When Sinclair and Braddock entered room 201, Garvin was sitting in the corner with a cast covering his right arm from the knuckles of his hand to just below the elbow. Sinclair had Garvin sit between him and Braddock at the small metal table.
“What did the hospital say?” Sinclair asked.
“The bitch cop broke my wrist.” Garvin glared at Braddock. “They said I need to come back next week for surgery.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” Sinclair said.
“It wasn’t even a real gun,” Garvin replied.
After Garvin had been safely confined in the patrol car, Sinclair examined the gun. It was a Crossman pellet gun, designed to look like a Colt .45 Model 1911. From a distance, no one could tell the difference.
“You’re very lucky an experienced police officer like my partner was there,” Braddock said. “It sure looked real, and most police officers would’ve shot. What are you carrying a BB gun for anyway?”
Garvin shrugged his shoulders.
“To shoot out windows and engage in other acts of vandalism with your anarchist friends?” Braddock said.
He shrugged his shoulders again.
“Right now, you’re under arrest on a warrant,” Sinclair said. “But that’s not why we picked you up.”
Sinclair and Braddock had discussed the interview strategy before coming into the room. There was a great deal that Sinclair didn’t know about the murder, and Garvin could be one of the suspects from the park. It was even possible that the three men in the park weren’t the ones who choked and shot Dawn but were instead the cleanup crew.
Sinclair slid the Miranda form from his folio and read it verbatim.
Garvin looked up at the camera in the corner of the room. “Lawyer,” he said.
“Suit yourself.” Sinclair took out a blank arrest form and filled in Garvin’s name and birthdate. “What’s your home address?”
“Lawyer,” Garvin said.
“You’re required to provide this information,” Sinclair said. “If you don’t, you’ll sit in the booking cell until you do.”
Garvin recited his parent’s Rawson Street address.
“Bullshit,” Sinclair said. “We’ve been there and searched the house. You don’t live there.”
Garvin shrugged his shoulders.
“Right now, there’s a relatively low bail on your warrant. Even if you can’t make it, a judge will probably release you on your own recognizance when you go to court tomorrow. But only if you have a valid address that shows you’re a responsible and permanent member of the community.”
“Twenty-seven-oh-one High Street.”
“Apartment number?” Sinclair asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“Who do you live there with?”
“I know what this is about,” Garvin said. “I was working that night.”
“What night are you talking about?” Sinclair asked.
“Saturday night. The night that whore was killed and strung up in the tree.”
“Since you’re bringing it up, work address and occupation is another box I need to complete on this form.”
“I work at Best Buy.”
“The one in Oakland?” Sinclair asked.
“Yeah, by Emeryville.”
“Best Buy closes at nine. The woman was probably killed after that. So if you think you’ve got an alibi through work, you’re wrong.” Sinclair was on rocky ground, because if Garvin said something in response to Sinclair’s comment that incriminated him in the murder, a judge might rule that Sinclair induced him to continue talking even when Garvin clearly asked for a lawyer. But Sinclair didn’t care.
“Three of us did inventory after hours that night. I was there from closing until six the next morning.”
“If I can verify that, we can disregard the Miranda stuff. I just want to know who was at the park that night. I understand you know them.”
“The whole world knows some bitch shot off her mouth on the Internet about who it was, and then one of those stupid fucks chimed in.”
“Then you know the police saw the same thing on your anarchist website. I’m trying to figure out who Gothic Geek and Anarchist Soldier are.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Just send me to jail. I’m not saying anything else without a lawyer.”
“Have it your way. We have your phone and laptop. If you give us permission to search them, I can return them to you by the time you’re released from jail. If you make us get a warrant, the technology in both will be obsolete by the time you get them back.”
“Fuck you.”
Sinclair and Braddock left the interview room, finished Garvin’s paperwork, and took him to the jail. Before he turned Garvin over to the jailers, Sinclair shoved his card into Garvin’s pocket in case he changed his mind after a few hours.
Sinclair and Braddock drove through the rain-soaked city to High Street, about a mile from Garvin’s parents’ house. Two uniformed officers were waiting out front when they arrived.
Sinclair instructed one of the uniforms to stay outside in case someone jumped out a window. Sinclair, Braddock, and the other officer approached the front of the three-story building. An occupant coming out held the door for them. Sinclair rang the bell and knocked on the door of unit twenty-three. Having the manager open the door for them would’ve been the easiest approach, but they didn’t have the legal exigency to do so. At the same time, they didn’t have sufficient probable cause to get a warrant based on anonymous Internet chatter and sources the intelligence unit wouldn’t identify. He sent Braddock to the manager’s office to see if they had information about Garvin, his roommate, and any friends. Meanwhile, he sent the uniform down the hall one way to knock on doors, and he went down the hall the opposite way.
A petite Hispanic woman in her early twenties with a small boy clinging to her leg answered the first door Sinclair knocked on. Sinclair showed his badge. “Do you know the man who lives next door? We think his name’s Sean Garvin.”
