A few months ago, I posted a 3-part blog [see www kengoddardnovels blogspot com] on the real-life origins of my admittedly edgy and violent 2nd novel, The Alchemist ... explaining, among many other things, that I wrote the book as a way of saying hi to a long-ago UCR organic chemistry professor of mine who had fatefully agreed to teach me (at the time, I was a brand new San Bernardino County deputy sheriff/criminalist. having recently graduated from UCR) how to make methamphetamine so that I could pose as a young (22 year old) university chemistry student willing to 'cook' meth for cash in a hidden/illicit underground drug lab ... in order to infiltrate what we thought was a group of 'franchised' drug labs out in the Mohave desert. I was the logical choice because I was 1) a supposedly competent chemist; 2) I was new to the county; and 3) I hadn't testified against anyone yet.

To no great surprise, I suppose, things went wrong (events which, in retrospect, probably saved my life), and I crossed paths with this professor one more time (in an amiable way via a 'designer' drug investigation, while working at the Huntington Beach PD) before he was arrested by the DEA for suspicion of running a big PCP lab on the East coast ... whereupon, as far as I knew, he went to trial and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Thirty some years later, I posted the blog, hoping that someone might know what happened to him, because I've always thought he might have done something --- or said something --- that saved my life the night I went into the desert with the snitch and a couple of SBSO narcs who were going to try to keep an eye on me that first night from a couple of miles away.

A few months later, much to my stunned surprise ... well, you can hear to story for yourself on NPR's Snap Judgement on an interview I did with producer Stephanie Foo titled Breaking - Good. See: http://snapjudgment.org/breaking-good

Breaking Good | Snap Judgment
snapjudgment.org