even though it should be closed, and he was told he had to get approval from his boss or partner before he said anything else.”

“More secrecy,” said Sinclair. “Who are they protecting?” Once the screen came up, Sinclair punched in his user name and password and clicked the icon to open RMS. If Olsen had any contact with OPD, he’d be in the department’s record management system. It could be as insignificant as making a report for vandalism or witnessing a car break-in. He typed in Chris Olsen and searched from the date of Samantha’s rape forward.

He got three hits. The first one was for a man twenty-six years old. Too young. The next one was a woman—Christine. The last record was for a Christopher Olsen who was forty-six. He brought up the report. A hit-and-run driver struck Olsen’s car in East Oakland last month. Sinclair toggled to the DMV system and entered the name and the date of birth from the hit-and-run report.

The driver’s license information popped onto the screen. Five-foot-eight and two-thirty. Not even close.

“Jankowski,” Sinclair yelled. “You know anyone else at NYPD?”

“I got the cards of a couple of Polack detectives from the Bronx that I drank beer with at the last homicide conference in Reno.”

“Dan, you can’t . . . oh, never mind,” said Braddock.

“I’m a Polack and proud—”

Sinclair said, “Can you get them to run Olsen in their version of RMS or DMV out there?”

“I doubt they’re working on Sunday, but I’ll give it a shot.”

Sinclair turned back to his computer and pulled up the screen for CORPUS, the county arrest and criminal history system, and typed Olsen’s name. Four pages of hits. He printed them out and scanned down the list, crossing out those younger than thirty-five and older than fifty. That left him ten entries on four different people. The first three didn’t match the age or physical. The fourth one was six-one and two hundred pounds. He ran him out. This Olsen had a local arrest record going back twenty years with his first arrest in Fremont for disturbing the peace, followed by a succession of drug charges. It didn’t look favorable. Sinclair couldn’t imagine the killer spending time in the Bay Area until recently. The last arrest was six months ago. Sinclair scrolled through the entry and found the subject had remained in custody with a parole hold until his last court date when he pled guilty to a two-year sentence. Definitely not him.

“As I suspected, no one’s in,” said Jankowski. “But I talked to a precinct desk sergeant who said he’d try to call one of my old drinking buddies at home. While we’re waiting, Braddock and I might as well head over to the city and do those interviews. Maybe we’ll find someone who saw someone fitting the description of Olsen.”

Sinclair went back to his computer and ran out all Chris Olsens with an Oakland address in DMV. He was ready to expand his search to surrounding cities, but he knew he was wasting his time. It was a long shot anyway. The Chris Olsen he was looking for wouldn’t have a California driver’s license, and if Olsen was the killer, as meticulously as he had planned the murders, he’d certainly be able to avoid police contact. He tried several websites and found more than a hundred Chris Olsens in New York. He eliminated
some. It was appearing hopeless. Even if he were looking at the right Chris Olsen on the computer, he might not know it. He needed a birth date, a social security number, or some other identifier to bring up a driver’s license, a criminal history, or some other record to be sure the Olsen he was viewing was the Chris Olsen he was looking for.

The man sat at his hand-me-down desk in the windowless office scanning the Channel 6 breaking news on his desktop computer. The big news so far was the heat. Not yet noon and San Francisco was already in the mideighties, and Oakland was poised to tie the record high of ninety-nine degrees for the date, set in 1978. It showed one news team was in Marin County filming sailboats on the bay with the skyline of San Francisco in the background and another was interviewing a fire chief in southeast Alameda County about the risk of a wildfire. He pulled his smartphone from his jeans pocket, looked at the e-mails in the draft folder that he had previously prepared, and reviewed the first e-mail in the sequence:

He pressed send.

As he paced the homicide office in his stocking feet, Sinclair felt like the inmates he’d seen walking prison yards. He’d given up trying to find the right Chris Olsen among the hundreds on the Internet and spent the last hour reading reports from Melissa Mathis’s murder, hoping for something that would tell him Olsen was the man responsible. But there were no witnesses to her abduction and none of the witnesses on the freeway got a look at the driver’s face. He called the crime lab, and a criminalist in the fingerprint unit answered the phone.

“This is Sinclair down in homicide. What’re you doing here on a Sunday?”

“Working your murder cases, Sergeant,” she said.

“Any luck?”

“No, but I’m relooking at the evidence in all the cases to see if there’s anything we can examine for fingerprints again, maybe through fuming.”

“If you find anything—”

“You’ll be the first one I call,” she said.

