Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

For a few minutes we ate and didn’t talk. The food was good and it felt good going down. But I was not sure either of us could fill the uncomfortable hole Ed had made in the evening.

And so for the rest of dinner we slipped into old-shoe talk about the people we knew and had worked with and who was doing what.

And until we stood up and walked out to our parked cars he did not say another word that was not ordinary. Then, as I was sitting in my tiny rental car with a hand on the key in the ignition, he leaned into my window for just a moment and said to me in a soft, hurt voice, “Find this guy, Billy. It’s important.”

And then he was gone.

I went back to my hotel room with a sinking feeling I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t pin down.

I still didn’t know who killed Hector. But for the first time I felt his loss.

Chapter Fourteen

Back in my hotel room I ripped open the Ralph’s bag and waded into the two case files Ed had given me. I wanted to start with Hector’s—and not just because of what Ed had said. I was pretty sure Roscoe was murdered because he had been looking into Hector’s death. And anyway, Roscoe’s case file was just a day old. There wouldn’t be much in it.

Hector’s file was another matter. It was a good-sized stack of folders and manila envelopes. I opened it up.

If you grew up reading murder mysteries, you probably wouldn’t recognize modern homicide files. They’re not done in pencil by a half-smart bulldog. They’re not typed out sloppily on a thirty-year-old Underwood by a fat guy in a stained shirt. There are no eraser marks and no splotches of chili on the margin.

What you see is a series of computerized forms that looks more like an inventory control report from an office-supply warehouse than a document examining the violent death of a human being.

The first several pages are almost identical with one of those computer dating-service questionnaires. The pages are filled with neat rows of numbered boxes. The detective in charge of the investigation puts a check or an X in each appropriate box to fill in all the details about victim, location, and procedure.

I looked at a top sheet marked (017) Black (023) Male (41) Gunshot.

That’s what Hector came down to. All summed up in a neat row of Xs.

The next form was the lead sheet. It carefully spelled out who would check into each predetermined compartment of the case:

WITNESSES—Mallory

BACKGROUND CHECK—Rodriguez

AREA—Spitz

There’s a lab report, of course. It’s usually spit out by the lab’s computer. The lab techs and coroners generally have blood, brains, bone splinters, and feces up to the elbow. They don’t mind, but the guys with nice offices who have to read the reports do. To keep things neat, which is important nowadays, the lab guys generally have the computer fill in the boxes for them.

It went on—page after page of neat, computerized forms. I didn’t much like it, but that never seemed to be as important to the department as it was to me.

Ed was the guy who had tried to explain it to me, back when he was first bucking for detective and we were sitting in a patrol car together for long hours.

“When you got ten murders a year, Billy,” he had told me, “then you can be creative and go by instinct, get the feel of each murder, each one different. When you got ten murders a week you got to be organized. So you set up grids, make a pattern based on all the other kills. You fill out forms. Play percentages. Everybody do it the same each time so you know where you are.”

“Uh-huh,” I had said. “And that way, when you fuck it up at least you got your name spelled right on a nice-looking piece of paper.”

He had given me the kind of look a sheepdog gives a lamb that keeps getting tangled in the fence.

It still seemed to me that somewhere along the way detective work, like everything else, got to be a bureaucratic procedure. When it did, it started to be about covering your ass.

Because of politics—in the department and in the community—a detective needs to prove he has all the reasonable angles covered. That’s okay as far as it goes. But murder was not reasonable. A lot of times it didn’t fit in the little boxes and you could not track it with a grid. But nobody ever argues with computer-generated forms. Nobody would dare.

So all homicide investigations are handled pretty much the same way. Columbo, Kojak, and Dirty Harry just fill out the forms; no more raincoat, lollipop, and make my day.

But there are still a couple of places in a homicide file where you can find some hint of individuality, and that’s what I was looking for. First I looked to see if the detective filled in the boxes with an X or a check mark.

It was a personal quirk of mine. I had a theory that if you use a quick check mark you’re trying to finish the bullshit and get on to the real work. An X means you take this stuff seriously.

Detective R. Cole had used an X: a careful guy. The arms of the X went up exa