When Detective Julissa Trapp arrived, her partner was already knee-deep in the trash surrounding the young woman's body in the cavernous, ear-splitting warehouse.
For Trapp, it was hard to imagine a more chaotic crime scene than Republic Waste Services in north-central Anaheim, where tons of trash surged across a series of elevated conveyor belts, fed by an endless procession of garbage trucks.
A rat scurried over Trapp's shoe. Pigeons wheeled and flapped. The stench was thick.
Machines echoed off the walls and high ceiling. The belts kept rolling, except for the one on which Det. Bruce Linn was currently standing, the one where a worker had spotted what looked like a protruding human foot.
It was Friday morning, March 14, 2014. The victim was a blondish young woman, unclothed, her jaw broken, her leg snapped, her skull crushed, her body wrapped in a shredded blue tarp amid what looked like debris from a residential remodeling job.
Who was she? How did she get here?
The detectives decided to collect trash in a wide radius around the body _ 20 to 30 feet in each direction. They were looking for addresses that might lead them to the trash bin she had been left in.
Linn spotted something else _ a tube of acrylic sealant labeled TremGlaze. It was the closest to a hard surface he could find, the kind that might hold a clean fingerprint. With a gloved hand he dropped it carefully into an evidence bag.
Trapp and Linn had seen many varieties of savagery, but the singular coldness of the scene struck them both. "Everybody dies _ I get it. The death rate is one per person," Linn said later. "But to get thrown out in the trash? Now, that ain't what you do."
Linn was a transfer from the fugitive-surveillance squad who had spent years in disguises, often unwashed Dickies and a tool belt _ "a dirty mechanic, a dirty plumber, a dirty elevator-repairman" _ and so had not hesitated to climb into the trash. He had deep-set, watchful eyes set in a hard-boned face that looked as if it could absorb a heavyweight's right cross.
He had worked murders with Trapp for more than two years, wearing a suit and tie and short-brim fedora. The camaraderie was instant, and by now they could sometimes read each other's thoughts with a glance. At the office, their cubicles were a few feet away, and they liked to get each other's attention by launching spongy ping-pong balls at the other's head.
"Yin and yang," he called their partnership. Both were devout Christians, Trapp a Catholic who liked Blanton's whiskey, Linn a Calvary Chapel evangelical who believed in the Bible's inerrant word and shunned alcohol.
He could debate theology tirelessly, and liked to ask why she sometimes prayed to Mother Mary, rather than directly to God. "Every once in a while, I want to talk to a woman," she would say, and sometimes had to add: "Can we just get back to murder?"
"She's all girl," he would say when he teased her about the price of the Christian Louboutins and Manolo Blahniks she wore off duty. "She's a dude," he'd say when he recalled how hard she punched the bag in Krav Maga class or took control of a scene.
Linn's approach to his job was informed by his years hunting fugitives, where he had been a step removed from the victims' families. The suspect was his focus.
Unlike Trapp, he didn't pin the victims' faces on his cubicle wall. Neither did any of their veteran partners, one of whom was once asked how he could function clear-headedly after seeing decades of murder victims, and who replied, "I don't know them."
Trapp was different. She went out of her way to know the victims, and their families' bottomless pain, which she somehow seemed able to absorb without limit. "That's what makes me push," she said.
