I have been many things in this life, but a bad father never crossed my mind as a label that I would have to accept. My wife was brutally murdered in a wrong place, wrong time situation amidst the fog of infidelity and a fling in the worst cliche of a motel one could conjure to thought. It was an intentional b and e but whether or not the junkie had intended to commit a double homicide is far from me to deliberate on or forgive. She has paid tenfold for the sins she has committed, so I will refrain from slander, with no intent or malice. She should have known, my sweet Mary, that going to a place like that, dressed for a formal event yet still stunning, would only tempt and enlighten the greed in the heart of man. The junkie must have seen money walking in the door, a glittery and dazzling mirage, with clean and perfect blond hair, and bright red lipstick on a silky, moonlit canvas. The woman was someone to kill for on looks alone, and for what now seems like all too short a time, I had her, and we made a beautiful little girl that could warm the coldest of hearts with a smile and enlighten all within earshot of her laugh. I won't claim to have been the best husband; we all have our demons, mine just so happened to be a stereotype as well. The bottles of vodka hidden around my house often got more attention from my scruffy, burdened lips than the woman to kill for no further from me than they were. Most days, it felt as though I was married to my job. My wife was my secret mistress, whom I would occasionally stop by for a nice dinner and a good lay.. Still, we all have our demons, mine just never sleep or quiet down, and even if you get used to staying up with them and drown out the noise, the people who love you don't; they grow deaf and cold in your absence. It started for me as soon as I could interact with the world and ask questions, my intuition and stubborn bordering on obsessive need to solve the puzzles of life laid before me and others is my greatest gift and most agonizing burden, I can't turn it off anymore than I can put down the liquor, it's why my wife fell in love with me and it's what killed her. My father was a detective before I was born, and to satisfy my investigative instincts, he began teaching me at an early age to help him solve cases. At first, he would simply read the notes from the crime scene and the leads derived from them to me in the evenings before bed. I may have been only six at the time, but to him, there was no age too early to become a man. A few years and a handful of helpful opinions and questions from my slowly dwindling innocent mind, and he started bringing photos from the crime scenes home to me, much to the chagrin of my mother, who rightfully thought this would only darken my heart and shake my soul. Still, my father had his hat hung on the hook of pride, and I was lining up to be an asset and a legacy to the family name and his job, which he, too, was married to more than my mother. After the first case with photos, the air of mysticism and fantasy around the cases dissipated like hair in a fire or the exsanguinated blood from a lacerated artery. All that made the cases seem fun was left behind for a time as well. I could no longer think of the victims and their predators as characters in an arguably morbid and mathematical novel, but as real flesh and blood staining my dreams, both in the day and at night, with a violent scarlet and pestilent hue. The nightmares came on that first night of photographs, and they stayed every night since, filling my perception in my subconscious with dangers always encroaching. At night, I would dream I was the victims I read about and saw, the predators taking on forms beyond human comprehension, wielding forces one cannot hide or run from, every night I died slow and painful by horrors ineffable. You see, my father never showed me photos of the killers, on suspects, and in my young mind the true evil lay somewhere darker and more impossible than I could be convinced of, I couldn't accept that a human being could harm so callously his fellow man, in my perspective for that period of my life I could not imagine or force the desire to commit such acts. I, therefore, could not see the predators as anything other than literal monsters and demons. However, there is a darkness within the hearts of all of man, and I learned of my darkness very early in life, not long after those first photos. As I observed the cold indifference to the world my father projected and the cruelty of the other children around me I began to imagine my hands at work with the darkness pulling my strings, I could imagine the pleasure of forcing one's shape of the world onto another, I could dream that I was the monster eating the child. I did not go in the direction of the monster however, but I started to use the mind of one to smell their essence and feel their presence, even before they knew or accepted what it was within that abyss in our souls that they wanted to express. I started to see murder, rape, and abuse as art, not the kind you would hang in a hallway but one where you could determine the intent and emotion behind the brush strokes, I could read the words written in lacerations and contusions of the victims. My ability to appreciate that art allowed me to imagine myself as the painter. The largest drawback from this connection I have to the macabre is that on occasion, I get a deja vu of guilt and sadness as if I were the one responsible for the state of what I felt were my victims. I spent my nights in those early days muttering and pacing around my room in the dark, attempting to convince myself that I was no more responsible for the crimes I read and dreamed about than the victims of those Crimes were for being chosen. In a sick sort of irony towards my predicament my only escape from the claws of my horror was to Delve deeper into the depravity and sickening minds of the monsters of man, I had to teach myself to use a sight beyond convention, logic, and physicality to act as a salve to my flaming mind. Long before I had started teaching myself the philosophies and spiritualisms of the enlightened, I had already been hard at work constructing my mind palace. Not only was this a constructive attempt to hide myself from the emotions of the terrors that lurked within my mind without resorting to the baser instinct to disassociate from them, but it also allowed me to compartmentalize all that I had seen, read, and heard into something tangible that I could grasp. Inside my palace, I had rooms with spider-webbed boards that tracked all my suspects and leads, along with well-organized cabinets filled with endless and detailed files that held all pertinent information. With time and a lot of practice, I created an interrogation room in the attic of that palace. I could take the profiles I had conjured and project them into the distorted and horrifying entities that the crimes their predators committed formed within my subconscious. In that attic, I could ask my questions, scream, and torture out the intent behind their actions and discern their desires. Given time and the ability to interview the criminals we captured, I was able to fine-tune the instrument built into me, and the shadows of the suspects would reflect the darkness within them; I saw their true form in my mind. Their silhouettes were projected by the fluorescent lights within the interrogation rooms of my father's department. If the suspect I was about to interview had an extensive file and concrete evidence against them, their shadow would more readily distort to its true abyssal form.