Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: First H:LOTS fic. Not sure whose POV it is; I'm reading the book and that influenced it a bit too. Guess it could be from anyone's POV. Enjoy.
If there's one rule in being a cop, especially a detective, it's that everybody lies to you. Witnesses lie. Suspects lie. Your average citizen lies. Victims lie, even the dead ones. And it's your job to wade through the lies, sift out the whoppers from the big ones, the big ones from the medium ones, the medium ones from the small ones and so on and so forth. And you've got your boss on your back, telling you to close the case, pick the guy with the biggest lie and nail him to the wall. Jsut for a little more black on the board.
The only reason your boss is your back is because his boss his on his back and so on up the food chain. And us guys at the bottom, the detectives who sift through lies, we get all the crap that falls from above. A good ole shitstorm, if I may. So we, down at the bottom that is, break out our umbrellas and wade through shitty, soggy lies. It's a job, right?
Wrong.
It's more than a job, no matter how much we complain about lies and shitstorms and all the bullcrap we deal with. We don't like to explain it, but that's probably because we don't know how and when we can't explain something, it doesn't bode well in the pits of our stomachs. Doesn't matter what it is, if we can't explain it, it generally means we didn't solve the case, at least, for ourselves we didn't solve it, and it ferments in our stomachs until... until...
Fuck that.
Of course, explaining things can get a little hairy when all you're given are lies. Lies upon lies upon lies, until this teetering stack of lies reaches the bosses and it all crashes down around you, this neat pile you've worked on for a whole year to make so high. And with the falling lies comes the shit, but we already went over that.
See, we answer that damned bleating phone, drive out in any weather to the scene, ask some questions, poke the body a bit, send off the body, haul some witnesses down to the house and interrogate 'em. Or at least, we talk to them. See if they know anything, even though we know wall we're ever gonna get are lies. Then, we get their name and address, which are sometimes more lies, and send them home to formulate more lies among their buddies. We run around for a couple days, to the morgue, to more houses filled with lying witnesses, to anywhere the case takes us. And hopefully, at the end of all this running around, we catch the guy, try to get a confession, but are usually lied to, then send him off for the lawyers to worry about. And only when the lawyers start pissing on us do we really go back and make their case a little stronger.
All this work because people lie.