October 29th, 2014 :

      Detective Marlena Whitman approached her desk, placing the bag containing her lunch on the desk, as she scanned the table in the corner, hoping to find some cream for her coffee. Spotting a couple of packets which had been misplaced behind a stack of napkins, she scooped them up and sat down, popping the lid off of the cup.

      As she added the cream, a uniformed officer approached, holding a Post-It note in her hand. "Excuse me, Detective, but dispatch received a call just a few minutes ago, regarding a murder case, and they told me to bring it up here, and let one of you handle it." the young woman informed her.

      "Somebody calling in a lead?" Whitman asked, as she replaced the lid on her cup.

      "No, ma'am, it was someone wanting information on the case. Maybe a family member."

      Motioning to the desk, Whitman replied "Put it down there, I'll get on it as soon as I finish my lunch."

      The officer placed the note on the desk and walked away, and Detective Whitman opened the styrofoam container and removed her sandwich, pleased to note that it was still warm. She wolfed it down in several large bites, as usual, since she could never be sure when she would be called out on a case. After she shoved the last piece into her mouth, she opened her desk drawer, pulled several wet wipes out of the container she kept there, and wiped her mouth and hands.

      She then picked up the sticky note from her desktop, glanced at it briefly, and took out her phone. Punching in the number from the slip of paper, she waited as it rang several times, and then the ringing finally stopped, and a woman's voice said "Hello."

      "Good afternoon, Ms. Malveaux. This is Detective Marlena Whitman, LAPD Homicide Division. I'm following up on a call you made earlier today."

      "Good to know someone's finally freed up some time to talk to me." the woman said, and Whitman could almost feel her frustration coming through the phone, nearly as thick as her Southern drawl.

      "I'm sorry you feel that way, Ms. Malveaux, it's never our intention to give the impression that we don't care," she replied, using her most soothing tone. "But there never seem to be enough of us to go around. Now, how can I help you today?"

      "Just call me Briar, Ms. Malveaux sounds too much like my grandmother," the caller said. "I was hoping that someone might be able to tell me if y'all have figured out anything about my cousin's murder, or if you've just stuffed it in a box in the back of a closet like our so-called family wants to do!"

      Something in the woman's voice struck a chord with Whitman. It was obvious that she cared about her cousin, but had somehow been made to feel that no one else did. This obviously caused her some distress, and Whitman resolved to do a better job than whoever Briar Malveaux had last spoken to.

     "If you can give me some basic information on your cousin, I'll have a look at the file, and contact you as soon as possible."

      "Her name was Sylvia Baxter, and she was killed in May of last year." Briar said in a tight voice . "I was out of the country working, and I didn't know anything about it until I went looking for her when I got back, and one of her street buddies told me. I barely got there in time to claim her body before they chucked her in some unmarked grave somewhere!"

      "So you're saying that no one else in your family was aware of your cousin's death?" Whitman queried, wondering incredulously how that could happen.

      Her question was answered when Briar gave a sarcastic chuckle and said "No, I said that I didn't know about it. Our family was informed, they just didn't give a fuck about giving her a decent burial. According to our grandmother, she brought it on herself, so they washed their hands of her."

      Detective Whitman shook her head, wondering how people could be so cold toward their own flesh and blood. If something happened to one of her kids, she would go to the ends of the earth to bring them home, if only for she and Tim to have a place to visit them .

      "I hope this isn't too personal, but why did they feel that way?" she asked.

      Briar exhaled deeply, and responded "Sylvia had a drug problem, and a record, but they turned their backs on her long before that. Hell, my entire criminal record consists of a ticket for expired tags, and if I turned up dead tomorrow, they'd probably say the same thing about me! My lifestyle isn't exactly up to their standards. But that's not important now, all I care about is finding out if you guys are getting anywhere close to finding out who did it."

      "I'm sorry to hear that, Briar. If you'll give me a day or two, I'll pull the files and talk to whoever the case is assigned to, and I'll call you as soon as I know something." she promised.

      "If it helps any, the last time I called, they sent me to a Detective Weintraub, and I got precisely nowhere with him." 

     Repeating her promise to contact Briar shortly, Whitman ended the call, then leaned back in her chair. That clearly explained the young woman's original attitude, because Irv Weintraub was the poster child for insensitivity. His partner, Keith Harris, was a decent sort, but Irv had once been described by one of their colleagues as the bastard love child of Archie Bunker and Al Bundy. She guessed that the only reason he hadn't been fired was because he was so close to retirement that it was unlikely they'd make it through the review process before he simply aged out.

      She stood up, left her office, and walked down the hall, peeking around doors until she found Harris and Weintraub in one of the interrogation rooms. She rapped her knuckles on the door, and they both turned to face her. Weintraub hitched up his slacks  and gave her a faint nod "Marlena."

      Harris offered a slight smile and motioned for her to come in. "Something we can help you with, Lena?"

      "I hope so, Keith. I just took a call from a young lady who was curious about the status of her cousin's murder case, and she said that she spoke to Irv previously, so I assume it's one of your cases. Do either of you recall the name Sylvia Baxter?" she inquired.

      Both men paused for a moment, then Weintraub snapped his fingers. "Baxter! Yeah, I remember that one. That was the junkie hooker that got hauled up outta the lake last year."

      "Yeah, I think he's right," Harris chimed in. "A couple of teenagers on jet skis found her, she'd been worked over pretty bad, she was probably dead before she went in the water."

      "Did you ever get any leads on possible suspects?"

      "Hell no, and we're not likely to!" Weintraub growled. "Like I told her cousin, or whoever she is, last time she called, the list of possible suspects is basically the Greater Los Angeles phone book! She was a junkie whore, and my guess is that she either crossed up her dealer, or maybe pulled a sick trick. Occupational hazard. We'll never find the guy unless he does it again, or somebody eventually decides to rat him out for a lighter sentence or something."

      Whitman and Harris were both gaping at him in astonishment by the time he concluded his outburst. He looked at their expressions and furrowed his brow in confusion. "Whaddya lookin' at me like that for?"

      Harris blinked at his partner, and ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. "Irv, let me offer you a friendly word of advice: Don't let the Lieutenant hear you talking like that. He'll have you bounced out of here so fast you'll get motion sickness."

      Whitman stepped forward so she was almost nose to nose with the older man, and snarled "My words aren't nearly as friendly, Detective. If I ever hear you speak that way to the family of a murder victim, no matter who they were, or what they did, I will lay you out myself, and then I'll file a formal complaint with the review board. Do we understand each other, Irv?"

      He opened his mouth, as if to reply, but something in her expression apparently made him reconsider, because he simply nodded, and walked out of the room.

      After Weintraub had left, Harris turned to Whitman. "I hate to admit it, Lena, but I don't think he was totally wrong. I would never say it to a family member, but it probably did happen pretty much the way he figures. You know as well as I do that the working girls out there have a much shorter life expectancy than most other people."

      "You may be right, Keith, but you also know that doesn't mean that we stop trying. I promised her I'd have a look at the file. Are you cool with that?"

      "Not a problem. And if you run across anything worth checking out, let me know and I'll get right back on it, Irv or no Irv." Harris replied.

      Detective Whitman left him in the interrogation room and made her way to the evidence room. After a brief search, she found the Baxter case file and took it to her desk. Opening the box, she pulled the first file and skimmed over the first page. Sylvia Baxter had been twenty-six years old, originally from Metairie, Louisiana, and had several arrests for drug charges, prostitution, and petty theft. Her body had been found in a small lake up in the hills on May 27th, 2013, apparently brought to the surface by the wake of the jet skiers who had called it in .

      Setting that file aside, she opened the packet of crime-scene photos, and was immediately glad that she had already eaten lunch. "Don't know if I'm gonna want dinner, though." she mumbled, as she shuffled through the stack of pictures.

