Chapter 4
Auggie
My own dreams were unrestful that night. This was nothing new. I rarely slept well at night.
Falling asleep was never the problem. Ever since boot camp, the ability to lie down and immediately drop into REM had been drilled into me.
No, falling asleep wasn’t the problem. Staying asleep, however, was a different issue.
There were always dreams. Sometimes, it was the faces of the people I’d killed during my years of service; sometimes it was the fellow soldiers I’d lost along the way. Sometimes, it was the “what ifs” that haunted me.
What if I’d reacted sooner and pulled my companion away from that IED faster?
What if the intel was wrong, and the target I’d killed had actually been innocent?
It was so reoccurring, I could almost predict what I was going to dream even before going to sleep.
Tonight, however, was different. There were no soldiers, no dusty war zones, no dead victims crying out for me.
Instead, there was just a hospital room, and a beeping machine counting each heartbeat of the body lying still on the bed.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I reached out for the John Doe, just intending to touch their shoulder, when I realized I was holding a bag.
It wasn’t the bag I usually carried books in.
I’d never even seen it before. Made from purple velvet with a golden drawstring, it looked like it had been stitched together by hand.
Not something I would ever own, yet somehow I still recognized it.
It was a bag of fairy dust.
If just one pinch could make children fly, then surely a whole bag could help the John Doe rise up off the hospital bed.
Quickly opening the bag, I turned it upside down to dump the contents over the man’s unconscious face, but it was empty. There wasn’t a single speck of dust to be found.
Beep. Beep... Beep...
The heart rate on the machines slowed down, each beat taking longer than the last.
“No, wait.”
I gripped the John Doe’s shoulder, the only part of him that wasn’t taken up by injuries or tubes, but even under my hand I could feel him growing colder.
“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 still in 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 a feeling 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.
Rather than act guilty, I instead turned my computer screen toward the other detective that had stepped up beside me.
Roland had the desk closest to mine, so I’d talked to him more than anyone else.
Out of all the other detectives in the unit, he was the only one I could maybe call a friend, and that was only because we’d got lunch together a few times.
“I’m just looking up some old cases. I was volunteering at the hospital last night, and I came across a patient that I thought we might have some info on.”
Roland leaned closer to look at the screen, but he barely glanced at the digital files before he quickly lost interest and returned to his own desk.
“You volunteer at the hospital during your time off?”
Shrugging, I closed out of the file system. It wasn’t helping anyway.
“It’s something I’ve been doing for a while now, even before I moved here. I like it. It makes the patients happy, and... I don’t know. It’s great being the one to cause happiness for once, you know.”
At the desk next to me, Roland had his feet kicked up so he was leaning on the back legs of his chair, tossing jellybeans up into the air to catch them in his mouth.
“Yeah, I get that,” he said after swallowing the candy. “Bad guys are never happy to see us, and the victims we save are always at their worst moments. We rarely get to see their healing journey.”
He tossed another jellybean and caught it, crushing it between his teeth before turning to look at me.
“But don’t burn yourself out. You need other hobbies, away from all this stuff. It gets in your head, and pretty soon, you think the whole world is filled with nothing but victims and criminals.”
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed, though deep down what he said sounded familiar. Sometimes it really did feel like there were only two kinds of people in the world. “I’ll be careful. But I like to help where I can.”
“Great!”
Letting his feet drop down from his desk, Roland tossed a stack of files in front of me.
“Then you can help me with this paperwork for my latest case.”
I groaned, but my hand was already reaching for a pen as I opened the pile on the top of the stack. John Doe’s case didn’t have enough information, yet other cases like this one were drowning in too much information.
There really needed to be a better balance.