Disclaimer: The Sentinel belongs to UPN/Paramount and Pet Fly Productions. No copyright infringement is intended and no money has changed hands.
Author's note: I wrote this for my creative writing class. We had a limit of three pages double spaced, so it's not very long.
How many times had he walked by that same door? How many times had he seen the woman on her front porch, her blue hair blowing in the breeze, a bag of knitting beside her as she rocked on the ancient porch swing and made afghans for the shelter? She had always seemed full of life, and especially full of history, having seen so much of it in her time. She was the only white woman in the neighborhood for sixty years, but it didn't matter to the kids what color her skin was. She had been an icon of the neighborhood, the one everyone knew, no matter what age or income. She was the one that everyone had known since they were a kid, who the children of the area had gone to for cookies after school for three generations.
Now Henri Brown stood at her door for a different reason. He was a cop. He was a good cop, and now it would be his job to solve her murder. Someone had come into her home, intent on stealing what a fixed income couldn't afford to loose, and when she discovered them, she had resisted. A woman who had survived ninety eight years, raised her kids through the Great Depression, and kept a good humor through one of the most tumultuous centuries in a millennium, had been killed with a switch-blade by an unknown assailant, killed in cold blood simply for being in the way.
Brown knew that he would have to make some attempt at objectivity, or Captain Banks would throw him off the case, so he waited until the coroner had left, knowing that if he saw her body it would become too real, too personal. He wanted this guy, wanted him bad. He went in, hoping to get some sense of what the killer had been after. The bedroom had been trashed, and all her old ceramic figures knocked off the shelves, a pile of shards in front of the dresser. All of the drawers had been pulled out of the dresser and the clothes flung all over the room. He didn't know what could have been in them. Had the killer known her? Had he known what to look for and where? He looked over the scene again. No, the destruction was too haphazard, not planned in any way. The perp was just being thorough. The closet had been ransacked, the mattress even pulled off the bed to check for cash. The entire house looked like that, methodical destruction.
Then there was the living room. There wasn't as much damage in here, not to property. This was where she had interrupted him, where she had taken the oak cane with the jaguar-shaped pewter grip and swung it at the thief, attempting to defend her home instead of getting out and calling for help. She had always been like that. Her father had been a cop, as had her husband. Her eldest son had retired from the force only last year. Living so long with cops, she could never have allowed the invasion and had automatically tried to solve the problem on her own. As it was, she had definitely held her own, at least at first. There was blood on the head of the jag, whose mouth was open in a perpetual roar. It looked like the animal had taken a bite out of it's mistress's killer. But in the end, the younger, stronger man had prevailed, thrusting his switch blade up between her ribs and into her heart.
The detective left the house, remembering again. It had been her son who had convinced him to get out of the gangs, having arrested him one night with a bag full of stolen cigarettes. He had spent long hours in that house, talking with their family, all of them helping him to get out of street life and into a more righteous way of living. They had made sure that he was never without a friend, and that he stayed in school, and when he announced his intentions to join the force, they had been the first to congratulate him. The woman had always been his friend, and now she was dead.
It took less than a week to find the killer, really not much more than a kid, but already hardened by a life in the gangs. He hadn't grown up in the neighborhood, so he hadn't known the woman. He had decided that home invasion was an easier means of getting cash than selling drugs, and had been the perpetrator of at least twenty such robberies in the last year. They had caught him at a clinic getting his shoulder treated. The distinctive mark of the wound looked exactly like a miniature jaguar had taken a bite out of him and would ensure that he didn't get off. But none of that helped. It wouldn't bring her back.
He was sitting at his desk, working on the paperwork to officially close the case. Blair Sandburg, the anthropologist/observer who was partnered with Jim Ellison, noticed him sitting there, and there must have been something in his expression, because the man came over and asked him what was wrong. They talked for a while, Brown telling him all about the woman and what she and her family had meant to him over the years. Sandburg was never one to let someone just stew in their own misery, so he talked with the detective, trying to help him with the grief. Brown said, "I don't think I'll ever be able to get over this. She would never have hurt him if he hadn't broken in. He didn't have to kill her, even to get away."
Sandburg nodded. "No, he didn't. But I doubt that she would have wanted you to keep beating yourself up like this. She would probably have told you to get on with life. You can't control what other people do, but you can put away the bad guys. That's the best way I know of to honor her. She helped you to become a cop, so that's what she would want you to keep doing. Be the best detective you can be."
Brown nodded. The kid was right. He just had to keep living. That was the best any of them could do.
End