Part 06

The elevator opened, and three officers exited; two younger guys that Stegner had never been introduced to were talking quietly, but the third one stopped as he walked by.

“Late night again Steg?” Raymond Bailey was one of the old-timers, and worked on the third floor, in the evidence locker.

“Yeah, you know me,” Stegner shrugged. “I love this place so much, I can’t tear myself away.”

“You ought to just get a cot and sleeping bag.” Bailey was joking, but the thought had actually occurred to Stegner on many occasions, and he had even at times found himself waking up at his desk in the middle of the night.

“Nah. We super-cops don’t actually sleep.”

Bailey grinned and shook his head as he walked towards the door, and the night air beyond. Stegner stepped into the elevator, hit the button for the second floor, and sighed heavily as the doors closed.

Stegner’s mind began to drift, as it always did at the beginning of a case. He had long ago learned that after he took his notes at a crime scene, the best course of action was to clear his mind of all conscious thoughts about the scene, and focus on the mundane task of writing up his reports from a detached viewpoint.

In the movies, the detectives always seemed to either generate these huge lists of brilliant deductions, or postulate wild theories until one fit. That wasn’t how it worked, at least for him.

Instead, he would let his subconscious ponder and stew on the crime scene as he provided a clinical description of the scene and the victims. In most cases, the crime itself was fairly simple to solve. Most murders were crimes of passion, and interviews with the family or associates of the victims was enough to put him and Jenkins on the trail of the perpetrator. Then came the real work, of tracking the murderer down, and proving the case with the evidence.

This however was not a typical case. It wasn’t a crime of passion. It was obviously a well thought out event. He would of course know more once the identities of the victims had been obtained, but he felt safe in an assumption that this wasn’t personal.