Thrill Kill (22 page)

It was quarter to four when Sinclair merged onto the 580 Freeway heading east. He hated making a drive to the South Bay during commute hours, but he had a gnawing feeling Travis was more than merely the genius son of a sex-addict businessman. He tasked Braddock with finding someone at Google who could locate Travis and securing a place where they could interview him, while he plugged in his headset and listened to his office phone voicemails.

The crime lab had left a message saying they matched the slug from the Pratt case to the one from Dawn, as they’d anticipated. The lab entered the second bullet into the system and still got no hits, which wasn’t a surprise, since they’d never suspected the gun was a pass-around as was common with drug and gang murders. Traffic slowed for a few miles in Hayward but soon started flowing at normal speed. Braddock was still busy on her phone, so Sinclair called Maloney.

“Any luck with getting the chief to bring Yates in?” Sinclair asked.

“He wants you to prepare a list of questions for the councilmember, which the chief will ask.”

“Come on, boss, you know that doesn’t work. I need to be able to ask follow-up questions and to call bullshit when the little prick lies.”

“I’m just the messenger, Matt. I don’t think the chief is too excited about Preston Yates right now, especially considering the FBI and homeland security has issued a red alert for an imminent but unspecified terrorist threat with Oakland as the primary target.”

“Yates might be related,” Sinclair said, and was immediately sorry he had.

“How?”

“I don’t know. But it all ties together. I just don’t know exactly how yet.”

“When you figure it out, let me know, and I’ll get you an audience with Yates,” Maloney said. “What are you doing now?”

“Just running down leads with the Feds,” Sinclair said. “Pure grunt work.” Maloney would be pissed if he found out Sinclair lied to him again, but if nothing materialized on the Travis Whitt angle, they didn’t need to tell him. If it did, Maloney might be grateful Sinclair didn’t put him in a position where he’d have to rein Sinclair in—at least, that’s what Sinclair hoped.

“Okay,” Maloney said. “Give me a heads-up if anything develops.”

Sinclair was halfway across the Dumbarton Bridge when Braddock put down her phone. “I talked to this guy who’s a retired captain from San Jose PD and now works as the number two or three at Google security. He confirmed that Travis works there. Like most employees, he’s a contract worker, so another company handles recruitment, hiring, and all human resource functions. By the time we get there, he’ll know what division Travis works in, and he can find us a place to interview him.”

Traffic slowed again as they approached the exit for the Shoreline Amphitheater and Googleplex, the corporate headquarters for Google, with more than three million square feet of office space.

Braddock’s phone rang. “You’re kidding,” she said. “Three months . . . okay . . . well, thanks anyway.”

“That didn’t sound good,” Sinclair said.

“The security guy apologized for wasting our time, but Travis left Google three months ago. Travis was exhibiting behavior problems consistent with drug abuse, and when confronted about it, he resigned. They later learned that Travis was prescribed Ritalin for ADD, which is common for these computer whizzes, but he was buying extra from others in his work group, crushing it up, and snorting it. His employee file listed a residence not far from here and the same cell phone that we already have.”

“I wonder if we could talk to his supervisor and coworkers,” Sinclair said.

“The security guy said he’d do that himself tomorrow. Says he can low-key it and get more than we could. Besides, Google isn’t real keen on cops on their campus unless it’s an emergency.”

“Investigating a series of murders probably doesn’t qualify,” Sinclair said wryly. “Let’s see if he’s home.”

The address on North Rengstorff Avenue was less than two miles away. They pulled into a 1960s apartment complex of basic three-story buildings surrounding a center courtyard with a pool. They found the apartment number, rang the doorbell, and knocked. No answer. So they found a door marked
Manager
. A fortyish man with a ruddy complexion and receding hairline invited them into a small cluttered office.

“He moved out,” the manager said after they identified themselves and inquired about Travis Whitt.

“When was that?” Braddock asked.

“Couple months ago.”

“Can you be more precise?” Braddock asked.

The man opened the bottom drawer of a metal file cabinet, pulled out a manila folder, and opened it on his desk. “October thirty-first,” he said.

“May I see that?” Braddock asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders and handed her the file. Sinclair and Braddock looked over the rental application, which was dated three years ago. It listed Travis’s employment with
Google, a monthly salary of eight thousand dollars, his father as an emergency contact, and checking and credit card account details, which Sinclair recorded in his notebook.

“Did he leave a forwarding address?” Braddock asked.

