When I was a boy and still new to the world, My father and I built a treehouse above my mothers grave, to remind ourselves that home always was where the heart was, and my mother was home. Leaving my youth, I solved things that needed to be solved, as a Detective for murder cases. Police, fellow members of my own community, were vanishing, one right after the other in the same stretch of time and in the same order. Two weeks, every two weeks, gone, more and more, gone. Causing fear in an officer's life. Settling down year to year, from two weeks to four, four to six and so on and so forth. years seemed to put age on the deaths. Judging by the pattern I counted down, minute to minute, for the next disappearance. If I am right, one of my own will be dieing in the next minute! I paced my office shakingly, glaring at my phone, just waiting for the call to bring me devastating news that I will have the displeasure to deliver to an unfortunate family. The worst feeling possible. The phone rings and it shocks me still, and I fear picking up the phone. I answer unready to hear bad news, but was relieved to find out it was just my father calling to let me know he was thinking about me and he loved me. Weird, he is an affectionate man who usually doesn't show much emotions.I sat in my chair still waiting for a call that never happened that night. Was I wrong? I decided to stay a few hours in the morning and waited for a discovery call, but I got nothing. Taking a deep breathe I left my office. Before I decided to go home I wanted to stop by my fathers to check on him for that weird phone call last night. In the car i thought to myself, I have been working on this case for two years and I was not once wrong about the timing of a murder, something didn't feel right. I pulled up into my dad's driveway and walked up on the porch and knocked. No one answered, but his car was in the driveway, right in front of mine and the porch light was still on, signaling that he was still home.I picked the locked and let myself into my dads house and found him sitting in his chair, sleeping. It was dark in the house still, not to mention it was 6:44 in the morning. I kissed his forehead and walked to the kitchen, and grabbed a cup of his homemade wine, he made every year around the holidays. I then went to go sit down next to him, when i slipped on some of what I thought to be wine on the floor until i turned the light on to see it was blood oozing from my fathers neck. Over my sobbing and vomiting, I managed to get ahold of a friend at the police department and get first responders over immediately. That night was the longest and coldest night of my life.Usually in a time like this a person would take some time off work for grieving, but this just made me more blood thirsty for this horrendous cop killer, who made the mistake of making my father the next victim. I spent two weeks practically living in my office before the head of the police department sent me home on a paid vacation, he said I needed time to put my personals aside so I can think clearly again. Over the time I spent on the case I haven't realized that my wife and I had grown apart and she had left me, and taken our only son with her. I didnt have any strength left to go after her or my son. Monday came by of the fourth week and I was called to go see a man about my fathers will, he has freshly written it 3 days before he died.I showed up to the meeting and received possession to everything my dad owned, which seemed right seeing that I was an only child. Shortly after the meeting, me and an old friend I used to have over every day when I was a kid moved my stuff into my fathers old house, it gave me the feel that I was still with him and my mother. At night I had dreams of my dad and I burying my mother under the old tree outside, I was so young and didn't understand. The dreams quickly changed to images of the tree house we built over my mother's grave and my father repeating the phrase, "Home is where the heart is", as he did as we buried his dead wife. A loud noise came from the tree house outside my bedroom window, I jumped up and grabbed my gun and ran outside. There was a note from my father taped to the back porch door in an envelope with a set of keys to the old tree house."I am so proud of you son, you have become everything I wanted you to be and more. Your smart too so that helps. I am sorry for what I have done to your childhood and who you are now and I promised you i'd make it up to you when you were just a young boy. You know i'm not good at these things but i am so sorry son, please forgive me for everything you will find out about me soon. I did it out of love for you and your mother." What did this mean, was it just his time? I quickly shined a light up into the tree house and a couple of birds flew out, relieving me to know, I didn't have an intruder in my backyard.I brought the papers with me when my boss called me in to talk about my father. The talk was full of apologies from him, which is the nicest he's been to me all year, and the confirmation that it was a self inflicted death, suicide. My father must have thought it was time to go and slit his own throat, and I am in possession of a suicide letter. There is no evidence of anyone being in the house with my father except the strange lack of any fingerprints on the weapon, not even my fathers, which seemed highly impossible. Something wasn't right.Later on that night I had dreams of my mother and father dancing in the backyard under the old tree house but it was strange, my mom was young like the day she had died, and my father old, like the day he had died. They kept looking up at the old tree house and it was like something was looking back. Slowly a shadowy looking head started to pear out of the tree house, it almost looked like my mother, but aged, and it only revealing it's eyes, then I woke up. A loud noise broke me from my dream like the night before and there was definitely something in the old tree house.I slammed the lightswitch up for the back porch light and the face from my dream was peering at me from the tree house, just like in my dream. Shadowy, gray, old, with dark eyes and very little hair. I stood at my window staring back at it trying to go through my thoughts to comprehend what was going on. I called my friends from the police station for back up and grabbed my gun so I could investigate. Could I have finally found my mystery murderer? The one who has killed my father, and was I supposed to be next? I ran to the ladder of the old tree house and shined a light up. There was no way this killer has gotten away without me seeing, he had to be in there. I started to climb the ladder pointing my gun up for protection. When I reached the top I found the most horrific sight I have ever seen in all my careerMy mother remains and my father's lifeless corpse lie together on a bed in the middle of the tree house and there is no murderer to be found. I scan the room to be sure but all I find is pictures of the dead police I have been investigating over the last two years, and body parts or "souvenirs" for this sick freak hanging on fishing wire from the ceiling. The ladder starts to shake and a dark figure arises from the top but I can't see it clearly so I fire two shots into it and watch it drop, along with my flashlight. I climb down to reveal I had shot a fellow police officer, a friend! And the whole police department watched me do it. I never found out what I saw in that tree house from my bedroom window and I never will. Not here anyway as I sit in a cage like an animal and await for my time to come ,on death row, and no one will ever find the real cop killer or if there even was a cop killer at all.
