door and into the open garage just as a woman with two armloads of groceries slammed the passenger door of a white Audi Q7 with her hip.
Sinclair stayed back to avoid startling the woman, and Braddock took the lead. “Ma’am, we’re with Oakland PD, can we ask you a few questions?”
The woman looked up. Midfifties, white, brunette, wearing a tan raincoat over jeans and boots. “Sure,” she said. “Come on in so I can put this stuff down.”
Braddock grabbed an eco-friendly reusable bag filled with produce and followed her through a laundry room into a kitchen.
The woman set the bags on the counter. “I was waiting for the rain to let up before going to Safeway, but we’re out of everything.”
“Do you know the Whitts next door?” Braddock asked.
“Sure, we’ve lived here going on twenty years. He’s been here longer.”
“Do you know if he’s home now?” Braddock asked.
“I don’t have a clue. I mostly see him if we’re both going in or out at the same time. It’s not like we have a front yard to hang out in.” She looked at her watch. “He’s probably at work.”
“His office said he’s home,” Sinclair said.
She shrugged her shoulders and opened the refrigerator.
“What about his son, Travis?” Sinclair asked.
“If he’s home, you’d probably hear him.” She began unloading plastic bags full of vegetables and fruit into the refrigerator.
“Have you seen him lately?”
“I saw him about an hour ago with a bunch of his weirdo friends. One of them was blocking my driveway, and I had to wait until he moved to go to the store.”
“Can you describe him?” Sinclair asked.
“The one driving?”
Sinclair nodded.
“Shaved head, in his late twenties, about Travis’s age. A few inches taller than you. Muscular.”
“There were other friends of Travis’s with him?” Sinclair asked.
“One that I saw. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he wasn’t as tall and a lot thinner.”
“What were they wearing?”
She closed the refrigerator and opened a cabinet next to the sink. “Black raincoats and black pants. Everything black. Travis, too.”
“And the car?”
“An old Bronco. The big truck-like ones. It looks like it was painted with cans of spray paint. An ugly mud-brown color.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“Travis came up to the muscular one, said something, and he got into the Bronco and pulled it into the Whitts’ driveway. That’s when I left for the store.”
“Was Travis’s car there?” Sinclair asked.
She put a jar of peanut butter and boxes of pasta into the cabinet. “His little green Prius was in the driveway when I left.”
“When did you last see Travis before this morning?”
“It’s not seeing him, it’s hearing him,” she said. “He’s been back home for the last two or three months. It’s better now that it’s raining, but when the weather was warm, he’d leave the slider open on the bottom level and blast his music. I don’t even know what people his age listen to these days. I though rap was bad, but this stuff . . .”
“Have you talked to William?”
“Several times, but it only goes on during the day when he’s at work.”
Sinclair copied her name and numbers into his notebook, thanked her for her help, and returned to the Whitts’ front porch. Sinclair noticed Braddock adjusting her belt under her coat, unconsciously touching her holster and other gear. He didn’t have to tell her the trail to the killer was getting hot.
While Braddock told Buckner and his rookie what the neighbor reported, Sinclair called Bianca. “I’m at William Whitt’s house. His office says he’s home but he won’t answer the door or his phones. Do you think he’ll answer for you?”
“I can try,” she said. “What’s happening?”
“I can’t get into it, but I need to talk to him and Travis now.”
“Is Travis there?”
Sinclair hated being the one answering questions right now, but he needed her help. “He was here, but I think he’s gone off with some friends who are about to get into major trouble. They may have a gun.”
The phone was silent, and Sinclair looked at it to ensure there was still a connection. “Bianca, are you there?” Sinclair switched the phone to speaker so Braddock could hear.
“Matt, when William and I were seeing each other, I took an interest in Travis. He was a troubled young man who needed a mother figure. He would talk and I would listen. I hadn’t heard from him in a year or more until maybe a month ago. He called me and said he knew his mother didn’t die