Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 836


Show and tell.


I live in a different era now, a different age of technology, new rules and politics. Essentially ever since the human race started philosophising and writing these thoughts down, there is a basis to say that some of the undercurrents of the human experience are essentially always the same. Office politics is part reason, part emotion, and a person must be rational when making decisions regarding rules. Even technology proves the ever essential thought that things always change, and nothing ever stays the same. As much as I remember of the past, as much as I am tied and bound into emotional being by the events of my life, the world still moves around me, and if I want to keep my present lifestyle, I need to move with it.

I was born into a Las Vegas much less crowded than the one that exists today. Less casinos, less houses, less shops, less everything. It was an era where the roles of men and women were still in the position of man being domineering, and women following behind, with the bucket, as it were. My parents were progressive people, and from what I have heard of the grandparents I never really knew, there was a good reason for this. Growing up in a strict Greek society is enough to make anyone want to change their future.

When I went to university journal articles existed in bound volumes in libraries, and computers were huge. When mobile phones came along, they were novel, but large also, as were a number of other technologies that have now been downsized to the extreme. Politics, real world politics were different too, as were those of the office. Now I look back and I have a veritable history class of presidents and other country rulers in my head, of events in Russia and in Asia. I have an even larger catalogue of murders that I remember, countless dead bodies stacked up high in my mind. Hundreds of murders here, dozens of suicides there and accidents aplenty; I have watched the crime rates rise and fall and I have experience all of it.

I am hesitant towards change, by which I mean not all change, but that which is too fast, too quickly. I realise that change is essential for society to move forwards, but too much change too quickly often results in unrest, or mess, simply because people haven’t taken the time to think things through. Of course, not all change has to take years or months or even weeks, but especially when it is to happen quickly, it must be well thought out. Changing office policies simply does not take one moment, one thought, one person, it takes a collection of people, a collection of moments situated in an allotment of time, when other things are not happening and people are free to discuss matters.

In my field I have risen to one of the highest positions possible, at least compared to the hopes of other CSIs, lab techs, and even cops. I have new responsibilities and duties, and a schedule that is much the same, because I already worked longer hours than I was meant to, did more in one day than I might have if I was a slower, lazier person. It is not only my good work ethic that has moved me up the ladder now, it is also due to my ability to play the game of office politics. All of this, being good at knowing people, adapting to the new faces and new technology, it all involves being good at changing, at accepting change as it causes different, new, fresh, occurrences within the world.

Earth will always change, and eventually, I will no longer have an influence upon my corner of the world. As time passes and changes cause things to differ, eventually I will die, and a new generation of people will take hold of science, of my job, of the roles I have filled in the workplace. However, right now in my life, I am finally in a position of greater influence, I am able to, at a greater level, show and tell the people I work with what needs to be done, what might be done, and what can be done, all within the spectrum of the passing of time, all causing eventual change. Even though I will never have children to show things to, or family to tell things to about the life that I have led, and will continue to lead, I am now at a point in my life where I can show and tell many things. I now have a good responsibility and role concerning change within my environment, and admittedly, this change itself, came at the cost of other things I would have appreciated staying fixed. I have never had family, not much of it anyway, and I have never desired children, but irrelevant of that I am still a good man, I can still, make a difference.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 684


Take someone out.


“Do you remember this Conrad?” the woman spoke, holding up a piece of folded paper, a badly printed menu for an Italian restaurant. The CSI smiled distantly as he continued repacking evidence boxes, noting her weary eyes and her coat, slightly askew on her shoulders. He had heard of what the Nightshift team had just been through, multiple fatalities as the result of a head on collision between a very large bus and a very large car on a dark road in the middle of the night. He could imagine it, had managed to see some of the crime scene photos in passing, and there were bodies strewn every which way across the dirt and the road and beyond.

The man rolled his shoulders loftily and ran a hair through his hair in mock confusion and forgetfulness, a little smile curling up his face in a telltale sign of confidence.

“Ninth date. One pizza, extra anchovies, Greek salad, two shots of vodka once we got home.” Ecklie said, pausing and cocking his head to one side as he pressed the lid onto the final box closed. Michelle was smiling at him, wearing that smug grin of hers, the superior one that spoke of past contempt and present knowledgeable satisfaction. The man raised his eyebrows slightly, willing to admit a slight curiosity but not honest enough to verbally admit it.

“That is one of the first times you have referred to us as going home. It’s always your house or my house with you.” the Nightshift replied, handing over a slightly wider, more affectionate grin, her eyes circling the surrounding room and nearby hallway, waiting to see the nonexistent people that might be spying on them, that might see that they were actually being nice to one another for once.

“You and your womanly affections.” the CSI said, running his hand through his hair once more, noticing the gradual thinness, the increasing thinness, and passing off the slight tinge of worry by nodding at the woman and the door.

“You get on back to my place and I’ll try and be home for lunch. I’m suspecting it’s going to be a busy day, so perhaps we’ll catch dinner instead.”

It was more a statement than an inquiry or a polite question of preference, and as a lab tech came through the door into the light table room, Michelle winked and slipped out. It was like Conrad to be like that, funny the one second and back to his old ways the next few minutes. He was gruff though, and she had begun to know exactly when and when not he was being mean with actual sadistic intention behind it.


Conrad Ecklie wound his way through the door that night slinking like a jungle cat, the house still dark, light shining from his bedroom. He smiled, putting off sleep for a later hour when he knew he would need it more than he felt he required it then.

Michelle was on the bed brushing her hair and putting it up into a fancifully intricate ponytail, as if she had somewhere to bed, something to do. She knew him too well, obviously.

The man smiled and coughed, leaning n the doorway of his bedroom, their bedroom, smiling, holding the shoddily folded menu, the bad print job with the doubled text and the off green colour resplendently grasped between his fingers.

“I made us a booking, shall we go out?” he queried, smiling, tired, yet happily familiar after a busy day, with that feeling of coming home to something that wasn’t emptiness, pain or emotional depravation. For once.

“Yes, take me out, take me out please Conie, we need a break.” Michelle said, finishing her hair, smiling and standing up from her seat on the bed, a picture of perfect beauty in his eyes.

The rumble of agreement in his throat and the slight nod was all that she needed to suffice for agreement on his part, and together they went, the unusual couple, a good couple, strong against the world, nothing able to get in their way.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 1353


You pass a complete stranger on the street and notice they are crying. What do you do?


It felt like the auspicious start to a new era, walking the streets of the city of Las Vegas, knowing that he was without Grissom to go back to, to torment, to befriend without being friendly, without feeling friendliness. The streets still bore the gauche signs of depravity he had become heavily accustomed to; the signs of whorehouses, of strip clubs, of bars that sold too much alcohol, too fast. Yet the city still screamed for people like him, and while he existed, it was his duty to always heed the call for help, because it was his job, much like the policeman, the security guard, to serve and protect his public. Now though, now he was Undersheriff and Grissom was gone, Sara was gone, Warrick was dead, and of the Nightshift team there were only three originals left. Only three people, accompanied by Jim Brass, who he had known for so many years, who he had become far more accustomed to, compared to his own team of the past, of two promotions ago.

It bore at Conrad Ecklie, the uncomfortable feeling of having lost his supposed nemesis, who had really been more of an itch in the side in the past years, than a real annoyance. Ever since he had become Assistant Director and ever since he had stood up for the fate of Nick Stokes against a man he later learned to be corrupt, ever since he had allowed the Nightshift team back together, things had changed. Ever since it had become clearer that he outstripped Grissom as far as the professional ladder went, things had relaxed between them. If they were not close friends, by the time Grissom had come to leave, then the many intervening years between their meeting and their departing of ways had indeed changed them, made them a little more friendly towards each other. Just as the recent years had changed their relationship, the two men themselves had also changed. As Ecklie become more secure in his role as a friendly domineering tyrant, Grissom had finally been able to love Sara, so much so that he was able see his job as a CSI as only one facet of his life. Just as it had finally become comfortable between them, to talk and not have to spat, to discuss and not have to threaten punishment or payback, they had come across other thoughtful discoveries.

