Most people think a detective’s life is action-packed. You know—the shoot-‘em-up and kick-‘em-down thing. That happens from time to time, but a typical day in the life of a detective involves major case management, amassing admissible evidence in serious crime investigations and a lot of networking. It’s not that exciting.
For my debut post on The Kill Zone, I thought I’d give you a look at what really goes on behind the screen in the detective world. It’s not like you see in CSI shows and Netflix specials. Most detective work has long periods of painstaking procedure with only short spurts of adrenaline.
I liked it that way. I spent a career with Canada’s national police force, the RCMP, where I served as an investigator with the Serious Crimes Section. We mostly dealt with homicide cases because murders take a lot of time and you can’t mess one up. That’s a sure-fire way to end up writing traffic tickets.
I looked back in my notebooks and picked a particular day that was somewhat routine but had enough going on to interest you. It was a Thursday in the summertime. I was on dayshift in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, and my schedule was 8 am to 4:30 pm.
I got into the office just after 7. With coffee in hand, I checked our internal email server to see what floated in since last shift. For a change, not much was there. I opened Outlook, and then set priorities for the day. Those were four squares of “Must-Do”, “Should-Do”, “Might-Do” and “It Don’t Matter”. I learned this organizational technique from a Franklin Day Planner my daughter gave me for Christmas.
The system works. This day, my top priority was furthering a recent death case where we’d found a decomposing body dumped down a wooded bank beside a rural road. It turned out to be the most bizarre and baffling homicide case of my career.
The corpse looked like a zebra-zombie with a wild-looking stripe pattern across his bare torso. Gaps in the trees allowed a part-on-part-off sun scorch which left him partly mummified and partly putrefied like an ebony and ivory piano key of human breakdown. The autopsy showed he was gut-shot, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
At 7:45, Harry showed up at the Serious Crimes office. It looked like she was hungover. It was hard to tell with my partner, Harry. Harry was a large lady with large hair and an even larger personality. Her real name was Sheryl Henderson, but we called her Harry after the Bigfoot in the movie Harry and the Hendersons.
Our squad consisted of four teams of two detectives each. Because two heads are better than one (most of the time), we found pairing was the best way to investigate complicated cases like murders, attempted murders, rapes, armed robberies and the occasional kidnapping or extortion that happened in the drug world. Pairing is also safer when we’re on the street, and it’s more credible when we’re in court.
This morning, Harry “had court”. That was the universal cop-term for being subpoenaed as a witness. It meant having to hang around the courthouse and wait to see if we’d be called to testify. Or not.
There was a lot, and I mean a lot, of time wasted at the courthouse. But, they were the end to our means, and what we delivered as evidence packages suffered tremendous scrutiny. There’s nothing worse than being “on the stand” and having to explain why you messed up.
Back to the day.
I was on my own, doing follow-ups on our man from beside the road. Harry got her lies straight, and she left to meet the prosecutor. Once she was out the door, I took-on my top priority. That was trying to figure out who the hell this dead and rotting guy was. From that, I hoped to solve what happened to him.
Brian MacAllister beat me to the phone call. Brian was the senior firearms examiner at our crime lab. He was also a good friend outside of work.
“This one’s weird.” I knew Brian was shaking his head. “That twenty-two bullet from your guy beside the road? There’s no rifling or striation marks on it. Like it was never fired… like he swallowed the damn thing.”
“Serious?” I’d seen the bullet when the pathologist plucked it from the viscera. I looked at it with my naked eye and, yeah, it seemed smooth as a baby’s butt. But, then, I couldn’t see what Brian could see with his scanning electron microscope.
“Never seen this before.” Brian paused. “I’m thinking a slick bore like an antique dueling pistol. Or, it could be the tip of things to come. A Three-D laser-printed pistol downloaded from the dark web.”
“Any chance of making a match?” I sensed Brian was perplexed, but he was a competent expert and knew his stuff.
“Hmmm… dunno. We rely on rifling and engraving. None here. Might have to get Chemistry Section involved and do bullet-lead composition analysis or neutron activation. Leave it with me.”
I got off the phone and took another call. This was from Honey Phelps, our coroner. Love that name, Honey. She fit the part.
Honey updated me on our entomology evidence where we used insect remains to establish an estimated time of death. She said the forensic entomologist, who we privately called “The Bug Bitch”, gave a two-week period. Seems our mystery man lay stinking beside the road for around 14 days before we found him.
