Free If You Really Loved Me by Ann Rule

their meeting. "We were in Little Saigon at a triple murder scene, and Fred and I were trying to identify shoe impressions in blood. I said, 'Nike,' and he said, 'New Balance,' and we looked at each other and suddenly realized we had more in common than a mutual interest in death investigation. We were both runners." The initial attraction long outlasted that murder. They got married.
    Fred McLean, compactly muscled at fifty-three, a ruddy-cheeked blend of Scotch and German ancestry, was the one obsessed with running. He began each day by traversing a brisk five- to seven-mile course. He was what you might expect if you took a career Marine and turned him into a street cop, tough and taciturn at first glance, a softie when his veneer was peeled away. He did not peel easily.
    "My folks came to L.A. from Kansas in the thirties to find gold; they found the Depression instead, and I was born in the Salvation Army hospital in Los Angeles. Back in Wellington, Kansas, my grandfather owned half the businesses in town and had a verbal contract with the Santa Fe Railroad to ice their produce cars. The Santa Fe built a spur to Wellington right up to Heinrich Wilhelm Glamann and his enterprises. The old man gave my dad a job when L.À. fizzled on him, paid him eighty-five cents a day—good wages in 1937."
    And so began McLean's sporadic "commute" between Kansas and California. His love of sports stemmed from the glory years of football in Kansas when his team was first in the state. He joined the Marine Corps in 1956 where he played guard and blocking back on the football team in the single-wing formation. Young McLean soared high and fast in the Marine Corps. He became a first lieutenant when he was barely twenty-one, flying 119s, Panther jets, and any aircraft the Marine Corps used. He wasn't thirty when he was one of the "old guys" who shepherded five thousand young Marines to stand by off the Bay of Pigs during the Cuban missile crisis. "They never got to fight. They were too young to appreciate that; they were so revved up they damn near tore up a town."
    McLean learned a lot about human behavior, and a great deal about discipline and commitment, in the Corps. He loved it all. When he said, "The Marine Corps was my life," you know he meant it and could sense what it cost him to walk away. But McLean's first wife gave him an ultimatum after he had been with the Corps for a decade. He seldom had stateside duty; his son rarely saw his father. The choice was simple. The Marine Corps or the marriage.
    McLean chose the marriage.
    Police work was the only civilian career that appealed to him, and it began as a grudging second choice. McLean's wife was dubious about it, suspecting—correctly—that it might be as dangerous and as time-consuming as being in the Marine Corps. She agreed only after he promised he would stay away from Los Angeles County and sign on with some sleepy Orange County department.
    Garden Grove fitted that description when McLean joined the force on August 26, 1966.
    But not for long.
    The marriage foundered, but McLean's fascination with police work bloomed. To counteract the fine edge of tension that walks with a policeman always, McLean ran and played football. He was forty-eight when he hung up his shoulder pads for the last time. He was out in the field on training maneuvers with his Marine Corps reserve unit until he was fifty. And to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ran fifty miles. Over the years, McLean survived shoot-outs and dicey encounters, and his skill with people moved him steadily up through the ranks from patrol into the detective unit.
    He had found his niche.
    As the primary investigator into Linda Marie Brown's murder, McLean was present at her autopsy. The postmortem examination began at nine-thirty A.M ., five hours after the young mother had been pronounced dead.
    From the "cold room," in the Orange County Forensic Center, the gurney carrying Linda's body turned right and trundled perhaps