The phone rang just after lunch.
“Smith.”
“You still remember the Mendoza file?”
I smiled immediately.
Only one person could ask a question like that as if no time had passed at all.
My old supervisor from Financial Crimes Task Force sounded exactly the same—focused, energized, still mentally standing over the case years later.
Thirty years on the job and he still sounded hungry.
We spent an hour discussing the investigation, which had now evolved into a federal case. Wire transfers. Cooperating witnesses. International movement of money. The kind of case that refuses to die quietly.
We talked like detectives. Actual detectives.
Leads. Timelines. Follow-up. Mistakes. Strategy.
When the call ended, I sat there for a moment thinking about how refreshing it felt to speak with someone who still cared about the work itself after all these years.
Then Del walked into the office.
Frank Deluca never left Starlight Division.
Nobody really knew why.
Maybe he got comfortable. Maybe he never had larger aspirations. Maybe the department simply dissolved around him while he remained in the same building telling the same stories to different generations of detectives.
Somewhere along the way, Frank Deluca stopped becoming a person and became “Del.”
That’s what long police careers do sometimes. They sand people down into nicknames and routines.
Del moved through the station like old furniture nobody questioned anymore. He knew every hallway, every retired lieutenant, every bar that used to exist within a five-mile radius in 1996.
Ask him about current investigative trends and he looked personally offended by the question. Ask him about the good old days and suddenly he came alive.
Del did not live in the present. He visited it occasionally. Mostly, he lived somewhere between 1989 and 2004.
I started noticing it almost immediately after we worked together.
One fraud victim kept repeatedly calling after Del closed her case within hours of receiving it.
“No elements,” he declared confidently before conducting a single meaningful follow-up.
No subpoenas. No surveillance review. No interviews. Nothing.
The victim wanted rationale.
So did the lieutenant.
Del reacted like a man being unfairly persecuted for the crime of being asked to investigate.
He grumbled for days afterward as though basic follow-up was beneath him.
Another time, we drove across the city together on one of my investigations. I thought we’d discuss suspects, timelines, inconsistencies—normal detective conversation.
Instead, I became the unwilling chauffeur for “The Adventures of Del, 1994.”
Forty-five straight minutes of old bars, old girlfriends, old commands, old fights, old parties, old arrests.
I drove silently while he narrated his own exhibit at the Museum of Himself.
By the time we arrived on the follow-up, we still hadn’t discussed my case once.
Not once.
And I think that’s when Del began to dislike me.
Because I wasn’t impressed.
I had already worked with the kind of detective he pretended to be.
Del wanted admiration without evidence.
And deep down, I think he knew I could see that.
