Thrill Kill by Brian Thiem

disbanded vice, didn’t SVU pick up that responsibility?”
    Braddock huffed. “In theory. But when I was assigned to the special victim’s unit, we couldn’t even keep up with the rape and child abuse cases, so there wasn’t much time to take on major investigations like that.”
    It still riled Sinclair when he thought of how the department had been decimated by budget cuts and reorganizations demanded by the Oakland City Council over the years. When he came on, vice-narcotics had three squads, one totally committed to prostitution and gambling enforcement. A half-dozen investigators out of the youth services division handled child abuse cases, and another four sergeants handled sexual assault cases out of the criminal investigation division. Today, the responsibility for all those crimes, as well as domestic violence, fell on the newly created SVU with half the personnel.
    “Since you didn’t have time to work them, what did you do when you came across information about escort services or major prostitution rings?” Sinclair asked.
    “We passed on the info to Intel in the hopes they could coordinate with the Feds and take down the organizations.”
    “Did they ever get the owners of the escort services?”
    “I don’t think the department’s targeted anything but street-level prostitution in years.”
    “If the department wants to address the problem, they need to do more than a couple of operations a month picking up the girls who are dumb enough to solicit an undercover,” Sinclair said.
    “What about the johns?” Braddock asked.
    “Bust them, too,” he said. “They’re half of the problem. You remember when we used to do the john sweeps? We’d put a female officer that wanted to play hooker for a night out on the corner and snatch up every dude that solicited them.”
    “I loved watching other officers I worked the streets with hang up their uniforms and slip into their hooker getups inthe locker room. They made bets on who could snare the most johns.”
    “I never saw you out there.”
    “Not my kind of thing, but I respect the gals who did it.”
    “I think the record was something like thirty-four johns in one night.”
    “That was Jane Oliver,” Braddock said.
    “Where’s she working now?”
    “Still patrol in East Oakland. You’d never know how hot some of our female officers are when you only see them in uniform.”
    Sinclair’s desk phone rang.
    “This is number seventy-three in radio,” a dispatcher said. “We just received a nine-one-one call from a woman who said her name was Tanya and she’s helping you on a murder case.”
    “Yeah, well, sort of,” Sinclair said.
    “She said some really sketchy dude just approached a few of the girls at Thirty-Third and Market, showed off a gun in his waistband, and asked if any of them wanted to take a drive to Burckhalter Park and party. Isn’t that where your murder occurred?”
    “Yeah. Did she give a description?”
    “Male, Hispanic, twenty-five to thirty, five-ten, slim build, driving a black Camry, partial plate six-four-three.”
    “Did you broadcast it?” Sinclair asked.
    “I assigned two units to check the area. The caller said she wouldn’t talk to uniformed officers—only you. She’s waiting inside the Cajun restaurant in the thirty-one-hundred block of Market.”
    Sinclair hung up the phone and said to Braddock, “Let’s go. Tanya might’ve spotted our killer.”

Chapter 10
    Sinclair cruised north on San Pablo Avenue, scanning left for the black Camry, while Braddock scanned right. The sun had set more than an hour ago, making it difficult to distinguish car makes and models through the rain-streaked windows. The wipers beat rhythmically, ending with a squeak at the bottom of each sweep that reminded Sinclair that they were far beyond their useful lifespan. He could drive out to the city corp yard and wait an hour for a city mechanic to do the five-minute job, or stop at an AutoZone and change them himself as