Free Improbable Cause by J. A. Jance Page A

she said.
    I filled out the lab request and handed it to her. Jan signed the bottom of the form.
    “What are we looking for?” she asked.
    “Blood,” I answered. “Can you type blood even if it’s been diluted with cleaning solution?”
    “That depends,” she said.
    “See if it matches up with what came in on that carpet kicker from the crime scene on Second Avenue, will you?”
    She nodded. “Knowing you, I suppose you want it yesterday, right?”
    “You got it.”
    Al and I walked up the three flights of stairs between the crime lab and the fifth floor. There, in our cubicle, he took charge of the paperwork while I got on the horn to Sergeant Bob Daniels at the Community Services Section over at Eighteenth and Yesler.
    Daniels is the commander of the twenty or so community service officers, that strange branch of Seattle P.D. that’s neither fish nor fowl. Daniels told us we’d need to come to talk to the nighttime supervisor of the CSOs.
    The concept of CSOs is fairly new on the scene. They’ve only been around for the last few years, and I’m one of the die-hard old-timers who resisted the idea tooth and nail when they first talked about instituting it. In my book, cops are cops and social workers are social workers and never the twain shall meet.
    But CSOs turn out to be a little of both without quite being either. They aren’t sworn police officers. According to the procedures manual, they’re supposed to relieve street cops of a lot of the landlord disputes, juvenile runaways, utility turnoff problems, domestic violence, and other noncriminal crap that eat up law enforcement time without taking any hardened criminals—routine killers, drug dealers, and other professional bad guys—off the streets.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that domestic violence isn’t a crime. And I’m not implying that there’s that much more of it now than there used to be. Like child abuse, it’s finally being reported more these days. And DV cases take time, lots of it.
    As the number of reported incidents increases, some of the old domestic violence myths are gradually biting the dust. DV doesn’t happen only in blue-collar families on payday Saturday nights. Rachel Miller hadn’t said as much in so many words, and Debi Rush had flat-out denied it, but I suspected LeAnn and Frederick Nielsen’s big gracious house on Green Lake had been the setting of some ugly scenes most people prefer to relegate to the wrong side of the tracks.
    But to get back to the community service officers. They are called to reported cases of domestic violence, the ones where someone— usually a woman—has had the crap beaten out of her. The CSOs take over where street cops leave off. Once the initial police report has been taken, they provide moral support for the victims, as well as transportation to a local safe house.
    I was vaguely aware that safe houses existed, in Seattle, three of them by actual count, but this was my first experience at trying to find someone who was staying in one. I was surprised to find myself running smack into a brick wall, a petite red-haired brick wall whose name was Marilyn McDougal.
    There are always rumors downtown of street cops and detectives running afoul of the CSOs, but this was the first time I had tangled with one. It turned out that all those rumors were fact, not fiction.
    If I had seen Marilyn McDougal on the street, I might have thought her cute, but I’d hate to think what would have happened to anyone dumb enough to call her that to her face. They wouldn’t do it twice, that’s for damn sure. She was like a little bull terrier, all growl and teeth and determined as hell.
    She sat there, dwarfed by the bulk of her regulation-sized desk. Her brown, lightweight summer uniform was open at the collar. With horn-rimmed glasses pushed up into curly red hair like some offbeat crown, she regarded me with a kind of regal disdain.
    “Of course we don’t give out that information,” she