7. Another Dead Sunset Stripper

There was nothing original about a dead hooker on Sunset Strip. They would show up on scattered mornings like my grandma's day lilies, causing an early stir around Hollywood Division, not much to look at by sundown.

What was unusual about the latest case I sat transcribing late one night was the fact that our guys had nabbed the suspect red handed in the act of dismembering the corpse and packing her in a suitcase to catch the next Greyhound bus out of town.

Another bizarre twist was that the victim was my roommate, Rita. I didn't know this at the time, thank God, as I scrambled to assemble her killer's arrest file while wearing a pair of clean panties I'd borrowed from her just a few hours earlier in a pinch. There had been no way to identify the victim, and Rita didn't look much like herself in the crime scene photos. It would be some time after she went missing before I connected all the dots, and it wouldn't have done her any good, me losing my head just when she needed a friend to do right by her without knowing it. Sometimes it's good when smart isn't your thing. Makes you the last person to end up with too much information.

Normally I'd be working alone in back with a wicked case of the yawns, another police issue pencil pusher transcribing burglary and shoplifting reports droning from my head phones. The station was all abuzz that night, though, with normally expressionless gumshoes running around the joint like their hair was on fire. They seemed to be looking at me, of all people, to organize their witness statements and field notes on what would for sure be an open and shut case. Crazy how things tend to go the most wrong when you're most determined to get it all right.

Though the arresting officer, Muñoz, Mark, Badge Number 7162, who'd been first on the scene, was getting huge props from the crazy crush of press camped outside, I couldn't help noting he didn't seem to know the difference between there, their and they're on his incident report. Not that I was ever all up in that grammar and usage crap, but hello, it's called spell check -- you might want to start with the correct plurals and possessives when opening a high profile homicide investigation. Matter of fact, it might have been those little mistakes -- undotted i's, criss-crossed t's -- that made me take a second look at any of it. The D.A. loves paperwork about as much as much as cops hate it, which is why a monkey could have done my job of making sure the file was in order.


It wasn't. Obviously, that's where the trouble started.

Poor Rita. Whatever she'd gotten herself into, she didn't deserve to end up like that. Imagine getting hacked up with a buzz saw in some flea bag motel on the northeast corner of Hollywood and Franklin, with nobody on the case but the dumbest blonde you ever met.