He stared into the deep blue eyes before him. They seemed to reflect the hazy waters of existence from which they both had traveled. As he tried to lose himself to memories, she reached across the pillow to caress his brow, brushing her long, sandy-brown hair against his warm skin. Gaining his attention further, she placed her wet lips upon his cheek, followed by a firm, wet grasp upon his inspired yet hesitated motion of wanting lips. She then pulled him towards her long, limber shadow as she dimmed the lights just before placing his head upon her firm chest, and running her fingers through his hair.

“I lost you again baby,” she spoke softly. “Where did you go off to in that mind of yours? Mine is still on you and that exciting performance of yours.” She smiled.

An unseen warmth quickly entered John’s face as he blushed in the darkness. She always did know how to bring him out of his personal shadows. He looked up at her, and placed his hand upon her cheek. “I always enjoy taking an evening joy ride with you my dear,” he whispered. “You’re my best girl.” His eyes continued to stare up at her, the memory of her face bright in his mind. “Sorry, I was just um, thinking about, well it’s not important. I just kind of dazed again. ” John smiled as he thought of her warmth, which now held him prisoner. He loved being held by Caroline. She always made him feel safe. That’s something he didn’t always get after his morning rides to work, a feeling of safety. “You know I love you, Caroline. Everything’s fine. Tell you what, why don’t we just book another ride between the sheets for tomorrow night?” John then offered as he gently kissed his wife.

“Oh that sounds very enticing baby. Come here,” she ordered him laying his head back down on her chest, her breasts caressing his slightly whiskered face. Caroline then looked down at him and smiled. “I love you too baby, goodnight.”

Morning arrived too soon, and the annoyance of the morning sun and a buzzing alarm clock hardly welcomed an enduring hangover, which John pondered passing off as a sick day. Better to save that card to be played for next week’s anniversary dinner he had planned however. Reluctantly, he raised his head from the pillow and swung for the snooze button, swing and a miss.

“Damn thing’s laughing at my ass, piece of shit,” John thought out loud. Using his adrenaline of irritability, he lunged forward and slammed the clock against the wall. “Who’s in charge now?” John questioned, as if with anticipation of an answer. He was left however with a blinking red light and a hole in the wall. Caroline awoke at this humorous exchange of blows and found the hole in her wall anything but.

“John, why are you throwing things across the room?” Breathing deeply, she calmed her voice. “Please calm down, hun. I’ll get up with you ok, even though it’s a little early for me.”

“Screw it,” John replied. “Just take your extra thirty minutes and shove ‘em why don’t you?”

As Caroline noticed the outline of a small pillow fly in the direction of her head, she sighed a deep breath of mental exhaustion. He could be so frustrating, but she was one of the few people who understood John’s lack of ability to control his anger outbursts. She knew how his dark past seemed to permanently shadow his present personality, and lay claim to his continuous relationship issues. She also knew inside, what a great man he was. After watching John reluctantly enter through the doorway of a new day, Caroline contemplated what to now do with her time, and she decided to go ahead and wake their son, Christopher for school. Getting herself and Christopher to school early would give her more time to prepare her classroom for the long day ahead anyway.

John now reached for his towel as he wiped his eyes, stepping out of the shower. Instead of the towel, his hand met the warm skin of his wife’s face. “I’ve got Chris eating his breakfast, hun,” Caroline said as she handed John his towel. “I think we will be leaving a little early this morning.”

John looked at her, highly annoyed at her implication.

She smiled, trying to lighten the anger that she saw flashing across John’s face. “I hope there’s not a cache of pillows stashed in the shower there.” She laughed.

John didn’t go for the lighter side of the issue however. He stepped around her ignoring her comment and slamming the door.

Caroline then simply rolled her eyes at herself. “Jeeze, I deserve to be sworded by a comforting, feather pillow after that attempt at an olive branch,” she mumbled aloud to herself before returning to the kitchen where she had at least one of the men in her life still being pleasant toward her on this fine morning from hell.

Craig laughed at John’s description of the morning’s events. “What’s the equation for pissing your wife off and the number of roses needed to save your ass? I’m not sure; but you better figure it out if you’re going to swing that make up fuck, my friend.”

Craig’s amusement cracked a humorous smile across John’s face. Bullshit calculations started dancing in John’s head, he couldn’t help but laugh. Detective Craig Wilson was one of John’s good friends. They had gone through the academy together many years before. Now they were both working in the city of Knoxton, John being a lieutenant serving over his friend by rank alone. He considered himself to be on equal footing with the detectives that served “under” him.

“I think we should get some womanly advice on that, heh,” John responded, and he would have no problem getting volunteers. John was a very attractive blue eyed beauty. Being secretly voted most sexy, unavailable man by the precinct, women definitely hinted at this attractiveness. Also, he was true to his friends and always stuck up for his people at work no matter who he pissed off. He was not afraid of questioning authority when needed, which seemed to be often. John’s attitude issues aside, he was a very caring, standup guy. The sensitive “bad boy” type was always appealing to the ladies.

