Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read Online Free PDF Page B

Eve. I checked all my gear, checked my shotgun, then reported officially that I was on duty. We termed it “clearing for calls” or “ten-eight.”
    This is gonna be great
, I thought as I pulled out of the station parking lot.
I’m finally a cop
.
    Two hours passed uneventfully. Then just after two A.M. , a call came crackling across the radio.
    “We’ve got a multiple-car accident on I-Five, the Santa Ana Freeway, near Florence Avenue.”
    I responded and reached the scene on the darkened highway minutes after the crash. As my headlights cut through the darkness, what I saw made me feel numb and short of breath, as if all the oxygen hadsuddenly been sucked out of the car. Sprawled out along the still and deserted road was the bloodiest mess I had ever seen.
    Cars were overturned, and random scraps of metal were scattered as if a bomb had exploded. Beyond the cars, I could make out the shape of a motorcycle lying on its side. There were bodies in every direction. My mind and my heart started sprinting at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, as if they were trying to outstrip each other. I called for backup, working hard to keep my voice steady. Then I leapt out of the car.
    What to do first? Save lives. I ran to the nearest body. A man I guessed to be in his late twenties was sprawled flat on his back on the concrete, white and still, eyes fixed on nothing. One look and a quick pulse check told me he was dead.
    I hurried on. More limp and crumpled bodies lay motionless at strange angles. No one was breathing. Hadn’t anybody survived this thing? I glanced around frantically, looking for someone to save, and caught sight of a pair of boots a lane and a half away. Something about them looked familiar, and I felt my stomach lurch. The motor-cyclist had skidded across nearly two lanes of pavement and ended up wedged under a chain-link fence that served as the divider in the center of the freeway. As I drew closer, I saw that the man’s body was on my side of the fence, but his head and neck were on the other side. Standing over him confirmed my fear. I was looking down at a California Highway Patrol cop in uniform. Over my shoulder I heard a car stop, and a concerned passerby appeared out of the darkness, rushing up to offer assistance.
    “Can I do anything to help, Officer?”
    The man’s question shook me out of my paralysis. I told him to grab the fence and yank it upward as hard as he could to lift it off the cop’s neck. Meanwhile, I crouched down and gently eased the injured man toward me, trying not to look at the blood everywhere, not to think about what it meant: There was too much of it. We were toolate. As I leaned over the fallen officer, a strong, sharp aroma of alcohol pierced my nostrils. It didn’t take brilliant detective work to deduce what had happened here.
    The officer had been out partying, celebrating Christmas Eve, probably at the end of his shift. He had knocked back one too many eggnogs, maybe with friends from work, and headed home on his bike. In his hurry, he had tried to slip between two cars, passing them on the white stripe.
    But I didn’t care that this man had had too much to drink. I didn’t care that he had used questionable judgment. As a cop—even a new recruit—when you see someone in uniform wounded, you feel an instant bond. You think, That could be me. That could be one of my friends on the force. That could be a member of my family. By the looks of it, the guy wasn’t much older than me. What if this officer had a new wife at home waiting for him, too? What if he had little kids? It was Christmas Eve, for God’s sake. What kind of Christmas would his family have now?
    I knelt beside him and slipped my hand behind his head to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Where his skull should have felt solid, it felt as soft as an overripe melon. It seemed to settle between my fingers like a floppy, half-full water balloon. I wrestled down a rising tide of nausea and a