The realisation of Ecklie that he could get along with Grissom had come only a short time before Grissom had realised that his loyalties could, and would, lie elsewhere than the lab. Now that Grissom was gone, things continued much the same as they always had done, accommodating new CSIs into empty positions, teaching new CSIs old tricks and watching the previously new generation move into the haunts of the recently departed oldsters. If anything though, Ecklie had seen most of them come into the lab. He had seen Catherine on her first day, and she was now Supervisor, he had seen Grissom as he had entered the lab, and now, Grissom was gone, and he still remained. He had wanted to punish Nick for all his wrongdoings and now Nick had shed off the role of little brother, and stepped into the boots of the main male mainstay of the vaguely new Nightshift team. They had a young arrogant girl in Warrick’s place and a Professor where Gil had once been. It was different.


Rounding the corner to a familiar coffee haunt, Ecklie found Catherine sitting in a window seat, wearing much the same expression as he was. It was early morning, so she was probably coming off shift, and he was, he wasn’t sure where he was, but he hadn’t exactly started work yet. The man slid into the seat in the booth opposite the woman and tried smiling at her. It came off rather malicious, or so he supposed, because fresh tears started to edge their way down her face, few and frequent in between because she was trying her best not to cry, not to seem upset in a place where so many other cops and co-workers might see her. He knew what she was thinking about; it always seemed that he knew what the Nightshift was thinking about, better than some other people he knew.

“You’ve lost a lot in the past while, haven’t you? Warrick and Grissom are gone. I told you not to make a shrine of Gil’s office, so I see it’s been split up between the rest of your team.” Ecklie said, eyeing the Nightshift as she looked up at him, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Maybe she was grimacing at him, or maybe she was smiling in thanks. Either way, it was an unfamiliar expression on her. He wasn’t one to readily recognise gratitude.

“Grissom taught us each a lot of things, Conrad. I am happy for him, but it is different without him here with us, like it is with, Warrick. You probably wouldn’t notice it, but it is.” Catherine replied, to which Ecklie proffered forward another facial expression, something closer to a friendly smile.

“He threw a coffee pot at me once. I was just beginning to forgive him for that.” the Undersheriff said, smirking at the memory, one of few actual displays of physical violence between him and Grissom, their past animosity towards each other brought into the realm of the real and visible. Catherine smiled in return to this snippet of memory, something fond and warm lighting her face.

“They were good men. Gil still is.” she said, speaking softly, with that same shining kindling of emotion.

“Yes, yes they were Catherine, and I would not worry. If it consoles you, I think I miss them too. Friendships are hard to find in this city, and with the life that each of us leads, it leaves room for little else but the relationships in work. Grissom may have been the closest thing I have had to a friend, in a long time.” Ecklie said, head cocking to one side as he listened to his own voice, his own words, his eyes noticing the cautiously turned heads of two familiar lab techs sitting in the booth behind the Nightshift. Catherine herself seemed to have cheered up and stopped crying, her sadness replaced by a set of facial quirks that looked better on her face than his, and no doubt, they came with more ease than he could muster.

The woman laughed at him suddenly and patted him on the arm he had laid on the table.

“That’s probably the largest amount of honesty I’ve ever heard out of you, Conrad. How does it feel?” the woman queried, suppressing evident amusement on his behalf. Maybe she didn’t want to ridicule him; maybe she wanted to save professional face in a space filled by many of her co-workers and potential contacts.

Ecklie shrugged, an unfamiliar rolling of the shoulders that admitted cluelessness as much as it did the willingness to give in to the need for honesty.

“I can’t say that I love it. But perhaps, we aren’t meant to lead our lives entirely in science, as Gil would have had us once believe.” the man replied, and fell silent, before the hole he was in dug itself any little bit deeper.

“I said I felt sorry for you, you know? Having to become Undersheriff in place of, so many other kinds of people, because of, well, you know.” the Supervisor said, a little happier still, smile growing a little larger, a little more amused, a little more forgetful of the past.

To the snickers of the listening lab techs, all the Undersheriff could muster was a half hearted sardonic, “Yes”, to which she nodded in agreement, seeing through his bitterness with a referential nod to their other co-workers.

Perhaps they weren’t complete strangers after all. Perhaps, after all these years she had stopped hating him as well, and maybe, they might become better co-workers in the absence of Grissom. Perhaps, anything was possible. Maybe, maybe not.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 803


Cheer someone up.


“Undersheriff?”

The woman marvelled at him through eyes lined with wrinkles and her hands, curled with age were quick to grasp his hands and squeeze vice tight. Conrad Ecklie nodded and smiled at his aunt as she patted him on his head, fingers brushing over the growing lack of hair that the years had been none to kind to remind him of. She was more excited than he ever would be, or could be possible of displaying, although, he did feel something, somewhere, deep down. In his promotion to Assistant Director he had felt, he had felt the kind of grim satisfaction that he had come to associate with a promotion. When he had been made Assistant Director he had seen it as one rung up, one rung that he deserved a place on, that he had earned through hard work and absolute adherence to the rules. This, this being Undersheriff, this was different, it felt, a bit different, just a bit. Perhaps it was just the appearance of his aunt, who now, a few years older, was that much closer to death, and to him being left alone. Perhaps it was just her continued living that was making him cheerful and not actually the chance that he might actually, feel something that wasn’t tightly ordered and placed in a category of strict emotions, somewhere between anger and steely control.

Grissom had been, proud of him, proud of him? In one of their final discussions he had been so angry, was it angry, so angry perhaps, with him leaving. Then there was the conversation they had together when he told the Nightshift about his promotion to Undersheriff. There was that implicit, unspoken silence between them, of what his promotion entailed, and some of the reason for why it had occurred then, in that situation, those circumstances. It went unsaid, but if Warrick hadn’t been murdered by McKeen, then the previous Undersheriff might not have slipped up as soon as he did. If that hadn’t happened, then things would be different, and it might be someone else standing in Ecklie’s place. It might have still been McKeen even, if the world was seeking to reward people who actually were vile, corrupt individuals.


“We’ll go out to dinner, we’ll celebrate.” the man said, producing theatre tickets out of s coat pocket and nodding at the elderly woman, still seated in her rocker. She was, his aunt, she was his aunt still, but she seemed just a bit more fragile than the last time he had seen her, and the way she moved was a poor excuse for the sharp agile young woman she had once been when she had adopted him and taken him in as her own. In doing that she had doomed her life to be a certain way, for her to have certain responsibilities that she wouldn’t have had otherwise, the care and education of a young child mostly, that alternately needn’t have existed until a time of her choosing. Much like how he didn’t get to choose the actions of McKeen concerning Warrick, she had not been able to say no to him, when she had been, always would have been, the only person he had left.


As Conrad Ecklie helped his elderly aunt into his waiting car, as they took off into the night to a swanky restaurant, reservations produced out of thin air because a friend owed him a favour, he reached what he might have called cheerful. For the first time in a while, this promotion, his promotion, didn’t feel just like a fated puzzle piece sliding into place for a hard working player. It felt like that, but, it also felt like something else. It felt full of something, memories, largely, of who had died and who had gone corrupt so that the pieces slid in his favour. It reminded him of a past that had borne him out of fire, to become a hard working, intelligent man, instead of something else. Most of all, though, while he had regret for how things had happened, and some emotion for all the hard work he had done to get where he was at that moment in his career, the promotion brought him a kind of stilted cheer. While he wasn’t about to go out and paint the town red, as he helped his aunt out of the car and into the place where she would share a meal, the man, Conrad Julius Ecklie, the Undersheriff, he smiled at her. For the first time in many years, he smiled at someone, and truly, truly felt something when they smiled back. Something which transcended plasticity, pretending, which surpassed deception and supposition. He felt happy, and for the moments that this happy cheerfulness lasted, he was able to enjoy it, completely.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 1030


Is redemption truly possible?


Atonement for guilt, worthy payback for the commitment of sin, that is what is being talked about here. Redemption is one of the major cornerstones of many religions, including my own. I am supposedly meant to atone for my sins, for my ill thoughts, the bad things I do, have done, and may ever do for the rest of my life. According to some sects of humanity, women are beyond redemption by being female, and every person alive has committed the ultimate sin of causing another person pain, simply by having been born. Disabled people are beyond redemption because they are disabled, because they simply are different and can’t help it. As for homosexual people, those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, even those who are transgender, well, that’s a big issue, as is so much of everything else. According to the hardcore fanatics of religion and politics, messing with gender stereotypes and roles is beyond redemption as well. People who injure themselves, people who commit suicide are all beyond redemption, all beyond being forgiven by the very people who should be forgiving them! I have to say, I am a man who solves crimes for a living, I look into the deepest darkest corners of the human condition, as it is, and there are far more terrible things that a person can do than just being who they are, without harming anyone else.

