20 #VirginTweeter

Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

This is my first tweet – I hope I don’t screw it up.

Captain Sorrell had only provided the bare minimum personal information for his profile, which simply stated, Born and bred in Baltimore. His avatar was a picture of the city’s landmark, the Key Monument. There was no mention of the police department, or any hint he worked in law enforcement. He was determined to keep his two teenage daughters out of his online existence. He already worried about them enough after his wife had pointed out their casual use of social media, and he regularly berated his kids over what they were posting.

‘What have I told you about posting all these pictures of yourselves and your friends, then telling the world where you are going to be on a Saturday night? This is a bad guy’s dream. He has your names, what you look like and even your location. It’s like you’re begging for trouble,’ was how one of his rants would go. His daughters would give a half-baked apology, go quiet online for a while before they were back to the idle chitter-chatter their dad hated so much. The truth was, like many cops’ kids, they were tired of the lectures they’d had all their lives about the bad men lurking in the shadows. Why should they worry when their lives were full of friends, parties and boys?

It was their father who had the dubious pleasure of having to witness the other side of humanity. The things he’d seen would regularly keep him awake at night. It was the burden those on the frontline had to bear. He was now beginning to believe that ignorance really was bliss.

Sorrell remembered how, as a rookie cop, he had wrestled a knife off a man who was threatening to slit the throats of his partner and three-year-old child. It had been a block from where Sorrell’s oldest school friend lived. He had later warned his high school pal to be careful as there were dangerous men in his neighbourhood. His friend had calmly put a hand on Sorrell’s shoulder and in a reassuring manner said, ‘Bernard, I have lived here all my life and I’ve never so much as seen a knife, never mind a gun, on these streets. Some fruitcake trying to slice up his family can happen anywhere.’

It had made Sorrell realise a plain truth – that it was the cops who saw society’s underbelly. They were the ones who had to tackle the mad, bad and mentally deranged. Meanwhile, the innocents would just go about their daily routines, laughing, joking, making love, drinking beer, moaning about their bosses, having affairs, going to the ball game and basically living their humdrum lives.

Twenty-five years on, Sorrell had stopped trying to metaphorically clean up the city. He realised a long time ago that it was a losing battle. But although he was now cynical with age and battle weary with the bureaucracy of the police department, he had never lost his core belief that if you murdered someone, you should be caught and sent to jail.

Early on in his career, Sorrell had discovered he had a knack for homicides. On entering a crime scene he could usually suss out within minutes what had gone on. His talents were soon recognised by his superiors and he began to climb the career ladder and humble pay scales. But Sorrell also realised the higher up the chain of command he got, the further removed he was from catching the bad guys.

He had become something of a control freak over homicides. He’d despair at some of the botched investigations carried out by his underlings or how they’d try to over-complicate their murder theories. Sorrell would berate them: ‘Stop watching CSI: Zip Code and get back to basics. The victim almost always knows their killer. And someone ALWAYS knows who the killer is. You’ve just got to find the right people to lean on.’

Sorrell prided himself on getting the right man, for the killers were rarely women. He’d never had an unsafe conviction or attempted to frame someone just because he was a strong suspect. Instead, Sorrell let the detective work take him to where the killer was. Then he’d nail them good. Although it didn’t allow him to sleep any easier, it did allow him to be able to face himself in the mirror each morning knowing he had done right.

An email arrived on his iPad informing him he had a new follower.

‘Hey, what do you know, honey, I’ve got myself a disciple,’ he chuckled.

‘It’s probably just spam, babe,’ his wife, Denise, hollered back from the kitchen.

Sorrell decided to follow back his mysterious new follower, called Baby Angel.

Moments later he received his first direct message. It simply stated, Do you want to know who killed Bryce Horrigan?