E-Mail

Three thirty in the afternoon. It should be coming anytime now, she was like clock work. School gets out at three, she'd screw around with her friends on the way home, grab a soda from the fridge, maybe a snack, then sit down at the family pc and e-mail her father that she was home. She'd started it one day, hadn't been told to do it, she just did. He'd answered her, a short note that he'd hoped didn't sound to baffled, and she'd responded quickly, telling him about her day. Thus began a secret ritual between them that he enjoyed and looked forward to so much he made sure he was in his office at three thirty every day. She enjoyed the accounts he'd tell her about his detectives, though he never went into much detail about the crimes they investigated. He'd been a patrolman when she was born and when he made detective, then captain, he'd promised himself and his wife that the only work he'd bring home with him was paperwork. But he told her what he could in those emails between father and daughter, the people he worked with becoming characters of a living soap opera to her. He'd learned that she wrote much more than she'd ever come out and tell him, and he liked that. Liked that she choose him to confide in.

Failure

Never an option. Never had been. Never will be. When he was offered the position, even as he grabbed it up, he thought only of the promotion in status, the chance to do real work, put real bad guys away and not just low priced hookers and bad car thieves. What didn't occur to him was that headline-grabbing criminals produced headline trials. And verdicts. He tried his best to avoid the phone calls that would come after a decision against him. Sometimes the phone on his desk would be ringing as he walked through the office door. Answer it, don't answer it, the lecture would come, either now or tomorrow. It had always been the same sermon, different words were used at different times, but they were all the same. All had the same meaning: Win. Simply that: win. The most memorable lines rang though his head at odd times, sometimes sounding off in his dreams. No son of mine loses. Where was your head boy? Failure is not an option. Failure is not an option.That one became his own personal mantra, chanting it to himself as he jogged. So, he became a DA, prosecuting the really bad ones, and sometimes he lost. Fact of life, sometimes you loose. And the phone in his office would ring.

Gossip

She'd never have believed it if she hadn't heard it, hadn't participated in it. Her partner, big burly, intellectual cop, was a gossip. He may use long words, analyzed and explained every action and reaction of the people involved with the detachment of a psychiatrist, but a gossip nonetheless. Logic told her it was his way of keeping his brain going in between cases, and sometimes a way of distracting himself while deeper parts of his brain concentrated on a witness' statement or a suspect's actions. But she had suspicions that this inclination of his came out of the habit of telling his mother stories of the neighborhood, news of the goings on of the world outside her bedroom window. She also thought it was his own way of temporally hiding from the facts of his own life, his way of evading reality. At the times he would begin his chatter, be it about celebrity or co-worker, she'd mentally shrug and go along.

Harvest

If he had to choose a word to describe it, he would run down a list of all the words in his head, both English and otherwise, picking out one, only to toss it back, finally coming up with harvest. If you think about it, it is quite a bit like that. A word spoken by a suspect plants itself in his subconscious; watered by a witness' statement, have light shine upon it from his own knowledge, until there it is, fully-grown, perfectly clear and ready for harvest.