Читать книгу A Killer's Touch - Michael Benson - Страница 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Violent crimes exact their toll on cops and bequeath a painful residue—something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Peace officers are a courageous and stubborn lot, proud by nature, and not many would admit to weakness of any sort—but this one did.

“I’m not going to be able to give you an interview,” he said, a veteran of ten-plus years on the force.

“Why not?” the writer asked.

“I get nightmares. I don’t ... I don’t want to relive this again. I want to get my point across about this—but I can’t. I still get nightmares.”

In all of the cases he’d handled, all of those crime scenes, two still stuck in his psyche and probably would never let go. One was the very first unnatural-death scene he saw, a suicide by hanging. The other was the murder of Denise Amber Lee.

At night, he would close his eyes and return to that dungeon, that rape dungeon. Creepy wasn’t the word for it. Evil was the word. There was evil there. His hands shook the entire time he was there. His hands began shaking now, just from thinking about it....

The author has used a novelist’s methods but not his license. Although this is a true story, some names will be changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be noted upon their first usage. When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard the words. In places, there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites.