By Robb Scott, author of 15 Miles.
I was still a kid when my father transferred from the New Jersey State Police’s Identification Bureau to Homicide Investigation. Looking back on it now, I preferred the ID gig, because the transfer to Homicide, while a step up for Dad, meant fewer ghastly photos to peruse around the family dining table.
15 Miles by Rob Scott
In those days, ID troopers basically collected evidence, took dozens of grim pictures, and carried eleven different-colour pens in their jackets. I have no idea why. As a high school principal, I have twenty-two thousand pieces of paper that cross my desk every day, and most of them can find reasonable closure with blue or black ink.
Regardless, when it came time to testify at a murder trial, Homicide detectives concentrated on the arrest, while ID guys put the evidential bricks and mortar in the case, often colour-coded. Most of the murderers living out their lives behind bars in Trenton State Prison today owe their incarceration to a talented ID trooper who paid close attention to details. Oh, yes you could reach the knife, Chumbly, because I measured and photographed the distances from the corpse to the knife to the bedstand to the indentation your bony shoulder made in the pillow. Any questions?
But the transfer was a good move for my father. He got to kick the doors in and actually loaded a few rounds into his old .38, just in case. (What many TV viewers don’t realize is that homicide investigators rarely make an arrest on their own. Bringing along a busload of heavily-armed troopers and SWAT snipers sends a powerful message to any felon thinking Hey, maybe I can shoot my way out of here.)
At home, the stories Dad told as a detective were the same: everyday folks doing reprehensible things to one another, sometimes while under the influence of spooky-sounding drugs: horse, smack, crank, dust, coke, reds. Most often, though, these atrocities were fired by more familiar fuels: screw-cap wine, keg beer, cheap Scotch and vodka served neat from a brown paper bag. There were occasional serial killers, sociopaths with KA-BAR knives, and a smattering of honest-to-God mob hits (it was New Jersey, after all). Yet most of the time, murder investigations connected a husband or a wife to a weapon on the kitchen floor or buried in someone’s chest. Afterward, the dead spouse was connected to an adulterous affair, a drug or gambling addiction, or a tendency to start the day with three fingers of yummy Popov’s. Little pink houses for you and me!
One particular case from the late ’70s I remember only in blurry black and white. It involved a farm full of dead bodies and ravenous, highly disagreeable cats. Dad was a homicide detective at the time, so my friends and I never got to see the photos; those went home with the ID troops. As an adult, I suppose that might have been a good thing. But at the time, I wished we had seen them! And not photos of dead bodies; we’d been through hundreds of those. What we wanted were actual photos of cats so crazed with hunger that they would attack a meter reader or a postal employee dropping off the Sunday Times. These were cuddly housecats state troopers had to shoot with a 12-guage to keep from being attacked...and eaten. Holy Stephen King nightmare.
To this day, I am not a cat person. We own a dog who thinks he is a lion, because he spends twenty-three hours a day sleeping in whatever rectangle of sunlight spills through the windows. When he is awake, my dog likes to eat what he clearly pretends is freshly killed gazelle, but in actuality is chicken-flavored kibble. I’ve never owned a cat, and probably never will. This may be because my dog is immortal and wouldn’t welcome the company, but more likely is because I’ve always wondered how it might have been to arrive at that farm only to find a legion of lunatic felines waiting just for me. Lovely.
I’ve included a few of these cat nightmares in 15 Miles. Pleasant dreams.
Robert Scott
Virginia, USA
