Thrill Kill (Matt Sinclair #2) - Brian Thiem Page 0,19

and he’s the killer?”

“So to be on the safe side, we should get a warrant?”

“If it were my case, I would,” Braddock said.

*

Three hours later, Sinclair returned to the apartment with a copy of the warrant. It hadn’t been a difficult affidavit to prepare, but to Sinclair, it was nothing more than a legally mandated waste of time. The four-page affidavit summarized his training and experience, the crime and his investigation, the evidence he was looking for, and the legal justification for the search, to include identifying the suspect, the motive, and the location of the murder. It took Sinclair an hour of roaming the courthouse to find an available judge so he could watch her read his documents before he was asked to raise his right hand and swear to their truthfulness.

Since Sinclair had called Braddock as soon as he had the warrant, the crime scene processing was well under way by the time he returned to the apartment. One evidence technician was twirling a brush and spraying fine black graphite powder on the file cabinet. The other, a woman dressed in the same dark-blue utility uniform, was taking a photo of a latent print on the desk. She then applied tape to it and placed it on a card.

“They’ve already photoed all the rooms,” Braddock said. “I figured I’d have them start with the office area since that’s where we probably want to look first.”

“Good idea,” Sinclair said.

“I had a uniform secure the apartment, and I started a canvass of the building when you were gone.” She opened her notebook and paged through a legal pad. “No answer at half the doors. I left my card with a note to call. None of the other tenants really knew Dawn. Those who did knew her by first name only. The consensus was she was a very nice, quiet tenant. They mostly saw her afternoons and early evenings. I couldn’t find anyone who saw her leaving for work in the morning, so everyone figured she went to school and worked irregular hours or that she slept somewhere else. She had occasional guests, normally men, but no one could remember anyone specifically or provide a description. The officer’s continuing to knock on doors on the first floor.”

“All finished here,” the male tech said. “We’ll do the bedroom next.”

Sinclair pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened each drawer of the file cabinet. Empty. “No reason to have a file cabinet if you have no files.”

“So whoever took her computer grabbed the files as well,” Braddock said.

Sinclair sat at the desk. Brass desk lamp, electronic calculator, a two-hole punch, computer monitor, and a wireless keyboard and mouse on a leather desk blotter. Very neat and organized. The desk drawers were filled with typical supplies: ruler, paperclips, scissors, tape, an assortment of pens and markers, pads of paper, and envelopes. Two small boxes of business cards were in the top drawer behind an assortment of power cords.

Sinclair placed the boxes on the desk and removed a card from the first one. A headshot of Dawn wearing a conservative blouse and “Dawn Gustafson, Business and Personal Bookkeeping” followed by a phone number and Gmail address.

Braddock leaned over his shoulder. “It’s looking more and more like she’s a bookkeeper. Did you have this number and e-mail for her?”

“I had nothing.” Sinclair pulled out his phone, hit speaker, and called the number.

It went immediately to voicemail: “You’ve reached the number for Dawn Gustafson. Please leave your name and number and I’ll return your call.”

“No landline here,” Sinclair said.

Braddock removed an iPad from her handbag, powered it up, and entered the phone number into the Safari search engine. “It’s a Verizon cell phone. Nothing else comes up, so she probably doesn’t list it on a website or anywhere else on the web.”

“We should eventually do a warrant on it,” Sinclair said. “I’d like to see all of her call and text records and any locator data the account shows.”

“Verizon will take at least a week to return info unless we can justify exigent circumstances.”

“Yeah, and another half a day wasted typing when we should be investigating. I’ll put it on my to-do list along with writing a warrant on Google to get her e-mail info.” Sinclair slid a few of her business cards into his pocket and opened the other box. Sadly, he wasn’t surprised at what he saw. A photo of Dawn wearing a lace negligee and a provocative come-hither smile took up the left