The squad room was empty when I got there, which is surprising. Normally, I'd walk in to find one or two of my detectives already there, going over one case or another. But they're all conspicuously absent. A look at the clock on the wall told me that I wasn't going to see the first of them for at least another 45 minutes. Odd as it felt, I was grateful for that fact, grateful for the chance to be alone in here for one last time.
I wouldn't be back after today. When I walked out of the squad room at the end of the day this time, it would be the last time. Come morning, my resignation would officially go into effect, and I would no longer be a cop. So there I was, standing in the middle of the squad room, taking everything in one more time. I wanted to commit it all to memory, didn't want it all to fade away after a few days' time, though, in all honesty, I doubted a squad such as this would just disappear from my mind.
Before I knew it, I was looking back five years. To where it all began, or so some told me. My eyes wandered over the squad room, and as they did, I realized something: I believed what had been said more now than I did then; five years ago, I would have never imagined that I'd end up in this position. Now, of course, here I was, exactly where I never thought I'd be, and I couldn't help but think that I'd been through more in those five years than I had been throughout the rest of my career.
Then again, having the department's so-called 'resident oddball' assigned to my squad was probably more a part of it than anything else. If Goren and I hadn't gotten along before, one would never know it by looking at the both of us now. He was unorthodox while I was by the book, and while any other guy might've had him out of here within the first few weeks, I kept him around. Eames probably did more to balance him out than the rest of us could have ever hoped to do, which, considering everything we knew about his past, was no small task.
Eames, however, was an enigma herself, though whether or not she thought of herself that way was yet to be seen. I'd certainly never seen anything indicating it, and I doubted anyone else had either. But we all admired her, in one way or another. Being made to deal with Goren as a partner wasn't easy, but she handled it, probably a lot better than I would have, had I still been a detective. She was the one who kept him from going too far; the one that he could fall back on if he needed to. It went both ways, and the department watched, however suspiciously, but they had never been able to find anything.
That, however, meant nothing in itself: I knew what they did not, what Goren and Eames both were adept at hiding from everyone. There was a point where I was afraid of having to split them up, but it never came to that. And then there were the encounters with that so-called librarian, that 'Elizabeth Hitchens', otherwise known as Nicole Wallace, the woman who would prove to be the bane of our existence. There was nothing we could do about her, Teflon criminal, she was. Nothing ever stuck to her. She disappeared after being acquitted in the case we'd made against her. We never expected to see her again.
But then we did, and the first thing she did was start her mind games again, but she couldn't get to Goren the same way she had before. So she poked at Eames, expecting her to be quick to anger, but if there was one thing I could say for my detectives at that moment, it was that they were not, and are not as vulnerable as they might appear. And together, well…to put it shortly, they were and are unstoppable. We thought she was dead when everything finally came to a head, but she wasn't. She reappeared a year later, and her sudden 'change', if you can call it that, was more of a surprise than seeing her.
By this time, though, Goren and Eames and I had already met up with Logan, who was, up until nine months ago, stuck out on Staten Island. A case that Goren and Eames had landed ended up pulling him in as well, which, if anything, annoyed the brass. He'd punched out a councilman in '95, they said, and as far as they were concerned, he was nothing more than a mutt with a temper. Ten years after the fact, and they still wanted nothing to do with him. I found it amusing but annoying; at the same time all of this came along, it was revealed that Goren really was, as Eames had mentioned not too subtly many times before, running himself into the ground.
It took a hell of a fight to get the brass to agree to let me bring Logan back from 'exile', so to speak, out on the island. Even more of a fight to talk them into letting me have him out on the streets. Wasn't too hard to find him a partner, though: Barek came along soon after he did, and the two clicked, whether or not they wanted to admit it. I'd somehow gone from having two to worry about to having four, and had they been any other four, I'd have probably run in the other direction. But they weren't; they were my detectives, they knew how things were supposed to be done and they did them (though not always they way I might have wanted them to, but it hardly mattered).
This particular thought made me sigh, and I suddenly found myself back in the present. Fifteen minutes, and then the day would officially begin: the detectives would be there, the phone in the office would start ringing off the hook, and I was still expected to answer it, until the workday ended. With this thought in mind, I walked back towards the office that, in a few short hours' time, would no longer be mine, took off my coat and set it on one of the chairs, just like always.
It was ironic, I mused then, as I sat and looked back out towards the squad room, how this felt just like any other day. Might've been, too, had it not been for a case that had provided one man with the 'justification', if you will, to turn my entire life upside down. This was all I knew, this department, the various squad rooms I'd been in over the course of my career, the detectives I'd worked with. Leaving now seemed like…well, it seemed like treason, to put it simply, and reluctant as I was to admit it, it hurt like hell.
Voices broke into my line of thought; I looked up, and there were the detectives, sitting across from each other at their desks, some of them yawning into those ever-present cups of coffee, some of them wide awake and ready to go. The phone rang at this point; I rolled my eyes and reached for it. Another day was beginning, and whatever got started today would be handled by someone else tomorrow morning. It was a relief, but a bittersweet one.
It was one of those things, I thought as I finally hung the phone up a few minutes later, that would stay with me until the time when I closed my eyes and didn't wake up the next morning. One of those things that would linger, bothering me every now and then, at night, when shadows danced across the bedroom ceiling, when it was quiet and there was nothing better for me to do than sit there and think.
I'd told them to leave it alone, and they had. But that was odd for the lot of 'em: usually, I told them something, and they did the opposite, and no matter how annoying it was, I could never really stay pissed off at them for too long. I had the feeling that they'd end up going at this behind my back, but at the moment, I didn't know, and I didn't exactly care to think about it. Their voices were still drifting in my direction, and at the moment, it was all I could do to keep a sudden onslaught of tears from falling.
We'd become somewhat like a family, the five of us, over the past five years, nine months, whatever. I had the feeling that it was the one thing making this so hard to handle…the one thing making all of this weigh so heavy on my heart.