Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule Page B

gettin’ rich if you’re gettin’ high all the time.”
    The argument made sense to dealers, so they bought it.
    Besides, that stuff was like gold down at the station: You had to account for every bit of it. When you signed out for $50 to buy weed or coke, you had better turn in $50 worth of weed or coke as evidence. Not $45. Not even $49.
    I started out simple. My supervisor, Al Soule, and senior narcotics/vice officer Jerry Gilbert taught me a lot. They gave me a primer on what to say and what to steer clear of to avoid entrapment or tipping my hand (“Where’s the action?” is okay; “Can I buy some drugs from you?” is not), then they pointed me in the right direction and offered advice whenever I needed it. At first I just showed up at the bars, streets, and parks where drug trade was heavy. I would hang out for a while, make a buy here, an acquaintance there, but mostly keep a low profile. Gradually, I dug my way deeper into the scene, forging more pivotal contacts and progressing toward the power players—big-money dealers and drug lords.
    Soon my hair was long and shaggy, and I had grown a scraggly beard. I looked nothing like the clean-cut young officer in uniform of a few months earlier. Stained T-shirts and grungy ripped jeans had replaced my starched shirts and crisply pleated navy blue pants. By now, my wife and I had three small children, and I looked bizarrely misplaced with them, like a drifter who had wandered inadvertently into a happy family scene. People did a double take whenthey saw us at the grocery together. What’s that shady-looking guy doing with those nice folks? they wondered. I could read it in their expressions.
    But disdain from strangers didn’t bother me. I loved working undercover. I became another person. I played the part, looked the part of a doper. I’ve always been gregarious and affable, and that helped me win the trust of the people I needed to convince.
Case Study: The Overdose
    Many of my undercover days in Downey were spent chasing a tall, lanky teenager named John Sutherland. * The kid was a pain in the butt, always in trouble. Ostensibly a heroin dealer, he shot up more than he sold. I arrested him repeatedly, but he always made bail and turned up again causing problems. I kept following him, hoping to get him off the streets once and for all. As it turned out, he did that without any help from me.
    I was at work one day when I overheard a call on the police radio about a dead body at a familiar address in a run-down neighborhood nearby. John Sutherland’s address. I recognized it at once and hurried over.
    When I walked in, John was lying in a corner of the living room dead, with a needle sticking out of his arm. There was blood all around him.
    A lieutenant I knew well was there with some wet-behind-the-ears rookie patrolman I had never met. In I came, with my long hair and scruffy beard, and pushed right past them toward the body.
    “How ya doin’?” I called.
    “Hey,” the rookie cried indignantly. “What do you think you’re doing? This is my crime scene. You’re not supposed to be in here.”
    “He’s right, Rod,” said the lieutenant, grinning. “You’d better back off.”
    Chagrined, I apologized and asked if it was okay if I hung around. The rookie grudgingly agreed.
    I retreated to an out-of-the-way corner and studied the scene from there. Why was John so bloody? Dark stains had soaked into the carpet and spotted the shabby furniture all around his body.
    I had seen enough drug use by that point to draw some preliminary conclusions about the crime scene. It wasn’t uncommon to find a user dead with a needle jutting out of some part of his body. Addicts OD’d on hot doses—undiluted ones that they either didn’t realize were lethally strong or were too desperate to take time to cut with quinine—all the time. But I had found those bodies before. At most, I had seen a trickle of congealing blood that had run down their arms in their final