Morton drives an inconspicuous silver minivan while tracking down criminals.

Constable Lisa Morton knocked on the door of an unassuming Calgary home after receiving the report of a break-and-enter. She was greeted by an elderly religious Jewish woman wearing a wig who, after allowing Morton to enter, informed her, “You’ll have coffee.”

“No, no thanks,” Morton replied. “I’ll just get to work.”

“Fine,” the woman said. “You’ll have tea.”

There’s no sense in arguing with an older woman who has made up her mind. While her cup of tea was being readied, Morton went to check out the window where the burglar got in. She wanted to use a fingerprinting dust that would stain the walls but checked first to make sure it was okay with the homeowner. The woman reacted as if the question were ridiculous.

“Whaddaya think, I can’t paint it?” she said.

Sure enough, the dust turned up the burglar’s sweaty handprint on the semi-gloss paint. The window he’d climbed through was so high that he’d had to hoist himself up to get in, leaving evidence behind. The burglar obviously didn’t know much about the Identification section of the Calgary Crime Scenes Unit, where Morton has worked for the last three years.

“He was toast,” Morton recalls.

She managed to lift four fingerprints from the inside of the windowsill. The prints turned out to be in the police database, since their owner had been involved in previous criminal activity. Morton recognized the name attached to the prints, and the burglar was arrested soon after.

But first, Morton followed her hostess into the kitchen where she drank her mandatory and well-deserved tea.

Morton gets ready to hit the road in search of a criminal.

All in a day’s work

Lisa Morton has been a Calgary police officer for 10 years, and has belonged to the Crime Scenes Unit for the last three.

Her day is dictated by the laptop, and by a police radio hooked up to her unmarked minivan. The radio squawks and crackles reports of recovered stolen cars and other crime scenes from officers, and from Morton’s partner, who drives a separate car.

The Identification section where Morton works is responsible for checking out murder scenes by examining body positioning, extrapolating the direction of bullets based on wounds and point of entry, and finding evidence that would say nothing to an untrained eye, but that, to her, speaks volumes.

“I’m really good at figuring out what caused certain types of blood splatter,” Morton says, conjuring a hypothetical crime scene on a nearby wall with a wave of her hands. “Like, for example, the guy had to be standing here and shot from this angle for his blood to spray this way.”

On a slow day, Morton will head to one of the police service’s giant storage lockers for recovered stolen cars, and will spend hours going over a car with a flashlight. She’s looking for evidence and fingerprints on metal, glass, and plastic so that a suspect can be connected to the theft, and charged.

It’s possible to drive past her, completely unaware that she’s a cop. The silver minivan that Morton drives makes it easy to mistake her for a soccer mom.

She dresses in plain clothes, which she finds more practical than her uniform because “I’m less likely to rip the back of my stretch pants when I’m crawling on my hands and knees.”

She wears no makeup, and has an outdoorsy, no-nonsense look about her. Darkening roots peek out of her ash-blonde hair, which falls down the back of her black Calgary Police windbreaker.

Morton keeps her van heater on low. It’s no wonder, since the woman seems to create enough heat of her own. She’s a talker who waves around her hands and arms to illustrate her every point. Her enthusiasm might get her mistaken for a rookie who has yet to become jaded. It’s hard to believe that this woman will ever become cynical about her job.

While Morton says, repeatedly, that she’s a cop before anything else, she relishes the more specialized nature of her current position with Ident (Identification section), puzzling out the who, what, where, when, and why of crime scenes.

“My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy,” she admits. “I’ll sit there for hours and try to puzzle out [a crime scene] and I think it’s fun.”

Morton dusts a beer can for fingerprints.

The glamour of garbage digging

The Calgary Police Crime Scene Unit is no CSI: Miami or CSI: New York. The TV shows’ high tech machinery identify the culprit and victim while officers sip on chai lattes and toss around theories. Their world is a far cry from real life.

Instead, the fingerprinting lab smells and looks more like a high school photography room, with a vinegar tang of chemicals, smudged, worn countertops, and cement floors.

Morton and her colleagues make do with the limited resources they have. Morton winks when explaining, “Both boys and girls use the same powder room here.” The “powder room” contains the dark magnetic fingerprint powder recognizable from TV, a couple of small feather dusters, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and a garbage bag full of pop and beer cans.

Morton whips out a can from a garbage bin and proceeds to demonstrate how to dust for prints.

“You’d be amazed at the prints we can lift from cans, chip bags, chocolate bar wrappers,” she says. “Stuff people throw into the back of a car that they’ve stolen or are in while out committing another crime.”

The lab also includes two rooms with humidifiers that work in conjunction with certain chemicals, and are used to lift prints off special materials like cardboard or plastic.