Sinclair dialed the home phone number he had for Donna Fitzgerald and was surprised when she answered.

“I’m not calling about Jenny,” he said before she could hang up. “What can you tell me about Chris Olsen?”

“I need to put this behind me, not only for Jenny’s benefit, but for mine too,” she said. “Please don’t call me again.”

At least she didn’t slam the phone in his ear, he thought, as he called the phone number the woman at Berzerkeley Boutique had given him for the owner. Skye was the only person who had seen Olsen, assuming the man who bought all the medallions was Olsen. He got her voicemail and left another message. He entered her phone number into the computer, and it showed to be a landline with a Berkeley address. He called Berkeley PD and requested they send an officer by the address to see if Skye was there.

Ten minutes later, the Berkeley officer called. “The address is a big, old house filled with big, old hippies. Her housemates said she’s away this weekend but should be home by around five this afternoon.”

“Any way to locate her now?”

“They said she doesn’t believe in cell phones, and the rumor is she’s at a lesbian camp or commune somewhere near Guerneville.”

Even if he could get the locals to look for her, there were hundreds of rustic camps along that part of the Russian River, and Skye would probably be on her way back long before anyone could find her.

Sinclair thanked the Berkeley officer and called Braddock. “How’d you do?” he asked.

“Big waste of time. We talked to two supposed witnesses, but neither really saw anything.”

“I should’ve been out there with you.”

“Jankowski’s keeping me entertained.”

“What’s he bitching about today, the moral decline of the country’s youth or the imminent collapse of the world economy?”

“Only the weather. Says if he wanted to sweat his butt off doing police work, he’d have joined LAPD. We’re going to grab some lunch on the way back. You want to join us?”

Sinclair’s watch read 11:55. “Nah, I had a big breakfast.”

“Jankowski’s waving at me. I’ll put him on.”

Sinclair pulled the phone a few inches from his ear as Jankowski’s booming voice came on the line. “Sinclair, I just got a call from NYPD. I guess I rattled enough cages to get this pushed higher than the precinct captain. This deputy inspector bigwig claimed his cops misunderstood his directive. He only told them he didn’t want anybody screwing with the Arquette family over bullshit or digging into shit that didn’t concern them.”

“Can this deputy inspector make the detective who handled the case call us?”

“He’s on vacation. He’s an old timer and only carries his cell phone on duty because they make him.”

“Sounds like one of our old-timer homicide sergeants,” said Sinclair.

“Fuck you too, Sinclair. I take my phone with me on vacation—I just don’t turn it on. Otherwise, you youngsters bother me all the time.”

“They’re cops. Can’t they find one of their own?”

“The detective’s driving home right now from somewhere in Pennsylvania and’s expected to be home by seven or eight, their time. The inspector ordered someone to sit in front of his house and call us the moment he pulls up.”

Jankowski gave the phone back to Braddock, and Sinclair told her what he learned about Skye.

“We’ll be back in an hour or so,” said Braddock. “I guess we can go back into the reports and see if we missed anything.”

“Or twiddle our thumbs until NYPD calls,” said Sinclair. “Maybe he’ll give us something that points to Olsen or at least give us all his info and maybe a photo.”

“Then Jankowski and I can go to Skye’s house by five and wait for her. If her description of the man who bought the medallions is anything like Olsen, we can show her a photo lineup.”

“Sounds like a plan. Enjoy your lunch and don’t worry about me. I’ll just be here reading reports like a good little building rat.”

He brought up the next e-mail from his draft folder, pasted it into a reply, and hit the send button.

Sinclair grabbed the next report on the stack, looked at the thirty pages stapled together, and flung it across the room. It sailed like a Frisbee until the pages opened up. Then it fluttered and fell to the floor. Sanchez stared at him but said nothing. He’d been reading reports and doing computer searches all morning. Still, no clues jumped out. Sinclair couldn’t fathom how Sanchez sat at his desk all day reading reports and entering data into a computer. Sinclair could manage only a few hours at his desk on the best of days before he needed get out of the office and do something. Today, all he could manage was thirty minutes.

He pulled the stiff shoes onto his feet and took the service elevator to the basement, stopping at the heavy steel door that led to the indoor range. When he heard a lull in the gunfire, he swung open the door, grabbed a pair of earmuffs off the railing, and covered his ears. Two of the three bays were occupied with two officers each. They faced downrange, guns holstered, hands inches away. Sinclair heard a metallic click, and four silhouette targets mounted on metal rotating stands turned to face the officers. They
drew their Glocks, brought them smoothly to eye level, and fired two shots each into the life-size depictions of an armed man’s upper torso.