      The body had obviously been in the water for some time, which made it bad enough, but even that didn't hide the fact that the woman had been brutally tortured before death. Turning to the autopsy report, she noted that the M.E. had estimated that the body had been in the water for three to four days before it had been found, and that she had almost certainly been dead before being dumped. Fortunately, the plastic dropcloth she'd been wrapped in had kept the water from doing enough damage to hide her injuries, and the M.E. had been able to distinguish numerous marks on the body; Shallow, non-life-threatening cuts, bruises, and what appeared to be electrical burns, but the actual cause of death had been ligature strangulation.

      This last fact brought a memory forward in Whitman's mind, and she turned to her computer, tapping rapidly on the keys. She scanned through her files, and finally found the one she wanted. Opening it, she scanned it quickly: January 3rd of 2013, she and the department supervisor, Lieutenant Garrett Sanger, had worked the case of Robin Greene, a nineteen-year-old prostitute and scam artist, whose body had been found in a dumpster behind a convenience store. While she hadn't been savaged as badly as Sylvia Baxter, she had also been strangled, and her body had displayed evidence of the same kind of burns, which indicated that there could be a connection.

      Greene had been killed a little over four months prior to Baxter, and if the two cases were related, that indicated that the killers behavior had already begun to escalate. "And if that was happening almost two years ago, then what has he been up to since then?", she mused.

      Sanger was out on vacation for several more days, but she made a mental note to bring the files to his attention, and suggest that they look for similarities to other cases. She dismissed Weintraub's assumption that Sylvia Baxter had fallen afoul of her dealer, simply because most drug dealers, if they did reach the point of killing a customer or rival, used the most direct methods, like a gun or knife. They didn't normally engage in torture, either because they found it impractical, or because they were too messed up themselves to focus for the length of time required.

      But, she thought, there might be something to his idea of a "sick trick". After all, it wouldn't be the first time some psycho decided that picking up a hooker was the quickest way to get to act out his disturbed fantasies. The Green River Killer was a classic example, along with their own "Grim Sleeper", and the sick freak she remembered seeing on a true-crime program once, who picked up hookers, killed them, and then cut out their eyeballs.

      Comparing the two files side-by-side, she noted that the only thing really working in their favor was that the M.E. had found skin under Robin Greene's nails, and had sent it to the lab. They had run a profile, but hadn't been able to get a CODIS match. That meant that either the guy hadn't ever been arrested, or had never been required to give a sample, meaning that any record he did have would likely be only minor crimes.

      Setting the files aside for the moment, Whitman picked up her phone and hit the redial button. The phone rang twice, and Briar Malveaux answered, saying, "Hello, Detective, I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon. Does this mean that I should assume that your department has put Sylvia's case in a cold file somewhere?"

      "No, you shouldn't. I've been looking through the file, as I promised, and I think I may have found a new lead that we'll need to check out. I can't give you any details right now, until I can confirm my idea, but it will be looked into."

      Briar's voice came through the phone, sounding hopeful for the first time in both of their conversations. "You can't give me details, fine, I can live with that. I'm just glad that somebody's finally taking it seriously, instead of acting like I'm asking them for the moon or something. Yeah, I know that Sylvia was messed up, but she didn't deserve that. Hell, I talked to her on the phone just a few days before she died, and she'd finally agreed to let me get her into rehab! I'd made all the arrangements, and she was scheduled to go in the day after they think she was killed. So she was actually making an effort to get herself together, but some fucking creepazoid decided that she shouldn't get the chance, and I don't want that to happen to anybody else."

      "Neither do I, and that's what I'm hoping to prevent. I promise you, if we find any more information on what happened to your cousin, I will personally keep you informed. Also, Detective Weintraub has been put on notice that his behavior was unacceptable, and on behalf of the department, I apologize. You should never have had to deal with that, and I'm sorry."

      Briar thanked her, then said that she had to go back to work, and ended the call. After putting down the phone, Whitman leaned back in her chair, still looking at the files littering the top of her desk.

      "Do we have another serial killer roaming around out there somewhere?" she wondered. "Shit, I wish Garrett would hurry up and get back. We need to get on top of this before somebody else ends up dead."