“I can fix this.”
But I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do.
For years, I’d been a master at taking life, but when it came to saving one, I was helpless.
The machine went silent. The heart rate stopped.
The John Doe’s chest no longer moved with any sign of breath.
Throwing aside the useless, empty bag, I fell to my knees beside the bed.
“I can fix this.”
But I was lying.
I couldn’t do anything.
The dream ended and I awoke. I didn’t gasp or cry out. I didn’t even sit up. For a long while, I just lay in my bed staring up at my ceiling.
Well, I called it a bed, but really it was just a mattress on the floor. My real bed was still in an Ikea box waiting to be assembled.
Nightmares were an old friend at this point. I was so used to them that they didn’t surprise me anymore. In fact, by this point, I’d be more surprised by a night of sleep that wasn’t accompanied by nightmares. I knew the routine. Lie here until the shaking stopped, then get up, because sleep wouldn’t be returning to me any time soon.
After about twenty minutes, I climbed off the mattress, stumbled to the wall, and flicked the switch to turn on the lights, illuminating the mess of my house. Most of my stuff was stillin boxes from the move, and even the few pieces of furniture I owned had been haphazardly placed. It was a nice apartment with plenty of space, but the lack of organization made it look rundown, regardless.
It didn’t bother me since I was rarely home, but if I wasn’t going anywhere then I could at least use that time getting the apartment in order.
Where to start?
My bedroom didn’t matter. I barely used it. The kitchen needed the least amount of work since all the pots and pans had been put away, and the apartment came with appliances included, so I didn’t have much to do there.
Instead, I turned my attention to the guest bedroom. This was the main selling point when I bought the apartment. The whole reason I’d moved to this city when I retired from the military was to be closer to my daughter, Melody. She lived with her mother, but now that I lived in the same city, our custody arrangement could be changed for her to spend more time with me.
That meant I needed a bedroom for her.
I’d already bought most of the furniture, but my hands still felt a little shaky after my nightmares and I didn’t trust myself to assemble nuts and bolts.
In the end, I decided to finish painting the walls. Melody had already picked out the exact shade of purple, her favorite color, that she wanted, and I had two cans ready to go. It just needed to be slapped on the walls. I was no artist, but I could manage that much.
The first rays of dawn were cresting over the horizon by the time I finished. The room was painted, and it didn’t look half bad. I’d miraculously managed to not stain the floor, though I had plenty of paint stains on myself. After a shower, I even felt refreshed enough to catch a quick nap and earn another hour of sleep before heading into work.
When I’d moved here and made the transition from soldier to cop, I didn’t really care what unit was I put into. As far as I was concerned, helping people was helping people. It didn’t matter what “category” the victims fell into.
The Federal Protection Agency was an option that I hadn’t considered before, but apparently the special task force had recently experienced a surge of cases and were recruiting new blood from both the pool of experienced detectives and new transfers to the area who had military experience, so, after a quicky interview with Mason Wright, the organizer and lead man of the task force, that’s where I ended up.
In my first few weeks, I’d only been assigned small tasks and easy cases. Nothing that required more than a few hours of work here or there but still gave me a chance to check out the inner workings of the team. A get my bearings sort of transition period, if you will. Most of my time there so far had been spent filing paperwork and occasionally interviewing suspects. My stern face didn’t make me the best choice for interacting directly with victims, but I was very good at intimidating suspects. I’d already managed to squeeze out a few confessions just by staring at people for too long.
This morning, I didn’t have anything lined up immediately, so I used my freedom to search through the Baton Rouge Police Department’s database of old cases, which the FPA had access to due to Jonah West’s position as the captain there now. I had afeeling a big part of that access was also due to his new husband, Cooper Jones-West, and his position as the computer whiz for the FPA.
According to Newt, the warehouse fire that had resulted in the John Doe’s coma had happened longer ago than I originally assumed. I hated the thought of that nameless man lying alone in that bed for so long with no one to visit him, possibly in pain as his burns healed, but having a date helped me narrow down my search.
No one by the name of Eli had been reported missing, and no one named Eli had filed any missing person reports, either. In fact, the only record of an Eli I could find anywhere in the departments files was a recent child abuse case, but I highly doubted that had anything to do with John Doe. Not only was there no connection to the warehouse fire, but the Eli in question was only six months old.
“Hey, what ‘cha looking at?”
I’d heard the sound of approaching footsteps, so the question came as no surprise. While I didn’t necessarily want to be interrupted, I also refused to act ashamed or suspicious. As a member of the FPA, I was allowed to look at these files.
The little voice at the back of my mind that insisted I was doing something wrong was just my imposter syndrome talking.