Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Devil Linda VII

The first thing that Linda discovered that she knew was that the detective’s main suspect for the murder was Mathias. However he had no proof and therefore had not actually reported to his superiors his suspicions. She looked deeper and discovered the motivation for his suspicions and wrote them off. He was mostly thinking how easy it would be to assign the guilt of the murder to a man who was a suspect and already dead in a car accident. The detective wasn’t a man who concerned himself with justice, he was thinking about the fact that there would be no interrogation or tedious court if the blame could be put on a dead man’s shoulders. The only fact that the detective actually had against Mathias was what Linda already knew, Mathias and the old lady had had no love lost between them.

Linda was the most interested in knowledge that the detective had on the subject of Mathias’s life. What hell had on each spirit was only what the watching demons could catch and while the watching demons were very good, they never caught everything. For instance they had not caught whoever had killed the old woman, it would have been a lot easier if they had, nor had they caught a lot of Mathias’s childhood.

It was for reasons like that that crimes went unpunished sometimes at first, but the person never actually escaped forever. There was someone higher then both god and the devil and from what Linda understood that person never missed any crime. The explanation from Dante had been vague and confusing but from what Linda understood that person wasn’t a human like the rest of them and therefore could simply reach inside someone and know everything that person had ever done. That was the thing that assigned the reincarnation, the day that Linda had heard of it she had sworn her best behavior, she knew that one day she too would have to go through its hands.

Mathias had no known relatives alive, something that Linda hadn’t realized actually ever happened. He was truly alone in the world, he had bounced between foster families until he had come of age, not getting attached to any one family and he had finally found himself without a home at the age of eighteen, and with no prospects. It had been an advertisement for a handyman and person to do general yard work in a news paper that had brought him to the old woman. That was interesting but had no actual connection to the case Linda decided.

What the police knew about the old woman was almost exactly what hell knew. There was nothing there. She had been married, had kids, had her husband die, had her children leave home, all but one who had kept on as a sort of live in maid, and then had been murdered. No actual reason had even been found for why anyone would like to kill her, nothing had been stolen, no one had made death threats, it was truly confusing.

The next day Linda went to work again in a less then happy frame of mind. She got through a lot of her work just like every day but it was obvious, even to the usually carefully unobservant Dante that there was something else on her mind. He finally commented on it and she threw down her pen and faced him.

“I’m still bothered by Mathias’s case,” Linda admitted.

“You could still give him a harsher sentence,” Dante suggested.

“I didn’t mean that, that’s what you were bothered by in his case. I’m bothered by the fact that we didn’t know if he had killed the old woman or not. We should know these things.”

“Some things just have to be left to the higher being. It is what gives us this task but it doesn’t expect us to manage everything, it is happily forgiving.”

To be continued...

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