A Day in the Life of an LAPD crime fighter

Greetings from sunny California, the City of Angels. My name is Cole Phelps and I’m an LAPD detective. I was recently promoted from traffic desk to homicide. I don’t know who designed the police station, but the same person probably designed some hedge mazes by the looks of it. I always get lost in the place. I meet up with my partner, Rusty Galloway, at the morning brief at the station. He smells like he had a generous nightcap and maybe brushed his teeth with scotch in the morning too.

Captain Donnelly has a case for us: a broad beaten to a pulp, strangled, and left under a tree on a hill. Before leaving the station, Rusty reminds me that as detectives, we should not be making assumptions before seeing evidence. Ironically enough, after arriving at the crime scene he seems sure that it was the boyfriend/husband who did it. He has tons of experience, but maybe he’s also tired of these cases, since most of the time they end up exactly the same.

 

 

Investigating the crime scene, we found multiple clues as well as the name of the woman who was killed: Deidre Moller. We get an address by ringing the station and decide that we swing by the house and see if we could interview someone about the events. Rusty insists that I drive, since he had already had some to drink before work. As the roads looked blurry and cars were just flashing by, I knew I had forgotten something in the morning: my contact lenses. I tried my best and we managed to get to the residence unharmed, except for a few knocked lamp posts and pedestrians jumping out of the way in the last second.

There’s a girl in the residence, Michelle. She says her dad was out to look for her mother. We tell her the bad news and ask a few questions. Her dad, Hugo Moller, storms in in the middle of it, so we interrogate him. Turns out their marriage was not the prettiest and they fought at times. He said as an apology gift he had gotten her a golden butterfly brooch. We ask him to come down to the station for further questioning. As we leave the residence, a neighbor waves us down and tells us that she has seen Hugo burning something in his backyard. Before we know it, he’s at it again and tries to make a run for it. Fortunately, I used to run track in high school and caught up to the guy pretty quickly. I’m glad there weren’t any hurdles in the way, or I would’ve ended up on my face not having my contacts on. We cuff the guy and call for someone to take him to the station.

 

 

We go to the morgue to say hi to the coroner, Malcolm Carruthers. He’s done with the autopsy and wants us to take a look at some rope samples to determine what kind of rope was used to strangle the victim. We also compared some plaster casts of footprints taken from the crime scene. Rusty just wants us to go accuse the husband and be done with it, but I want to go have a look at the victim’s car that was found at a school parking lot. On the way there I crash into benches and another car, totaling our police car that we got assigned on behalf of the department, so we have to lend a car from some law-abiding citizen. At that point I decided to stop at home and put contacts in my eyes.

 

 

We get to the school parking lot and have a chat with the school janitor, who tells us about the car, but also mentions that he’s had an eye out for a lurker on the school grounds. Oddly enough, we see someone lurking behind a bush and it turns into a foot race once again. I tackle him and we question his actions. Rusty wants to knock his teeth out, but I manage to hold him back. The lurker’s name is Eli Rooney, some kind of a sick pedophile, it seems, so I don’t judge Rusty and his will to punch this guy in the face. We tell him to empty his pockets and find the golden butterfly brooch that the victim had received as a gift from his husband. This kid-lurker just turned into a suspect in the murder case, so we have him taken to the station and check the trunk of the victim’s car, like the original plan was.

In the trunk we find bloody coveralls, a bloody tire wrench, and a bloody piece of rope. We have no clue who had put the things in the trunk of victim’s car, but it must have been one of our two suspects. Time for interrogation at the station. We try to squeeze the truth out of them. Moller seems very nervous and Rooney seems almost too calm. Both of them seem guilty, but neither of them is the clear murderer. Captain Donnelly shows up and tells us that Rooney is an old acquaintance of his and wants him behind bars, whether he actually did it, or not. Rusty agrees with him, so we decide to charge Eli Rooney with the first-degree murder of Deidre Moller.

 

 

And that’s on good police business. We managed to cause a few thousand dollars’ worth of damage to vehicles and the city, so I’m afraid that we’ll also see that in our next paychecks. Either way, another case closed, and papers have their headlines. On to the next one.

 

The pictures are screenshots taken by the author.

More from Features

---