“The same as his emergency contact, his father in Oakland.”

“I heard he had a roommate,” Sinclair said.

“He lived alone,” the manager said. “If someone was staying with him, I didn’t know about it. It was only a one bedroom, so if he did have a roommate, someone was on the couch or they were sharing a bed.”

“Did he have any friends here?” Braddock asked.

“I don’t pay attention as long as they pay their rent and don’t do nothing that causes complaints from other tenants. Most of the Googlers don’t do much other than sleep here.”

“A lot of your tenants work at Google?” Braddock asked.

“The unit Whitt moved out of—a six-hundred-fifty-square-foot one bedroom—was advertised at thirty-one hundred a month, and I had a dozen applications within two days. You have to work at Google or one of the other high-tech places to afford that.”

“You mind if we knock on some doors, see if anyone knew him?” Sinclair asked.

“You’re the police. You can do what you want, but most of these computer nerds don’t roll back home until nine or ten. With the cafeterias there that feed them for free, these kids eat a bag of chips in the morning, wash it down with an energy drink, and go to Googleplex until it’s time to go to bed.”

Sinclair and Braddock knocked at twenty or thirty doors. The few people who answered had no idea who Travis Whitt was, which confirmed the manager’s assessment that the tenants didn’t do much beyond sleep here.

On their drive back to Oakland, Braddock called back to homicide and had Jankowski run out Travis. He had no arrest or criminal history record and nothing in LRMS, which meant he had never been listed in a report taken by OPD. DMV showed
a valid driver’s license with the Mountain View apartment as his current address and a three-year-old Toyota Prius registered to him.

Sinclair called William Whitt’s office and, as he expected, got the corporate voicemail saying the office closed at five. He called Whitt’s cell, but it went directly to voicemail. “Let’s stop by his house,” Sinclair said to Braddock.

“Do you think he’s lying about his son?” she asked.

“Among other things.”

Wind-driven rain slapped Sinclair in the face when he exited his car in front of Whitt’s house. He turned his head into the wind to keep it from blowing his hat from his head and marched to the front door with Braddock on his heels. He rang the doorbell. The house was dark and quiet. He rang again. Still no answer. He dialed Whitt’s cell phone. It went straight to voicemail. He called the home phone number and heard it ringing inside, but no one answered. “You feel like doing a canvass of the neighborhood to see if anyone’s seen Travis around?”

“In this weather?”

Sinclair smiled.

“Damn you, Sinclair,” she said, stepping off the porch into the rain.

The first two houses to the left were dark, and no one answered the door. A frail woman leaning on a walker answered the door to the third house. She knew the Whitts but hadn’t spoken to Mr. Whitt in years. She was vaguely aware of a son named Travis, but that was about all. No one answered the door at the next house. Sinclair and Braddock knocked on the doors of three houses on the other side of Whitt’s home to no avail.

Back inside their car, Sinclair grabbed a handful of paper towels from the glove box and dried his face and hands. His pants were soaked from the knees down. Water had run down his neck and soaked his shirt collar. He was back to wearing his old London Fog raincoat, which wasn’t as waterproof as the Burberry trench coat Walt had loaned him and which the FBI
now had as evidence. Sinclair wondered if he’d ever get it back and whether it was even repairable after what it endured during the explosion.

Rivulets of water rolled from Braddock’s hair and down her face. Her wide-brimmed hat didn’t keep her head any drier than Sinclair’s hat with rain coming in sideways. She dabbed her face with a paper towel. “I’m going to have to start wearing waterproof makeup when working with you. Should you call your buddy, Uppy, and tell him Travis is in the wind?”

“The FBI’s only worried about the bombing and how it relates to terrorism, and we have nothing more solid that connects Travis than when we talked to Uppy earlier.”

“Yeah, but Travis Whitt is causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. Maybe we can put out a comm order on him and his car for questioning in connection with our one-eighty-sevens.”

He was glad Braddock’s gut was starting to feel the same as his. “Go ahead, but limit it to OPD and specify he’s only a witness to our murders and we’re only looking for his whereabouts. We don’t want some rookie thinking he’s a suspect and getting into the shit arresting him without probable cause, or worse.” Sinclair didn’t need to say the
worse
could mean a situation escalating into a shooting, which would require a whole lot of explaining as to why they put out a want on him.

