Marko Zorn is a homicide detective.
That is not a common occupation for a member of this compendium but he earns his space here due to the nature of a couple of pretty intense cases he is handed. This is especially true with what is called his "alternate career".
As we learn in a blurb about the first recorded adventure, "Marko Zorn, a Washington, D.C. homicide detective with expensive tastes in art, classic cars, and women, must take on extra work - not always strictly legal, often unorthodox and usually dangerous - to supplement his income - work which requires his special combination of skill and steel nerves. Although he's adept at navigating the corridors of law enforcement and the world of criminal gangs, he'd prefer to stay home and watch old movies, enjoy his art collection, and listen to cool jazz."
At first the impression I got from Zorn is that he is a little loose with his acquaintances and this adds greatly to the unorthodoxness of his life.
In the first adventure we find he knows a nonagenarian female crime boss who wants her top lieutenant removed and wants Zorn to do it. Zorn reminds her he does the odd item or two for her but assassination is not on the books but she insists. All of this takes place at the same time he deals with gun smuggling. And the main event which is the murder of a female Secret Service agent and pressure from the White House, including the big man himself, to let it drop.
In the second adventure we discover he has multiple dealings with a fellow named Voss who is best described as an international broker for getting 'broken' things 'fixed'. On occasion Voss calls upon Zorn to do some of this fixing and Zorn has earned a good deal of the money used to buy his expensive paintings and other pleasurable trinkets by doing that fixing. Not always on the straight up-and-up, mind you, but never so badly that he would lose sleep.
Zorn does have a conscience - and a pretty good code of ethics. He does, though, realize that some laws can handle a bit of bending here and there.
Zorn does not like guns. He is not afraid of them and he definitely knows how to use one but he is of the opinion that if he had one readily available in a fair number of events he was forced to be a part of, he would have felt obliged to use it and the end results would have been drastically different. He prefers thinking and talking to shooting. He will, however, if he has to, pull the trigger.
All told, Zorn is an interesting man. He is a law-enforcement officer who steps over the legal line a time or three but does not live on that other side. He works for the D.C. police solving murders but also gets involved in matters dealing with the White House and the State Department. He answers to a police lieutenant on a day-to-day basis but is on a first-name basis with the female head of the FBI's CID division.
A multi-faceted man is Marko Zorn.
Good line:
- Arguing with a federal agent about whose case a murder was, Zorn argues for control while admitting to himself, "I have no idea who has legal jurisdiction here. But then neither does this ... joker".