Last night I dreamed someone close to my family had been murdered as the result of being a witness to a drug deal gone bad.
Only I didn’t know that in the dream until near the end. We just knew she’d been killed and it was, of course, horribly upsetting.
In my dream I was investigating it as some sort of hobby, like a private investigator from a book. My "investigation" led all over the place, including a futuristic apartment set high in the sky with horrible clear lucite floors and walls that you could see right through, and an artificial lake full of comatose people, who may have been doing the equivalent of serving time in jail or something. Unlike the floor in the apartment, the reason they were comatose under water was not clear.
It was not a good dream, even though I did find the killers, because the murder victim was still gone. A hollow triumph.
My dream got me thinking a bit about how real investigations, as opposed to fictional ones, end. At the end of TV shows and books, there’s a bit of triumph as the bad guy gets dragged off in cuffs or tries to escape and gets shot or jumps off a building. In real life, though, I’m guessing it’s more like the dream. Even if you feel good about the person getting caught, the victim is still gone forever.