A woman with long brown hair chewed a fingernail absently, leaning back against the hard plastic chair she was forced to sit in, one leg crossed over the other. The room behind her was dark, only the lights from the city serving to illuminate the room. It was long past dayshift hours, and she had nodded off twice in the past fifteen minutes, but still she sat, in the dark and alone, her eyes narrowed and brow creased. The fingernail she was chewing on ripped, and with it her head jerked a bit and inspected the ruined nail. A sigh came next, a rub of the finger and then a tuck of the whole hand into a pocket of the nice slacks she had worn that day. Well, they had once been nice, but now they were more of a grunge pair, used as a back-up in case dumpster diving was on the agenda for the day.
She hadn't gotten more than three hours of sleep a night for God knows how long, and maybe that was why she was sitting in a dark room in her place of work at three in the morning. Absentmindedly, now that there wasn't an abused finger to chew on, she rubbed an old scar from a stabbing when she had first started out as a CSI. Slowly, she closed her eyes, which didn't make much of a difference to her sight while open-eyed. Nothing happened, only the sensation that she was sitting with her eyes closed in the middle of a room that anyone could walk into (however unlikely that was) appeared in her mind, and she snapped the eyes open in nervous panic—it was understandable, as police officers had to watch their backs at all times lest be caught off guard. That's how she was hit the first time.
She took to the window, staring down at the usually bustling street. It was mostly empty, even for New York, the city that never sleeps. Every so often, a car drove by with a purr of its motor or a dog barked a grating woof over the din. The barking saddened her, just a little, with things that were irreversible. Occasionally there came a couple, laughing and carrying on in the middle of the night, though she wasn't exactly sure what they were doing walking in the dead of night—perhaps coming back from a bar or a club. A cracking sound in the sky made her jump, and she rubbed her tired eyes, looking at the clouds illuminated by neon. She then took her hands and ran then both over her face and through her hair in an attempt to wake herself. Rain started to drip from the clouds, and she breathed against the window, making a cloud of steam she quickly drew a small pattern of design in before it faded to nothingness.
She couldn't see where the rain landed, as she was thirty-four stories from the ground, and her mind briefly wandered to the creaking of the building and a wonder that the structure stood at all. She supposed she was watching the city, but it was a pathetic kind of watching done by an insomniac police detective with nothing to do but relive the experiences of her past.
Even over the rain and the height, she could hear (periodically) the shriek of a police siren or an ambulance, maybe even a fire—and every time they occurred she took her pager out of the pocket the abused hand was not in and checked it, even though she knew she would hear the beeping of the thing if she was needed. She practically willed it to jump to life and give her an excuse for being here, at work on a Saturday morning—but at the same time dreading the scene that would await her if it did. Would there be a bullet hole through an innocent child's head? A partially decomposed corpse fished out from the East River? A victim of a violent crime left in the street for anyone to find? Any way it stood, it would be another shortened life, another reminder of the human depravity and want to kill, something that happened every day and did not get any easier.
She loved her job, and she didn't even want herself to get herself wrong: she relished putting away another psychopath that thought they could get away with murder, but part of her—part of her died a little each time she saw another life stolen away, quietly or violently as it might be. She glanced at her useless pile of evidence briefly, the results of months of pulling everything about the man she was pursuing that she had access to and some that she had no business coming near to. She had been unable to sleep for years—an insomniac by definition. It had started years ago, with the loss of her best friend to abuse and neglect. It had been then when she had begun to watch the cops with a curiosity that could only be mustered by a ten-year-old. It was then when she had decided to become a cop, then when she realized that the only way to help her now was to avenge and help others, like she couldn't help poor Elisabeth.
She shivered with remembrance of her dead friend and pressed her forehead into a closed fist. She was failing her, wasn't she? By sitting here and not doing anything? She licked her lips, wondering what she could do that she hadn't already done, hadn't already explored. The leads were exhausted, every witness bone-tired of her questions. Her desk was cleaner than it had ever been, the evidence room organized from her feverish attempts to do something—anything to help. She wondered vaguely if this was what burnout felt like, but shook it off. No, she couldn't worry about this right now. She turned back to the table and turned on its light, seeing instead of this evidence Elisabeth, who was looking at her with accusing eyes, as if to tell her that she had failed her one time too many. She wound her hand back and threw her weight into a fist straight through the illusion, sending her forward over the table and banging her hip on the cold metal. She gritted her teeth, clutching her head in both hands and letting out a primal, guttural sound that chilled the air.
She fumbled through the room to her case, which she flung open and rummaged in until she found a worn, much-loved brown stuffed dog. She clutched it in one hand and over her heart, hot tears spilling down her cheeks and dripping onto the dog, whose black plastic eyes looked up at her in sadness. Her rage faded and she stroked the balding thing. It was going on twenty years old, after all. Elisabeth's birthday gift to her, a use of all the money she had scraped up over the years to give her the best birthday ever. It had been their last together. She used her other hand and cupped the little thing near her face, where she looked at it for a moment until she felt the strength to put it back in its hiding place, back in the metal case she took with her on the job. She had touched the dog a thousand times since Elisabeth had given it to her, but somehow, despite it all, it retained the smell that she associated with Elisabeth—everything citrus. She sighed heavily as she closed the case back and sank back into the hard plastic chair, which was no longer cold from her body heat.
She had considered the dog as a mere object of their friendship for a year, not the most treasured thing but a thing nonetheless, and she had only started to treasure it after the girl had died alone, her throat ripped out in the middle of Central Park where she had waited for her to come play. She hadn't shown up—she had contracted strep throat and had failed to tell Elisabeth. Maybe she would still be alive…
And with that last thought, the woman slumped over in her chair, hair falling around her as her face contorted in a sob. She was alone. Maybe she always had been.