My next stop was down the hall to the Forensic Identification Section. At the autopsy, the pathologist clipped each finger and thumb tip from the cadaver and placed them in individual vials of formalin. The idea was to turn what was left of the skin into a malleable or rubbery substance to raise fingerprint detail.
Sergeant Cheryl Hunter was my go-to in the CSI department. Cheryl dashed my hopes of anytime soon by telling me she needed more time finger-fixing before she could try for an ID. In the meantime, I was stuck with not knowing who this John Doe was.
I got another call. It was our Street Crew team, and they wanted to talk to me. I met them in their hovel of a basement office.
For some reason, lots of cops get nicknames. My boss was “Leaky” Lewis, and he earned that handle from chronic post-urinary drip. The Street Crew pair were “Beefcake” and “The Inseminator”. Beefcake looked like Fabio from Harlequin Romance covers and The Inseminator was a weasely little sex addict.
Beefcake did the talking. “We got intel that a hooker beaked to a John that she knows your dead guy. Problem, though. We don’t know who the hooker is. Just that she goes by the trick name Amber.”
I felt a rush. This was the first time since we found Beside The Road that anyone on the street talked. Up till now, there was zero—zilch—nuttin’—being said. That made the case more peculiar.
Beefcake said they’d dig into this. The Inseminator vigorously nodded. I had no doubt they would. In the meantime, I went back to my office and found mail on my desk.
One letter was from the Federal Justice Department. They had a wrongful conviction application from an inmate who now decided he didn’t do it. I looked at the name. Yeah. Yeah. He spouts off in a motel room to a couple hippie chicks and confesses to a murder including giving out key-fact or holdback evidence that only the killer and the investigators know. I’ll get to this when I get to it.
The other letter deserved attention. This was from the National Parole Board who needed victim impact statements from the family of a murder victim. The case happened before my time, but I sure knew about it. So did pretty much everyone. Twenty-five years had passed, and the animal wanted loose from its cage. I moved this to Box-B.
I was about to tap into the CPIC database. That was the Canadian Police Information Center, and it held a lot of mineable stuff to help identify my latest murder victim. The phone toned again.
It was a reporter from Global television who I had an on-and-off-again relationship with. Professionally, I mean, although she was a knockout brunette with teeth that should be licensed. J’Anna had a tip for me. A viewer called-in about Beside The Road, and it sounded good.
The murder victim was a carnie, the tipster said. He was a carnival worker who disappeared from the traveling circus right when The Bug Bitch estimated time of death. J’Anna gave me the name. I plugged it into CPIC. Everything fit. All I needed now was some prints, so I ordered them.
It was noon.
I met a dear friend for lunch. Sharlene Bate outranked me, but I’d known her since she was a gangly teen with a pimple problem. Now, she was Inspector Bate from the regional force called I-HIT, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.
I don’t know if I have a thing for women with great teeth, but in a dental war, Sharlene and J’Anna would have fought to the death. Sharlene, though, had a common mentor with me—Detective Sergeant Fred Mahle—who gave her the nickname “Chicklets”. Good old Fred…
Sharlene and I talked a bit of shop. Some included who topped the upcoming promotion and transfer list. Mostly, though, we talked about her daughter—our God-daughter’s—medical problem and Sharlene’s postponed re-marriage plans.
I got back to the office around 1:30. There was a note on my desk to call the Emergency Response Team leader. ERT is a secondary duty secondment for some police officers, and I was part of that alumni. I was too old now to dress up and play army, but I still helped in training programs.
Another secondment was lecturing at the Police College. I had a specialty in effective interviewing techniques and often resourced in seminars to share skills with other investigators. There was an email confirming a lecture date for the fall, and I banged out a quick reply.
I moved off Beside The Road’s file for the day. It’d be nice to carry one file at a time, but reality in the detective business is each investigative team has around twenty open dossiers. Some require urgent action, like figuring out Beside The Road. Some were solved cases pending in court. Then, there were cold cases that still needed “Diary Date” entries to keep them from freezing right over.
I spent the afternoon on Box B and Box C, then called ‘er quits. It was 4:45 pm. I phoned my wife, got dinner directions and stopped at Thrifty Foods for supplies. At 5:30, I parked my unmarked Explorer in our driveway, went through the garage, put my Sig Sauer in the laundry room locker and walked into the kitchen.
