Wanted to be a writer. Ive always been intrigued by crime and police work and how they do they jobs and thats how i got into this. I work for the Baltimore Sun covering the police department. In fact i had the job not long after david simon had the job and hes the guy who wrote homicide, life on the street and the wire. I wanted to do Something Like he did. I reached out to the son of the secret Service Agent in my first book rawhide down. I said i wondered if you would allow me to trail your Homicide Department around. He said sure. I only made one provision and i said id like someone to the department to review the manuscript before its published to raise objections to information that might harm a witness or in danger prosecution they did that and the only thing they came up with that they didnt really like, there were some minor things i was able to tweak like some information that might identify a potential witness that i didnt think was important but thats why they do this. Then i think i got and i eye color wrong of a detective. I think i put green and he said it was hazel peered i dont know what the differences but apparently theres a difference. He did know. I think pg county is a fascinating place and i thought what a great place for a book. There always sat in the innercity and pg county is a fascinated place that sowed diverse culturally, ethnically, racially and as well as the landscape. One time i was in farm country in two weeks later or two days later i was at a homicide scene at the park in an illegal apartment that was a brewhouse where they were just giving away beer and everything. My editors calling me. Today i edited a bunch of stories and i was covering the mass shooting in orlando florida. Im a little frazzled. That might be why. Anyway. So the day after that i met an innercity capitol heights. You cant tell a difference between those two neighborhoods and whats across the d. C. Line. The only way you can tell us if you look at the street sign. I love that. What a great place to set a book. So i come here and i dont really know what the book is. Im just gonna hang out and see what theyre like and see how homicide detectives do their jobs today. As i did that, i spent like six months and i couldnt figure out what the story was. I was struggling. I was running out of money for my publisher to keep doing it. Then i realized oh my gosh, i love stories where you test characters under intense stress and circumstances and then see how that reveals their character. In my first book i tell the story, i wrote 80,000 80000 words about one day in u. S. History. I wrote 3000 words about three minutes and these men and women who were pushed to to their limits to save the life of the president of the united states. February 2013, you remember you remember that, there were 12 murders and 28 days and thats when you also had two of the final, remember there were Six High School students that were killed that school year in the last were killed in february 2013. I looked at that month and i realize the first of the month they interrogated guy who they think may have killed amber stanly. She is this gorgeous smart 17yearold honor student who is destined to be a geneticist or something and she was beautiful. She was a model and shes killed in august. They worked so hard from august through february. They finally get the guy who they think might have done it. They interrogate him. They interrogate him all day february 1. They dont break in. They spend the rest of the month, these detectives trying to build a case against that guy. In the final final day of the month the dna comes back not with the named suspect so they have to get rid of him. The very next day they get dna back to a serial rapist. They get that and they get him. They interrogate him all day. Im not going to reveal, case you get the book to know what happened to him. Nevertheless, thats what happened at the end of the day. Within that month there was the murder of a 71yearold lady who is partially paralyzed for her 40 Television Set set. I had the murder of Charles Walker who was killed for his tennis shoes. Im the murder of a drug dealer, eddie florez. He was trying to solve it because he wants to solve it so bad. Eddie florez. Yes you can come join us. So thats why focused on one month. I thought what a great month. They were exhausted. That month was exhausting for me personally to. Not that my trials and tribulations are remotely as interesting as my characters but i should not have been driving, i was dead to the world. In fact, by the end, i couldnt read a word i had written. I was sleep deprived. The two detectives, what i really loved about this book where the characters so i had a diet pill popping cheese burger eater. A female quarterback of a Semi Pro Football Team and a dude who bragged about herbal erection remedies he was taking. Those were the detectives. So those guys helped overwhelm the narrative in some way. I just said im going to stay as close to them as possible and right there story as good as i can. Thats how the book started to come about and how i got into it. What i really found interesting was the humanity i saw. I saw really Beautiful Moments and really horrible things. I think people dont understand and theres no better time to write a book about what it takes and why it matters to be homicide detective or a Police Officer than now. I think its a really important book to write right now. We are having a big National Debate about the best way to police our communities. Thats very important from all the things i saw. I think that book will end up being a war shack test because i make very few opinions. I dont inject a lot of opinion or analysis per night just write what i saw. I love narrative storytelling where youre on the shoulder of your characters where they go through things. Some of the detectives were not particularly happy when i made it into a book and other things they were. They said everything you wrote was true. One of them posted on facebook, the book is pretty good but everything happened. That made me feel good. There was no one complained to me after who said thats not what happened or i didnt say that or i didnt fall asleep in the Interrogation Room with you while i was interrogating someone which he actually did. People wont understand why that happens until you live