I am fortunate in that my aunt was a progressive person. Oh yes, she was stuck in her ways, intending I take classes in manners and table setting, but for her generation she was progressive in the set of social things she accepted. I was thus, raised a child accepting of people and their differences. I have no issue with homosexuality, nor disability, and working in the public service role I have long since inhabited, it is not in my nature to be a discriminating being. All people should be treated equal, and I try my best to do so.

In my life, I have caused injury, and I may have occasionally played a role in the death of a criminal, when the law gave me no other option, but I am not a law breaker. I follow the rule book to the absolute, I help whoever needs my service, and I give my best service to the people who I am helping, always. I see people on the worst day of their life, when they have either been killed, injured, or are otherwise suffering the pain that death can bring, through the discovery of mourning and loss. Working back from this, it is then my job to see that the evidence that is collected is processed by the proper methods in due course, all to help catch the criminal who has committed any particular crime or set of criminal acts.

Perhaps there are a few people beyond redemption. The criminals without guilt, maybe, the murderers who feel no pain for what they have done, the repeat rapists, the paedophiles, the continuous abusers of animals, women, children, other defenceless people or creatures. All the guilty people who intend to harm, to spill blood or spout absolute abuse at their victims, whose only aim is to provide a grisly service of continued suffering via their very own hands. Those are the people who are beyond redemption, and who remain beyond redemption until they feel that spark of guilt, until they feel remorse for the pain they have caused, true remorse and sorrow. Yes, I believe that some criminals can be rehabilitated, but for the ones who are lost to normal human notions and thoughts, to those who are like this and have already committed their crimes, it is different. For criminals who do not feel guilt or remorse, they place themselves beyond the forgiving eyes and minds of the people they harm and who they have affected as a result of their devious acts.

Although I am sure the murderers of my mother and father may soon die, as may my aunt, the man who violated and murdered my wife will probably live for a long time yet if jail doesn’t get him, if cancer doesn’t spread through his body. I have visited him, and still do on occasion, and never in all these years that have passed by in the duration, has he ever shown remorse, pity, pain, a desire for forgiveness, a reprieve from his actions. That man who took away my Michelle, my wife, my lover, my everything, he is beyond remorse from me, beyond redemption, and if the world was a different place, he would have been sentenced to death a long, long time ago. For him, there is no redemption, because he is evil thoughts housed in an evil body, with hands to purport his truly, truly evil acts of terror, injustice, pain and horror. As for me? Am I beyond redemption? Sometimes I think I am beyond forgiveness for having left my wife behind, but then the next day I take a triple homicide, or I go and meet the family of a rape victim and I am reminded that I am a force of immense good in this world. I may have been able to prevent the death of my wife, but I did not, something which I did out of no cruel intentions, merely fate. I am not beyond redemption, no, I am not. I atone for my sins, even if I go and get angry and shout the next day at someone or something else. But will I ever forgive myself even if I know I am a human, a man, open to redemption? No, no I will not, because Michelle is gone, my father and mother are gone, and once my aunt dies, I will have no one left. People who have redemption, I am sure, do not continually punish themselves, do not continually suffer nightmares for decades on end. Yes, I may be a man open to redemption, but as far as inner forgiveness goes, I will never forgive myself for not, being there, for not having made, the situations that irrevocably changed my life, gone differently.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 666


Prison.


The man was precise as he unbuttoned and rolled up his shirt sleeves, inch of fabric folding upon inch of fabric in a tight curl upon each of his forearms. Through the bars of the cell he scoped the area outside, and stood for a few minutes, silent and intense, watching the movement of people passing by, waiting to see if any discernable pattern would emerge. This survey provided nothing, aside from the conclusion that people did pass by, that the hallway outside of the cell was a regularly visited piece of floor way for the passage from here to somewhere else. He had already known that. There was no pattern though, no people coming by, then a pause where none came, followed by more people, at regular intervals. There was just unpredictable randomness, one person from left to right, a pause, then three people from right to left all at once, more people, more people, more nothing, more people It could not be said that there was a definite time where there would or would not be a pause. To do anything in that cell, a person would have to come upon a period of low or no activity, by pure happenstance.

Ecklie made a careful examination of the small room, bars at the front, three walls, toilet and sink at the back, empty bench on one side, and another empty bench on the other. There were two blankets, one on the end of each long seat, a hatch on the door for the passage of food or items. It was all standard affair, all completely frustrating, nothing to discover, nothing to use that blared significantly obvious cause and effect, but many small details, things amiss here and there that may have helped him. That would have helped him. Inwardly he may have heaved a sigh, but even his innards could not give him this emotional recompense, and instead chose to stay silent. He may have even wished to escape the prison, but he did not, because it was now his designated place to stay, for the time being.


Taking a second to smooth the fabric of his sleeves, the man turned around, and bent down to his kit and pulled out a pair of gloves. Slipping them on, he approached the dead body on the floor and examined it. There was a balding security guard who was dead inside the prison cell of a shopping mall security lockup, where shoplifters went, where people who vandalised property went. A cell which was on the way to the shopping mall break room, with people passing to and fro almost every damn minute. A man killed and locked inside the very cell he probably guarded every day of his working life, by whoever had been inside it and was now out.

Time move on, as it always did, and the coroner arrived, as the coroner always did. He processed the scene, found the knife hidden under one of the blankets, photographed the arterial spray painted high on the wall and then left the prison for the day, to return to his labs. At the end of this day he returned to his rooms, his office, his own world, outside of the three prison walls and one door. That prison should not have been the scene of a death. That prison should not have been the scene where a hard working man died. That prison was a cell where mildly criminal people went. That prison was his only for the working day, to examine and note down. Inside his mind he had his own prison, and had lived in it far longer than the one he had just spent a couple of hours processing. While he could leave the shopping mall prison cell, just like the person who had killed the security guard had done, leaving the jail inside his mind, that could never be done. That was, impossible, and had been for a very, very long time.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 1344


Under what circumstances, if any, is it ok to break the law?


The laws of the United States broadly cover the government of action in many situations. There are regulations for who can own dangerous weapons, where they can operate them and when they may be able to use them. The same goes, widely speaking, for other circumstances, such as driving a car or defending one’s self against grievous bodily harm or the threatening of death. There are terms, some coined by law makers and some by lawyers, such as probable cause, and reasonable doubt, beyond all reason and circumstantial evidence, that are used to assess the guilt of the accused. There is a lot of lingo and jargon, some unnecessary and some much necessary, that I use and have used for many decades so that I may adequately and supremely fill my job as a public servant.

It is the nature of many accused people who wish to deny the wrongdoing that they have obviously done, to misconstrue the laws that keep most people safe from harm. The first, second and fourth amendments to the constitution come to mind, the rules of American society that help govern religion, expression, bearing arms, searches and seizures. Even at the level of mere descriptive titles, it is easy for anyone from around the world, to see how these can be pulled away from their true meaning. To most people, the right to bear arms does not equate to the stockpiling of weapons inside a person’s home, and freedom of speech does not mean burning effigies representing the topic of hatred in the street. To some, it does, and, to some, if it is deemed that through their actions they are breaking the law, they will be punished as people who have the power to punish, see fit. It is these people, who misconstrue, and the murderers I normally deal with, who down and outright flout the law, that I have a problem with, and therefore, here I am, in law enforcement, as it were.

If the law is looked at strictly speaking, without any room for leeway or otherwise interpretation, then perhaps I have broken the law occasionally. I have injured, I have sped, but that is to the extent where any snooping reporter could go to try and undermine my good character. To be honest, I have only sped when in pursuit of a suspect, and even then, it is not normal fare of my job to do so, and I was in the lines of what was expected of me in the situation. The same goes for injuring another person, which I have been forced to do a handful of times over the years, as it was a probable thing, at the time, that they may have otherwise killed me in a fit of accusatory rage or drug fuelled anger.

Under normal circumstances there is no reason to break the law, as it serves and protects the very people it is designated to serve and protect. I am one such person who uses their knowledge of the law to their best ability in order to perform with a high level of excellence in their job. I am however, aware of the certain periods and circumstances where normal conventions of law can be stretched, but not to any adverse situation, in the end. Police cars speed, but they speed in pursuit of a suspect who is evading arrest. There is always an explanation for anything that I do that could be considered law breaking.

