Thrill Kill (Matt Sinclair #2) - Brian Thiem Page 0,31

up talking shit. She said she certainly didn’t solicit them. She admitted to me she was still in the business, but only doing outcalls and wouldn’t even consider doing a bachelor party for less than five hundred. I believed her. I talked to the sergeant who ran the operation. He confided that they were playing fast and loose to make an impact and get the city councilwoman in that district off their backs. He suspected the DA wouldn’t file charges on most of their arrests. I told him Dawn was an informant of mine. He had no problem with me cutting her loose, so I went back to the jail and filled out the eight-forty-nine-B paperwork.”

“But she wasn’t really your informant and didn’t have any info on murders?”

“No, but it wasn’t the first time we cut someone loose on a bullshit arrest that we knew wouldn’t be charged in order to cultivate them as an informant.”

“Fair enough,” Braddock said. “Did she ever come through for you?”

“She’d call me occasionally and want to talk, but I told her I was too busy unless she had something on a case for me. Then she called me one time and said she was in trouble and needed help. When her parents told us about her returning home pregnant, I thought about the timing and figured that was what her trouble was.”

“Was the trouble more than just being pregnant?”

“We met and she said someone, or maybe a group of people, were causing her problems. She never mentioned she was pregnant. She wouldn’t tell me who this person or persons were or the nature of the problem, only that she was afraid and didn’t know what to do. I tried to get her to open up, but she wouldn’t. I figured it was over some john or maybe she got mixed up with some major players. I told her maybe this was a wake-up call telling her it was really time to change her life. She said she couldn’t go home, that she felt dead when she was there. I talked to her a few more times over the next few days, and I guess she realized it was more important to go home and feel emotionally dead than stay here and end up physically dead. That was the last I saw her until the park.”

Braddock crossed the room and sat on the desk beside him. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sinclair thought for a minute. “I guess I knew my relationship with her wasn’t fully professional. I couldn’t really call her an informant because she never provided any info, yet I was helping her out.”

Braddock laughed. “So you felt ashamed because you helped out a citizen for no reason other than she needed help? Jeez, Matt, isn’t that what police are supposed to do? Not every interaction with a citizen has to lead to the arrest of a bad guy. Maybe you’re afraid you’re reputation as a tough, law-and-order-only cop would get tarnished.”

“There’s also what she was.”

“In this city, just about everyone we come across is involved in some kind of crime. As long as you’re not banging her and then looking the other way when she robs banks or something, what’s the big deal?”

“Just the same, I’d prefer you keep what I told you between us.”

“Mum’s the word. Not that you don’t take every case personal, but I’ve had the feeling this one was more personal than most.”

Sinclair nodded in agreement.

“What do you say we call it a night?” Braddock said. “We’re still on standby, and the city’s overdue for another killing.”

Chapter 12

The mansion was quiet as Sinclair wrote a note and left it with his dirty suit and raincoat in the butler’s pantry. When he had first moved into the guesthouse, it felt strange having Walt and his wife handling everything from grocery shopping to housekeeping, but Walt insisted it was part of their responsibilities as the caretakers of Frederick Towers’s estate.

Walt had first met Fred Towers six years ago when Walt was working a second job as a limo driver and was assigned to pick up Fred at his Oakland office, where he was the CEO of one of the largest corporations in the city, and drive him home every day because he had lost his license after a DUI arrest. Over several weeks, Walt shared with Fred how booze had destroyed his own life fifteen years earlier, and eventually drove him to his first AA