When I returned to the office the next day, I finished up my final report and gave it to Lieutenant Hunt, my bald and overweight middle aged boss. As I was about to leave his cramped office stuffed with every kind of paperwork the department had including forms that had been updated long ago, he tapped the desk with his pen.

“Do you have a question Sir?” Was my automatic robot like programed response.

“This is good stuff,” he mutters back not even making eye contact, “You have quite a career ahead of you as a crime fiction writer.”

“I beg your pardon?” was my angered reply.

“I am only interested in facts, Deputy Hunt.”

“That's what I put in my report,” I protest.

“I'm not interested in theories,” he says raising his voice to assert authority.

“What do we do with the case now?”

“Wait for the forensics guys,” he explains like a teacher talking to a student that doesn't understand, “If they find something concrete we will investigate further.”

“And if they don't?”

“Case goes cold,” he says looking at me for the first time, “This is for the Social Services Department to sort out.”

“So that's it?”

“We have an unsolved homicide, a suspected car burglary ring, a rapist who went missing from his parole officer and a half a dozen other crimes to work on right now,” Hunt explains, “We don't have the time or the budget to be wasting it on things that have no promise of showing results.”

“Understood,” I reply with military like crispness and walk out of the office with a private rage burning in my gut.

    I became an officer of the law to help people. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves, is a key role of law enforcement. This case had become a political football before the ink on my reports pages had dried.

    Hunt was friends with and worked for Sheriff Donaldson. Donaldson was an elected official. He was up for re-election in a few months and had made it clear he didn't want anything coming out that would bite him in the ass.

    The board of supervisors was currently working on the County Budget for the next year as well. The more we showed them we were doing our job, the fewer questions for Donaldson. In these tough economic times, every dollar was being looked at. Sometimes I felt guilty for having a secure job when friends of mine were getting laid off left and right.

    About three days later, the lab report came back in. The CSI team had done there best, but the truck was old covered with dirt, grime and leaves contaminating the evidence. In the end what they found were a few hairs. Those they tested for DNA and ran in the various databases. That lead to one person, a Hugo Ramirez who according to the computer was serving out a sentence for narcotics selling at the state prison in Avenal.

    A call to the warden's office at Avenal updated the situation. That prison is notorious for violence, especially between racially based gangs. Hugo had got himself in the middle of a brawl, stabbed a White Supremacist inmate. He had been transferred to solitary confinement to await trial on charges of attempted murder. The other inmate had survived, but barely. Hugo had stabbed him in the neck with a homemade shiv.

    I decided to call over to Avenal again this morning. If an inmate was up for a charge after already being convicted of another and serving time, sometimes they would trade information in hopes of getting the charges knocked down or the sentence shortened.