But without reason though, without any proper circumstances such as those concessions given to the police, no, there is no excuse for breaking the law. A man who speeds to get his pregnant wife to the delivery room before she gives birth in the car may usually be let off, as far as the news is concerned. All very well, but what if the same man crashed his car and killed his pregnant wife? The media would not be very forgiving then; at least, I hope they would not be. The reason goes, that the laws of the United States serve to protect American citizens and all people living or visiting within our borders. When I come to a murder scene, I do not only have a murder, I have a criminal act which has resulted in the death or injury of one or more people. I have a direct example of how people can severely disregard the laws that have been well crafted and honed over years of political inquiry and procedure, to function together as a well oiled machine does. I have displayed before me in all the grisly appearance of death, one more person who has passed on, one more life that no longer exists and has been extinguished, in most if not all cases, before its due time.

Looking at a robbery case even, and it is obvious why laws exist to protect and to serve people. I dealt with several consecutive Robin Hood styled robberies several years ago, the final one, which as any interesting story goes, ended in a murder. Oh yes, the criminal may have been doing good deeds in some eyes, by stealing from rich gated estates, and giving the proceeds of the crime to the poor. However, he still broke the law. Doing things for noble reasons that break the law, there is no excuse for it. It got that person not very far, because in the end they ended up killing someone. By mistake, admittedly, but it was the breaking of several laws that lead them to the accident in the first place.

No, there is no excuse for breaking the law. There is no excuse for dismissing the laws, the rules of modern society, as something which does not apply to this person or that person, that woman or that man. There is no excuse for breaking the law and it is grossly inappropriate for the criminal to be holding the thought that such laws apply to everyone but themselves, but one single individual who deserves punishment. In a just society, people who commit criminal acts are punished, whether through fines, jail sentences, tied in with arrest and a possible trial if it is warranted. While I think that the breaking of laws is one of the most severe and brutally ugly acts a person can commit, while I may work very hard to ensure that criminals are caught and duly convicted, there are still horrible people out there. While I may think and feel that there is no excuse for breaking the law, while I hardly ever, while I never could condone it, the world is, unfortunately for this case, not perfect. For every rapist I help put in jail, there is another one there, bred through indifference and the learning of respect for human life and individuality, rendering it an indistinguishable thing that can be warped for any particular person’s advantage.

A man breaks a window in a house on fire to rescue a woman, a baby, a cat, something. By normal circumstances, he has broken the property of someone else, and should be punished. But he will not be, because he has reasonable reason to go through with such an act, and the law makes room for that. By some definitions, a person may indeed appear to break the law, but by looking closer, they have not done so. The thing about the breaking of laws is that, just as they can be misconstrued by the obviously guilty, the laws can also be interpreted in many different beneficial ways. That is the essential factor, the knowledge of and ability to, interpret the law. By interpreting the law, there may be several different ways one law, one act, governs society. A person could do one act in several different variations, and the law still protects them. It is when the law is ignored or misconstrued to a point of clear disregard, that people begin to get hurt, that people are killed and begin to die in the dozens, or more.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 787


What have you done to make ends meet when you were broke?


In circumstances some might describe as fortunate, I have never been very poor, very broke, none of those terms used to describe monetary lower class living. In their deaths, my parents both had life insurance, so I went to a good school and lived in a comfortable house with enough food to eat and clothing on my back. I was not a child who wanted many toys, nor an adult, as I am now, fond of every new shiny gadget. I have a computer, which I update every few years, and a laptop, which follows much the same tradition. As my aunt no longer works, I help to support her, just as she worked to make our household functional when I was young. I have a house, the ownership of which has long since passed into my hands, and I have a car, which I care for well and keep running, even though it is getting old. I am quite a thing and tall man, so I by way of habit I eat very little. I live by myself to I use very little water for washing, and not as much electricity as some larger families might. My bills are small and my work does not require large amounts of travel at my expense.

Contrary to so many inhabitants of Las Vegas, I have not succumbed to the temptation to become a gambling addict. I do not gamble for pleasure, and in fact I never gamble except for a few charity poker games that I participate in every now and then for the sake of the lab. I have never been a big believer in the need to spend money in order to obtain happiness, which is, after all, something else I do not indulge in the same way as other people do. I do not feel happiness as the result of the things that most other people seem to find the cause of such emotions, and therefore, to spend money in excess is for me, pointless, and a circumstance that never happens. It never happens unless it is for a good reason for it, and aside from minor things like tire replacements and replacing minor household appliances when they cease to work, the amount of money I spend in one go is rarely significant.

Oh yes, I do indulge sometimes. I do eat on the job when I do not make myself lunch to take to work, but those are simple almost necessities. I buy books and sometimes magazines, I maintain several journal subscriptions, but while these may not be a matter of life or death, they are simple, unselfish things in life, not things that cause great pleasure, that I obtain so I can learn more, or so I may be more efficient in getting back to my job or my household duties. Yes, maybe my monetary circumstances are fortunate in that I work hard and earn a highly moderate wage, I may be fortunate in that I spend little and save much, but that is only money. Introduce the rest of life, and the fact that I sit on a bank account with a satisfyingly reassuring sum in it, fades away into almost inconsequential insignificance. I am a widower, I am an orphan, I may have money but that damn well doesn’t make up for an inch or a nose tip of everything, every single fucking thing that life has taken away from me.

Money does not buy happiness, it only, for those it can bring happiness to, provides a simple, temporary high. Not even having as much money as I do, makes me happy, because it seems worthless, absolutely fucking worthless in the face of everything I do not have, that I once have, and have lost forever. No, if we are talking about money, I have never been broke, but if we are talking about everything else, I have long since been broken and have long since been past repair. I make ends meet, I always make ends meet, but that is a mere function of life, spending money to keep the wellbeing of my person, my house, my objects, my possessions, high and settled. I manage my money efficiently, as I do every other thing in my life, and that is all there is to it. Working as long as I have, working as hard as I do, I earn money, I do not have to worry about being broke, and I have never been broke, so yes, I lead a comfortable life. While I may never have gone hungry or without shoes, I am still aware, I still know, that there are far worse things. That is the absolute truth.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 1586


You’re fired! Talk about a time you were forced out of something.


“You’re leaving.”

The tone of voice was blank, uninflected, uncaring even, but the way his pronunciation put emphasis on the last word betrayed any attempt at being completely uncaring, at ignoring the totality of the matter and the invisible burden it seemed to create. The invisible weight between them, which had so long been a viciously swinging pendulum of vehement dislike and audacious displays of disregard, now teetered almost motionless on the end of a near to snap string. While the displays and the dislike had been mostly Ecklie’s animosity towards Grissom, mostly his way of defending himself against a near equal, Grissom too had his own victories against the Assistant Director. Where Ecklie stood to defend his own pride, his own reputation, his own work, over the years the Nightshift had frequently put his reputation, his whole career, on the line for the greater good of the victim or the co-worker. He was ultimately liked more because of that, because he was a likable person, who had faults, whereas Conrad Julius Ecklie, was the stern authoritarian voice of utter control replete with icy tones and steel like grips. With the entire exception of his aunt, Grissom was one of the only people who chose of their own free will not to wish him untimely death or gruesome injury.

As happened so often in their select single meetings with each other, silence consumed the attempt at conversation and Grissom cocked his head curiously, tiredly also, lids creating docile half closed eyes. While the pendulum was no longer swinging, the weight of their work was still there, different cases with similar themes they had all experienced. Blood, gore, rape, murder, pillage, homicide, attempted murder, disembowelment, decomposition, between them they had seen all that and so much more. Together, yet always separated by their own shifts and schedules, they had seen so many unspeakable tragedies that no human should have to describe, but which they assigned themselves to speak about, their job entailing it to be so.

Eventually the Nightshift just nodded, opening his eyes fully and righting his head to stare at the other man, the one behind the desk, straight backed in his chair, stiff as always. He tried to read emotions off the balding man, off the person he had worked with for so long, but Ecklie betrayed close to nothing, almost nothing at all.

“Do you envy me Conrad?” the Nightshift said suddenly, aware already of how almost familiar these conversations felt. How almost familiar this situation felt, the way they were seated across from each other, totally alone with the weight of accumulated misery thundering over their heads, threatening to drown out their civilised attempts at conversation.

