and openly.”
“You should be cautious dealing with them. They might not be what they appear. And I’d appreciate you passing on anything Decker tells you.”
“I’m sure you would,” Sinclair said as he got up and walked out the door.
Sinclair stopped at the crime lab to see if they had any results from the crime scene or Dawn’s apartment. The firearms examiner had determined the bullet recovered from the victim’s head was a nominal .38 caliber projectile, which included .38, 9mm, .380, and .357. Based on the weight of the jacketed hollow point slug, 87.6 grains, they surmised it was most likely a .380. The bullet displayed rifling characteristics of five lands and grooves with a right twist. A list of firearms with those characteristics included Llama, Kel-Tec, Walther, and Smith and Wesson. The lab entered it into IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, but got no hits. That only meant the gun that fired the round had not been recovered in a crime by any police agency that enters their crime guns into IBIS, or no identifiable bullets from the gun had been recovered at a scene. In other words, the bullet dug out of Dawn’s brain was a dead end.
The fingerprint unit examined nearly a hundred latents that had been lifted from Dawn’s apartment. Eighteen were identifiable; the others were either partials or too smudged to identify. Twelve of the identifiable prints were eliminated as belonging to Dawn. That left six, which could have come from different people or could have been from different fingers of the same person. They entered them into their computer, which searched prints at the county level, then the state level, and if neither hit, then on to IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the FBI. There were no matches, which meant the prints didn’t belong to anyone with an arrest record. A friend of Dawn’s or even a technician who fixed a broken refrigerator last month could have left them. Another dead end, unless Sinclair identified a suspect to match them to.
No one from the DNA unit had yet looked at the clippings of Dawn’s nails for DNA, but Sinclair never held his breath waiting for DNA results, knowing the backlog of DNA cases in Oakland.
Everyone in the homicide office was busy when Sinclair made his way back to his desk. Investigators were talking on the phone or working on their computers. Both interview room doors were closed, indicating witnesses or suspects were in there awaiting their opportunity to reveal details about a murder other than Sinclair’s. Everyone seemed to have leads to work on their cases except him. Braddock had a case packet from another one of her open murders on her desk. Even she was working on something other than Dawn’s murder.
Sinclair spent the rest of the day typing up search warrants and affidavits for Dawn’s phone and e-mail accounts. The longer he sat at his desk, the more irritated he became, not only because he hated clerical work, but also because it meant there were no active leads that could justify putting these mundane tasks on the back burner.
At five o’clock, he shut down his computer and headed out the door, figuring he should join the commute traffic to Lafayette and hit one of his old AA meetings. That was always a good place to dump a load of irritability.
Chapter 20
Friday morning, Sinclair was in Dr. Elliott’s office, listening to the tones in his earphones ricochet from one ear to the other. He had called her office at 4:00 AM after he woke drenched in sweat from a nightmare that left his heart racing for the next hour. Although he wasn’t expecting her to call until normal business hours, she called a little after six and told him to come right in.
He was back in Baghdad, a special agent with the Army CID detachment assigned to a trial program that would handle deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers as criminal offenses rather than acts of war. Sinclair and his partner had identified the Shi‘ite bomb maker who provided the IED that took out part of a U.S. convoy the previous week, and someone a zillion levels above Sinclair decided they should arrest the insurgent and turn him over to the newly formed Iraqi justice system for prosecution. The operations officer for the MP battalion that was assigned the tactical side of the mission detailed a squad of ten MPs to accompany the two CID agents. Sinclair argued a