The crimson rivulet oozing from a 1995 Dodge Dakota was Jared Elliott's first clue that a career as an impound yard attendant isn't for the squeamish.
"It was my first day on the job, and I find blood dripping out of the door and all over the seats," he recalled. "It turned out to be a homicide vehicle we were holding for the police."Elliott, on the job since September, later learned that two men, after a nightlong drinking bout, had settled their differences with gunfire. The survivor abandoned the truck with the bloody victim still inside.
Next stop: the city's impound yards, a sprawling expanse of metal, glass and rubber in west Salt Lake.
"I opened the door and just thought, `Oh boy.' I couldn't believe it," Elliott said. "They told me this was a wild place."
A daily stream of tow trucks arrives at the yards, adding to a monthly total of 650-700 vehicles. Roughly a third of those are hostage to unpaid parking tickets that on any given day are worth $500,000 to the city.
Others are "hooked" as abandoned vehicles. Anything left on city streets for more than 48 hours gets hauled off. Burned-out hulls also are frequent arrivals; torching a car is a common method of disposal that makes determining ownership difficult.
Then there are the cars and trucks held for local, state and federal criminal investigations.
"A lot of cars we hook (come from) a law enforcement prostitution sting or raid on a drug house," said Brad Baxter, outgoing manager of the city's business district services office. "High-profile homicide and drug cases are stored inside a high-security area.
"Each of them has a story," he said.
Cars, from luxury models to junkers, along with motorcycles, trucks, boats, campers, trailers, motor homes and even an occasional piece of farm machinery find their way to impound limbo.
"We had a dump truck in here one time that was seized by ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms)," Baxter said. "There was a Jeep Cherokee (from) a gang shootout. There were bullet holes all over . . . but no one got hit."
The car of confessed pipe-bomb murderer Mark Hofmann, demolished in 1985 when one of his devices went off inside, was held here. So was an auto belonging to Arthur Gary Bishop, executed in 1988 for kidnapping and murdering five boys.
Nineteen-year yard employee Kamie Vailea has seen her share of grisly artifacts.
"Suicides are the ones that are really bad," she said. "We had one 11, 12 years ago where the father took the wife and kids for a ride and shot them, then shot himself. There was still a baby seat inside and a lot of blood."
Other vehicles tell lighter tales, a sort of humanity in the raw.
Baxter tells one about a local minister in a big hurry to redeem his vehicle.
"(He had) photos in the back of his car that were, shall we say, less than appropriate. He got rather panicked about it all," he said.
Often, cars towed for accumulated parking tickets provide - over time - rank surprises. Like an uneaten chicken or fish dinner. Or, in a case Vailea vividly recalls, a slaughtered sheep in a trunk.
But on this day, the main attraction is a spanking new BMW 750 LL seized in a pros-ti-tu-tion case. The luxury car features a state-of-the-art sound system, fax machine, cellular telephone and a posh leather interior.
In the back seat was a pair of white, thigh-high leather boots. "That's what really cracked all of us up," Baxter said. "We picked that one up off a girl who was hooking. It belongs to her pimp. He calls regularly to see how it's doing."
If a judge declares the BMW forfeit, it could end up in one of the city's monthly auctions. Seventeen percent of the vehicles go unclaimed. Most are sold, but some of the clunkiest are used for police and fire department training exercises.
And let the buyer beware, Baxter warns.
"We sell them as is, including the contents," he said. "You buy them as is, brains and all."