Death as a Living by Doyle Burke

Author:Doyle Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkshares
Published: 2021-09-29T20:09:53+00:00

16.

Yes, Honey, the Rope

Took Him to Heaven

I remember a night during a long, hot summer, a very busy summer for us. As I got out of bed and put on my suit, I noted that it was 3 a.m., then grabbed my badge and gun and headed out. I was driving far from home when I realized I had forgotten the location of the call, so I phoned dispatch.

“Good morning, this is Burke,” I said. “Hey, what’s the address on the callout?”

There was a moment of deep silence and the dispatcher replied, “There is no callout.”

I was confused for a moment. Then I realized that I didn’t remember the pager going off or talking to dispatch. I just woke up, got dressed, and started driving, completely on autopilot.

I’d like to think that this job didn’t affect me. But it did, in ways that were obvious and in ways that I’m still figuring out. When you’re waking up in the middle of the night assuming there is a callout when there isn’t one, you know the job is affecting you quite deeply.

It never leaves you. Even when you are alone, at home, you find yourself haunted by certain incidents that just stay with you. But home alone is often better than going to a party. It’s hard to talk about this stuff with people who don’t experience it firsthand.

The hours didn’t help. Some people punch a time clock at work. You won’t find a time clock in a homicide office. Our scheduled hours were 8:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., but you might as well have called that a suggestion. We were always in early and usually worked late. When you get a promising lead, you follow it. You don’t yell “time-out” and go home, even if it’s 9 p.m. and you’re already three hours late for dinner.

Then consider the call load. We investigated dozens of homicides a year—but we also handled hundreds more cases where the victims survived. Most of those assaults did not happen at 9 a.m. on a weekday. We were always on call. Even if you were already working a half dozen cases, when a body dropped, you headed that way. There’s an old cliché about not knowing if you were coming or going. For us, this was the truth, and sometimes, as I discovered that evening when I must have dreamed about a callout, there was nowhere to go.

Our squad agreed that we had to give every victim our best effort. Victims vary. Some are completely innocent, like a four-year-old bystander to a drive-by shooting. Others are criminals themselves. But all of them have a loved one out there. Even when it wasn’t easy, we told ourselves that every victim deserved justice, and so did their loved ones.

The line between hero and scapegoat turns out to be quite thin. At times, victims’ families were so grateful that you could really feel a bond develop with them, sometimes almost instantly. Others hated us because a case went in

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