Back to normal

Yep.

The tiki bar outing was splendid, and it's a good thing that people far more articulate and entertaining than I am memorialized it for the ages. People like Coaster Punchman, Johnny Yen (great pictures!) and GKL of Two Minutes in the Box.

Because once I returned to work the next day, it was back to normal. Oh yeah. Normal.

The parents of the girl who decided to casually mention that she was raped as she went off to the psych hospital after a domestic with her parents (she claimed she was raped by her boyfriend, and then went to the mall and walked around with him after they showered together, and decided to report it 2 weeks later when her parents got mad at her) no longer want us to investigate. Believe it or not, we have another, similar, case from about 2 weeks ago, and that victim has not contacted us either (she also disclosed her assault on the way to the psych ward after a domestic disturbance with her mom).

Another sexual assault investigation, involving a 90 year old dementia patient, continues, and hopefully we'll make some progress with it this week. What started as a great lead in an armed robbery we were investigating (a person matching the description of our robber checked into a nearby hotel 20 minutes after the robbery, paid cash for the room, and was on parole for robbery) ended with me yanking the guy off a toilet, naked after he sat there pretending to take a shit as he flushed the dope we didn't care about in the first place, and then realizing he had nothing to do with our robbery. The idiot informed us he had hepatitis C after coughing all over us during the encounter. And did I mention he wasn't our robber?

I spent a good part of this evening standing in a room at a local SRO hotel with the body of a 39 year old man who died some time after Christmas. He was kinda blue-ish and marbly-looking, but not ripe enough to burst yet. We were lucky enough to leave before he had to be transported, so if he popped and oozed when they bagged him, at least we weren't around for it. I got to inform his estranged wife that he had died--he'd been living in this flophouse since they separated pending a divorce. I felt bad for her--she had to break the news to their kids. A little while later I had to reach out to another agency, and some poor cop got sent to his parents' house to tell them their son had died. At least I remembered to wear my raid jacket to the death scene, so I didn't have to go home with my winter jacket smelling of human decomposition.

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One of the things I do, in between the other stuff, is to look at the crazy letters that come to the department. Some of them are anonymous, some are not. You know the letter is crazy when it arrives--I don't know how to describe this, but the crazy letters just look different. Sometimes it's the extra-tiny handwriting, sometimes it's the typewritten address with no return address on the envelope. It depends.

So, you get one of these letters, and if there's a name or return address you check it out, try and determine if the person poses any threat to anyone or is just one of the legions of the harmless crazy obsessed.

Here's the latest. It was a handwritten screed about an encounter at a local restaurant that somehow seemed to trigger an attack of blisters and boils in the armpits of the writer. He thoughtfully included copies of a typewritten letter he wrote to another police agency 10 years ago by way of reference. Just so we'd understand the severity of this new incident. He also attached photocopies of two photographs. They appeared to be self-taken photos of a man wearing some type of bra. The flash in the mirror, and the poor quality of the photocopy prevented me from figuring out exactly what I was looking at.

Read on:








So, readers, what do you think? Should we go out and meet this "magic dancer" or just file the letter and do nothing else with it? I'm leaning toward filing it.

Well, it's Monday now. First day of the week, last day of the year. Oh boy.