The Poet By Michael Connelly Essay Research

The Poet By Michael Connelly Essay, Research Paper

The Poet

By Michael Connelly

The Poet is about a search for a serial killer that the FBI names “The Poet” due to this person’s signature of forcing the victims to write suicide notes in the form of a quote from Edgar Allen Poe. Jack McEvoy, a newspaper reporter from Denver, is the brother of a victim who was killed by the Poet. In an attempt to avenge his brother’s death McEvoy, and the FBI, form a nation-wide manhunt in search of this cunning illusive killer.

The Poet begins with the Rocky Mountain Newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy being informed of his twin brother’s suicide. As two of the detectives from the Denver police department who also worked with Sean McEvoy in the Crimes Against Persons unit inform McEvoy of the incident, he immediately has doubts about his twin’s alleged suicide. Seeking to better understand what his brother did and what the Denver PD says his brother did, Jack McEvoy decides to write a story for the paper about his brother. From this point on McEvoy began to learn about evil in a new way.

Sean McEvoy was discovered in his car in a parking lot at Bear Lake, and the park ranger who discovered him came immediately after he heard the gunshot to find him dead. The investigators came up with the information that Sean had placed the gun inside his mouth and killed himself. Due to the high stress that Sean’s co-workers and therapist had experienced him in due to the current homicide investigation, the case was closed and it was ruled a suicide.

Jack investigated his brothers death and the further he got into the case the more clues he found suggesting foul play. The final line written on the inside of the windshield by Sean McEvoy was ‘Out of Space out of Time.’ Jack linked the epitaph with the final entry in the chronological record of the case his brother was working on which read simply that he’d received a call from an unknown source and then: RUSHER was written. The connection was made by McEvoy to a similar suicide case in Chicago where a detective’s last words written on a pad were ‘Through the pale door’ taken from an Edgar Allen Poe story titled “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which the main character is Rodrick Usher. As McEvoy used this information about RUSHER, he also related his brother’s line ‘Out of Space out of Time’ to a Edgar Allen Poe poem called “Dream-Land.”

Sean McEvoy was deeply involved with the investigation of the homicide of a young adult named Teresa Lofton who was found in a public park with her body completely cut in half. The case apparently highly disturbed McEvoy, to the point of seeking therapeutic counsel. Mrs. McEvoy also noticed a different husband following his deep involvement in the Loftin case. Although the above factors played into the diagnosis of a suicide, the knowledge of Sean’s assertiveness, and determination contributed to Jack McEvoy’s discovery of the fallacy of the PD’s diagnosis.

The facts leading up to the re-opening of the investigation of Sean McEvoy’s death, were determined by his brother Jack McEvoy, and had everything to do with the crime scene analysis. The car Sean was found in was his undercover police car. The car had security locks on the rear doors, and the procedure was to always keep the security locks engaged. If the officer takes a nonprisoner in the car they can always disengage the locks. Jack’s theory to prove that a killer was in the car with his brother was that the killer had disengaged the security locks, allowing him to hide and then escape out the rear doors. This theory proved true as Jack and a detective named Wex took another look at Sean’s car. Jack had another theory about how the words ‘Out of Space out of Time’ came to be written on the fogged windshield. Fog only occurs on the inside of cars when either people are talking or when it is cold outside and the heat is turned up. As Jack and Wex were reassessing the crime scene they also noticed that the heat was turned off, determining that two people were talking to each other before the murder.

The linked case in Chicago also proved to be very interesting to Jack. Along with the Poe quote, other similarities were found in the victimology and with problems in the crime scene. Larry “Legs” Washington was the partner and friend of the detective who supposedly committed suicide, Jumpin’ John Brooks. According to Larry, due to a few facts he doubted the police department’s diagnosis of his friend’s suicide from the very beginning. Brooks was involved in a homicide investigation of a young black child who was brutally murdered. The young boy’s body was also found in a public park brutally mutilated and the killer had not been found, which greatly impacted Brooks. Brooks, like Sean McEvoy, also sought counseling due to job and life stresses. Brooks also was noted to be highly assertive and determined to succeed. Larry and Brooks were African Americans that grew up together in one of the worst ghettos in Chicago. McEvoy thought it was a miracle that they both survived the horrid childhood due to the conditions they faced daily, which also supported the conclusion of the victim’s desire to live. Larry new first hand that they had worked their way out of hell and he knew that Jumpin’ John was not about to go back by his own hand. Looking at the crime scene another factor seemed amiss. The gun that killed Jumpi