Zero Day

Cole wants to see her murdered officer. She is cool and professional, and Puller guesses she probably feels embarrassed for her earlier emotional reaction. He reflects that she shouldn’t feel embarrassed; seeing friends die never gets easier. Together, they take down the body, careful to preserve possible evidence, and Puller takes temperature measurements from the corpse and the ambience air and uses them to estimate the time of death as approximately one o’clock.

Puller asks Cole if she is related to Randy, the young man he met outside the motel. She says Randy is her younger brother. When the other three Drake County cops arrive, Puller notes that the lean one has a Navy tattoo on his hand. The chubby one, Lou, tells Puller he has a cousin in the Marines. Puller replies that Marines “covered my butt” often in his combat career (58). Watching Cole interact with her subordinates, Puller observes that female police officers encounter some of the same resentment that women in the military sometimes encounter from their colleagues and subordinates.

Puller sketches preliminary drawings of the scene using precise measurements. While going over the crime scene with the police photographer, Landry Munroe, Puller points out a set of three impressions in the carpet.