was the same thing. “Homicide Investigator” was more than a title; it was the top of the line for cops. It was where all the other cops wanted to be. Whoever watched a show on television about the burglary division?
For me, well, I was never the high school quarterback, but he never became the chief of homicide either. Besides, my stories were a lot better. So, to put it mildly, I liked my job. After I graduated from law school, I briefly considered going to work at one of the big law firms. A lot of money was out there if you did it right. But me? I wanted to be a real trial lawyer. I wanted to try cases all the time. I didn’t want to sit in an office listening to some client pissing about what had been done to him or what he wanted to do to somebody else or how much it was going to cost in legal fees. No, I wanted to be exactly what I was. There was that one moment at the beginning of a big case when the judge would slowly look at everyone gathered, all of those who waited pensively, the jury, the defense team. Then the judge would focus on me. That was my moment at which all the nervousness disappeared, the great beginning when the curtain went up and I was alone on the great stage of human drama. I liked standing up and saying, “Ready for the People.”
Bill flipped on the dome light and got on the radio. He wanted to know which investigators were at the scene. He lowered the window on our undercover car. I always laughed at the idea of his car being undercover. Who drove a blue Dodge with a whip antenna except cops? Of course, that was back then. Nobody has a whip antenna anymore, but the blue Dodge hasn’t changed. It still looks like a cop car and doesn’t fool anybody, especially since the blue color is one that nobody would really pick for a car, and there were also the cheap hub caps to always give it away. I think automobile makers must have a selection of paint just for police undercover cars, or maybe it’s just the paint that is left over after all the other colors are picked.
“Boss, it’s a triple. We got some witnesses and I guess a neighbor tried to play John Wayne with the shooter. Got himself shot in the ass. You ready?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I slid into the front seat beside him. A triple? Not “three dead,” not “three people murdered”—we called it a “triple.” If it had been two, it would have been a “double.” If it was a single, it was a “dead guy” or, depending on the part of town where the homicide occurred, “a stiff.” When you said it, everybody in the business knew what you meant; “I worked a triple last night.” That was enough. Besides, when you said it, you didn’t need to swagger. Those on the inside knew what you did and those on the outside just knew that you must do something special. Bill gunned the engine. He never did that in his own car, a Cadillac. Oh, well, it wasn’t his gas.
“What else we got?”
Bill glanced over and frowned. “Three down in what looks like a robbery, but Kenny says there’s something not right.” Kenny was Kenny Badiali, the on-scene sheriff’s detective.
“Not quite right? How?”
“They got some woman who was at the scene when the first officers rolled up. She was in the bathroom, covered in blood and hysterical. They took her to the hospital. Ross Kelly talked to her. Kenny thinks there’s a connection. Said she wasn’t hurt and she looks like she’s loaded, maybe on meth. Says he doesn’t want to talk more over the radio. Too many people are listening.” Kelly was another on-scene investigator. He was built like the stereotype version of a truck driver: curly, reddish hair, thinning in the middle of his head, with the rest of him spreading out around the gut. A really good guy.
“Kenny spends too much time worrying. Wired too tight. Tell him that we need to draw blood from her at the hospital and run a drug screen,” I said.
“Well, wired too tight or not, he knows what he’s doing. He says we need to get there yesterday. If Kenny says something’s wrong, then something’s wrong. And, I’ll bet he’s already asked for the drug screen.”
“Just make sure, Bill. I want that blood before she starts to realize something’s going on.”
Bill didn’t give me his usual comment about the investigators knowing what they were doing, which meant he wasn’t sure either. He got on the radio while I sat back and stared out the window. I had a bad feeling. Not something I could put my finger on—it was just a bad feeling. Years before, I had handled another murder that came out of a burglary at Fran’s Market. I had gotten to know the owners, the Schletewitz’s, good people, Ray and Fran. I hoped they weren’t lying dead in the market. It may seem kind of crass of me to hope the bodies in the market weren’t my friends, because whoever was lying there was somebody’s friend or son or daughter or husband or wife. I guess I have been to too many homicide scenes. After a while, you get kind of jaded. The victims stop being human beings, lying on the floor or on the street or in the dirt, their aspirations unfulfilled and their dreams ended. They become pieces of evidence.
That wasn’t true for me if the victim was a kid. I still couldn’t handle the kids. You kept thinking that they had a whole life ahead of them and some asshole had stolen that away from them. And if it was a woman, well, I guess there is a double standard. It still bothered me more if it was a woman and, especially, if it was a woman who had been raped.
For a while, I had been in charge of sexual assault crimes and crimes against children. I couldn’t handle it. Sometimes, you get to the point where you start to hate the “perps.” When you get to that spot, you don’t have any objectivity. You can’t step back. I just couldn’t handle those middle-of-the-night talks to women spitting blood out of holes where their teeth used to be, or trying to get some little kid to tell me what some pervert had done to him. No, homicide was the right fit for me. For some reason, murder never became as personal with me as did sex crimes. I guess it had something to do with the fact that I never got to really know the victim. Maybe that says something about me, maybe not.
Bill was moving fast. There was a red light that we could put on top of the car, but it wasn’t an emergency and we didn’t need it. Even in an unmarked car, a cop will always take liberty with the traffic laws. If you don’t get stopped, no problem. If you do get stopped, the traffic officer will see our exempt license plate and know it is another cop.
It was almost 9:30 P.M. when we got to the scene. I hadn’t been to Fran’s Market for over three years, not since the earlier homicide investigation. The long, rectangular cement block building looked the same, a quasi-country market, painted paper signs in the window advertising whatever was on sale, a beer sign glowing. Fran’s wasn’t far enough outside the city to be in the “country.” In fact, its location was just right—if you were a robber. Sheriff’s officers’ cars filled the lot, and the obligatory yellow crime scene tape was already up. People had gathered around to look. Sure, some were there out of concern, but most just came to gawk. Blood and death always draw people who want to see it and then tell everybody how awful the scene was. That’s why traffic always slows down as people drive by an accident. Everybody wants to see the horror and then shudder when they describe to their friends just how terrible it was.
Some news media reps were already there and the cameras turned on me as I got out of the car. There was a time when I would pay attention. Now, I just moved past them to get to the deputy trying to control the crime scene and keep people out of the area. At the other side of the parking lot, I saw Ray and Fran. I didn’t go over. I was relieved to see them outside the store. But their son, Bryon, also worked there on some nights. As I said, I had a bad feeling.
Kenny was waiting outside the back door to the storage room. I had been in it before when I worked the first homicide, a burglary that turned out a lot worse. There was a certain degree of irony in going into a place on a 187—that’s the California penal code for murder—when you’d been there before on another murder case. There were some places where it seemed like every year we were making a visit, usually a liquor store or the local “stop and rob,” where some poor soul
