Red Line by Brian Thiem Page A

it was handed off to you. There wasn’t much to go on.”
    “Bullshit,” said Sinclair. “I should’ve solved it.”
    “I was working sexual assault when this case came in on a Monday morning. Samantha was still at Children’s and hadn’t regained consciousness. Newman and I talked to Jenny at ACH, but the last thing she remembered was meeting some boys on College Avenue—the hippie area she called it—and going to a frat party. She had the classic symptoms of Rohypnol amnesia. Her description of the boys was all over the place. One minute a blond, the next an Arab. She thought they went to a bedroom in a frat house, but then thought they were raped in People’s Park insidesome hippie tent. Both mothers said the girls were virgins, and the sexual assault exams were consistent with that.”
    One of the things Sinclair liked about homicide was his victims were dead. He hated going to Alameda County Hospital and interviewing victims as Braddock did. He pulled Newman’s investigative report from the case packet and paged through it. Newman had hit every fraternity at the University of California with photos of the girls, but nothing panned out. It was rush week, the weekend before classes began, and every fraternity had some kind of party going on. Newman continued trying to talk to Jenny Fitzgerald until, finally, her mother told him to stop calling. Jenny was in therapy and her mother wasn’t about to allow the police or courts to interfere with that.
    Sinclair scanned the report he had written back then. He’d asked the lab to resubmit the DNA profiles from the rape kits—both girls had semen and hair evidence—but both turned up negative, which meant the suspects’ profiles weren’t in the system. That supported his assumption they were college kids. He had sent flyers to the UC Police, and they distributed them around campus, but no tips came in.
    “Homicide’s supposed to solve the tough ones,” said Sinclair. “I did no more than Newman.”
    “We have a second chance.”
    “A year ago, Arquette and Fitzgerald got left on the bus bench. Last night, Caldwell. What’s the connection?”
    “Why must you call these kids by their last names?” asked Braddock.
    “Didn’t they teach you in your report writing classes that we list victims, suspects, and witnesses by their last names?”
    “I’m not talking about in a formal report. I’m talking about between me and you. Their names are Samantha, Jenny, and Zachary. You don’t need to dehumanize them.”
    “If I humanized every homicide victim, I’d go crazy. Thinking of them as numbers on the board, last names on a report, is what allows me to do this job.”
    “Thinking of them as someone’s children is what makes me want to do this job,” she said.
    “Feeling isn’t healthy in this job,” said Sinclair.
    “I had met Jenny. I sat by Samantha’s bedside. I talked to the mothers. Those assholes not only raped those girls, they stole their innocence. Now there’s Zachary. There must be a connection beyond the bus bench.”
    “I don’t believe in coincidences,” said Sinclair “Tomorrow we’ll do a full background on all three of them and see if any commonalities pop up.”
    “Sounds great.”
    Sinclair looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. “Go home. The next case is yours, and you need to be fresh when the phone rings at oh-dark-thirty with a dead crack dealer in East Oakland.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’ll be a few minutes behind you,” said Sinclair. “I’m just gonna clear this paper off my desk.”
    Sinclair brought his case log up to date and filed the reports, statements, and other papers in the Caldwell case packet. He grabbed the Arquette packet from Braddock’s desk and opened it. On top was a legal pad with Braddock’s log, beginning with an entry last month: Case reassigned to Braddock. Her notes followed.
    Sinclair started at the original crime reports and statements the patrol officers took from people at the