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Chapter 1: A Newcomer to the Homicide Squad
"Are they gone?"
"Just left."
"Christ, another cold case."
Inside the spacious office, cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air. Supervisor Wenner, his shirt straining slightly over his middle, wore the grim expression of a man who'd delivered too much bad news.
He picked up a red pen and wrote a series of case numbers on the whiteboard—another entry for the Homicide Team's growing collection of failures.
Cold cases. The department's polite term for investigations that had hit a wall and been left to gather dust.
Two whiteboards dominated the far wall of the office. The red one, reserved for unsolved cases, was nearly full, its surface crowded with numbers that represented shattered lives and unanswered questions.
The blackboard beside it, meant for solved cases, was barely half-filled—a stark reminder of their success rate.
After adding the latest number, Supervisor Wenner clapped his hands together, trying to muster some encouragement for his team.
He opened his mouth to say something motivational, but the Deputy Police Chief's assistant appeared in the doorway, summoning him with an urgent gesture.
The team members hunched over their desks, lost in case files and cigarette smoke. The large office buzzed with the low murmur of phone calls and shuffling papers, punctuated by the occasional curse or frustrated sigh.
Half an hour later, Supervisor Wenner returned, his face somehow even darker than before.
Theodore had been watching for his return, and after a moment's hesitation, he knocked on the supervisor's office door.
Wenner's expression could have curdled milk. When he saw Theodore, though, he made an effort to compose himself. "Dickson, what can I do for you?"
Theodore Dickson Hoover—though no one here knew his full name. His father had been a World War II paratrooper who'd come home with demons that never quite left him.
Theodore had been raised by his uncle instead. After college, a bitter argument with that same uncle had driven him from D.C. to this small city of Felton, where he'd shortened his name to Theodore Dickson and joined the police force.
What no one knew was that the original Theodore had died of illness two months ago.
The man standing in Wenner's doorway was someone else entirely—a professional profiler from sixty years in the future, whose academic conference had ended abruptly when a truck sent him tumbling off a cliff and into this body, this time, this life.
He'd fought his way out of the Patrol Department just a week ago, finally earning a transfer to Homicide. But so far, Wenner had kept him on the sidelines, observing, learning the ropes.
The supervisor seemed to like him well enough and had mentioned plans to gradually bring him up to speed.
"Mr. Wenner, I'd like to take on 600403."
Case 600403—the investigation that had just been relegated to the red board. The Homicide Team used report dates as shorthand rather than wrestling with the department's official sixteen-digit case codes, which looked more like computer passwords than anything useful.
Wenner's eyebrows rose. "You have a lead on it?"
The question carried weight. Under Wenner's leadership, the Homicide Team functioned as a unit. There was pressure, sure—enough to crush a man if he let it—but no backstabbing, no politics.
Wenner despised internal conflicts and had no patience for officers who held back information. If this young man he'd been mentoring was playing games, he'd find himself back in a patrol car by morning.
Theodore, unaware of the supervisor's train of thought, shook his head. "No leads. I'm just interested in it."
"I've been watching how things work here for a week now, and I'd like to try my hand at something real. Besides, this case is already cold—if I can't solve it, we're no worse off than we are now. But if I do crack it..." He shrugged.
"That's one more number we can move to the blackboard."
Wenner thought about the tongue-lashing he'd just received from the Deputy Chief. The young officer's proposal had merit, but experience had taught him caution.
"You need to understand what you're getting into," he said slowly. "I've seen good men get lost in these cases, seeing patterns where there are none, chasing shadows until they can't see straight anymore."
He leaned forward, his voice taking on a paternal tone. "Learn when to walk away, Dickson. Don't let pride make you stubborn. Most of our guys don't handle cases independently until they've been here at least a year."
Theodore nodded, taking the warning seriously. Wenner studied his face for a moment, then his expression softened into something approaching a smile. "All right. Go see Bernie Sullivan—he'll give you the case file."
Theodore felt a surge of excitement but managed to keep it off his face until he'd left the office.
Only then did he allow himself a quick, victorious fist pump. Through the venetian blinds, Wenner caught the gesture and shook his head with an amused grin.
...…
Bernie Sullivan sat at his desk, methodically packing case materials into a cardboard box. He had the sharp, angular features common to his Germanic heritage—high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a nose that looked like it had been carved from stone.
His jacket stretched tight across muscular shoulders and arms that spoke of hours in the gym or maybe just years of hard labor before joining the force.
The department preferred men like Bernie—tough, physical, built to intimidate suspects and handle whatever violence the job might throw at them. The entire Homicide Team was cut from the same cloth.
This was still an era when police work was as much about brawn as brains. Technology remained primitive, and most officers trusted their fists and instincts over laboratory reports they couldn't understand.
Face-to-face interrogation, physical evidence you could hold in your hands—that was real detective work.
When Theodore approached, Bernie was sliding a thin manila folder into the box. These materials would disappear into the archives, waiting in the dark until some future breakthrough—if it ever came—brought them back into the light.
"Bernie, I just talked to the boss. I want to take a shot at 600403."
Bernie paused, holding the folder halfway into the box. "Wenner signed off on this?"
Theodore repeated his earlier explanation. Bernie listened, then simply pushed the cardboard box across the desk. He made no offer to walk Theodore through the case—not out of laziness, but out of wisdom.
Any explanation would inevitably carry Bernie's own assumptions and theories, and those preconceptions would only cloud Theodore's judgment.
Theodore carried the box back to his desk and began spreading out its contents.
The box was barely half full—surprisingly sparse for a homicide investigation. Everything appeared to be there, but the folders were thin, some containing only a few pages. Not much to work with.
Theodore skimmed through the materials quickly, getting a feel for the overall picture. Then he pulled out a fresh notebook and began constructing a timeline:
6:00 AM - Mr. Brian and his son Sitt leave for the mountains to cut timber.
8:00 AM - The victim, Mrs. Brian, has breakfast with her daughter Anna.
9:00 AM - Neighbors Diane and Carter arrive as invited, bringing homemade cake and candy.
11:50 AM - Carter and Diane leave together.
12:00 PM - Diane observes someone asking the victim for directions.
12:10 PM - Diane discovers the victim lying on the front lawn and screams. Carter, hearing the commotion from his nearby house, comes to investigate and helps call the police.
12:33 PM - Police arrive. A crowd of neighbors has already gathered at the scene.
Theodore went through the witness statements carefully, extracting the most crucial detail—Diane's description of the prime suspect:
"Around noon, I saw a yellowish-brown truck parked outside. The driver was a bearded man wearing a hat and an orange jacket. He was asking her for directions."
The autopsy report was more straightforward: a two-inch irregular laceration on the victim's right temple, with radiating fractures around the wound.
A linear fracture of the temporal bone extended to the base of the skull. Subdural hematoma, punctate hemorrhages on the brainstem surface.
In plain English: someone had caved in her skull with a single, devastating blow.
Her arms showed defensive wounds—she'd tried to fight back. Her clothes were stained with dirt and fragments of rye grass.
Beyond that, the file contained a handful of crime scene photographs and page after page of largely useless witness testimony.
The statements were a study in human unreliability. A significant portion of the witnesses swore they'd seen the victim being dropped from a UFO.
Others insisted they'd witnessed a mysterious truck driver choking her—or stabbing her, or suffocating her. The townspeople had let their imaginations run wild, conjuring up every conceivable method of murder.
After three hours of careful review, Theodore had extracted precious little useful information. It was still early in the day, though, and he had a plan. Time to visit the crime scene.
But first, he needed to track down the officers who'd responded to that initial call.
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