Double Take - 9781524534721

A young woman walked through a noisy crowd of abortion opponents and supporters to enter an abortion clinic. Without any warning, someone fired a shot killing her instantly. Chaos ensued but the police could find no witnesses who knew anyone responsible. The Police Department assigned veteran detective Basil Slonsky to the case. Without any witnesses, he could initially rely only on computer names of probationers and parolees in the state. The Department assigned Officer Honey Wissman, currently working as a vice officer but highly skilled in technology, as his partner. Entering numerous cases in Department computers, she discovered the Division watch commander in the Department communicated personally with another officer about the murder and exchanging intimate details of the officer''s dead wife at the clinic. Neither Slonsky nor Wissman knew this information. The watch commander reading his files noticed his computer had been hacked by another department computer. Wissman, becoming aware of this disclosure identifying her computer, told Slonsky. The veteran detective, fearing danger to her, sent his partner to a cabin in Oregon. While there, an unknown assailant seriously wounded her in the shoulder with a firearm while she was sleeping. After treatment in a hospital, Oregon police flew Wissman back to Los Angeles. Slonsky waited several days in the local hospital while doctors treated her but he became aware her injury had caused an emotional change stirring. She had become more than a partner. Yet, in the interim, Slonsky learned from a colleague that his partner was an ardent feminist. Viewing TV tapes of the crowd at the clinic, he saw Wissman standing next to the officer who had communicated with the watch commander. Slonsky, suspicious of their relationship, questioned Wissman in the hospital who revealed that herself, other feminists, and the officer planned to disrupt the crowd for pro- abortion publicity, but not to shoot anyone. The officer hired a hit-man who would merely fire into the air, but she did not know his name. At the autopsy of the dead woman, Slonsky discovered she had used her maiden name in applying for abortion, but he found her married name to a police officer in her purse. The officer, now aware of Slonsky''s investigation and questioning of Wissman, drove to the hospital and beguiled a nurse to tap Wissman''s room in her absence. Several days later, Wissman explained to Slonsky in more detail her impersonal relationship with the officer who had suggested the publicity stunt. Unaware of the tapped hospital room, she denied knowledge the woman killed at the clinic was married to the officer who stood next to her in the crowd. Slonsky continued his investigation and learned a Superior Court judge had observed the shooting from his chambers in the courthouse, located one half block from the clinic, but had declined to report it because he could not identify the face of the assassin. He had seen SWAT officers with rifles on the roof next to the courthouse with rifles but no shooting. The autopsy showed the fatal wound was fired from a 45 degree angle-not latterly from someone on the ground. In the interview with Slonsky, the judge discovered his phone had been tapped by someone in the courthouse. The following day, Slonsky himself tapped the courthouse phone and heard the officer and a court administrator discuss the shooting. Included in the conversation was the name of the killer. Slonsky began a search of the killer''s location. The District Attorney filed murder charges against Wissman and the officer. Slonsky, with help from Wissman and who both had become more intimate upon her release on bail, discovered the murdered woman had filed domestic violence complaints against the officer but under her maiden name. The court staff, unaware of her married name, had set the case for trial under her maiden name but the court would dismiss because of her death. The judge, aware of the mistake, contacted Slonsky and agreed to testify. Knowing someone would share this knowledge, Slonsky devised a plan to arrest the shooter with the cooperation of the judge. Explaining the plot to the judge, he acknowledged putting the jurist''s life in danger of assassination. The judge agreed to participate

• | Author: Judge Lawrence Waddington
• | Publisher: Xlibris
• | Publication Date: Oct 10, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 396 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Fiction
• | ISBN-10: 1524534722
• | ISBN-13: 9781524534721