Quotes About Investigation

Wherefore, all wise men have agreed that without our utmost care and diligence in the investigation of the truth, we must be contented to walk in the shades of ignorance and error.

You may trust to the truth of my sympathy; but you must remember that I am engaged in the investigation of enormous religious and moral questions, in the history of nations; and that your feelings, or my own, or anybody else's, at any particular moment, are of very little interest to me,--not from want of sympathy, but from the small proportion the individuality bears to the whole subject of my enquiry.

Got here half an hour ago and had a look, eyeballin' it, Sawyer said. It's murder, all right. Tell you something else - the sun went down, and it's as dark as the inside of a horses's ass out here. You're sure? Well, I've never actually been inside a horses's ass.

Now Flowers was arguing the same thing back to him. If Dannon and Carver had killed Tubbs, Lucas wouldn't find out about it except by accident. If justice were to be done, it would have to be extrajudicial.

SCHIFFER WAS LEAVING, Dannon asked Carver to do a serious look around the yard. One of the radar buzzers had been going off, Dannon said, and he hadn't been able to isolate why. "Probably another goddamn skunk," Carver said. He pulled his jacket back on and went to look.

Murdered? Somebody murdered him?" Palmer was agog. A thin, soft man with a pitted nose and a bald, bumpy egg-shaped head dotted with dime-sized freckles, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said, "NSA, Our Customer Service Pledge: You Talk, We Listen.

John Connolly novel, Every Dead Thing

So what killed him? Virgil asked. I'm thinking aliens. You mean like, Canadians?

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

A wise man -- a cop named Capslock -- once observed that he'd never seen a murder with a large sum of money attached to it, in which the money wasn't important. On the other hand, Virgil hadn't ever seen a murder that involved an intense sexuality in which sexuality wasn't involved.

Sherlock Holmes and that whole Holmes thing—that once you've eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, must be the truth. What Holmes never admitted was that there is a vast universe of the possible, and sorting through all the possibilities is often impossible.

her. "From what you've told us, the killer

The woman had thick plastic glasses and looked up at them, eyes large as eggs behind the lenses, and asked, "Jeez, who got murdered?

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

About a billion cops," Darling said. "You move there, you'll have fifty government workers looking at you, checking your tax records, asking where you moved there from, where you work now, how long you've been there. California is like a Nazi state with palm trees—'Papers, please.' Seriously, I've looked into all of this." "Ah

Now that was a road trip," Sherrill said, enthusiastically. "Fightin', fuckin', and detectin.' So what's next?

We heard that you think somebody might try to hit Mrs. Bowden. Is that right?" Monroe asked, as he unlocked Palmer's front door. "We don't know the exact situation, but it's worrisome," Lucas said.

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.

So they were here sometime before ten, but we don't know how long before, and they were gone before eleven," Robertson said. Robertson was sartorially distinct from his partner, wearing a blue-striped Façonnable long-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slender jeans with the cuffs rolled up a half inch, and tan lace-up shoes; Lucas envied him the shoes. "We have a call on Likely's phone, to Baker, at nine o'clock, so he was alive then.

VIRGIL HAD BEEN WORKING the telephone from his truck

Sherlock Holmes. When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever was left, however improbable, must be the truth. Or something like that.