My victim is a drug dealer. I need suspects apart from his wife. Possibilities:
1. could he have a partner in drug dealing? Or do drug dealers work for themselves?
Unless they're growing their own pot or cooking their own meth, drug dealers have to get their supply from somewhere. I'd go with Mexican cartels here.
Could he have a partner who accuses him of cheating him and giving him a lesser share of the profits?
Completely plausible, and a good idea if you want the killer to be someone close to the victim. There doesn't even need to be any cheating involved. It can be simple greed. Maybe the partner figures he doesn't need the victim anymore and he just wants to take over the operation and keep all the profits for himself.
2. how about if he gave free drugs for a time to someone and that person is now hooked but doesn't have money for more drugs? And so the client barges into his home. Though the dealer never gave anyone his home address, the client finds out where he lives, barges in, and demands more free drugs. A crazed client could be s suspect; he could be bitter the dealer got him hooked.
Like notthatamanda said, dealers give out free samples all the time in order to hook new customers. (Some of us do the same thing with ebooks.
) The new customer is more likely to rob some unsuspecting person, though. Criminals tend to go for the easy marks. For example, it's a lot safer to rob an old widow than a drug dealer.
Modern-day meth heads are notorious for being copper thieves. They break into abandoned buildings or buildings under construction and steal the copper pipes and the copper from the appliances and air conditioning units and whatnot. They then sell the copper at scrapyards for the money with which they fuel their drug habits. It's a much less risky way of stealing than actually confronting people and risking personal injury or being identified.
So if I was writing this story, I wouldn't have the customer rob the dealer. There are a lot of less-risky ways to get the money.
3. a parent of a child who he got hooked could want to kill him but would the parent not be more likely to just report him to the police? Why go through the mess of murder? Except in whodunits, people kill for the flimsiest of reasons.
Sometimes calling the cops is pointless. There have been times and places in American history where the system does "catch and release" of suspects. Arrested, booked, released on little or no bond, charges later dropped or reduced to nearly nothing. Sometimes even the arrest doesn't happen; cops just "smile and wave" when they see crimes being committed. Crooks commit felony after felony after felony, but nothing ever happens to them. When that goes on long enough, ordinary folks learn not to bother with calling the cops. They learn that if they don't want to live in a dystopian wasteland, then they have to face the bad guys themselves. When the movie
Death Wish came out in the 1970s, it resonated with people for a good reason.
Sometimes the matter is simply too traumatic and personal to leave to an unreliable--and often way too lenient--judicial system to resolve. Here's a real-life vigilante:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Plauch%C3%A9And here's the news report showing the actual killing. (Spoiler tags due to graphic nature)
If the DA had been dumb enough to take Gary to trial, then those jurors would have acquitted him, guaranteed.
Interesting fact: Jody Plauché, the boy who was abused, is all grown up now and has a book available on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1948903210/Who else might want him dead? Who else could he have harmed?
Could be a neighbor who is sick of the bad elements in his neighborhood.
Why on earth did I never try out at least pot so I’d have some clue as to how these things work. There are grave drawbacks to having lived a clean life. It is not at all helpful for fiction.
Well, I've never left the planet, but a lot of my fiction takes place in space or on other planets, so hopefully personal experience of a subject isn't a prerequisite for writing about it. ;)
Anyway, there you go. Hope that helps.
