MISSING PIECE - by Favyyy

I woke up to the shrill sound of my alarm for what felt like the first time in years. For a few blissful seconds, I simply lay there, staring at the ceiling, enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of having nowhere urgent to be. Then I looked at the clock.9:17 a.m.I had overslept by nearly three hours and that was very unlike me. I sat upright immediately, only to wince as a dull ache spread through my shoulders. My hands hurt too. When I turned them over, I noticed a fresh scrape across my right knuckles. There was dried blood beneath one fingernail. And then it came back to me.We had spent hours searching the place yesterday. Broken concrete, rusted metal, loose bricks... it wasn't surprising that I'd picked up a few cuts.At least, that was the explanation I chose to believe I showered, got dressed and reached for my boots by the door. They were still caked in dried mud. Frowning, I struggled without success to remember walking through that much dirt.I brushed the thought aside and headed for the station. The atmosphere inside the station was almost unrecognisable. For the first time in over two weeks, people were smiling.From all around, praises flew my way, hands gripped mine and eyes looked at me with gratitude words could not quantify. Even the chief was not an exception as he firmly gripped my shoulder and poured out a torrent of praises and promises from HQ. Who would have thought that my insistence on searching the wall would change everything. Behind the loose brick, we'd discovered a weatherproof ledger. Every page contained dates, measurements, maps and coded entries that proved every murder had been planned months before the first victim died. Forensics still hadn't broken the code, but everyone agreed on one thing: the killer had finally made a mistake.But as everyone celebrated, I remembered the notebook: the small black notebook I'd found tucked behind the ledger before anyone else reached the wall. For reasons I still couldn't explain, I had slipped it into my coat without telling anyone. It was still there.The days that followed should have been the easiest of my career, instead, they became the strangest.A woman at a filling station thanked me for helping her change a tyre. I had never seen her before.A waiter asked if I wanted "the usual." I didn't even remember eating there.One afternoon, an elderly man waved enthusiastically from across the road. "You've not come back to finish our chess game!" he shouted. I smiled awkwardly, but inside of me, something twisted.At first I blamed exhaustion.I mean fifteen days without proper sleep could do terrible things to a person's memory. Still I booked an appointment with a psychiatrist.I told him about the sleepless nights, the stress, the pressure, the headaches, the forgotten conversations.He nodded patiently and scribbled into his notebook. He suggested a lot of diagnoses ranging from burnout, fatigue, exhaustion, he even suggested PTSD and that this was my body's way of protecting itselfIt sounded reasonable, until it stopped sounding reasonable.Because burnout couldn't explain why people remembered conversations I had never had, or why I occasionally found myself driving home without remembering the journey.After my fourth session, I stopped going.Some questions were beginning to frighten me more than the answers.I threw myself back into the case.Officially, we'd made our breakthrough on the fifteenth day.Unofficially...I wasn't convinced.The ledger had contained one final coded statement which the analysts believed pointed toward the killer's identity. They were still trying to decipher it.One evening, while reviewing old clips from the crime scenes in my house, I stumbled on a particular footage It was all things we've seen at the station together: bodies, police tape, officers moving equipment. Rewind Then, a man crossed behind the camera; it was only for a second, his face never appeared.Just his back.His dark jacket, something about it bothered me.I paused the tape and moved closer.My stomach tightened.I owned that jacket.The exact same tear near the left elbow, the same faded cuffs.I hadn't worn it in weeks.Or I didn't think I had.Trying to distract myself, I finally opened the notebook I'd taken from the warehouse.The first page made me smile.It was my detective notebook, observations from previous cases: sketched, deductions, theories, statements I frowned.How had the killer gotten hold of it?But I kept reading.The handwriting never changed, but the words did.The neat investigative notes slowly became something else; measurements, street names, victim routines, reminders, all so precise they almost seemed like instructions.I closed the notebook so quickly it slipped from my hands.I told nobody, instead, I started investigating the only person I still trusted.Myself.I reviewed station logs, phone records, fuel receipts, traffic cameras, everything capable of review.Every answer I found only raised another question.There were gaps.One hour here.Ninety minutes there.Nothing that would naturally cause an alarm, until I placed the murders beside them.Every single killing happened inside one of those missing hours.I shudderedThere has to be another explanation.Only there wasn't.I enlarged every blurry photograph we had, compared heights, walking posture, the jacket, the boots. I tried to find reasons to dismiss every single thing. The jacket could have been anyone's. The boots were common. The height meant nothing. Even the reflection could have been a trick of the light. I wanted it to be. I needed it to be.Frame by frame the killer slowly stopped looking like a stranger.The final piece came from a reflection in the glass of a closed pharmacy.The image was terrible and anyone else would have dismissed it.I couldn't.Because I recognised the face.I'd been shaving it every morning for years.I didn't get a wink of sleep that night, or the next.By sunrise, I had written a statement. I created a file and tendered all of the evidence: the notebook, the missing hours, photographs, everything I addressed it to the chief and left it on his desk before anyone arrived.Then I handed over my service weapon, my badge, keys.By midday, every officer in the city was searching for Detective Chima.The newspapers called it a tragic breakdown.Some believed the killer had kidnapped me.Others insisted I'd gone into hiding after getting too close.Officially...The Ghost Butcher was never caught.Unofficially...The detective solved the case.The last mystery I never managed to solve...was whether I had been hunting a monster...or simply waking up as one.

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