“Yes. My husband know him,” she replied in somewhat broken English.
“Is your husband home?”
“He stop work at five. Then come home.”
“Does Sean, the man next door, have a roommate?”
“Ed.”
“Do you know Ed’s last name?”
“Edgar is his proper name. I do not know surname.” She nervously shuffled her feet, looked back into her apartment, and then back at Sinclair. “Come in. You must see.”
Sinclair followed her into a small, basic apartment filled with mismatched, used furniture. She led him down a hallway into a bedroom with a full-size bed and a particleboard dresser. She pointed to a mirrored closet door. Sinclair looked closely and saw a hole in the middle of the shattered glass. Across the room in the opposite wall—part of the common wall with Garvin’s apartment next door—he spotted a small hole and loose plaster in the drywall.
“When did this occur?” Sinclair asked.
She looked at him confused.
“When did you first see this?”
“When I came home today. About three o’clock.”
“When was it all okay?”
“My husband and I leave today at seven in morning. He go work. I go where I work day care—watch children.”
“Why didn’t you call the police when you saw this?” Sinclair asked.
“I tell husband when he come home. He do.”
Sinclair phoned Braddock and asked her to bring the manager with a key to Garvin’s apartment. Shining his flashlight into the closet, he searched for the path the bullet would have taken after it went through the door. There was no hole in the back wall, so the bullet probably hit the tightly packed clothes in the closet. He’d let the techs search for it later.
Sinclair met Braddock outside Garvin’s apartment and told her about the bullet hole.
“Sounds like plenty of exigent circumstances to me.” She put the manager’s key in the lock and pushed open the door.
Sinclair yelled, “Police, anybody home?” He drew his gun and entered. Braddock and the uniformed officer followed.
Sinclair took two steps inside and stopped.
A body lay on the living-room floor in front of him. Thick blood soaked the dirty, worn carpet under the man’s head. A two-inch piece of skull was missing from the back of his head, and brain matter had oozed and congealed in his hair. Checking for a pulse was a waste of time.
They swept through the rest of the apartment looking for other people—dead or alive—but it was clear. The officer used his radio to request a field supervisor, an evidence technician, and additional units. Sinclair also had him request an ambulance. Even though there was no doubt the man was dead, as long as the victim’s head was still attached to the body, no one wanted the police making the official determination.
The victim was lying on his side, looking like he collapsed in a heap when the bullet entered his brain. Sinclair gloved up and lowered himself to the ground, careful to avoid getting blood on his pants. The victim’s right eye socket looked like it was filled with grape jelly. Probably the bullet entrance. Once he made sure the officer was out of the room, Sinclair removed the victim’s wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a driver’s license, copying the name Edgar Pratt and a DOB that made him twenty-four into his notebook. Sinclair returned the wallet to his pocket so the coroner wouldn’t be the wiser.
“That’s the roommate according to the rental agreement,” Braddock said. “Both Garvin and Pratt work at Best Buy. There’s not much more on the application than that.”
Sinclair discovered a hole in the living-room wall about five and a half feet high. He walked back to the body and pointed his hand toward the hole. Looking to his right, he got down on his hands and knees and peeked under a worn maroon upholstered chair. He located what he was looking for—a shiny brass shell casing. “It’s a three-eighty,” he announced to Braddock.
“Wasn’t that the caliber of the slug they recovered from Dawn?” Braddock asked.
“Sure was. We’ll need to find the slug in the neighbor’s apartment for a comparison, but I’m sure it’ll be a match.”
“I can’t believe the bullet traveled that far,” Braddock said.
“I can. It looks like it entered Pratt’s head through the eye socket, so it might have entered the brain without hitting bone. It would still have plenty of energy when it came out of the back of the head. It took nothing to punch through two pieces of sheetrock—one at this wall and one at the neighbor’s wall. As long as it didn’t hit a stud, it had enough energy to smash through the glass and the particleboard closet door.”
“Check this out,” Braddock said as she crouched next to a series of shelves that held a large flat-screen TV, cable company receiver, and dozens of cords. Braddock held up a wireless controller in her gloved hand. “These are the DualShock controllers for PlayStation Four.”
“I didn’t take you for a gamer.”
Braddock laughed. “When that husband of mine had his knee surgery last summer, he was confined to the house and spent hours a day on the couch playing different SWAT and military games. He claimed he was honing his professional skills.”
“Where’s the box?”
“See this clean spot,” Braddock said, pointing to rectangular area on the shelf surrounded by thick dust. “This is exactly the size of the PS Four console.”
“The killer took the box?”
“That system is more than just a box,” Braddock said. “It’s a computer. They cost around four hundred without any accessories, so they could’ve taken it for its value. But more likely, they took it because of the data that’s on it—player names and a record of any chat messages between players. You can even e-mail or Facebook message through it. When people play online together, they’re often chatting via text, and the system would probably have a record of that.”
“So that box might’ve told us who the other suspects in Dawn’s murder were and who killed Edgar Pratt,” Sinclair said.