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these questions.” He pulled two business cards from his shirt pocket and slid them across the table to Zachary’s parents, carefully studying their faces. “My partner and I are with the Oakland Police Department—Homicide. I’m very sorry to inform you . . .”
    The coffee mug slipped from Brenda’s hand onto the table with a clunk. She grabbed at it and knocked it to the tile floor where it exploded in a hundred pieces. She pushed back her chair and jumped up.
    Braddock put her hand on Brenda’s shoulder and gently pushed her back into her chair. “Let me take care of it.”
    Dr. Caldwell took a deep breath. “Zachary’s dead?”
    Sinclair nodded. “I’m sorry.”
    Braddock grabbed a roll of paper towels off the kitchen counter, tore off a handful of pieces, and began sopping up the coffee on the table. Then she squatted and swept the pieces of broken cup into a pile.
    “How?” Dr. Caldwell asked in a steady voice.
    “We don’t know yet, but we’re treating it as a homicide.”
    Brenda grasped Dr. Caldwell’s right hand with both of hers. “You mean he was murdered?” She fought back tears.
    “We believe so,” said Sinclair.
    Dr. Caldwell slid his chair toward his wife and put his arm around her. She buried her head into his chest and sobbed.

Chapter 6
    Sinclair parked in one of the two slots reserved for the homicide standby team in front of the Police Administration Building, a nine-story rectangular building of glass and steel. When the PAB opened in 1962, on the edge of what was then skid row a half mile from the center of Oakland’s downtown, the modern, sleek, and clean police station was the anchor for the area’s renewal. Although the building suffered major damage during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and engineers determined it should be demolished and rebuilt, City Hall could never come to a decision to allocate the money. More than two decades later, with a minor retrofit, the building still housed most of the department’s officers and civilians, all of whom prayed they wouldn’t be inside when the next big one hit the Bay Area.
    As Sinclair slammed his door, Braddock pulled her car into the space behind him. Sinclair had wanted to leave the Caldwells’ house immediately after he broke the news to them, letting the Danville officer handle the emotional aftermath. However, Braddock quietly took the lead, and after thirty minutes of consoling words and gentle patson their arms, she received Zachary’s laptop computer, an index card containing his passwords, a list of his closest friends, and an assurance they would call her if they heard anything useful. Sinclair kept his mouth shut and stayed out of Braddock’s way.
    The homicide office was on the second floor. A side door at the top of a flight of stairs led from the street to the back hallway of the Criminal Investigation Division and into homicide. The walls were painted a shade of blue that psychologists in the 1970s thought promoted calm and tranquility, although it never seemed to work for Sinclair. A few years ago, pipes in the ceiling had burst and flooded the room with water and sewage, destroying everything except for their files, which officers were able to salvage. City workers brought the grey metal desks and file cabinets that had graced the PAB’s offices for its first fifty years back out of storage. In between the new ceiling panels and florescent lights above and the new floor below, the office looked little different from what it did in the sixties.
    Sinclair swept into the office and halted at Connie Williams’s desk. “Will you hold, please?” she said into her phone, then handed him a stack of pink memos. Connie was a stout woman with straightened black hair, a copper-colored complexion, and full lips. “Eight messages, the first one’s urgent.”
    “When’re you gonna leave that old goat you’re married to?”
    “Honey, it’s taken me forty years to train him. Besides, you like them skinny