Caryl is driving to Riverside, a place that has more cows than people, to learn forensic science. I thought it was poll dancing because what does Riverside offer but bars and cows? The police department there is running a class in police procedures for crime investigation. Blood splatter is next on the list.
I told her to watch Dexter. All the blood splatter you would ever want to know is in that series. I loaned her my book, Forensics for Dummies. That, and she asked me questions on police procedures when I was a cop thirty years ago. Back then there wasn't a procedure. You shot or captured someone and let the courts do the rest. Simple really, I remember my training when it came to crowd control. You grabbed the nearest hippie in the crowd and put a plastic tie cuff on their wrists (they had just came out), throw them in the wagon and get another one.
Nowadays you can't shoot them first. You have to wait, yell that you are a police officer and that you have a weapon. You do not shoot running suspects. It is hard for the department to explain bullet holes in the back. What you need to do is run faster then they and shoot them in the front or tackle them. I preferred to run over them with my cruiser. I wrote a hell of an auto accident report.
So Caryl was a dentist and now wants to work on dead people. Well, they can't ask for more gas can they? Can't compare you to a Nazi war criminal because the drill slipped. I guess it will work out. But there is one problem with the dead I never got over. They are really dead. I mean if you have to lift one. It is back breaking heavy. No wonder Dexter sawed them up and put them in bags. How else can you move the damn things.
I'd love to take a class in forensics - fascinating stuff
ReplyDeleteI've seen dead people. Not interested...tho' I do think the scene in "Departures" where our lead goes on his first job to the apartment of a woman who's been dead for 2 weeks is sickeningly funny. Squirt.
ReplyDeleteI went to the book signing for 'Forensics for Dummies'. Right now I don't have the book, Caryl does but it was at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood. It is ran by a kind of eccentric mystery buff. The place is packed to the ceiling with books, all in mystery genre.
ReplyDeleteThe author was in forensics for the Orange County Police dept. What he really wanted to talk about were terrorists attacks. Not just terrorists attacks but a particular kind. He was convinced that radioactive material has or will be planted in public places where people on a regular basis would walk by. Given enough time, you get dead people and hard to detect where it came from.
I asked if you needed a poisonous spider to kill someone or is it possible any spider could do.
He said some people are deadly allergic to just about anything. A certain type of insect saliva can do it.
Then he went back to Muslim terrorists are everywhere.