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LAPD had added a dozen pounds or so to her five-foot-nine frame and produced lines around her mouth and creases at the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she felt she’d looked acceptable when, recently, she’d attended her class reunion at the police academy. She had been married and divorced three times, twice to other cops, and was the mother of a six-year-old son.
    About her most recent husband, she’d told her partner, “As a cop, he’s solid. As a husband, he was a spawn of the devil.”
    She was partnered with Marius Tatarescu, a Romanian-born cop who was close to her age but did not have her experience. He’d joined the LAPD a decade later in life, after mastering English well enough to pass the civil service exams. At age forty-three, he only had eleven years on the Job. He was big and burly, a jolly jokester with a heavy accent, extremely dense black hair, and matching winged eyebrows. The first night they’d worked together, Sophie had told him it was a good thing the LAPD no longer required patrol officers to wear hats on duty, because he’d never find one big enough to accommodate his hair.
    He explained his bachelorhood to Sophie and the other much-married coppers of the midwatch by saying, “I am fourth-generation vampire from Transylvania. I suck too much blood from all girls I date, so nobody likes to marry me.”
    When citizens 6-X-72 encountered would inquire about his accent, Marius would say, “Texas is my home estate.” When people would grin and say, “Dallas?” Marius would answer, deadpan, “Austin. I was longtime neighbor pal of Georgie Boosh.”
    The reason it took 6-X-72 so much time to leave the parking lot was because Sophie Branson would often remember something that was missing from her war bag. Marius’s war bag was just the regular black nylon model that most of the seasoned male cops carried. Sophie’s war bag was the kind many women coppers preferred: a suitcase on wheels, such as airline flight attendants pulled to and from their boarding gates.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t have enough gear on her Sam Browne, including a Glock .40-caliber pistol, a Taser, OC spray, a rover radio, handcuffs, and extra ammo. There was other gear to be hauled: a Remington 870 shotgun, an Ithaca beanbag shotgun, a helmet, and, in her war bag ticket books and notebooks, pet treats and chew toys. It was the absence of enough pet food in the war bag that usually made her return to the locker for extra treats. Sophie Branson was a dedicated animal-rights advocate who firmly believed that the meanest pit bull they encountered on their beat was more worthy of kindness than any man she had ever married.
    Sophie was well known by everybody at the station for rescuing things: birds, cats, dogs, hamsters, the lot. Whenever anyone found animal hair or bird feathers in one of the shops they’d say, “Sophie was here.” She was a dues-paying member of PETA, the Humane Society, the ASPCA, and other animal-welfare groups. She had been admonished several times for picking up a stray dog while on duty and leaving it in the cot room with a sign on the door saying, “In use” until she could take it home after end of watch.
    She had caught feral cats with humane traps set in the Hollywood Station parking lot and fostered them until she could find them homes. Her own house in Van Nuys was a veritable menagerie. And once, while patrolling in the Hollywood Hills, she’d spotted a mother possum that had been killed by a car. She’d pulled the three babies out of the mother’s pouch and had taken them home, where she’d bottle-fed them, releasing them back in the Hollywood Hills when they were old enough to fend for themselves. She’d taken photos of her carpeted cat house at home, with rescued kittens and possum babies peeking out the little windows, and she’d taped the photos inside her locker at the station.
    There’d been a noteworthy moment in the roll call room a few months earlier when one of the