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I spent a year on cops.”
    I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.
    “St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a year?”
    “If we were lucky.”
    She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.
    “Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year. Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you want to work crime. If you want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat comes up, you’re probably not going to like it.”
    She shook her head.
    “I’m not worried about the next beat. This is what I want. I want to write murder stories. I want to write books about this stuff.”
    She sounded sincere. She sounded like me—from a long time ago.
    “Good,” I said. “I’m going to take you over to Parker Center to meet some people. Detectives mostly. They’ll help you but only if they trust you. If they don’t trust you, all you’ll get are the press releases.”
    “How do I do that, Jack? Make them trust me.”
    “You know. Write stories. Be fair, be accurate. You know what to do. Trust is built on performance. The thing to remember is that the cops in this town have an amazing network. The word about a reporter gets around quickly. If you’re fair, they’ll all know it. If you fuck one of them over, they’ll all know that too and they’ll shut your access down everywhere.”
    She seemed embarrassed by my profanity. She would have to get used to it, dealing with cops.
    “There’s one other thing,” I said. “They have a hidden nobility. The good ones, I mean. And if you can somehow get that into your stories, you will win them over every time. So look for the telling details, the little moments of nobility.”
    “Okay, Jack, I will.”
    “Then you’ll do all right.”

 
    W hile we were making the rounds and the introductions in the police headquarters at Parker Center we picked up a nice little murder story in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A twenty-year-old rape and murder of an elderly woman had been cleared when DNA collected from the victim in 1989 was unearthed in case archives and run through the state Department of Justice’s sex crimes data bank. The match was called a cold hit. The DNA collected from the victim belonged to a man currently doing time at Pelican Bay for an attempted rape. The cold case investigators would put together a case and indict the guy before he ever got a chance at parole up there. It wasn’t that flashy, because the bad guy was already behind bars, but it was worth eight inches. People like to read stories that reinforce the idea that bad people don’t always get away. Especially in an economic downturn, when it’s so easy to be cynical.
    When we got back to the newsroom I asked Angela to write it up—her first story on the beat—while I tried to run down Wanda Sessums, my angry caller from the Friday before.
    Since there was no record of her call to the Times switchboard and a quick check with directory assistance had turned up no listing for Wanda Sessums in any of L.A.’s area codes, I next called Detective Gilbert Walker at the Santa Monica Police Department. He was the lead investigator on the case that resulted in Alonzo Winslow’s arrest in the murder of Denise Babbit. I guess you could say it was a cold call. I had no relationship with Walker, as Santa Monica didn’t come up very often on the news radar. It was a relatively safe beach town between Venice and Malibu that had a pressing homeless problem but not much of a murder problem. The police department investigated only a handful of homicides each year and most of these weren’t newsworthy. More often than not they were body dump cases like Denise Babbit’s. The murder occurs somewhere else—like the south end of L. A.—and