Sinclair listened in as Braddock placed a call from her desk phone. She was much better at getting people to talk to her on cold calls than he was. When Sinclair did it, people all too often got pissed off and hung up on him.
“Special Ladies Escorts,” said a woman with a husky smoker’s voice.
“This is Sergeant Braddock, calling from the Oakland Police Department,” she said, pausing to let the woman take in what she said and reconcile it with the caller ID that surely appeared on her phone.
The woman’s tone changed from friendly and flirtatious to cold and professional. “How may I help you?”
“One of the women who works for your agency was murdered in Oakland Saturday night, and I’m trying to gather information on her.”
“Do you have a name?”
“She’s known as Blondie on your website. Her actual name is Dawn Gustafson.”
Sinclair heard the clicking of keys on a computer keyboard. A moment later, the woman said, “I can’t confirm or deny that Dawn Gustafson is an employee of the company.”
“Is there someone there who can?” Braddock asked.
“Hold please.” A Rihanna song, “The Monster,” beat over the phone for several minutes until the voice came back. “I’m sorry, but there’s no one here with that authority.”
“Do you have a number where I can reach the owner?” Braddock asked.
“I can pass on a message to her.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m not at liberty to reveal that. Would you like to leave a message?”
Braddock gave her the office phone number and repeated her name. “When can I expect her call?”
“I wouldn’t know. I will pass on your message.” The woman’s voice lost a touch of its edge. “If I may ask, how was she killed?”
“She was murdered and hung naked from a tree in East Oakland.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. I’ll pass your message on immediately.”
Braddock hung up. “Do you think she’ll call?”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Sinclair said. “These escort services are tough to crack.”
“Didn’t vice used to work them back when you were there?”
“We worked a few, but they were labor intensive. I was one of the UCs on a few operations my first few months there, but then I went over to narcotics.”
“Undercover in an escort operation. Every guy’s fantasy.”
“Yup. Sitting in nice hotels, drinking room-service wine, and waiting for sexy women to come to my room, take off their clothes, and tell me what kind of kinky things they want to do to me.”
“And then you’d arrest them,” Braddock said.
“And offer them a way to stay out of jail if they flip on the higher ups that make all the money.”
“Did vice ever make any cases?”
“A few actually got some prison time,” Sinclair said. “But most cases fell apart somewhere along the way. Usually, the agency shut down and reopened under a different name. When the department disbanded vice, didn’t SVU pick up that responsibility?”
Braddock huffed. “In theory. But when I was assigned to the special victim’s unit, we couldn’t even keep up with the rape and child abuse cases, so there wasn’t much time to take on major investigations like that.”
It still riled Sinclair when he thought of how the department had been decimated by budget cuts and reorganizations demanded by the Oakland City Council over the years. When he came on, vice-narcotics had three squads, one totally committed to prostitution and gambling enforcement. A half-dozen investigators out of the youth services division handled child abuse cases, and another four sergeants handled sexual assault cases out of the criminal investigation division. Today, the responsibility for all those crimes, as well as domestic violence, fell on the newly created SVU with half the personnel.
“Since you didn’t have time to work them, what did you do when you came across information about escort services or major prostitution rings?” Sinclair asked.
“We passed on the info to Intel in the hopes they could coordinate with the Feds and take down the organizations.”
“Did they ever get the owners of the escort services?”
“I don’t think the department’s targeted anything but street-level prostitution in years.”
“If the department wants to address the problem, they need to do more than a couple of operations a month picking up the girls who are dumb enough to solicit an undercover,” Sinclair said.
“What about the johns?” Braddock asked.
“Bust them, too,” he said. “They’re half of the problem. You remember when we used to do the john sweeps? We’d put a female officer that wanted to play hooker for a night out on the corner and snatch up every dude that solicited them.”
“I loved watching other officers I worked the streets with hang up their uniforms and slip into their hooker getups in the locker room. They made bets on who could snare the most johns.”
“I never saw you out there.”
“Not my kind of thing, but I respect the gals who did it.”
“I think the record was something like thirty-four johns in one night.”
“That was Jane Oliver,” Braddock said.
“Where’s she working now?”
“Still patrol in East Oakland. You’d never know how hot some of our female officers are when you only see them in uniform.”
Sinclair’s desk phone rang.
“This is number seventy-three in radio,” a dispatcher said. “We just received a nine-one-one call from a woman who said her name was Tanya and she’s helping you on a murder case.”
“Yeah, well, sort of,” Sinclair said.
“She said some really sketchy dude just approached a few of the girls at Thirty-Third and Market, showed off a gun in his waistband, and asked if any of them wanted to take a drive to Burckhalter Park and party. Isn’t that where your murder occurred?”
“Yeah. Did she give a description?”
“Male, Hispanic, twenty-five to thirty, five-ten, slim build, driving a black Camry, partial plate six-four-three.”
“Did you broadcast it?” Sinclair asked.
“I assigned two units to check the area. The caller said she wouldn’t talk to uniformed officers—only you. She’s waiting inside the Cajun restaurant in the thirty-one-hundred block of Market.”
Sinclair hung up the phone and said to Braddock, “Let’s go. Tanya might’ve spotted our killer.”