Ecklie grinned then, shattering the stilted silence with a mockery of happiness, the edges of his lips twisting upwards like the outreaching tendrils of a poisonous vine.

“No, I don’t Gil.” he said, quickly interrupted as Grissom, more awake, jumped into the conversation.

“Why not?”

It was a question that under any other circumstances none of them would have asked or answered, but this was one of the final showdowns, one of the final conversations they would have as Nightshift and ultimate superior, as co-workers.

“If I envied you Gil, I’d have to show it. Under my rules, I’ve always been the better man, because let’s face it, the rate of kidnappings, murders and injuries to my team was almost nonexistent. The number of complaints directed towards myself is of a different degree to yours, and hell, I follow the guidebook more than you ever have. I file my paperwork immediately, I follow up immediately, my desk is always free of clutter.” the old Dayshift began, conveying across the old habit he had formed over the years of summoning lectures out of thin air. Once more, the familiar silence resumed residence, and the invisible weight of years and accumulated pain pounded at their ears.

“Damn, Gil, if I envied you, if I wanted exactly what you had, do you think I’d be this man? No, I’d do what the rest of your team has done, I’d lose whoever I loved, and moved on, what you’re doing right now. However, even you know, I have not got anything left to go to, no one out there I want to seek after. I’m a realist, Grissom, I can’t envy what others have when it is not possible for me to have anything like it.”

More silence, shorter this time as the Assistant Director nodded his head slightly forwards on razor edges shoulders, and drew in breath.

“You’re going free, you’re escaping this often unimaginable hell hole. Even if I wanted to leave, where would I leave to? You have Sara and her worries to go to, you get to leave and go find the same damned girl who has been lusting after you since before she first got here. Even if I left, it’s not like Michelle is waiting somewhere, because she isn’t, so the best chance I have of achieving what you are about to do is to die, and I find no ability to hold envy towards you over that. I don’t dream like that.” the man said, ending the sheer assault of words as suddenly as it had started, and into silence the air once more fell.


Opting for the quicker answers, Grissom tilted his own head forward, a perfect display of his usual intense curiosity, and quirked a smile at Ecklie.

“Really Conrad? Is all that honestly true?” he said, interlacing fingers completing the picture as they both tried a hand at attempting one last battle of wits.

Out of character, Ecklie rolled his eyes, a childlike action unusual on a face largely accustomed to stoic displays of nothing.

“You’re leaving. You asked if I envy you, and I’ve explained that I don’t. Gil, to me, you have always been inadequate, because your weakness is that out of depravity, you have found not only exhaustion, but happiness. Out of all the murders we see, you speak for the victim, and I speak for the victim, but we are still two different people. You’re leaving because you have a chance to do so, the will to do so. You have realised that you have something worth fighting for, as the adage goes, and you’re going off to do that. If you want honesty, yes, maybe I do hate that you are leaving, maybe I do hate that you have a relationship with Sara, that you have a better life to lead than just staying here to wait out the days until burial.”

More breathing this time, deep breaths, one two, as the old flicker of flame burned within him, the old flicker of something not quite envy, but not quite nothingness either.

“All these years, you have known that you are doing good work here, but you also knew that if the time came that you could break the ties and leave. Any chance I had of leaving started to die with the murder of my parents, and was finished off completely with the violent raping and murder of my wife. I don’t envy you in the way you may want. I don’t hate you because you have something I could obtain, because I can’t get it. I dislike you because you stand for everything I have spent a lifetime accomplishing without happiness. You get your job, but you get solace in it. I do my job, and I still go home, falsified. But my unreality, what I am, what I have become, this thing...”

His voice trebled for a split micro second, and was fixed when he began to raised it into a raised impertinent almost shout.

“It is the only thing I have left. Don’t you get it Gil? All these years and you can still leave. I was born into this place and I was never even given the chance because the nature of our job consumed me long before I had the chance to decide otherwise.”

Ecklie’s lips twitched just then, and he quietened, breathing slightly more rapid than usual, heart a dull but slightly quicker thud in his ears, his ribs burning not with any real physical pain, but with the banging of that pendulum weight. The weight that now just rocked silently, sullenly, and would soon quieten forever, mostly, as the Nightshift left and moved further away. The venomous grin reached across his face, spread like wildfire and settled into a grimace.

Reaching forward, the two men shook hands briefly, but nothing changed. It was true, they would see each other again a couple of times before Grissom departed, and more words would be exchanged, but not of such a confidential kind. There would be a time, probably, certainly, definitely, where Grissom would give Ecklie a very similar exchange of confidence, and then they would be over and done with. Grissom would leave and Ecklie would stay and in this finality his hatred of the man would be absolutely vilified and ascertained as true. Grissom could leave, Grissom could escape and Ecklie could not, he would never, and as he rose from his desk and swiftly exited his very own office, leaving the Nightshift behind, that was part of the reason he moved in such a way. It would be, had always been, part of the reason he hated the man so very, very much, why in some way, he envied him, and in other ways, he could not.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 1052


What languages do you speak?


I am fluent in speaking, reading and writing English, Greek and Spanish. English is a given, considering I live in America, and work as a public servant, in a position were language fluency is essential. I know Greek because it is part of my heritage, part of the culture I grew up with, that surrounded me in my childhood and beyond. It is a language that I feel deeply to be my own, even though I am a Las Vegas native, because my aunt made an especial effort after the death of my parents, to enforce on me the importance of knowing it. It remains one of the few contacts I have back to the family I know very little about. Knowing Spanish is the result of the same basic reasons as knowing English, except of course, it was more voluntarily my choice to obtain knowledge about. It is very helpful to know many languages, because the ignorance of people who believe that English will always triumph when spoken, is large and profound in its ineptitude.

In the course of dealing with crime, I meet many living people, whether they are victims themselves, people who are witnesses to a crime, or those who simply happen to be relations of the person who has been affected by such an occurrence. Many people constantly move in and out of Las Vegas, at an astounding rate that the lax and the unobservant barely notice as long as their basic needs and wants are met. There are the short staying kinds of people such as tourists and visiting relatives, people who come and stay and then move on just as quickly, leaving almost no trace behind. Then there are the other people who move here for longer periods, or who have even been here from the beginning. Those people are those such as the workers of many variations who run the backbone of the city, including but not limited to public servants such as myself, and the other more easily recognisable and more numerous kinds. People like hotel employees and sex workers, the very later operating both within and outside of the confines of the law, providing the city with a different reputation than what it might have otherwise. Just as more costal locations do, we get our fair share of illegal immigrants and transitory migrants of a more unidentifiable kind.

Summing these kinds of people all together, not all of them come from backgrounds of great education and wealth, and even if they do, it does not always mean that communication with them will occur in English. Being that many people do speak English, usually it is not much trouble finding a way to get the word across, to converse and ask enquiries of this living victim or that specific witness. However, if English can not be used, there is still a good chance that Spanish has a relevance or potential ability to get the act of talking underway. As for Greek, well, if I put aside heritage and culture, it is still an important thing to know. Just as Spanish fails, I know of many employees of the lab who speak different dialects, and they can sometimes take the place of a translator. If, for instance, a murder occurs within the strictly Greek speaking section of Las Vegas society, I am generally more available and easier to find than a Greek translator may be. Being that I have grown up here in Las Vegas and know, so very much of the Greek community, both young and old, it makes it simply easier to call me instead, to get me converse with that past generation who didn’t care as much for the language of English that is my original tongue, and which I would have needed to embrace fully, even if it were not.

If I lived in a community that spoke only one language, and if the chance of my leaving such a community was very small, then I would probably only speak one language. However, I was born into and raised in a multicultural community, I was born of parents who spoke both Greek and English, who had lived here for so long that they also saw the point of passing on such knowledge to me in my infancy. I was not the child of parents who only wished to enforce one side of my heritage, who wished to force on me only my life here or a life that they would have liked me to have lead if we had lived back in the old country of generations passed by. My parents were not like that, and while my aunt was probably a good measure stricter than my mother, she was not a backwards person either. In my youth, she encouraged me to be educated well, and to speak well in many languages. Greek held a soft spot in her heart, and she passed the same liking of it onto me. I find no trouble in fluently speaking three languages, and knowing the rudimentary basics of many others.