it. I think its a good book thats informative for people right now thats why i really wanted to write that story. The job is really hard, let me tell you. This job job is hard. It wears down your soul. I dont want to get too depressing about it but i think a lot of Police Officers will understand this because they deal with the worst 10 of the worst 10 . These guys dealt with the worst 10 of the worst 10 of the worst 10 . These people these people who kill people are not pleasant people. Theres a lot of talk, i never saw them break the law and never saw them bend the rules, nothing that would remotely count for that under current case law. They used a lot of trickery to try to get confessions but you can do that. I just remember how hard the job was, going out with them on death investigation. Somebody just died in their dead in front of you and theyre talking about business over this corpse. I saw more than 25 bodies in my six months, maybe a few more, i stopped counting at that point, i slipped on brain matter and i slipped in a puddle of blood. When youre right there and you realize im not the only one this happens to. They must all deal with this. These are some of the funniest people ive ever met, but you have to kinda be in tune to their non politically correct sense of humor. Like the idea that super gluing a Bumper Sticker on your partners wifes car that says i love to masturbate is funny but you have to be in the right mindset to find that funny. Maybe they call it stockholm syndrome, i dont dont know but i understood after having gone through it all. Understand why the medical examiner is joking about sex acts next to a heroin addict and i hope the reader understands that insight and not that anybody was callous or didnt care. Trust me. Absorbing it over and over again is very difficult. What i found most interesting, actually was that the worst thing wasnt the corpses or the body. For me the worst thing was this guy who was killed, he is a witness and by the way solving the murder of a witnesses hard because who wants to be a witness to the murder of a witness. So this guy is trying to solve this murder and i went to the scene and the mother was there, her son is shot dead outside her apartment door. He had his twoyearold son with him. When i got the scene there was a puddle of blood in the body was there and there was a little juice box in the blood. The boy had been grazed by the bullet. He was fine. But i couldnt stop staring at that juice box i get inside and he needed to question the mom but he couldnt get out of the house. He spent the next two hours interviewing the mother and talking to the mother and dealing with the crime scene and the mother was looking at her son and talking about it. I think he said he was a rookie and was kind of young and he said i probably shouldve gotten her out of the house and did it somewhere else but he didnt think to do that. I had permission from the mom to be there. I asked her if i could be there. So that was pretty bad. It was awful. The next day its the security video and it shows two guys walking up to the moms apartment and he disappears. As hes walking in the vestibule these two guys went after him and chased him and two seconds later they run out. Its the kind of guy that kind of has to click the mouse 300 times and then suddenly the computer freezes. Hes that kind of guy. So of course you want to watch this a hundred times. I had a watch this video must been three or four dozen times. By the end of it i was watching the video and i was almost screaming for him to get out of the way. I wanted him to leave because it was real and i knew what happened so its weird, that was the hardest thing. I still dream about that. It was just awful. I know the detectives have this place of distance and humor and this topics dairy are but ive seen it break down. Ive seen them kind of lose it in their own way he had a double homicide were to 18 yearolds were killed. Hes at the scene and goes to the hospital and one is dead already. The other is not going to make it hes been shot and has stuff oozing out of his head. The father says can i get the code for his phone because he has to solve the case. On a death notification, you dont just go say your son died, you asked you asked them like 20 minutes of questions first. So where was your son. Maam i just need to know. Where was he, who was he with, do you know the code to his phone. Only then do they tell them that their relative is dead. Otherwise they will be not coherent and they wont get any information. They tell this woman and she knew who i was and they tell her her son was dead, he was a drug dealer. His own son had been shot in his car. A great piece of detective work to sell that case but it didnt make it in the book. She was getting upset and then they tell her, im sorry your son was shot and he didnt make it. She is really upset, crying crying and sobbing and the detectives pulled out this phone thats when i knew how hard the job was. Theyre not trained to engage or give hugs and love people. There job is to solve a murder. They dont want to be part of the oral experience but they cant leave. They cant absorb all of that grief all of the time so theyre just on their phone. Now this detective billy watts, i saw him lose it in his own way there is a fatal fire and for members of the family died. We were in an exam room with a 4yearold whose dead in an eightyearold girl whos dead. Their sisters sisters and their dead under green. We going check it out and hes now worked a week of midnights, he has a cold and hasnt slept more than a few hours and his partner let go home early to get some rest and then he was woke up and they said you have come in we just had four people die. They come in and they do the work of the scene and then billy goes to the hospital and the medical examiner person is there and she pulls back the sheet covering the body and the whole room was just smelling like a campfire because their bodies were saturated in smoke. I could tell this bothered him, particularly when they didnt have a kid size name tag. It was this big name tag on the small fouryearold kid. Its seemed so awful. Nobody did it on purpose but it was just this big thing. He took his notes and talk to the grandmother and i could tell it bothered him. The father had died trying to save the two kids. He