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Da
A stocky blond man, thirty-fivish, was walking toward him. Da
“Yes. Is it Sergeant?”
“I’m a sergeant, but call me Mike. Dudley sends regards and regrets—the station boss here says Gene Niles has to work the case with us. He was the catching officer, and the Bureau can’t spare any other men. C’est la vie, I always say.”
Da
“One of your guys, Jack Shortell, a squadroom sergeant from the San Dimas Substation. Look, Upshaw, I’m sorry about Niles. I know he hates the Sheriff’s and he thinks the City end of the job should be shitca
His take on Smith was that he enjoyed hurting people. “That’s great. Tell the Lieutenant thanks for me.”
“Call him Dudley, and thank him yourself—you guys are partners on that Commie thing now. Look, here’s the others.”
Da
He was at least fifty years old. Da
“All mine, Deputy. Your first big job?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve worked half a dozen, so don’t be too proud to yelp if you get stuck.”
“I won’t be.”
Breuning and Shortell sat down a string of chairs over from Niles; Da
“Most of what we’ve got is in there, gentlemen. Autopsy reports, log sheets, my summary reports as catching officer on the first victim. LAPD didn’t see fit to forensic the apartment where the victims were killed, so there’s some potential leads blown. Of the officers working the two separate jobs, I’ve been the only one to turn up hard leads. I wrote out a separate chronology on what I got, and included carbons in with your official stuff. I’ll run through the key points for you now.”
Da
Da
“Sergeant Shortell, you’ll be making phone queries on the dental work lead. I’ve got a very long list of dental labs, and I want you to call them and get to whoever keeps employment records. You’ve got solid elimination stuff to go with: blood type, physical description, the dates of the killings. Also ask about dental workers who aroused any kind of suspicion at their workplace, and if your instincts tell you someone is suspicious but you’ve got no blood type, call for jail records or Selective Service records or hospital records—or call any place else you can think of where you can get the information.”
Shortell had nodded along, writing it down; Da
“There’s an approach that I’ve let lie because of jurisdictional problems, and that’s where the mugs come in. I want every known heroin and goofball pusher to see those pictures—hard muscle shakedowns, especially in jigtown. I want you to shake down your snitches for information, call every Vice Squad commander in every division, City and County, and tell them to have their officers check with their snitches for fruit bar scuttlebutt. Who’s tall, gray, middle-aged and has a biting fetish? And I want you to call County and State Parole for dope on violent loony bin parolees. I want Griffith Park, South Central and the area where Goines’ body was dumped thoroughly recanvassed.”
Breuning groaned; Niles spoke for the first time. “You want a lot, Upshaw. You know that?”
Da
Niles snorted. “It’s homo horseshit, we’ll never get him, and if we did, so what? Do you care how many queers he cuts? I don’t.”
Da
“For your career, so