5Jane supposed it looked pretty glamorous from the outside.
Probably from all the television shows with their soap opera melodrama of twisting surreal plots and driven character angst. Or all the movies with their wild high speed car chases and incredibly explosive fight scenes. Though, she admitted, it could even be from all the bestseller mystery novels with their steamy sex scenes and thriller cat-and-mouse games.
Not that she didn't enjoy any of that herself.
Because she did.
Particularly if she could con Maura into watching them with her.
And still somehow keep her from outraged analyzing them to utter death.
Jane dry swallowed another couple of aspirin, hunched back over her desk and irritably shoved that one particularly annoying wild black curl out of her eyes for the thousandth time.
But the truth was the reality of a detective's life was anything but glamorous.
Sure, there were moments worthy of the mass audiences when apparently bored silly Fate decided she was going to fangirl Preston and Child or Stephen King. Then you got the nightmare re-enactments of your PTSD for the rest of your life. Along with the ugly scars and obscenely high therapy bills that tended to come with them.
Moments like the carnival funhouse horrors of Hoyt and his scalpel crucifixion.
Or your own crazed stalker lovingly serving you dinner in bed.
Or trying to save your best friend from the artistic date from hell.
Or watching her getting her throat slit in front of you by your personal haunting demon just before you kill him.
But those heart stopping theatric style moments were actually few and far between.
Thankfully.
Jane crossed herself just to be one the safe side.
Most of the time, however, it was just the grindingly headache-inducing and temper-provoking never-ending drudging slog through mountains of stupid government required paperwork that usually just got stuffed into case files and report folders and evidence boxes only to be hauled off to storage.
It was constant frustrating trips to your databases or your resident genius or even a competent lab tech, to try and make sense of the Einsteinian morass of numbers and Star Trek technobabble bizarre chemical breakdowns that you really needed a six year degree, at least, just to figure out the summaries which came with every single evidence test you ran.
It was untold hundreds if not eventually thousands of hours staring at gruesome crime photos plastered all over your Murder Board, as you reworked theory after theory struggling to find out what really happened, in spite of unreliable witnesses or lawyered up suspects or next to nothing bits of seemingly conflicting proof.
Jane knew it was trying to fight a losing battle to do your job while trapped in idiot jurisdiction wars with a virtual raging ocean of alphabet soup Federal agencies, who usually cared more about possibly losing their career making 'big case' than the filled body bag you had down in the morgue.
It was struggling to bring the real killer to justice while being constantly harassed by attention gluttonous opportunistic politicians who didn't actually give a rat's ass who went to jail, just so long as they looked good for supposedly being the one responsible for forcing a 'swift solve' in every highly publicized case.
And it was having to grit your teeth and remain silent or say 'no comment' until you wanted to puke so you didn't give the bad guys' lawyers the easy opportunity to cry at the judge for a dismissal, and getting mercilessly character slaughtered by old style yellow journalism trying to kick up show ratings or paper sales by inciting the public mob to foam at the collective mouth at your 'uncooperative' or 'nontransparent' attitude.
Jane grimaced and rubbed the back of her sore neck, trying to work the kink out of her tired muscles. She gave up and dug around her desk for another pen.
You did all of that and more your whole career. Day in, day out. Until the day you finally retired to a small pension. Or until the day one of the bad guys retired you to something significantly smaller.
Definitely not anyone's idea of glamorous.
But then, Jane knew that detectives didn't really care.
Because they weren't actors or politicians or journalists or even one of the general public looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.
They were just detectives. Ordinary men and women. The kind that you would normally walk right past on the street without a second glance.
And what they cared about now was the same thing that had once made them decide to pick up their cop badge that first day on the job as a green rookie.
They wanted to make things right.
Not just for the wealthy or the famous or the powerful, who usually always got it eventually one way or another. But also for the others, the ones who rarely if ever actually did.
They wanted to get the murderer of that homeless John Doe found beaten to death in a dumpster.
And of the hooker found drowned in the river.
The plumber found burned to death in his car.
The housecleaner found smothered at her apartment complex.
Or the fast food worker found broken on the street from a hit-and-run.
And on and on and on.
Because they wanted justice for everyone. And actually meant it. Whether they knew them from Adam or didn't. Whether the victims mattered something to society or not. Just because it was everyone's right to have justice.
Simply because they had at one point all existed.
Jane just wished to her bones that they could catch all the damn monsters before they struck. It was an impossible wish, of course, but it had never stopped any detective from making it anyway. Every profession had its impossible wishes.
But it wasn't all darkness.
Because for every one of those monsters that they hunted down and put behind bars, there was usually at least one other completely unsuspecting person somewhere out there who got their get-out-of-the-morgue-free card at the same time.
And just had the innocent bliss not to ever know it.
Humanity wasn't really as far from the beasts as it liked to portray itself. And once anything got a taste for blood, it usually just kept drinking.
So, with every successfully closed case, Jane liked to think of all the people she might have just saved. It made her long weary hunts for justice for the dead seem not quite so . . . heartbreaking in the end.
Or sometimes so very hollow.
No, it really wasn't a glamorous work by any means.
But it was still a truly worthy one.
And Jane knew that made it enough for a detective's life.
At least it did for hers.