Chapter 5
When does a person stop being a person?
"For Tom Pellegrini, the 3-by-5 color shots no longer produce anything that remotely resembles an emotion. In fact, he concedes to himself, they never really did. In some strange way that only a homicide detective can understand, Pellegrini psychologically stepped away from his victim at the very outset."
As the Latonya Wallace case sinks further into the past, it seems like she becomes less of a person, she's just an unsolved case. In chapter two, when her body is found, Simon says that even homicide detectives want to bring her in from the rain, but on page 243 Pellegrini refers to her as a "broad."
He doesn't care about her, and it's attributed to a few reasons, the colour of her skin, where they live, him being a desensitized homicide detective.
It makes sense that detectives should harden themselves against the realities of their job, but I find the way he thinks about Wallace sad, like she's not real, and never was.
It would be different if there was more of a perspective from the family, but I suppose the book isn't about them-it's about the unit.
It just goes to show how a perspective from a person can change a story.
There can be a cost for detectives to get emotionally involved in a case. There's a choice for them- they either become impartial, even joke about it, or let it get to them.
"More than most homicides, the Kirk Avenue arson had an emotional cost; Steinhice, a detective with perhaps a thousand crimes behind him, suffered nightmares about a murder for the first time-graphic images of helplessness in which dead children were at the top of a rowhouse stairway crying, terrified," page 264.
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