Identity Crisis

I am fortunate to have the ear of the local Police Chief who has actually been all over the world in various heroic positions! He is very experienced and smart and, happily, very approachable, so if I have a police question that involves more than a yes or no Google-able answer I text him. If it’s really complicated, I might talk with him about it on the phone.

In my new novel, a victim is sprawled across a sidewalk in midtown Atlanta. For the sake of tidying up, I needed to get him out of there and off for autopsy but I wasn’t sure how this would happen exactly. Would he be slid into an ambulance and transported quietly with sirens off? Would he be in an ambulance with the siren blaring for immediacy? Would the Medical Examiners themselves pull out a stretcher and tuck him into another sort of vehicle on its way to another sort of place?

It was night time. It wasn’t especially late, but it was winter, so it was dark. And it wasn’t especially early either. I grabbed my cellphone out of my purse and scrolled through my list of contacts, tapped the Police Chief’s name and typed a quick text, asking him how to get a dead body out of the street or something equally ambiguous.

Apparently, I was not in his list of contacts.

There was a lengthy pause and then his reply, a simple inquiry before further action might be taken – phone traces, dragnets, dispatched cruisers with sirens of their own – His text came up with a little buzz. Who is this?