Paul O’Connor has written comics, and for decades he developed video games, most recently as game director for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings. He makes his fiction debut in EQMM’s current issue (September/October 2023) with the story “Teddy’s Favorite Thing,” in which he manages to imbue a take-your-child-to-work day with chilling suspense. Here he revisits an incident from his own childhood that helped to inspire the story.  —Janet Hutchings

The woman on the bed was nude, and framed from the waist-up. Three black bullet holes snaked a dotted line up her chest.

“Here’s a bride they killed on her wedding night,” the detective said, grinning as he showed me the photo.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a naked woman before. I’m sure I’d never seen a dead one.

I was thirteen years old.

It was the middle 1970s and I was on a ride-along with my brother, a policeman. He was a dozen years my senior, and I worshiped him, eagerly jumping at the chance to join him on patrol.

We were the baby boom sons of a middle-class Southern California family. We grew up in a house on a peaceful street in the San Fernando Valley, with walnut trees in the front yard, and a swimming pool out back. Our father had been with the U.S. Marshals Service in the ’50s. Later he sold real estate, and owned his own dry cleaning business. My mom managed the home despite her chronic arthritis. When I wasn’t reading comic books or cheering for the Dodgers, I’d join the family to watch Adam-12, especially after my brother’s instructors at the LAPD Academy praised the TV show’s demonstration of correct police procedure.

We didn’t think in terms of privilege but we certainly benefited from it, white and middle class and American. My life was idyllic and sheltered, and free from violence. I had no experience with dead bodies, and was still capable of being shocked by them.

Except I wasn’t shocked.

When the detective showed me that photo—breaking who-knows-how-many laws and rules of evidence—a magical thing happened.

It was a rite of passage. It put me proudly in the cop club, where the darkest things could be shared with little boys for a laugh. And I knew—somehow and without being told—that my new club demanded stoicism and silence.

So I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Our morning was a snooze after that early detective encounter at the station. There were no car chases or wacky slice-of-life comic relief cases, like officers Reed and Malloy had on Adam-12. Instead we drove endlessly around the city, incomprehensible codes and cross-chatter coming over the radio. My brother’s eyes were always roving, noticing things I did not, mostly minor traffic violations that didn’t warrant a stop. People looked at me, probably wondering why a kid was sitting in the front seat of a police car. I felt pride that I was there, but also shame that people might think I had done something wrong.

After lunch a 211 call came over the radio. I’d heard that one a bunch of times on TV—”One Adam 12, One Adam 12, 211 in progress; One Adam 12, handle code 3.” Armed robbery!

But whether I was in the club or not, that radio call was as close as I got to the action. My brother put me out on the curb at a random intersection and roared off, lights and siren going. He cared about me and wasn’t going to risk his little brother catching a bullet during a stickup.

I stood on the street for an hour, wondering if I should be afraid. When my brother picked me up, he said it had been a false alarm or the guy had run off. No big deal.

No big deal that my brother drove away without me, maybe to kill or get killed.

No big deal seeing a dead woman.

It was my new normal, and it happened in a blink. Now it was my idyllic childhood home that seemed to have happened on TV, and Adam-12 which was real. I had no notion how close I was to disaster. It felt like a game.

I drew on that feeling for my story in the current issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Through the eyes of a seven-year-old-boy, “Teddy’s Favorite Thing” tells the story of a bring-your-kid-to-work-day that goes violently wrong. Warning signs mean nothing to Teddy. He’s just a little kid who wants to be a grownup for the day, hanging out with his dad in the cave of wonders that is his father’s workplace.

And then he sees and does things children should not see or do.

Kids trust that authorities—police, their dad, their brother—know what they are doing. Adults do, too, blithely ignoring the chaos lapping around the edges of our lives. Protests, riots, coups—these are things that happen to other people on TV. Until they happen to you.

I won’t spoil the end of Teddy’s story, but mine came out fine. The rest of our shift passed without incident. I grew up, developed more nuanced views of police than the ones I got from Adam-12, and became estranged from my brother. (Still love him, though). Like a lot of boomers, and thanks to the accident of my birth, I skated through life invisible to the authorities, enjoying an inside lane to chase the American Dream. Memories and little quasi-traumas from my ride-along got pushed down deep into the loamy place where writers get their stories. Everybody won.

Everybody except the woman in the picture.

I’d mostly forgotten about her, until I was invited to write this blog. I thought of her as I always had, as a thing that had happened to me. She was a prop in my story, the same way she’d been to that detective. I was still following the rules of the cop club, whether I knew it or not.

Only now do I recognize her as a person, with a story more important than my own. Who was she, why was she killed? How would the people who loved her feel, learning photos of her nude corpse had been shared around a police station as a gag?

What was her name?

It’s gone now, all of it. Those cops are long retired or dead, and the woman’s case was solved or not, for all the good it did her. My membership in the cop club has long expired, and my life has taken a different path than my establishment roots might have dictated.

But I like to think I still understand the police, at least a little bit. The experience and job of policing has changed greatly since the 1970s, but I suspect the police themselves are the same. Many cops—most cops, I choose to believe—are like my brother, honest people trying their best to do a tough job. Others are like that detective, desensitized or reckless, showing off like a fool to a little kid.

Good or bad, they wear the same uniform, see people at their worst, and face danger together. It can’t help but set them apart. Because of that, they have more in common with each other than the people they serve. They’re all in the same club.

The rest of us are not.

Especially that dead woman on the bed. And the little kid who needed a lifetime to understand that club wasn’t so cool after all.