This fragment of obsession is a continuation of Part 4. You can find the first four parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
The Victims
They stay with him. That much I know.
They weren’t merely evidence in sealed bags. They had names. They had voices. They were echoes in a room where someone had begged, bled, or died without being heard. They live somewhere behind his eyes, hidden deep down but never completely out of reach.
He doesn’t discuss them. But I can sense it in the way he moves, sometimes too still like he’s bracing for the inevitable. I wonder which one visits him in sleep. Whose case file he opens up in his dream without meaning to.
He must have a list in his head. A list of faces, some vaguely remembered, some impossible to forget. The girl with the red hoodie. The elderly man found with his hands tied. The body that no one claimed.
I used to think that grief only belonged to families and those who loved them. However, there is a certain kind of pain that comes from being the last person to look at their picture, read their texts, or trace their final hour backwards. He carries that deep in his soul, mourning for people he never knew.
Maybe it hardens something in him. Or maybe it makes him gentler in ways he doesn’t realize. The truth is I don’t know. I just know that he touches the evidence gently. And he blinks slower than usual when he stares at a photo too long.
In my culture, the spirits—antu—linger when death is unresolved. Some say they roam, whispering into the ears of the living. He doesn’t fear ghosts or darkness. The ones that haunt him are printed on paper, kept in boxes, and saved on hard drives. There they remain. Always waiting. Always watching.
The Walk
He walks at night, but not every night. Only on those when sleep is a stranger and the weight on his chest refuses to lift. He seeks the hour between two and four. That’s when the world goes quiet, signaling him to step out.
He brings no phone, has no destination. Just his feet on the pavement, carrying his momentum through sleeping streets. He passed shuttered shops, empty lots, and the lonely glow of neon signs. In this slumber, the city is transformed—muted, and temporarily pacified.
Is he trying to shake them off? The blood, the tragedies, and the ghosts that cling to the inside of his eyelids? Or is he chasing the silence he can’t find inside? Or maybe he just believes that if he walks long enough, the chaos in his head will have to settle.
Hands in pockets, shoulders a permanent slope. From afar, he’s just a man. But a closer look at his eyes would tell you everything.
This is the unseen part. The aftermath, stripped of crime scenes and case files. There is no suspect to corner, no puzzle to solve. He’s a man alone with the night, waiting to feel human again.
In that moment, I don’t see the criminologist. I see a tired man who would rather move through the honest darkness of the streets than lie still in a loud, empty room.
Epilogue
All of this, I’ve only imagined. The desk. The scene. The interrogation. The victims. The walk. They’re a part of his life that I will never touch. He doesn’t talk about it much, at least not directly. A line may slip out from time to time, and that’s it. Most of it comes through in other ways, like when he gets too quiet and his hands stop moving. The tension in his jaw after a long day. The shadows beneath his eyes that no amount of sleep seems to erase.
There are nights he startles awake. He never says why, just lies there, breathing heavily. I never ask either. I simply wait for his return.
What he endures is his own. And I’ve stopped trying to reach for it. His work is an extension of who he is, bound to his bones. It affects how he sees the world and how he protects others without even thinking about it.
However, there are times when it becomes apparent. Like when he touches me and listens to me even when I say something silly. Or how he holds silence like it’s sacred.
I used to think he was distant. But now I understand: he was too full of things he could never say. I write these fragments not to know him better or to hope that he’ll find them. He won’t. The door closed two decades ago. These are the only pieces I kept.
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