broke a window in cut out an artery and he was trying to save his two kids. Because they dont have the right date of birth they have to send him as a john doe and he doesnt want him to go as a john doe because he tried to save his kids lives. Hes going back to the car to go back to the office to get the photo to properly identify the guy get the record set straight to the guy can go to the hospital as who he really was. He gets in the car and we trudge out and i could tell this was bothering him. He sits back in the car and he leans back any size and he pulls out his phone and you hear hey dad, hows hows it going. He called his son. I can put distance between the double homicide related to drugs but my kids could die in a fire. Like i said, i watched a lot of good police work. I was fortunate, if anyone here is an author, they will understand that you choose your characters, they kind of choose you to and i had 25 to choose from so i chose the ones i wanted to write about the most. I watched a lot of good police work. I watched them work really hard to figure out how do solve the stanley case which is a tragically awful murder. That was really powerful to see. I watch them try to solve a murder of a drug dealer. The guys from north carolina. Nobody cares. Theyll be no visuals for him. Hes killed in the park without any id. He might as well be a pile of bones. He worked really hard to solve it. He wanted to solve his first murder. Andre brooks, i cant say the exact quote that he used because book tv is here but every other word was an expletive crackhead. Mcintyre was killed by a handyman heroine addict or thats what he suspected at the time and he was so angry about it. Why would anyone kill this innocent lady. Its not worth it. Human life meant nothing at that moment he just wanted to solve the case. So their humor, we talked about some it was fun and there were characters in the detectives they all came across as very caring, smart, decent people, especially the one i read about. I dont really i dont usually read from a book but theres one particular funny scene in the book where these guys are talking about facebook and have to remember, lets see. So member i was telling you earlier about how i watched the detective fall asleep in the interrogation. That actually happened because i want to leave everyone in an up note. This is what its really like. I think theres some police in the audience. Its not like that tv shows. Its not like sbu or csi. Maybe the wire is as close as it gets may be, but not really. You cant encapsulate the reality but thats what our experiences with police and crime. I just found this to be a funny moment where guys were thinking on their feet and its real and it really happened and its just interesting to me. Sean is pressing the brother about his crew and his eyes grow heavy and he gently rest his head against the wall. His eyes open and spring open again and then finally close shut again. He starts to snore. The brother says that he hasnt seen his brother for months. He looks at the snoring investigator. Any fights involving your brother. He is snoring pretty loud, let me tell you. No fights. In the last few months . No. He asked him if he had seen jeff buck with a gun or if he had heard about the rape of denise or anything about amber stanleys murder. He shakes his head. He glances at him whose oversized head is drifted against the wall and is prompted on his white hand. I put bubbles on his lower lip and hes breathing deeply. Shaking his head he blinked wildly thinking what did i miss. Was i really asleep . He checks with a blank eating grin behind his notepad. Seriously put did i just dislocate my thumb . How did you meet your girlfriend returning to a question he posed earlier. The witness seemed perplexed. Like i said before, through facebook. Facebook he said trying to think of something to say. The following investigator offers no help, watching him scramble is too enjoyable. He furled his brow and checks his notes but sees nothing that will get them back on track. Demise will have some fun he thinks. What is this facebook emphasizing the word if it was unknown criminal enterprise. He said you know it social networking. He says nothing. They stare at the with witness now shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Ten seconds pats in silence. So you read books on it. No. You keep in touch with people the man said. All like email. I get it. No. All like text messaging. No its facebook. How do you know what people are talking about on this facebook. He sighs and drops his head into his hands. He eventually gave up his dna. Probably because he was like i cant be in this room with these people anymore. Anyway if you have any questions im happy to take them. This is a famous author. Thank you. How much being around these detectives, how long, long was it before they started ignoring your presence or how much did their actions change because you were there. Second part of that is how much have you changed having been around them . So the first one, maybe after a month or two they forgot i was there. I heard a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with what i was writing about that you wouldnt mention in front of a reporter if you are smart. If you read the book, theres not a lot of censoring going on. So its pretty clear, i was very honest. And then, it changed me greatly. After i was done with that i had a really hard time. Trying to put the book together i went through a rough stretch. I think it was because trying to render these characters in their full environment while trying not to be absorbed by the evil in it. I dedicated the book not to these particular detectives but the men and women in darkness. Im not a cop, im not a soldier or firefighter, im not a schoolteacher mean some schoolteacher jobs are hard. Im not any of those things. Im a reporter. I had a briefing with dash i have a really great appreciation for how rough life can be and ill be honest, i get annoyed when you hear these people talking about the problems of urban and suburban america and they talk in this condescending way and youre just like i cant handle you anymore. I would love for you to be with the homicide squad for one month. Just one month. I was there for six months. When you come out your different person. Does that help answer . Actuall