Marc Cameron, a crime writer, reflects on his days as a US Marshal in Alaska:
One of my early assignments as a deputy US marshal on the Alaska Fugitive Task Force was to hunt a man who had beheaded one of his roommates with a splitting maul. Our guy had fled into the surrounding woods, and they needed a tracker. Homicide investigations take a considerable amount of time, so my team and I were able to make the three-hour flight down from Anchorage on the state aircraft before investigators had moved the body. The murder happened in a float house—basically a shack built on huge logs that went up and down with the tides. The smell at the scene was nauseating—rotting food, sewage, the sour odor of people living in extremely close quarters with no running water. Periodically standing over the medicinal cloud of alcohol vapors evaporating off the copious amounts of blood from the victim provided the only respite to keep us all from getting sick to our stomachs.
A brutal—and uniquely Alaskan crime scene.
Fast forward seventeen years. My eldest son was a special agent with Air Force OSI. My youngest was a newly minted officer with Anchorage Police Department, twenty-four years old, fresh out of the academy and still on field training. He’s a nice kid, our youngest. Reminds me of the Raymond Chandler quote I had on my wall when I was a detective:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean…”
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