Yeah... "Exgirlfriend drops a dime. Move back three spaces." "The police find a claw hammer in your truck. But you're a carpenter. Move ahead five spaces." "You have a chance to flip on Miss Scarlet for a lighter sentence. But the forensics are lousy. Do you take a chance with the jury?"

"The client's sister, in the Social Services supply closet, with an aluminium crutch."

Right. Something like that. It kind of reminds me of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets(as what doesn't, right?) But it's a foggy night and this detective and his partner are out working a case, and one says "I always wanted to work a case in this shit."
And his partner says why, as it's cold, wet, and miserable.

"Because it makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes going after Murray."
"Murray Who?"

"Professor Murray...the guy behind all those murders."
And then they both agree it's too bad there are no Moriarties in West Baltimore.

I'm thinking, if they were used as, well, a blunt instrument, could you tell they were the vic's?

Probably not 100 percent, but circumstantially, sure -- right height, looked the same, vic's fingerprints (and possibly DNA, though I don't know how much you'd get) on them.

And then they both agree it's too bad there are no Moriarties in West Baltimore.

On the series, they came up with one.

Oh, man, Luther Mahoney. Best. television. villain. ever.

Hot, too. Erik Todd Dellums is gorgeous.

It's true...he does fit the whole Evil Mastermind thing nicely. Never even thought of that. And, yes, he is. In a scary way. Stringer on The Wire is like that, a little closer to being legitimate, and he's a regular character. Love this.

Second drabble for "The End":

I didn’t get to say good-bye. She wouldn’t have noticed, or at least that’s what I believe.

She was gone two years ago, when she called me by the name of a girl she went to school with decades earlier. She didn’t know her grandchildren’s names, couldn’t find her way out of the tangled dreamland her mind had become.

She was no longer the sharp, funny woman who had gathered me into her family as if I’d been born there, trusting me with the memories her own daughter had no time to hear, and the love of her favorite son.

Oh, gosh, Amy, that's a powerful one. Makes me vividly remember my own grandmother first confusing me with my other brunette cousins, and then my mother, and then not seeming to see me at all....

Amy, that one just kills. My mother did that at the end, although, my mother being who she was, we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads.

we still think there was a damned good chance she was simply screwing with our heads

Oh dear.

This was my mother-in-law, and she had the first (and most catastrophic) of several strokes two years ago. She just died in September, on Jake's 13th birthday, and it was hard. I felt like I'd been grieving her for so long already. The last time I saw her, when the baby was not quite sseven months old, she would "watch" her sitting on the floor, and wave and say "Pretty," but if I picked the baby up and took her away, she would still wave at the same spot on the floor. Heartbreaking. I hate that Sara won't know her. She looks a lot like her, too.