One of the humidifiers is the size of a fridge. That’s overkill if you’re trying to lift a print from an object as small as a knife. For such smaller items, a police officer rigged up a second humidifier out of a cardboard box, cut a door in the side and used a pop can to hold the chemicals. “We use what’s handy,” Morton explains.

Next is the dry room. This room resembles a garage more than anything else. Any evidence that comes in wet or blood-soaked is stored in a locker in the dry room to ensure that it isn’t tampered with.

Morton smiles at a joke Bourassa made while relaxing in the Medical Examiner’s office.

Bodies, bone-saws, and ball-busters

A frequent stop for Morton is the Calgary medical examiner’s office, which suffers the indignity of being constantly mistaken for the post office across the street.

Out of all the offices on Morton’s daily rounds — including the personal desks at the police department downtown — the medical examiner’s looks the most welcoming, despite the dead body lying exposed on a gurney.

Morton plops herself down in the office space directly across from the corpse and, in full view of the autopsy equipment, starts talking with some of the medical examiners. Here, there are computers present, and all the equipment looks shiny and new. The facilities are brightly lit, warm, and smell like Glade air freshener.

But the fresh sweet smell fades when a round electric bone-saw (about the size of a fist and 10 times as loud as a dentist’s drill) starts whirring nearby, operated by one of the medical examiners. The hot, smoky smell of the drill on tooth and bone fills the air.

Morton and Kendra Bourassa, a technician, ignore the drill and remain seated in the office while chatting, their conversation shifting from the birth of a colleague’s baby to exactly how old you have to be before you’re considered a ‘cougar’ (an older woman who chases younger men). Bourassa ups the estrogen level in the room a notch and describes the time she had to castrate a body during an autopsy while a couple of male police officers watched.

“The guys said ‘we saw the way you handled that guy’s balls and we’re gonna call you the ball-buster,” Bourassa laughs.

A woman may not have to be a ball-buster to survive in law enforcement but it doesn’t hurt to be tough or have a sense of humor. Although the ratio of men to women in the medical examiner’s office is about equal, there are definitely more male cops in Ident than female. Morton says she has never been at a disadvantage.

It may help that Morton is physically imposing at 5’10” and about 210 pounds — a stature that counterbalances her bouncy nature. She’s an approachable police officer who also looks like she can take down the bad guys. Morton gleefully tells the tale of when she got a tip from a resident about a stolen car, back when she was a beat cop. Morton found the car along with the thief at a gas station, and confronted him alone.

“He sorta took a look at me and realized I was alone.”

Not at all threatened by a lone female police officer, the suspect allowed Morton to pat him down with his back turned to her and his hands on the hood of the car.

“As I was patting him down, I kept talking so he wouldn’t hear me reach for my cuffs. I had them on him so fast he had no idea what had happened.”

Morton cuffed the suspect in a single move, a technique all officers are taught during training. On the way to the police station, the suspect tried to strike up a conversation with her from the back seat.

“You’re a big girl, eh?” he asked Morton.

“Yup.”

“You work out?”

“Yeah, you kind of have to for my job.”

“You must be a farm girl.”

“Yup.” (Morton lives far from Calgary’s white-collar bustle with her boyfriend, another police officer. They own three horses and 10 cows.)

Thinking she wasn’t watching him, the suspect tried to take some drugs, including a capsule of hemp oil. The two proceeded to get into what Morton calls a “tussle,” ending with Morton’s foot stomped down on the suspect’s neck.

“The adrenaline is pumping and the stuff you’re capable of is pretty incredible,” Morton explains. “But you crash right after. I remember shaking because my energy dropped so low. So I had a Coke to bring it back up.”

Crimes and misdemeanors

Morton’s rural private life stands in sharp contrast to her career investigating city crime, but with her strong physical presence and her infectious enthusiasm, it all seems to work for her.

When she first started working as a cop, she and her partner answered a frantic call from a mother whose son was slashing his wrists. When they arrived at the scene, they both agreed that Morton should talk to the boy. The boy’s father had left home when he was young, and it was more likely he would respond to a woman’s authority.
  
After another suicide attempt and a second call from the mother, Morton went back to talk with the boy. This time the boy confided that his father, and a friend of the father’s, had sexually abused him when he went to visit. Based on the boy’s testimony, the father was arrested and charged.

Ten years later, Morton ran into the same boy after her partner pulled him over for speeding. Remembering, Morton shakes her head in wonder. “The fact that this kid was still alive was pretty amazing,” she recalls. “That I was able to reach him and have an impact on his life, wow.”

But she still gave the kid a ticket.

In The Fray Contributor