It was a winter day in Los Angeles. The temperature had barely reached the high 80’s.
It was one of those days where the Santa Ana winds blew in off of the desert and made your skin itch and crawl.
Every hair on your neck was charged with static, and the wives cutting up the roast for dinner held on to the carving knives just a little bit firmer, thinking about their husbands out on the patio guzzling beer.

That’s where I come in. There was a wife who reported her husband missing, but not in a way that gave you the idea that she missed him.
My name is Temple Rowe, and I’m a Private Detective.
I checked out my Snubby to make sure it was clean, and picked up a few extra .44 mag rounds for it. I don’t always invite Mr. Smith & Mr. Wesson to tag along, but something about this made me think they’d enjoy the ride.
I sorted out the gear I would need for this job, a Nikon D200 with a Tamron 28-75 lens for observation, some Home-Depot clamp lights to better grill the subject, and sharp, low angle lighting to give someone some shadows to hide in…
She was a pretty dame, in a peroxide-blonde sort of way, and when she came in and reported her husband missing, she said it with a sneering-smile that made my skin crawl, and I don’t think it was the Santa Ana winds causing it.
She said she wanted me to find him, but I was tempted to ask “which part?”.
She said that the time together with her husband hadn’t turned out exactly as she’d thought it would. Doing a lot of matrimonial work I get that a lot.
Yeah, the future is always brighter in the past…