The following morning, Sinclair carried his empty coffee mug to the intelligence unit, set it on Robert’s desk, and sat on his sofa. Roberts took his cup into the outer office, returned, and handed Sinclair a full cup of coffee and then settled in behind his desk. They glared at each other for a few moments in silence.
Finally, Sinclair spoke. “We used to be partners. I feel like one of our street whores, the way you’ve used me.”
Roberts took a drink from his cup. “This is bigger than your murder.”
“If you told me that two days ago, I doubt I would’ve gotten involved in this.”
“You were looking for an inroad into the escort service,” Roberts said. “This was it.”
“We used to be honest with each other. I sense there’s a whole lot you’re still not telling me.”
“My job’s different now,” Roberts said. “There’s a whole lot I can’t tell many people.”
“Will I ever get a list of the escorts and their clients?”
Roberts looked at him for several beats. “I don’t know.”
Sinclair couldn’t tell if Roberts really didn’t know or that was his way of saying no. “What unit do those FBI agents work in? They aren’t out of the Oakland office.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I reached out to my friends over there,” Sinclair said. “They knew nothing of the op.”
“Are you referring to Archard?”
“Her and the two who were in the hotel bar and later lurking around the design center.”
“She’s assigned to organized crime out of the San Francisco office.”
“The other two?”
Roberts said nothing.
Sinclair drank some coffee. “You can tell by looking at them they’re not field agents. They were too clean, too bookish to put handcuffs on an actual bad guy.”
Roberts said nothing.
Sinclair continued, “I wrote a crime report covering the prostitution solicitation by Danielle Rhodes and the pimping exchange by Helena Decker. I listed Cummings, Archard, and you as witnesses. Under normal circumstances, you each would have to provide a supplemental report.”
“You know we in Intel don’t like to be listed as witnesses.”
“You know we in homicide don’t like to be punked out.”
“You wouldn’t have Decker if it wasn’t for the FBI and IRS,” Roberts said.
“You didn’t level with me from the beginning. In our world, nothing’s more important than a homicide, but you guys are withholding evidence that I need to solve it.”
“Have you turned in the report?”
“I’m still holding it,” Sinclair said. “I don’t need to turn it in until I see the DA to get Decker charged.”
“Is that your plan?”
“Why should I tell you my plan when you won’t share yours with me?”
“Because if I know your plan, I might be able to help.”
“Ya know, Phil, all the dealings I had with Intel in years past were just like this. We peon cops pass on everything we know to Intel. They listen, sometimes say, ‘Oh, yeah, we knew that,’ and then write it down and stick it in a file. The only time they ever passed on anything to us is when they throw us little tidbits because they need something. I thought it would be different when you came up here.”
“Sorry, Matt. It’s the nature of the job.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll get my info from Decker and her lawyer. At least they deal with me honestly and openly.”
“You should be cautious dealing with them. They might not be what they appear. And I’d appreciate you passing on anything Decker tells you.”
“I’m sure you would,” Sinclair said as he got up and walked out the door.
Sinclair stopped at the crime lab to see if they had any results from the crime scene or Dawn’s apartment. The firearms examiner had determined the bullet recovered from the victim’s head was a nominal .38 caliber projectile, which included .38, 9mm, .380, and .357. Based on the weight of the jacketed hollow point slug, 87.6 grains, they surmised it was most likely a .380. The bullet displayed rifling characteristics of five lands and grooves with a right twist. A list of firearms with those characteristics included Llama, Kel-Tec, Walther, and Smith and Wesson. The lab entered it into IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, but got no hits. That only meant the gun that fired the round had not been recovered in a crime by any police agency that enters their crime guns into IBIS, or no identifiable bullets from the gun had been recovered at a scene. In other words, the bullet dug out of Dawn’s brain was a dead end.
The fingerprint unit examined nearly a hundred latents that had been lifted from Dawn’s apartment. Eighteen were identifiable; the others were either partials or too smudged to identify. Twelve of the identifiable prints were eliminated as belonging to Dawn. That left six, which could have come from different people or could have been from different fingers of the same person. They entered them into their computer, which searched prints at the county level, then the state level, and if neither hit, then on to IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the FBI. There were no matches, which meant the prints didn’t belong to anyone with an arrest record. A friend of Dawn’s or even a technician who fixed a broken refrigerator last month could have left them. Another dead end, unless Sinclair identified a suspect to match them to.
No one from the DNA unit had yet looked at the clippings of Dawn’s nails for DNA, but Sinclair never held his breath waiting for DNA results, knowing the backlog of DNA cases in Oakland.
Everyone in the homicide office was busy when Sinclair made his way back to his desk. Investigators were talking on the phone or working on their computers. Both interview room doors were closed, indicating witnesses or suspects were in there awaiting their opportunity to reveal details about a murder other than Sinclair’s. Everyone seemed to have leads to work on their cases except him. Braddock had a case packet from another one of her open murders on her desk. Even she was working on something other than Dawn’s murder.
Sinclair spent the rest of the day typing up search warrants and affidavits for Dawn’s phone and e-mail accounts. The longer he sat at his desk, the more irritated he became, not only because he hated clerical work, but also because it meant there were no active leads that could justify putting these mundane tasks on the back burner.
At five o’clock, he shut down his computer and headed out the door, figuring he should join the commute traffic to Lafayette and hit one of his old AA meetings. That was always a good place to dump a load of irritability.