For a homicide detective, a day on the job means hunting killers while trying not to get killed. If you’re a homicide detective in Los Angeles, it also means dealing with the most overwrought, desperate, and deluded criminals anywhere. When you’re a brand new homicide detective spending your days and nights in the gritty underbelly of the city that never sleeps with a tetchy veteran murder cop for a partner, you must keep your cool and your wits about you when the bodies start hitting the floor.
Putting the pieces together when someone shoots to death execution-style a semi-famous Hollywood screenwriter with mob ties is Howard Drew, recently promoted to Detective II and transferred into West Bureau homicide. Just when Drew and his veteran murder cop partner and mentor Detective Rudy Ortega think they are making progress in solving the murder, the leads dry up and the case goes cold. But on the mean streets of LA, there are always plenty more murders to investigate.
Drew and Ortega quickly pivot to investigating the rape-murder of a twenty-two-year-old stripper and aspiring actress. They spend their days chasing down leads in West LA while at the same time battling the inefficient LAPD bureaucracy and trying to coax the support they need to solve cases from the department’s overworked and understaffed Scientific Investigation Division. From their squad room at West Bureau, they see the glamour city for what it is: a sprawling metropolis where the tedious is dangerous and the dangerous is tedious.
Genre: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police ProceduralBest Sellers Rank: #302,254 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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The detectives found the coroner’s investigator, Don Harrison, in the master bedroom on his haunches next to the body. The victim, barefoot and dressed in a white T-shirt and purple sweatpants, lay on the floor near the doorway. There was a halo of reddish-brown dried blood beneath her head. Harrison had what looked like a plastic fishing tackle box on the floor beside him. He took a scalpel from the box and made a small incision in the upper right abdomen, just above the hip of the body. The criminalist then removed a thermometer and attached it to the end of a curved probe. He passed the probe through the incision, driving it up into the liver.
One SID technician was photographing the scene with a digital camera while two others were dusting various points for prints.
The bedroom was shabby and cluttered, the room of a woman down on her luck. It reeked of the odor of dog urine and mold. Faint winter light shining through the window illuminated a few brownish-red streaks of blood and a single bloody paw print that gleamed with a lacquer-like sheen on the worn hardwood floor. Drew crouched to study the chipped door jamb where flakes of paint dappled the floor.
“Looks like there was a struggle here by the door,” Drew said to Ortega. “Maybe the suspect threw her against it, or she grabbed it while struggling to get away from her attacker.”
Harrison went to work on the dead woman’s legs. He grabbed each foot and manipulated the ankles. Moving his hands up to the thighs, Harrison lifted each leg and watched as it bent at the knee. After pressing his hands down on the abdomen, he reached up and tried to turn the dead woman’s head. It rotated easily.
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Spanish
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Fernando Zelaschi
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