Messengers - 19

“Really?”

“Sure, I have to blame somebody, right? They sent me a message that I was going to kill Bobby Sinclair. I know they say that what the angels say doesn’t have to be, and I guess that’s probably true. But when I got that message it felt…inevitable. It felt like gravity. It was easier to just fall than to fight. So I didn’t.

I wish I could tell you it was hard. But it wasn’t. It would have been harder not to. You know about Bobby Sinclair?”

“After his body was found, they were able to connect him to more than thirty rapes. All of them were teenagers.”

“Thirty six. That were reported. God knows how many more that weren’t. He’d been at it for more than a decade. Poor girls, girls from the street. He figured no one would care enough to look very hard. He was right. If I didn’t know it before, I knew it when nobody found about Carcetti.

You know what I learned being a homicide detective? That most of us are smart. Most of us care. Most of us want to get the killers. And most of the time, it’s not that hard. Most of the time we find a husband with a bloody knife over his dead wife or we find some gangbanger killed by a guy who brags all over town. But if it’s not obvious, if it’s not someone that society cares about? We don’t get them. You know about the first forty eight right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s not because there’s something special about those first two days. It’s because if you can’t find the evidence you need that fast, you probably never will. Nobody cared about Carcetti. Nobody cared about those girls.”

“You did.”

“I guess so. But that didn’t change anything for them, anymore than it changed things for Amanda Carcetti. The angels weren’t helpful enough to tell me which Bobby Sinclair I was supposed to murder, so I needed to do some legwork myself. I narrowed it down to likely suspects.

The Bobby Sinclair I was looking for had been arrested once, back when he was in college. He was accused of raping a girl. There wasn’t any hard evidence. She was a townie, too young to be drinking. He didn’t deny sleeping with her, but they were both drunk and he was young and pretty and he walked.

He must have learned from that. He was smarter about it after. We never even had any idea that he even existed. But I was suspicious, you know? Something felt wrong.”

“So you broke into his house.”

“Sure. I mean, it’s not like I needed evidence for court. I just needed to know why I was supposed to kill this man. So I broke into his house and found all the reasons that I would ever need.”