My wife was at the table, playing Words With Friends on her iPad. I gave her a kiss, heard about the crazy day at her work and we had small-chat about our grown-up & gone kids.
Then, I reached into an upper cabinet, pulled down a bottle and poured two fingers of Scotch over frozen rocks. She sipped her glass of white wine as we sat in a relaxed, pre-dinner silence.
——
Garry Rodgers is a retired homicide detective with a second career as a forensic coroner. Now he’s a crime writer and host of a popular blog at www.DyingWords.net as well as being a regular contributor to the HuffPost.
Garry lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia at Canada’s southwest coast where he spends off-time cruising around the saltwater. Connect with Garry on Twitter and Facebook.
Great first post, Garry.
Thanks, Harvey. I felt like a school kid giving their first talk to a new class.
Welcome, Gary. I enjoyed your post, but I have one question. You wrote: “Harry got her lies straight, and she left to meet the prosecutor”
Is this a typo? Or cop slang? I can’t see cops deliberately lying in court (but what do I know?)
Nope, no typo, Terry. That’s cop slang for giving evidence in court. In all seriousness, no ethical detective would even dream of lying under oath. Getting the truth in a case is what detecting is all about.
Thanks so much for clarifying. Because “lines” and “lies” are so close, I had to question it given how easily typos slip off my fingers.
I hadn’t looked at it that way, Terry. Excellent eye to pick up on the “n”. You’re so right about typos. I can never type “from” without it being “form” and vice versa. There’s nothing like independent proofreading no matter how smart the editing apps are getting.
Welcome aboard, Gary.
Will you be sharing more of Beside The Road’s story?
Thank you, Eric. It’s a real vote of confidence to be invited onto the blog team. I did some shameless self-promotion with Beside The Road. It’s a bizarre true crime story of who he was and what really happened. The manuscript is in for final proofreading and the book is set for release in mid-June. However, if any Kill Zoners would like a free digital ARC, I’d be happy to ship one. Just email me at garry.rodgers@shaw.ca and let me know the e-format. (Mobi/Kindle, EPub for Kobo/Nook, PDF or good old Word Doc.x)
Nice debut, Garry. Happy to have you aboard!
Thanks so much for the opportunity, Jim. Honor to be in great company here 🙂
Welcome, Garry!
“It was a Thursday in the summertime. I was on dayshift in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, and my schedule was 8 am to 4:30 pm.”
Joe Friday’s voice echoed in my mind and I expected the next line to be: “My partner is Bill Gannon.” Except you introduced “Harry Henderson” instead and coffee snorted out my nose.
Thanks for great insight into your day–ranging the gamut from tragedy to hilarity.
Glad to have you at TKZ!
Yes, it was like Jack Webb talking to me. I love this writing style! No wasted words.
Jack Webb… that’s the name I was wondering about 🙂
Now I’ve got a Joe Friday earworm going… thanks, Debbie. BTW, Harry is now also retired and a local city councilor. She’s quite the character, that Harry.
Excellent work!
Engaging support characters. The nicknames are fun and effective descriptors.
Felt myself drawn into the story/mystery.
Thank you!
The thing about writing based-on-true-crime is that I don’t have to make up characters or material. They did it all by themselves. Thanks for reading and commenting, Tom.
Hi, Garry! Loved your post. I read some crime stuff, but don’t write it.
It reminded me of my days as a swing shift dispatcher for our local sheriff’s department. 12 hour shifts. Typical was 9 hours of sheer boredom (“10 status”; “Trollin”; “Received”) followed by 10 minutes of sheer terror (“10 roll domestic dispute at blah blah blah address”; “Received”; “10 status”; “Out domestic-one in custody”; “Received”). Followed by 3 more hours of sheer boredom.
Only one shooting and one home invasion during my tenure there. Not that I really wanted crime to happen, but I didn’t, at that curve in my life, like boredom.
Thanks for sharing, looking forward to more.
I understand your lingo, Deb. The US style is a little different from north of the 49th, but tells the same story. It’s a lot less stressful on the detective side – the front line uniform people are always in the line of fire. It can go from zero to a hundred in seconds.
In my part of the world (Northern Virginia), the fire and rescue dispatchers abandoned 10-codes and signal codes in favor of plain language. “Signal 9-I” (nine-eye) became auto accident, 10-61 became DOA. I think the change was triggered by a paramedic who announced that the suspected suicide was a 10-65 (police officer). He got a LOT of unexpected company.