I live in a city that moves, it feels, sometimes faster than time should really move. With this rapid shifting of life and society, it is needed of me, in the important public servant role that I am in, to try and help the public I serve as best I possibly can. As I can serve, as myself, better speaking three languages than I could just concentrating on one, I keep up my fluency in Greek and Spanish as best I possibly can. Las Vegas is no longer exactly the society my parents lived in, nor even the one I grew up in, and as crime continues, as I am still needed in my particular job role, it is still required that I try and do the best job that I can. If I am required to change with the times, then change I must, but even as life becomes faster, and so much more different, I will maintain what I know until death welcomes me with outstretched arms. Just because so much of Las Vegas moves in and out of the city in rapid motion, it does not require of me to become ignorant and minimalised in my obtained knowledge in the process.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 673


Cremation or burial? Talk about funeral arrangements.


In the graveyard of the small Greek orthodox oriented church I have been to all my life, there are three graves bearing my last name. The grave of my mother Martha, the grave of my father David and the grave of my wife, Michelle. They each have a headstone designed by the same man, and there is one by him stored away in the funeral home that directed the cremations of my parents and wife, already bearing my name and my date of birth. That man is already dead, so by the time I die, his protégée, or the apprentice of stonework that follows after him, will chisel in the date of my death and thus the stone will be erected to sit at the head of my grave. My aunt already has a gravestone for herself, and there is a plot next to my parents for her. When we all die, there we all will be, cremated and buried underground in urns of something similar. My aunt, my mother, my father, my wife, myself. All dead, all cremated, all buried, taking up such reduced space than the amount we occupied while living.

The bodies of Egyptian pharaohs were once preserved with all manners of substances and mummified. Their organs were cut out and put into jars, and they were buried with the most holy reverence of their servants and followers so that they may lead a good afterlife. When I die, when my parents died, when my wife died, the body is placed into a coffin, a service is held, and then it is burnt at a high temperature in a large chamber, fuelled by a roaring fire. What doesn’t burn may be ground down into dust, and what remains thereafter is placed in a container. All the life and worth of a person once they are cremated, equals only so much weight, and that eventually is buried or set free, wherever. In death, people are given to the Earth and left to rot in the dirt that creates around them, their new and most eternal hiding place.

My parents were perhaps ahead of their time in wanting to be cremated, but that is of no concern. The fact was, they were reduced to ashes and they were buried with their own headstones left to watch over them. Instead of their bodies being followed many years later by that of my aunt, and then myself and whomever I chose to marry, it was followed to soon, for my liking, by my wife. What lies now in the ground are the burnt remains of the three people in life who I loved, the three people in my life who I loved and who were murdered for who they were, what they had done, and who they might have been associated with, or what they might have seen. If I am not murdered at the hands of the many criminals I have helped be sent to jail, if my aunt is not murdered by one of the many enemies and ill wishers I have, then we will be the only people in my relevant and known family to die not by the injuries caused by some horrible and cruel external force. While it makes very little difference to me, and to the way I lead my life, even I am aware that the lives of my parents and wife should not have ended as they did. They were not bad people, and while it was their choice to be burnt to ashes in death, as it will be the choice of myself and my aunt to be cremated and buried, it was not their choice to be murdered.

I will be cremated, my aunt will be cremated, and my mother, father and wife were cremated because it will be, and was, our choice. The way I see it, it is efficient, rapidly decomposing the body via fire, and reducing its entire mass down to a very compact weight of dust and dry, brittle remains.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 975


In the event of a zombie apocalypse, what would you do?


By all the laws of science and reality zombies do not exist. It is impossible to bring the dead back alive when they are truly dead and buried, gone and never to be anymore, anyway, anyhow, anywhere. There is literally no point and no relevant sense in trying to create discussion about such a topic that has no use and no real purpose in real life. A zombie apocalypse is not going to happen anytime soon, and neither will it happen for many years to come, nor ever, in fact, so really, there is no option for discourse on the topic. I don’t deal in the imaginary. In the process of my job, I deal with the real, with real evidence and real dead people who will forevermore stay really dead, and I draw my real conclusions by using real hypotheses based on really possible situations. I may imagine how a bullet entered the skull of a victim, I may recreate the circumstances and events leading up to how it happened, but these situation recreations are made out of the evidence I have collected, that other people have collected. I do not create evidence that wasn’t there in the first place, as that would be a gross use of my powers to misconduct the course of justice. No, if I have to deal with the imagined, it is only brought about by the absolute adherence to the real, and to the reality of what was most likely to have happened under the particular circumstances, given such particular conditions.

Looking at the zombies taken purely out of science fiction and horror genres, there is no explanation based in real life, in absolute science without contrary imaginative speculation, for the possibility of such a thing existing. Once a person is dead, they can not be brought back to life again, and certainly not with walking capabilities and the potential to bring about destruction. Oh yes, medical professionals are sometimes lucky to jolt back a person to life after their heart has stopped and they have been without oxygen for several minutes, but even then there are the almost inherent risks of brain damage and the risk to the ability to function and think normally afterwards, which can be impaired. After hours of no movement, of no flow of blood and oxygen throughout the body, there is no chance that any life breathed into a dead body would bring about in it any high level of functioning. This is ignoring the fact, of course, that it is impossible in the first place.

This notion of a zombie is furthermore increasingly unlikely if thought is given to the stereotypical movie scenario of mad scientists digging up dead bodies to create a legion of un-dead servants. Oh yes, for creative purposes they destined for the length of their existence to be absolutely willing and ignorant of pain or disagreement, but it is likely, is it not, that they would be full of preservatives from funeral homes? That rules out any normal functioning, it rules out any ability to work or move like a normal human being, even more so than just zapping recently dead cadavers back into some sort of semi living existence. No, the idea of zombies is foolish, and always will be. Contrary to the imagined arguments of people who find satisfaction in make believe, or contentment in the creation of pretend scientific arguments, the bases of which are entirely made of whim and fancy, the idea of the living walking dead is not the best one to waste time and effort on.

In my life, in my job, I sometimes deal with the imaginary as a way of recreating the circumstances and events of a crime. I know for a fact that most bullets are shot out of guns, excusing the odd circumstance where they may fire of randomly under the endurance of some other external force. Knowing that most bullets come out of guns, it can be safely known that if I find a victim who has a bullet wound, that such a victim was shot by a gun. Taking all the collective knowledge of ballistics, I myself, or a ballistics specialist would look at all the relevant signs and evidence of a bullet having entered the victim’s body, and conclude what gun it may have been. If we find the bullet, we can be even surer of our conclusions and early assumptions.

Furthermore, if we conclude that the victim was shot with a bullet from a gun, if I can find out what kind of bullet or gun it may have been, then this helps. If I can ascertain at what angle and distance this bullet was shot from, it helps me move towards seeing how it might it have entered the body, and all these tiny bits of information contribute towards recreating the scene itself, if such a thing must be done. Therefore, while I may use by imagination in some way, I am not creating the impossible, I am instead working off the evidence of what has happened, and using such evidence to bring about a conclusion that is as close as possible to the reality of what actually took place. While I may not be able to say who breathed when or who moved their finger joints in the moments before death, I can, as a scientist rely on the facts and evidence to help me hold certain conclusions. Using such information, I can give an accurate portrayal and description of what events and what other actions contributed towards the death of a victim. That is a hell of a lot more worthy, the use of actual science to hold actual thoughts, than the use of imaginary scientific possibilities to bring about the highly unreal and impossible situation of a zombie apocalypse.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 930


What do you think?


What do I think? It is not any business of anyone in particular to try and grasp what I think. The human race gets great joy out of trying to understand one individual from another, it gets blindingly giddy trying to paint auspicious properties onto parts of the personality, tacking them where they obviously don’t belong. When I do my job, when I perform my duty as a public servant, when I process evidence to aid in the solving of horrendous criminal acts, I think, of course I think, that is quite and clearly obvious. These thoughts, while they may come from within myself, they themselves are the product of years of training, of following rules, of knowing the rules and the processes to the most minute detail possible. Part of my inherent nature or not, part of my preference of order, or divided from it, my thoughts, what I think, in terms of my job, are part of my education, my history, what has developed what I was into what I now am.

