Thrill Kill (Matt Sinclair #2) - Brian Thiem Page 0,3

there. I checked her pulse. She was cold and I knew she’d been dead a while.”

“You seem pretty sure,” Sinclair said.

“It might’ve been years ago, but the Navy taught me real well.”

“Have you ever seen her before?”

“I didn’t get a look at her face.”

“Fair enough. What about any suspicious people or activities around here recently?”

“This is Oakland. There’s plenty of that going on, but we’re far enough from the flatlands that it’s not as common up here. This morning, I didn’t see anyone.”

Sinclair plucked a business card from the case he carried in his shirt pocket. “Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything else.”

Sinclair walked Hines back to the patrol car and asked the officer to take him home just as the coroner’s van drove up. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Boone and two of his officers exited their cars, while Coroner Investigator Charlie Dawson and his partner unloaded the gurney. Dawson had been working for a mortuary transporting bodies when he was hired by the coroner’s office nearly four decades ago, back in the days when coroner investigators did little more than pick up bodies and transport them to the morgue. The three uniforms led the procession up the path, and Sinclair and Braddock brought up the rear.

“Any ID on her?” Dawson asked.

“No,” said Sinclair. “We’ll need to roll her prints and hope she’s in the system.” Even though the days of rolling a victim’s inked fingers onto a fingerprint card had given way to electronic fingerprint readers that transmitted prints within seconds through the county system to the state and FBI if necessary, the terminology had stuck, and Sinclair had always been an old-fashioned detective.

“What about missing persons?” Dawson asked.

“None that fit her description,” Braddock answered.

“Who found her?” Dawson continued.

“The RO can give you all of that once we get her back to the parking lot,” Sinclair said.

Although Dawson understood protocol dictated that the reporting officer was his source of information, he’d been picking up bodies for twenty years already when Sinclair came on, and he felt that his experience made him the equal of homicide investigators.

Dawson and his partner gloved up and spread a white sheet under the body to catch any trace evidence that fell when they moved her. “Do you want us to untie the rope or cut it?”

Sinclair had already examined the knots in the hope they would tell him something about the killer. If the knot at her neck was an authentic hangman’s noose or a properly tied bowline, it might tell him who he was looking for, but these were all sloppy granny knots. However, he also knew that rope was a great medium to collect skin cells that could contain the DNA of the person who handled it. “Let’s cut the rope.”

Sinclair reached under his raincoat to his suit coat pocket, pulled out a Spyderco folding knife, and snapped it open with a flick of his wrist. Its four-inch blade was serrated at the base and designed to cut through seatbelts to extract people trapped in cars during traffic collisions. With its razor-sharp tip, the knife was also the perfect last-ditch weapon.

Sinclair donned gloves and cut through the rope holding up the leg. Both coroner investigators hoisted the body, and Sinclair cut through the rope around her neck. Dawson arranged her on the sheet and wiped her wet, stringy hair from her face.

“She’s in full rigor, so time of death was at least four hours ago,” Dawson said.

The onset of rigor mortis was a very rough estimate, but it did tell Sinclair that she was likely killed last night rather than that morning.

Dawson pointed at her forehead. “Looks like the cause of death might not be the hanging.”

Sinclair stood over the body and saw a small hole surrounded by dried blood in her forehead. He looked more closely at her face. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Braddock said.

“Our victim’s name is Dawn Gustafson.”

Chapter 2

Of all the hookers Sinclair had arrested in his early days in vice-narcotics, Dawn was one he would never forget. Ten years ago, he was the new guy in the unit and often got stuck as the undercover on street prostitution details, or “trolling,” as they called it. He was the bait the vice unit dragged around the city, hoping to get a bite from one of the hookers. He would drive along the streets where the prostitutes worked, called the “ho stro” (short for “whore stroll”), in an undercover car and pull over when a