Everyone has Skeletons in their...Flower Bed?

OK so I just finished giving a statement to the police. Seriously. Two patrolmen and two detectives just left my house. I wish I had thought to take pictures. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me go back to the beginning of this story.

As I've mentioned, I've been cleaning up the yard in anticipation of the big Halloween party on Tuesday. In the process of pulling all the weeds out of a particular flower bed on Polly's patio, I found some pots and bits of ceramics. There was also a jawbone of what I figured was a coyote or some animal. In one of the pots that was covered in weeds there was also a what turns out to be the bottom spinal bone. It's the piece that fits into the coccyx. I, of course, didn't know that then. I looked at it and thought - another creepy animal bone, I'll leave it for Polly in case she wants to add it to her decoration for the party - and then I immediately forgot all about it.

So this evening Charlie, Polly and her mom are all sitting on the patio and they call me down and ask me where I found this bone, which I tell them, and then Polly says that she's pretty sure it's human. We debate this for a minute and then Polly calls the police to let them know that we think we found a human bone.

A half hour later two patrolmen show up, look at it and say that they don't know but it could be human so they call it in.

Another half hour later two detectives show up. I tell them where I found it and they ask some questions about the house. The older one thought it was an animal but the younger wasn't sure so they booked it and bagged it as evidence.

I want to point out that the younger, female, detective was in fact wearing a low cut top under a stylish jacket with really cute slacks and boots with heals. Her hair was also done up in a loose curly style. I mention this only because she looked like she's walked off a CSI set and I had always found the outfits on that show to be unrealistic. Apparently I was wrong.

In the process of this, the older detective started chatting with us and we were talking about downtown and he mentioned that we should be extra careful for the next couple of nights because they'd just done a raid of skid row and when they do that people often wander to the outskirts of our neighborhood. I am thankful for Mel.

Then we started talking about OJ, and he said that he'd been partners with Mark Foreman. (!!!) Then he said that a lot of good came out of the trial because it was so embarrassing for the LAPD that they became the first police group to have their own forensics lab, even before the FBI. Also they started training their officers outside of the LAPD instead of doing everything internally. He said that now there's a whole new generation of officers and it's a very different and much better organization.

I think all of this (minus the info about Skid Row) is extremely comforting. And I'm glad I have Mel who always looks out the front doors looking tough.

We'll see if it turns out I dug up a human bone. What a weird Thursday night.