I really don't want to tell the story, but seeing as how you've come all this way and are being really persistent than I suppose it's the only way to get you off my back.

Do you watch a lot of movies?  Heh.  Thought so.  Well, the movies tell you that stuff like this happens all the time.  It doesn't.  I'd clocked nearly twenty years on the force - most of that in homicide - and I'd never ever seen anything like this before.  This story is exactly the sort of story that never, never happens in real life but happens all the time in the movies.  This story is exactly the sort of story that gets turned into a movie.  Oh, they'd make a few changes of course.  They'd probably make me twenty years older.  I'd be played by Al Pacino or someone like that and I'd be a week away from retirement.  And Danny?  Danny would still be black but they'd cast him as someone straight from the streets.  An ex-gang member turned cop or something like that.  They'd get 50 Cent or someone like that to play him, someone to rake in the hip hop dollar.  In reality you probably couldn't ever find a more middle-class kid than Danny.  The closest he ever came to having a 'homie' was his gay room-mate at Columbia.  Still, I never met a smarter kid working homicide.  Good instincts.  Great partner.  Danny was on his way straight to the top.

I'm getting off the subject.  It probably won't be the last time either, but seeing as how telling this story was your idea in the first place you're just going to have to put up with it.  I'm sure you'll cope.

Anyway, we figured it was going to be business as usual that Monday morning.  We'd been told that it was a break-in that had gone wrong and now there was a body.  In this case the vicitm was a priest, a Father Denvers, which tended to complicate things a little.  If there was a list of people who would want to murder a Roman Catholic priest it would probably be as long as both of your arms put together.  Jeez, you've got pretty long arms, haven't you?  Was your father an orangutan or something?  Hey, now don't get upset at that.  I ain't even got started yet.

The vast majority of homicides are crimes of passion.  I don't mean that they're all committed by jilted lovers or anything like that, rather that they're not usually premeditated.  They tend to be opportunistic crimes.  Someone gets angry, grabs a blunt object and before you know it someone else gets dead.  In most cases the whole thing is usually messier than a fast food worker with Parkinson's .  Huh?  Offensive?  Get used to it.  Anyway, as I was saying most murderers are sloppy.  In ninety eight percent of cases you've usually got six or seven smoking guns right there at the scene.  As I said, business as usual.

We were wrong.



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