isabella [h.s.]

one

note: before you read, i just want to say two things: 1) i have never watched criminal minds 2) i have never watched brooklyn 99. i get a lot of comments comparing/insinuating i've 'copied' these shows, but that's impossible as i've never seen them. the crime aspect of this book is from my own research, or from when i studied a forensics module. so pls don't leave those comments bc they just undermine my work. hope you enjoy the book! <3

HARRY

While sitting at my desk in my office in the NYPD precinct in East Village, I rifle through the case file that I've probably flicked through about twenty times in the last hour. The precinct is practically boiling, the heating clearly having been put on full blast in an attempt to combat the subzero temperatures raging through the city outside. I've had to pull off my blazer which is now hanging on the back of my chair, and the sleeves of my white button-up are rolled up to my elbows, revealing some of the black ink littered across my forearms.

My hair is still slightly damp from when I, rather stupidly, headed out to grab some lunch from the deli down the street and was caught in the middle of a downpour. It was my own fault, really, for deciding to get an overpriced bagel instead of just saving some money and grabbing something from the vending machine like everyone else.

At the left side of my desk, behind the framed photo of me and my family posing by the Brooklyn Bridge when they came to visit last year, is a hefty stack of other case files that's verging on collapsing and toppling down to the floor. But I've mostly been ignoring that tripping hazard waiting to happen. Instead, I've been entirely focused on one case in particular, which I haven't been able to stop thinking about for the past few days. Being a homicide detective isn't an easy job, which is rather unsurprising considering the homicide part, but it becomes even more frustrating when you're presented with a case you desperately want to solve, but seems unsolvable.

It was barely 6am on Monday morning when I was woken up from my brief sleep by the sound of my phone ringing, and after I had blindly reached out to grab it and almost knocking over my lamp in the process, I was informed that a body had just been found by a jogger on their morning run, just a couple feet away from Washington Square Park. A young woman named Samantha Gerbner, aged twenty-two according to the coroner's report that came in today, who was enrolled at NYU and was walking home from the library in the early hours before she was grabbed, pulled into the bushes and had her throat slit.

Needles to say, another difficult part of my job is the emotional and mental aspect of it, because it can be quite hard to investigate these heinous crimes and try not to lose all your faith in humanity. Obviously, throughout education and training in this field you're taught to separate the emotion from the facts, and how to distance yourself from cases so you don't literally have a breakdown every time you read about the next horrible crime that's been committed when it lands on your desk. I've always been quite good at that. I can think logically and rationally, I can piece the puzzle together without getting too personally invested, and throughout the years I've spent in this job, I've learned to disconnect from it all when I go home so I can actually get to sleep at night.