Crime Beat

the locksmith has just opened the door to Walter’s apartment. The officers go in and find the place ransacked and the door to the master bedroom locked. They call for the locksmith to open it. And after a few moments inside, they call for the homicide squad.
    G EORGE HURT has gone home early. His sinuses are acting up and the last few days have been slow. He figures he can take the break. He is sitting on the couch and has the afternoon paper in his hands when he gets The Call.
    It’s another murder. An apartment manager. No smoking gun. No such luck.
    He is told where. He is told when. The how is not yet known. It is Detective Vicki Russo telling him this. She’s rolling on it, she says. And so are the others—they being all available members of the homicide squad. George Hurt, sergeant in charge of the squad, says he’s rolling too. A routine week in homicide has begun. Hurt hangs up and curses to himself. This is number 38.
    Murder in Fort Lauderdale comes in all ways, times, places and circumstances. It is a crime unclassifiable in any way other than by its final result, the taking of life. For George Hurt and the homicide squad the only sure bet is that it comes and comes. This is Monday, June 29, and already there have been 38 homicides this year. There were 42 in all of 1986. The most ever was 52, back in 1981. At this rate, George Hurt is thinking he is going to need another case chart for the wall in the squad room. There could be 60 to 70 murders in Fort Lauderdale this year. That’s kind of scary. And that’s why he curses each time he gets The Call.
    It is hard to account for the numbers. Economics, drugs, heat, full moons, whatever. Hurt’s squad has investigated three people shot to death in a fast-food restaurant during a Saturday morning robbery; a high-profile divorce lawyer murdered a few steps from his office elevator; a rock-and-roll singer beaten to death because he was gay. More than a dozen times the victim was either the buyer or seller of drugs when things went wrong. There have been the quiet cases that rated only a few paragraphs in the newspapers, and the big cases that drew the TV trucks with the microwave dishes.
    It all adds up to 37 times in six months that the squad has assembled at a scene that defied common sensibilities, the Norman Rockwell portrait of life. And now it is time to gather again. Number 38, Walter Moody, lies cold in bed, his blood four days old on the sheets and pillows, waiting for the homicide squad.
    “S MELL THAT ?” says George Hurt. “They just rolled the body over in there.”
    Capt. Al Van Zandt, a supervisor of the detective division, puffs on his cigar so the smell of tobacco will overcome the sickly smell of death.
    The two of them are standing outside the door to Walter Moody’s apartment. Hurt didn’t have to be inside to know what the smell is; he has had years of experience with it. Going back to his stint as head of the department’s forensic unit before coming to homicide, and even back 20 years to Vietnam, he says that it seems much of his life has been spent rolling bodies over.
    This time he stays mostly outside the apartment with Van Zandt, content to let the forensic investigators and the assistant medical examiner do the work inside.
    There are five homicide detectives working the first hours of the Walter Moody case. One of the first to arrive was Phil Mundy, the squad’s senior detective. But after surveying the murder scene and discerning that it was a “whodunit” as opposed to a “smoking gun” case, Mundy returned to the bureau to run record searches on Moody and to coordinate requests that would come from detectives at the scene. His partner, Pete Melwid, is still at the apartment building questioning tenants. So are detectives Mike Walley, Gary Ciani and Vicki Russo. Russo’s partner, Kevin Allen, is on the way, called in from a day off. When was Walter last seen? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? These are the questions the detectives are asking. In the early stages of a case, information is the only available tool.
    There is a basic rule to murder investigation; as more time elapses in a case, the chances of solving it grow slimmer. So whenever possible, depending on constrictions of time, the overtime budget, fatigue and so on, Hurt puts all available hands on the initial stages of a case. “It’s called trying to figure out what is what and going from there,” he says.
    The squad has a rotation