Quotes About Crime

GREER WAS STANDING OVER Cole Purdy's body when Lucas and the guard got to them and Greer was looking shaky and Lucas looked down at Purdy, who was lying on his back, gray eyes open to the hot sun, but already gone dull and blank. Blood spotted the front of his T-shirt, which was pulled tight over his chest: Greer had shot him six times, all the shots in the space of two hands, including two through Purdy's heart.

be somebody dead . . . maybe

Fuckin' trash, he thought. Where were the cops when you needed one?

You could get away with actual crimes for years, if you had enough money to protect yourself.

Lucas was forced to admit it: "No. Not absolutely sure. But pretty sure. The other possibility is that the people who paid for the porn to be dumped on Porter Smalls, knowing that doing so involves a number of felonies, are breaking the link between themselves and the pornography. Breaking the link very professionally. I did the obvious: I looked for professional killers. The only ones I could find"—Lucas nodded at Carver and Dannon—"are employed by you.

right. There's DNA on those sheets. You got her, even if you don't get

And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they've got guns." "Uh-huh." Virgil thought about that and said, "Okay.

VIRGIL HAD BEEN WORKING the telephone from his truck

the police don't stop crime; they simply record it, and sometimes they catch the people who do it.

Dannon brought the .22 up and shot him in the temple. Carver's head bounced off the side window and Dannon shot him again, the .22 shots deafening inside the truck, but hardly audible outside. Carver slumped, his face not even looking surprised.

Motherfucker who'd lock a live dog down in the basement," Zimmer said. "I don't think Glen would do that if he decided to kill himself. He'd at least let the dog outside. If Glen was murdered . . . Well, I can understand shooting somebody, but why would you do that to a dog?

And there's already a cop writer in the Cities." "Mostly that one guy," Lucas said. "Whatshisname. But his cop never does any paperwork. Or uses the can.

If it's criminal, it's either stupid or crazy. Stupid people usually have guns, crazy people always do. In a choice between stupid and crazy, first investigate the stupid, because stupid is more common than crazy. In many cases, stupid is also more dangerous than crazy. You could sometimes talk to crazy, but there's no dealing with stupid. None of the above is always true.

WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas went inside, badged his way back to the homicide unit, and found Roger Morris peering at a brown paper bag with a small grease stain at one end.

murdered, and that a

He didn't know if that was good or bad: concealed-carry people actually committed fewer felonies per year than cops did 

pulled the money bag up to the passenger seat. He reached inside the bag, pulled out a banded stack of bills. It was a half inch thick, all hundreds. He riffled the stack with his thumb, put it back in the bag, and attempted to tally the number of

So someone could just come up and kill me, and there would be no legal repercussions?" "Well, no," she said. "If someone were to murder you while you were legally dead, I believe that here in Ohio they could be tried for 'disturbing a corpse.

The violation of the inner person is the greatest territorial crime of all.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.

Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.