I can see that happening, John. I get a kick out of civvies struggling with the universal phonetic alphabet that first responders, pilots, etc. use. They get quite creative. B- banana, D- dogfish, H- hamstring, S – suppository 😉
Well done, Garry. Welcome aboard!
Um . . . Did I miss what you’re nickname was?
Hey, thanks, John! Nice to be part of this bunch 🙂 My nickname? There’s quite a story behind “Alfred Monagham”. Could be a book on its own 😉
Story, please!
You know that guy on the cover of Mad Magazine? Alfred E. Newman? It’s tied into that 😉
Great first post, Garry. Riveting, entertaining, and full of quirky character. You have me hooked. And looking forward to more from you down the road.
Thanks, Dean. There seemed to be more quirky characters on the cop side than the crooks. Like, you can’t make this stuff up.
Garry,
Welcome and thanks for the great post. I look forward to hearing more about the real world of detectives.
Thank you, Kay. It’s a real pleasure to be invited in. I think my upcoming posts will be “writing what I know”, but you never know 🙂
Welcome to TKZ, Garry! Awesome debut post. Well done, my friend. 🙂
Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you, Sue. Your support and friendship means the world to me! Thank – you!
Fascinating post, am looking forward to more.
Thank you! I hope to stick around for awhile if they’ll let me 🙂
Hi, Gary
Welcome! Loved today’s post, a fascinating and fun behind the scenes look in the day in the life of a police detective. There’s nothing like real-world experiences to bring a profession and a place alive. Very much looking forward to more.
Thanks so much, Dale. I’m thinking of doing “A Day in the Life of a Coroner” next. I retired from the police force and took an appointment as a coroner after that. The death investigation job took a more medical angle because cops only get involved in sudden deaths when there’s a crime string attached. With the coroner service, I saw everything from commuter plane crashes to someone who committed suicide by sawing their own throat open with an electric carving knife.
A good “day in the life” with just enough mystery. Welcome!
The real mystery is why they made me a detective in the first place 😉 Thanks, Elaine!
Enjoyed your post and look inside a detective’s day. Engaging! Looking forward to more.
Thanks, Patricia. That’s pretty much a typical day. Activity goes in spurts. It’s never boring but can get hectic when multiple murders happen in a short time. The initial response can take up a week or more – we call it “the Blitz” where we throw as many resources as possible at a new scene. Unfortunately, when cases get cold it’s hard to get back to them because of the new work constantly coming in.
That’s good for me to remember! Thanks.
Welcome, Garry, from about 100 miles due South!
That woke up a few memories. I spent a couple of decades (so long ago I was actually a sworn officer, before they went all civilian–boy, that dates me!) as a 911 dispatcher (Hi, Deb!) in a Southern California beach town, mostly on graveyard because that’s when the calls we got were usually Something. My fave was the couple who walked in on a burglary in progress. The guy calls, I’m asking for a description of the suspect and he says he didn’t see him, his wife did. So I ask to talk to her.
“She’s not here.”
“Is she all right?” They did just walk in on a guy piling all their valuables by the back door, after all. “Where is she?”
“I sent her out after the guy.”
“….”
Unless she’s an off duty cop or fed, or maybe a military sniper, I don’t want to know.
Good to have you here in this first stop for many!
Ha! I can so see that, Justine. 🙂 I’ve met some women over the years I wouldn’t want to tangle with – some of them were cops. 100 miles south? I’ll guess Everett or Redmond?? Hope you’ve got the bug under control now. From what I saw on King & Komo, your numbers were getting high.
There is that! But I did ask, later, and the responding officer said the wife was about 5′ tall and maybe 100 pounds if she was carrying an anvil… Maybe she was a martial arts instructor or something.
I’m on the other side of the sound, thankfully. I can see the south end of Whidbey Island from here. We’ve been lucky, only two deaths in the whole county, and last I saw only 150 diagnosed cases. So we’re good. Hope you are, too!
Port Townsend is one of my favorite spots in Washington State. I’m planning a book set there which should be ready in about a year from now. It’s also based on a true murder case which I was involved in, but I want to write it for a US market with the (faint) hope it attracts a video producer for the AZ or Netflix-type market.
Good luck with that! Port Townsend is a perfect setting. Such a distinctive location.
BTW, Justine – Have you read “Snow Falling On Cedars”? It’s set in your region.
That’s good for me to remember! Thanks.