Inside the glass-walled office at the back of the range, Norris leaned toward a microphone. “Come back to the fifteen-yard line. Make ready with one, two-round magazine in your weapon, and another two-round magazine in your ammo pouch.”

Norris gestured to Sinclair, who opened the door and stepped into the long, narrow office. Once inside, he removed his earmuffs.

“Hang on a sec,” Norris said to Sinclair, then pressed the microphone button. “On the turn of the target, you will fire three rounds center mass. You will then change magazines and fire two carefully aimed headshots. This is to simulate a suspect who is wearing body armor and does not go down after successive shots to the torso.”

Norris flipped a switch on the console and the targets turned. The officers fired the first three rounds in three seconds. Their pistol slides locked back and empty magazines dropped to the cement floor as the officers slid in fresh magazines and slammed them home. The final two shots rang out more slowly as the officers took their time to align their sights and press the triggers. One was still aiming when Norris flipped the switch to rotate the targets.

“Score each other’s targets. Possible is fifty. I want to see any targets with less than forty-five holes. Jimmy, I’ll score you.”

The young, black officer who didn’t get his last shot off brought his target into the office. Norris counted the holes, marking each with a pen.

“Forty-two,” said Norris. “Passing is forty, but it’s not good enough to survive on the streets. You missed both head shots.”

“I jerked the first one and was aiming for the second when the target turned,” Jimmy said.

“In the real world, you’d be dead. You need practice. The range hours for next week are posted on the door.”

Sinclair removed his Sig Sauer from his holster, dropped the magazine, ejected the chambered round into his hand, and handed the gun to Norris. Norris disassembled it; inspected the barrel, springs, and firing pin; and then put it back together. He grasped the gun by the barrel and added a succession of weights to a rod that hooked over the trigger until the hammer fell. He did the same for the single-action trigger and wrote numbers into a steno pad.

“Three and a half pounds single-action and nine double,” said Norris. “A little lighter than factory specs, but still okay.”

Sinclair reloaded and holstered his gun. “You mind if I shoot some?”

“Actually, I’d like you to test fire a scenario I’m designing for SWAT training next week,” said Norris.

Sinclair followed him to the third bay where the target stands contained two hostage targets. The paper targets were life-size cartoonish drawings of a light-haired ghoulish man holding a dark-haired woman around the throat with one hand and a gun to her head with the other. The woman shielded the man, leaving only half of his body exposed.

“Put on your ears and engage the one on the right,” said Norris.

Sinclair pulled on his earmuffs, drew his .45, and put two rounds in the ghoul’s head.

“Good,” said Norris. “The body’s the larger target, why’d you go for the headshot?”

Sinclair reholstered. “The man’s pointing a gun at the woman and has his finger on the trigger. He wouldn’t die immediately from a body shot and could still shoot. He could even pull the trigger involuntarily if the hand muscles contract. But a bullet in the head will short-circuit the brain.”

“Exactly,” said Norris. “I’ll turn the targets when I run this for SWAT, and they’ll have to figure it out instantly and go for the headshot. If they shoot in the torso, miss the head, or hit the hostage, they fail.”

“Simple enough,” said Sinclair.

Norris slid a sheet of plywood with a square hole cut in the middle in front of the other target. “This simulates the same hostage situation, but inside a house. The hostage-taker’s peering through a window, holding his hostage as a shield in front of him. Instead of a six-inch-wide head to hit, less than half of the hostage-taker’s head is exposed. More than an inch to the right and you hit the hostage. More than an inch to the left and you miss. I’ll have the snipers shoot it with their scoped rifles at a hundred yards and the operators at fifteen yards with handguns.”

Sinclair took several slow breaths, blew out most of the last one, aimed, and slowly pressed the trigger. The bullet creased the hair of the paper hostage.

“Just nicked her ear,” said Norris. “What the hell, a good plastic surgeon can repair it.”

Sinclair fired a second shot, this one hitting the ghoul in his left eye.

“Good shot,” said Norris. “Not easy, huh?”

“I don’t shoot as much as I used to, but the SWAT guys should be able to handle this,” said Sinclair. “But here’s the real solution.”

He aimed two inches left of his last shot and fired three quick rounds.

Norris walked downrange, yelling, “Sarge, you shot my window frame.”

Sinclair slid the bullet-peppered plywood away from the target to reveal three holes in the right side of the hostage-taker’s head. “A window frame won’t stop a bullet, so by ignoring it, I get a six-inch-wide target instead of a two-inch sliver. Easy shot.”