To be a CSI, a person needs to possess large amounts of intelligence, and even more copious stores of problem solving abilities. They need to receive the proper training and understand all the facts that they have learned. Good training, however, getting through all the required training even, does not always equate to a person being a good CSI, and if they are not, they generally fail also in areas of their service to the public. In the process of being both a trained CSI and one who is able to use all the particular learned abilities with significant success, I think my way through many problems. I examined and work my way through various scenes and evidence trails, and it is my duty to piece these together in a matter that is both coherent and true. What I think, when working, are thoughts related to my job, to the cases I am working on, the people I control, the various implicit and obvious duties I have to perform on any certain day, at any particular moment. It wouldn’t matter if I thought the sky was purple when the evidence says it is blue. I do not disagree with the story the evidence provides me with, the angle of an entrance wound, the type of bullet used, because there is no point in trying to argue with real, concrete hard facts. While I do not argue with what is true, part of my job is finding out what is true, first, and then assigning to it, a degree of certainty and relevance to the case being moved through.

When I was a small child, I was under the guidance of my parents, they would care for me and direct me towards how I was meant to function in life. They would provide me with the necessary abilities, equipment and knowledge to furnish my future life in splendid increments of maturity and responsibility. But they died, they were murdered, and life, being not all fair, or all forgiving, showed me that I can not have everything. I learned that day, that the concept of not wanting to think certain things, is more reliable an idea than a continual state of being mislead by putrid thoughts and irrelevant fears, or even by other people. Life continued on, as all lives do, and as I learned to think for myself, I gained my own kind of thoughtful independence. Love, the brief touch I had with it however, served to gain my downfall. It weakened me, and then I was reminded once more, that nothing is entirely fair, nothing lasts forever, and I certainly can not have everything or even a glimmer closer to it than I have always had.

What do I think? Of course you want to know what I think. I have shown you what I think. I think that life is not entirely fair, I think that human beings, the entirety of the human race, is made up at large of groups of people, either educated and useless, or uneducated and more useless still. Each person can query their ideas, their thoughts, even their troubles, until the world turns upside down and pigs fly, but in the end, life is still not equal, it is still not all forgiving or all giving. A long time ago, I learnt to think for myself and myself only. I think the thoughts I do, and I am responsible for the actions and consequential ramifications these thoughts lead me to doing or seeing. I am not privy to the blinding emotions of humanity because I killed out my soul, my happiness, my chance at normality, during a very, very distant moment in the past. I continue, however, to think, to breathe and to live, because I am one of the few educated and useful people who know how to think without the influences of emotion, who can be rational and acute with their ideas and their actions. What do I think? I think many things, but most of all, I am alive only because I think as I do. If I were any weaker kind of person, I should have shot myself when I was young and orphaned, and yet to be a future widower.

Are you happy now that you know what I think? How better has this made your life, your own thoughts, your own depths and squalid darkness? If you’re happy, then so be it. If you’re not, let me state this. I, simply, do not care.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 476


Schadenfreude.


A sad Nat King Cole tune wafted out of a crackling radio as the old man sat on his porch watching a glaring Las Vegas sunset. He liked the old songs because they reminded him of days passed by, of women gone by, of sources used and beaten until they were dry and dead, of things the way they used to be, the way they ought to be now. This particular man was not someone who found joy and satisfaction in all the rules and regulations that threatened to strangle and permanently exterminate the good law breaking way of life. The rifle that sat snake like quiet and snake like dangerous in his hands, laid across his lap like a sash of honor, silently agreed with him.

The heart attack struck quite suddenly, too many years of women, of cigarettes, of late night takeout orders culminating all of a sudden in throbbing pain and a massive thundering build up somewhere in his chest, like he was being flattened by a stampede of horses. The dots danced across his eyes like the stars he had intended to watch that night, and the snaky shotgun slipped to the floor, the very thing he had intended to shoot the cops with, the ones he knew were coming.


As the sun rose over Las Vegas the next morning, Conrad Ecklie had what an emotionally dead man might liken to an inner emotional smile. In this case, it was much easier to serve the search warrant when the person in hand was already dead. The missing parts of his face indicated, so far as the coroner was babbling on, some sort of animal having gotten at him during the night. As for the shotgun, well, it was all very good that the victim was dead then. It was also very lucky that the dead man’s switch he had been sitting on had been poorly made, and the cache of explosives inside the house had not blown up.

There was something very nice about the way it all had worked out, and having the guy dead would make it all that easier to rip apart his belongings and see into all the secrets he had indicated that he had hid away in special files, folders, secret hidey away places. It was nice he hadn’t shot anyone, it was nice that the explosive hadn’t blown up, it was, in a way, nice that the animals had chewed at his face, a kind of justified end for someone who was rumoured to have had a lifetime full of tying people to chairs and shooting them in the face. All in all, it was nice, and somewhere, deep down, an emotion existed, empty, largely blank emotion that was the closest the Dayshift would get to happy on that day, let alone any day at all.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 814


What are you wearing?


Bright Ecklie.

The hat said it all, the single feathered plumed sticking out of the band around the head. The dark colours, the snappy ironed pants, the gaudy tie, all angles and smooth fabric pressed into more corners yet. The face, painted serious but eyes sparkling in false ambition and merriment. He took the young woman by the hand and danced to a quick jazz number, saxophone blaring, piano tip tapping across the notes, the beat hectic and hurrying away, elusive and slightly melodramatic. The singer sung and they took their turn on the dance floor, moving to depression era steps that were secretly hopeful and remembering of a time, in the past, when they had been needed to fill the dancers with hope that there was a better day ahead. Being that there was no better day ahead for him, he had simply learnt them, practiced them, and put on the show. A competition was a competition and he thrived on competing, so whatever was needed was given, and whatever required function, was made to work.


Professional Ecklie.

Is tie was a mute blue, his suit an unimposing black or possibly very dark grey, his shirt a crisp white. Nothing was threatening, nothing gave away the impression that he was making any secretive jokes by dressing in a certain way, appearing with a certain manner intended. His face was clean, his hair was neat, and when he rose and launched into one variation of several previously prepared answers to the defence’s inquiry, his voice was impeccably smooth. It was not droll enough to be boring, but just like his clothing, it was not exciting enough that he was poking fun at the matter of homicide or criminal acts, or any of the serious matters he was being prompted to discuss and illustrate for the jury’s understanding.


Vicious Ecklie.

After all the years spent at the helm of people who inevitably made mistakes, who inevitable tripped up and found their way to his office, he had the art of inducing guilt rubbed down to a fine and imposing sheen. Leaning forward, he moved enough to slightly crease the front of his shirt, at enough of an awkward position that his coat started to strain at his shoulders and the end of his tie hung dangling in midair. His arms rested on his desk, fingers curled conspiratorially around paperwork, as if he had just been interrupted from something of great and vital importance. The man looked, for all intensive intents and proliferated purposes like a vulture waiting for the lost and unguarded child of prey to die of dehydration so he could rip out the guts and gobble the liver. He let the air hang, let it grow senescent while he waited for the nerves to build, and then launched into his tirade, letting his tie loosen a little as he gesticulated with hands and spat out with flaming words, the ineptitude of whatever mistake it was that had happened now, that should not ever happen again.

At home Ecklie.

For those few people who visited his home, he would usually arrive at the door looking as if he were about to go out to a business meeting. The pants weren’t as expensive as his work clothes, and he didn’t wear a tie, but the effect was the same. His shirts were ironed, his shoes polished, his socks never seemed to move further up or down his legs than they should have. He reserved only his least professional looking attire for gardening, for weeding and mowing the lawn where it was annoying to get grass stains in dress shirts and light coloured fabrics. When he dressed for bed, it was very much the same, no extravagant arrangements of colours, some stripes, some spots, maybe some paisley, but nothing chosen from desire. Everything was chosen from sensible colours and reliable brands that weren’t expensive because of who or where they came from, and that were mostly made of cotton, or a variation thereof.


Usual Ecklie.

Most of his clothes were chosen, bought and worn this way, so they weren’t offensive, so they didn’t have any other purpose than to look professional and orderly. What he wore wasn’t chosen for preference, it was chosen for intent, for what role he had to fill in that particular hour, or on that particular day. Never worn enough to look like he was wearing the same set of things day after day, but he never had more items than needed. Apart from those rare sets kept for his dancing competitions, from a life once lived, his clothes were much like him. Just like him they were rarely changing, and just like him they always existed with the same common sensibility that seemed to drive everything in his life, from personality to his unshakable need to hate everything and almost everyone.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 721


Customer service.


