Crime Beat

were solemn moments. He was observing the victim as a detective but there seemed to be something else going on as well. A sort of communion, or secret promise. It was not something he would talk to me about when I asked.
    But now I saw the earpiece and I knew something. I knew that when he hooked his glasses in his mouth, his teeth clenched so tightly on them that they cut into the hard plastic of the earpiece. It said something about the man, about the job, about the world. It was a telling detail that opened up a window into this man’s life. It said all that needed to be said about his dedication, motivation and relationship to his job. It was the most important thing I had seen in a week of seeing things I knew were important and vital to me.
    I instinctively knew that as a writer I had to look for this. From now on I had to find the telling detail in all the people I wrote about, whether it was a crime story for a newspaper or a novel about a detective. My life as a writer had to be about the pursuit of the telling detail. If I was going to be successful, I had to find Sergeant Hurt’s glasses over and over again in my stories.
    At the time, I was just beginning to write fiction. I was working on it at night, not telling anyone. I was experimenting, learning. It would be another five years before I got anything published. But the lesson learned in Sergeant Hurt’s office would see me through. Years earlier I had left the detective bureau feeling misunderstood and wronged. I now left feeling like a man with a mission, and a clear path toward completing it.
    T HE MOMENTS DIDN’T STOP THEN . They kept coming. I was lucky. I was blessed. I decided to shift my life, to move three thousand miles to the place my literary heroes had written about. On the day I arrived in Los Angeles I sat in a newspaper editor’s office being interviewed for a job on the crime beat. He tossed me that day’s edition of the paper. The day before, there had been a big crime, a bank heist in which the thieves had gone into the city’s labyrinthine storm water tunnel system to get beneath the target bank before tunneling upward. The editor, testing me, asked me how I would do a follow-up on the story. My answer that day passed muster and I was hired. A few years later I would answer with my first published novel, a story that took the bank heist and the tunnels and turned it all into fiction.
    Moments. They kept coming. As a reporter in Los Angeles you don’t go out to every murder—there are too many and the city’s too spread out. You pick and choose. Sometimes it is chosen for you. One morning an editor called me and told me to swing by a murder scene on my way into the office. Just like that, like I was picking up coffee on the way into work. He told me the murder was on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. I went as instructed and got the story. I also got the place where I would put the home of the fictional detective I had secretly begun writing about. A place where he could live and have a view of the city he helped protect, where he could go out on his back deck and take a reading, feel the pulse.
    N OTHING WAS LOST. All experiences went into the creative blender and were eventually poured out as something new in my fiction. A story about a man found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce became a novel about a man found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce. Stories about cops put on trial became a novel about a cop put on trial.
    It wasn’t only the cops I drew from. It was the killers, too. The first murder story I ever wrote was for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. It was a basic body-found-in-the-woods piece in 1981. But later that body would be connected to one of Florida’s most notorious serial killers and I became fascinated by what the cops I knew considered the ultimate kind of evil.
    Christopher Wilder was another serial killer. I wrote about him at length and for a time it seemed that he took over my life. As he crossed the country in a desperate effort to elude authorities, I think I took on the same mix of urgency and dread those chasing him felt. It seemed that each day a new woman was abducted or another body was found. It was a big story, perhaps the biggest of my career, but it was an awful story just the same.
    Sometimes the killers called me. The phony hit man who was convicted of killing and burying his wife called from jail to say I had been too harsh on him. And then there was Jonathan Lundh, the killer