Chapter 11

Day 11 (18 October 2018) Notes for Taxi Driver Task Force initiated on 8 October 2018

(Detective Trish Cavanaugh Badge 3446 SFPD)

A quick reminder that this entry for day 11 of 18 October 2018 will include the victim case files for Taxi Driver killer Victim number 12 only.

I got a letter of reprimand placed in my file today for being too familiar with the Federal side of the house in the Task Force. I suspected it was a prick cop called “Rat-face” O’Malley that stuck it to me because I refused to give him a blow job on a stakeout a few years back. I had thought that only females had that “grudge” complex that led them down the dangerous road of revenge when one least expected it. I couldn’t prove anything and I guess I was guilty as charged but it seemed unfair because I wasn’t the only one fooling around behind closed doors. I think O’Malley getting a promotion and a transfer to Internal Affairs caused him to stab me in the back just to teach me a lesson about proper respect and submission. I thought about doing a “Dirty Harry” on him but it wasn’t worth it in the long run and I figured I wasn’t getting promoted to Detective First Class anytime soon.

We are coming down the homestretch of the victim case files with only two more to go after this one for victim number 12. Number 14 is a real fresh one and hopefully the Taxi Driver killer is getting less cautious with each passing success in avoiding detection.

My adopted daughter Diane intercepted me on my way out to an emergency meeting about some new details in the case to inform me that she had gotten a long distance radio phone message from Doug, her short-term Marine boyfriend on the frontline of freedom over in Afghanistan.

She came right out and asked me point blank leaving me no time to give a non-answer.

“Did you keep Doug’s letters that I didn’t answer and pretend you were me? That is really weird, Mom because he is coming home on leave and has one of his legs screwed up from stepping on a land mine. I didn’t say anything, but I don’t want to be saddled with a gimpy guy that can’t dance or nothing. You went over the line to mess with my personal mail.”

I was sorely tempted to lie like I would usually do in a situation like this, but I didn’t think it would be fair to the injured Marine and I knew he wouldn’t mind my writing because if I hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have gotten any mail at all.

“I apologize dear; I was just sorry for him being out there all alone and not getting any mail. We will straighten it all out when he gets back and I promise you won’t be put in an awkward position.”

The meeting was a real confrontation between the locals and the Federal component of the Task Force. I was already in enough trouble on that score and I just kept my mouth shut.

It was obvious the local law enforcement was going to loss that discussion and we started to use the FBI procedures for keeping tabs on the evidence and doing follow-up interrogations of all suspects, witnesses and persons of interest on all cases going right back to square one with the very first case.

I was lucky to have my journal, the wall montage of all cases and various notes on contacts and lines of questioning that needed more follow-up. In fact, I believed my database was more complete than the FBI one but I didn’t want to toot my own horn because I was right in the middle of the road on the Task Force with friends on both sides of the table. I calculated that we needed no less than 67 follow-up interrogations to explore the leads in the initial interrogations. I figured from start to finish that would take about six hundred or seven hundred work-hours of effort and that was without any attempt to sort it all out when it was finished.

I suspected that our interrogation process was going to be curtailed sooner rather than later because we had already gotten several in-house memos about shortfalls in the budget and no chance for additional funding.

My friend Maggie down in finance told me that the raids on the budget to pay for the added expense of monitoring the influx of homeless people and the new hordes of undocumented residents flocking to reside inside the “Sanctuary City” of San Francisco was making all the crime fighting units suffer in their efforts to get the violent criminals off the streets. It looked to me like it was going to get a lot worse before it got any better. I knew that Seattle and Portland were in the same situation and I decided to keep my head down and pretend everything was just fine in my book because I had absolutely no good will in the bank with any Rabbi in the higher echelons.

Diane told me that she got a “heads up” from Doug that he would be in town that weekend but would only be there for a couple of days because he was heading up to Sacramento to visit his family.