Lena spotted her coffee on the table and took another sip as she thought it over. Her supervisor’s desk sat out in the open at the head of the bureau floor. If he needed to close a door, that meant he was in the captain’s office and didn’t want to be overheard.

For the past eight months, Lena had been fed a steady diet of Officer Involved Shooting cases. OIS investigations were time consuming, involved a lot of paperwork, and had nothing to do with why she loved being a cop. Even worse, the orders to pull her out of the normal case rotation were coming directly from the chief’s office on the sixth floor. Lena understood that it was political fallout, that she was being punished for how the Romeo murder case shook out. That the last domino to fall had worn a badge, and the department’s reputation had taken another hit. But what troubled her most was that the OIS cases didn’t seem to have an end. The new chief Richard S. Logan, his adjutant Lt. Ken Klinger, and the bureaucrats on the sixth floor couldn’t seem to let it go. After all this time she still didn’t have a partner. And she was beginning to worry that the rumors sweeping through the division might be true. That the barrage of OIS cases would never end because they were waiting her out. Trying to make things hurt until she asked for a transfer, or even better, decided to quit.

Barrera came back on, his voice clearer but still anxious.

“Something’s come up,” he said. “A dead body in Hollywood.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re close. The victim was found half a block north of Hollywood Boulevard. There’s an alley between Ivar and Cahuenga.”

“Behind Tiny’s.”

“That’s right. The alley behind the dive bar.”

Lena had started to reach for a pen, but stopped. There was no need to write down the location. She had worked out of Hollywood both as a cop and a detective before her promotion to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division last February. She knew the neighborhood, even the bar and alley off Ivar. The crime scene was in the heart of the city, just one block west of Vine.

“Do we have a name?” she asked.

“I don’t have any details. All I know is that Hollywood’s already at the location, and that they’re gonna pass the case over to us.”

Barrera was an ally. Catching the tremor in his usually steady voice, she sat down on a stool at the counter. Homicide investigations were usually handled by detective bureaus at the local level. For a crime to bounce up to RHD, the case was either high profile or particularly egregious.

“Why us, Frank?”

“It’s bad, Lena. Real bad. It’s a girl and she’s all fucked up.”

“So, after eight months I’m back in the rotation because I’m close.”

Barrera cleared his throat. “That’s the bad news. That’s the reason I called, Lena.