Sinclair’s watch showed 9:30 as he sat on his couch wrapped in a thick fleece robe, listening to the rain pounding outside. When they had returned to the office from Whitt’s house, Sinclair called the numbers he had for both William and Travis again. He then called the Oakland FBI office on the off-chance they’d agree to track their cell phones, but the duty agent refused, since Sinclair was still unable to provide a clear nexus to the terrorism angle. There was nothing meaningful for them to do, and Braddock said it would be counterproductive to sit in the office all night waiting for a call from the FBI or OPD on a break when their phones would ring as clearly from their respective bedrooms.

The Tylenol-Motrin combination that Sinclair had washed down with cold coffee in the office did its trick. His headache had dulled, and the rest of his muscle aches subsided to more discomfort than outright pain. Even though his body was so weary he didn’t even have the energy to get up from the couch and go to bed, his mind was racing with all the possibilities the murders presented.

When Sinclair had first seen Dawn’s burned, naked body hanging from the tree, he sensed the killer’s anger—an anger that stemmed from something sexual. And when they found Edgar Pratt’s body, Sinclair was convinced the killer or killers
eliminated him to keep him quiet about Dawn’s murder. Then there was all the Internet chatter about thrill kill, anarchists, and the Occupy movement. Everyone else was pulled in that direction, convinced that was what the murders were about. With the bombing and the subsequent threat conveyed in radical Occupy-type language, it made sense. Or the killers wanted the police to think that.

He was now certain they were wrong. The killers were gamers. They intentionally threw a red herring into the pack of badge-and-gun-carrying hounds. Obviously, the killers were somehow associated with the anarchists and occupiers, but as Phil Roberts continually reminded him, they were loosely affiliated and no one was in charge. Dawn’s and Pratt’s murders had nothing to do with that affiliation. The man who killed Dawn and Pratt hijacked a few of the radicals involved in the movement and used their skills and hatred for his own purpose.

Sinclair’s phone buzzed with a text from Alyssa:
R U still up?

Sinclair’s mind immediately went to the sexual connotation, but he answered as if his thoughts weren’t always in the gutter.
I’m wide awake.

A few seconds later, she called. “Cathy said you ignored the doctor’s bed-rest advice and went back to work.”

Alyssa had been on duty when Sinclair and Braddock came to the ER after the explosion, and after the initial exam by the trauma team and a CT-scan, she cleaned and dressed his wounds and prepped the one in his leg for suturing. Her demeanor was cool and professional as she probed every inch of his body and pulled up the hospital gown to expose his entire butt and wash the dirt and debris from the road rash on his left hip. When he glanced over his shoulder as the doctor worked on his hamstring wound, she gave him a smile so warm he hardly felt the pain.

“I should probably lay off running for a while, but would you like to meet for coffee before work tomorrow?”

“I’m teaching a Pilates class at seven, then doing a career presentation on nursing at a grade school.”

“Are you recruiting future nurses?” Sinclair asked.

“One of the women in my yoga class is a teacher, and her school has someone in a profession talk to their students once a month. A doctor was supposed to do it tomorrow, but she cancelled at the last minute, so I’m filling in.”

“The boys will all fall in love with you.”

“They’re fourth graders, so I’ll be gentle with their little hearts,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.”

“Cathy said you were in a lot of pain.”

“She exaggerates.”

“Get some rest,” Alyssa said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow afternoon.”

*

At eight o’clock, Sinclair and Braddock were seated in a conference room at the Oakland FBI office listening to the morning briefing. Agents had conducted background checks on hundreds of people and interviewed dozens of them, but they still had no likely suspects in the bombing.

ATF briefed that preliminary analysis of the pressure cooker, black powder, and blasting cap showed the bomb had been identical to one that was set off at the Occupy rally in San Francisco last year, and the blasting cap appeared to be commercial grade, rather than U.S. or foreign military. Analysts at the San Francisco field office were still working to trace the phone numbers and computer IP addresses of Sean Garvin and Edgar Pratt to identify their associates and try to link them to the bombing.

After the meeting was over, Sinclair and Braddock cornered Uppy in his cubicle.

“Can you locate a cell phone for me?” Sinclair asked.

“Not Travis Whitt again?” Uppy said. “Whatever happened to OPD’s Triggerfish?”

A Triggerfish was a device that mimicked cellular base stations to allow law enforcement officers to track cell phones. Since the device didn’t collect actual voice communications, courts determined police didn’t need a warrant to use it. “The city cut our funding, so we lost it.”

“Connect Travis to some kind of federal crime, even if it’s littering on federal property, and I’ll locate him. But give me something.”