“How about asking Lindsey?” Craig suggested. “She said Bryan just pissed her off about something. Why don’t you ask her what the going rate is for hard time.”

John just shook his head laughing at the thought of approaching their friend Lindsey, whom Craig secretly had a crush on. He didn’t know if she was the best person to ask, fearing a continuous joshing from yet another friend. “I think we’ll put that on hold, we need to get to the morning meeting I’m supposed to be in charge of. We do have some important shit to address with these ongoing cases. Let’s head on out,” John said, and the two of them headed down the hallway to their meeting room and began the day’s adventures.

The detectives gathered around the old grey, faded table inspired surely by the memories of experience it held, distracted however by their female counterparts now entering the room in enticing fashion. As the ladies took their seats, a whistle or two were discretely snuck into the ongoing conversations.

Detective Lindsey Winters blew the boys a kiss as Tara gave them a bow. Lindsey and Detective Tara Nelson, being the only two women in John’s Homicide unit, had had to learn the boys’ style of play on and off the field so to speak. They let the boys think they were in charge, though the girls always seemed to be the winning team.

On the field, in the precinct, it helped that John always seemed to help them out, him having a weakness to women’s weakness for him. Once again, he was very much loved by many of the women he worked with, and he was polite to most of his female groupies. Lindsey was a friend to him and Craig; she’d gone through the academy at the same time they did. Tara had become a friend of Lindsey’s when she was transferred to John’s unit about three years ago.

“Alright, who wants to fess up to the whistles?” John questioned. With no response, he issued serious reprimands. “Fine then, all you assholes can buy the ladies a beer tonight, eight PM sharp at the Coroner’s Café. And now on to less important business, police business, of course. As you know the Willis and Price murder cases are um, taking a spin towards confusion since they appear to include aspects of those cases that were high jacked by the Federal Discovery Command (FDC) one district over not long ago. We were told that those cases had later been classified as being solved on the Federal Level and had then been locked down. The murders in these cases that were taken over by the FDC one district over were actually pretty much identical to our Willis and Price Cases and considering that they were only one district away seemed a little too coincidental for me. I requested evidence information from those high jacked FDC cases thinking it might be helpful, and we just received a response late yesterday afternoon. According to said government findings, they assure us that there is no evidence that anyone else was involved in the previous serial murders that occurred in District 4, AKA high jacked FDC cases….” He paused and gazed around.

The detectives were listening and waiting for the rest.

“Even if this were true, our murders of Mr. Willis and Mr. Price could still be copycat murders as we discussed, and there could possibly be more murders coming. Mr. Willis and Mr. Price were both killed in the same way as the victims of the serial killer in District 4, blunt force trauma to the head from a piece of metal piping. This being a unique way to plug someone would seem reason enough to raise a red flag. More interestingly is the fact that we actually found a piece of piping at the Price scene, and that it came from the same abandoned factory as the piping found in one of the three cases the FDC took over. The only reason we know that is because I was assisting District 4 detectives up until the FDC took charge. Right now, we need to look more in depth at the similarities our two cases have with each other. This can help us draw a more firm association between our cases and the previous cases as evidence is hopefully shared with us.”

Some of the detectives nodded in agreement to this.

“The problem I’m expecting however, as always, is that our federal friends will continue to be less than cooperative in assisting us with our “small time, shit crime” cases, which is how our asses are viewed sometimes out their rearview mirror. They can snatch up any cases they want, and then don’t have to share a damn thing with us if they don’t want to about why. However, they encourage us to request their assistance at any time, heh. Well, I’ll work on trying to get more of the basic crime fighting essentials from the “gods” for our petty case assistance, while you guys can work with what we have so far on our own cases. I hope that sounds simple enough, but really we need to look into this as upwards on the to do list. I have a bad feeling that this could turn into one of those damn patterns on an IQ test that stares you in the face until you wake up with a hangover.”

After some additional words added to his crime fighting pep talk, John dismissed his team of eight to carry out their deductive think tank sessions of the day. His detectives, working in their two teams of three followed by John’s lead team of Craig and Lindsey began their day looking more in depth into the two local cases in question, as well as other cases of importance building up on Homicide’s To-Do list.

John then returned to his office. He closed his eyes and began to process the information his team had collected thus far, and the information he was keeping from them. He had had an informant introduce an interesting theory to him. The District 4 cases were not solved as officially marked, they were simply, locked down. And if the feds were covering up those cases, then who was there to keep them in check, no one.

This thought raised a hair or two on John’s neck. What would be the motive to do so in the first place? His informant had not indicated knowledge of the motive, only that the true conclusion of the three FDC murder cases barring similarities to John’s had received an informal, highly classified pass. This of course worried John to a point. If that were true then the feds were probably feeding him bullshit, and he should perhaps just play along until he could answer enough of his own questions. He’d wait and see if any further case information would voluntarily be sent under the distress signal of his so called “copycat theory.” He would welcome a copycat over a cover-up any day, however just as a picture is, a warning from a good informant can be worth a thousand words. This was especially true for informants on the inside, whom John knew, and up to now anyway, he had no reason to distrust.