The life of a public servant is very much about customer service. I serve the public, I am at their service, to answer the beckons of the evil doers of society in order that their actions do not go away unnoticed, and hopefully, unpunished. In taking the evidence from the crime scene, I provide a service to the dead and to the still living public out there, the family, the work friends, the customers, the school friends and whoever else notices the absence of any particular murdered person. If I act angrily towards a victim’s family, if I do not do my job properly, and lose evidence, then I have no fulfilled my role as a public servant, as the provider of a service to the customers who would never be at the lab otherwise.

That is it, though, the very thing that all these sorry visitors don’t quite grasp. I get to hear the grievances and the sad weeping tales of hundreds of customers, of fathers who have lost daughters, mothers who have lost husbands, lover who has lost lover, it goes on and on and on, all this ceaseless woe. The public come here wish they didn’t have to come, wish they didn’t have to experience loss and grievance, but they don’t realise that if society tried to fix the various ills it contains, then they would not be here. If some cruel violence didn’t take place, then a particular person, some particular people, wouldn’t die, and the people left behind, oh well, they wouldn’t become my customers. If violence was removed, I would not have a profession left, because without violence, without the anger associated with it, there would be no murder, no killing, no friends, family, loved ones left behind for me to serve, for me to listen to their cries and their woes.

Life is not that easy, no, it never is that easy. When I wake up tomorrow, I will be the same man I have always been since I was a very young boy. There is no reversing the terror already struck across my life. I am an orphan, I am a widower, and when my wife died, I was my own customer service because otherwise, who would have pursued the case relentlessly, who else would have been as knowing as I was of every intricate detail of her life? One of the reasons I became a CSI in the first place was because I thought I could do a better job than half the witless runabouts who worked on the murder of my parents. I continue my job because I am a public servant, and the public, the unwilling customers who step onto the threshold of the lab, into our world of depravation and pain, well, they need my service. I am in a job that can not be removed from society unless we all become mindless imbeciles, so therefore, yes, I do think customer service is important. Of course it is. If I mess up, if I don’t do as I should, then things are affected, they don’t go as well as they should. At least, if I am here, doing my job, then someone is there, doing what needs to be done. Unlike some people, I go home and sleep at night only because my body necessitates it, and even then, after all these years, the nightmares still come.

When my customers, when the families and the parents, the husbands, wives, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, so on and so forth, when they come into my work domain, I give them a service and they go away. They move on, they don’t continually touch death all the time afterwards. Most of them aren’t completely broken, most of them fix themselves up and move on with their lives. No, they get to move on, but I don’t. I’ll be here, doing this job, providing customer service to people who shouldn’t need it if society was some sort of idealised normal, until I am forced out of it. The world is imperfect, and it is people like me, who are left to deal with the imperfections. All the vile sludge and evil of the world, people in my profession get to deal with it, and a majority of everyone else, well, they just forget.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 718


Are you an only child? Write about your siblings or lack thereof.


I am not a man for children. Never have been, and I never will be. As a child, I was a responsible, clear headed person, my own present self in miniature, as some of the lax headed receptionists at the lab may say. Thinking it through thoughtfully, however, I was, in every possible way, neat, tidy and well behaved. I saw the world through different eyes than of my peers, whose need to play infantile ball games far outstripped their desire to read books, or acquire knowledge about the big bad world which, in some years time, all of them would be thrown into, head first. Therefore it is perhaps, quite fortunate that the normality of my childhood ended so early as it did. Playing the role of suffering orphan, it gave me a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to get on with life and to learn about the future I was headed towards.

Suffice to say, I never had siblings. No brothers or sisters to play with, or to annoy, or to wheedle at for favours. My father was a good man, he loved me, but parenthood had not been an idea he had spent a whole lifetime wanting. He merely warmed to it in the years preceding my birth, seeing during those times of hardship and fighting, how valuable life really was. Perhaps, like so many men of his age, he had always wanted an heir to carry on his legacy, but I will never be sure of this, never having gotten to know him longer than the eight and a bit years I was conscious in his presence. Even then, a person such as myself can readily admit that the thoughts of a boy still possess some minor differences to those of a man. If not many, I had no desire for parenthood, that errant whim played out in dollhouse fantasies, and many decades later I still desire nothing of the sort.

As it is, I have never known my parents in any more an intimate way than I could gather from eight years of experiences, as well as from the possessions they left behind after they were murdered. Even with all the evidence of their existence laid bare before me, I have never been able to tell whether I was destined in those early years, to have a little brother or a sister. It is certain, however, from what my aunt explains to me, that I was the first child. In my family, we are simple and honest, and there weren’t any children that didn’t live, or were conceived and never made it to birth. Having never lived closely with a child of any sorts, in a family or friendly setting, I have never known what it is like, that experience, but to be boldly honest, I don’t regret it.

When I was a child, I thought with the mental acuity of someone far beyond my years. Oh, yes, I had my moments, playing with model planes, and running races, but, that was life. Once normality ended during those Christmas time festivities, things changed, life changed, I changed, and thus ended the possibility of siblings. Speaking more broadly, of children at general, mine or not, I was even married, I did even, briefly, contend the idea of having my own child. Michelle and I, we even discussed it once or twice, we even, contended the idea as something that could be a reality. Yet, life doesn’t go like that, it never does.

I have handled some cases involving children during the course of my job, I have seen freshly made orphans, all because of the vicious hands of some jilted ex-lover, or some crack head high on some new concoction splashed out on the streets. Most of them have people left, most of them will go on to be something more vibrant than what I am, and somewhere, in another time, I might be happy for them, instead of merely satisfied that my job was done and dusted with. I am not happy for them though, I do not feel happy anymore. Just like I do not have any siblings, or any children of my own, I do not feel happiness, and for any of these things, I never will.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 758


"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version." - Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)


There is a lot to life that is unexpected, and it does not surprise me that after all the years I have spent as a public servant that people still question the basic facts I tell them. If there is a driver’s licence, if there is some sort of identification on the body, that does positively identify the victim, then it’s so simple. Eventually, the next of kin is told, someone, somewhere is told, yet when it comes time to discuss the dirty deed of coming over to the morgue, people still question. You tell them their loved one is dead, and all they do is question. Oh yes, I know what it’s like to have people die, I know what it is like to lose the bottom of the world in a single, minute, moment, but the interrupted judgement of people mourning is more often than not, a hindrance to how quickly my work my go.

The problem is that people do not want to accept death when it personally affects them. If their mother, their brother, their aunt, niece, daughter, whoever, is killed, or commits suicide, or is slain in an accident, all they would dearly love to do is turn back time and prevent it from happening. The thing about sorrow is that it clouds a person’s judgement, it makes their thought processes unnecessarily long winded, and eventually, they come full circle and end up where they began. Death distracts people from getting on with life, from getting the job done of simply continuing onwards with their lives. Subsequently, it is left up to people like me to deal with people suffering the ramifications of loss, because the people themselves, usually, can not handle it, they can not process with enough speed, what has occurred.

If I were a more artistic type of person, I would liken the way people deal with death to how people deal with scary stories. Even I have watched a few horror movies in my time, heard a few scary stories. It doesn’t matter how unnatural or disturbing the actual content is, most of the horror comes from the build up. What happens in a scary story, in a film filled with blood and guts and gore, is that the terror builds up, it grows and it fed by all these literary devices I couldn’t care less about, and then come the moment of climax, it is just that, a moment, perhaps one that appears more shocking than the rest, but is a moment nonetheless.

What I have gathered about death, what other do not in the moments following the notification of the death of their loved one, or dear one or appreciated one, is that death is final. An accident, a shooting, a suicide, a jilted lover acting out their rage with a gun; once the person is dead, then they are dead, and they are never going to be anything else, ever. Oh, how I would have liked to grow up with parents, to have my wife still by me, all these years later, but it doesn’t work like that. I’ve had a handful of psychologists attempt to contact me, to council the long living, marred denizen of this wretched city, because they conclude I must, by now, be a nutcase, or quite close to it. No, I don’t speak to them. What is in the past is happened, and now it is irreversible. Damage can be fixed, effects can be mitigated in an attempt to patch over relationships or hurt feelings, but death does not get undone.

It does not surprise me how people react to the notification of the death of a loved one. All these years I have spent working around death, breathing it in and out like oxygen, the things it causes to happen, do not surprise me. I may not like the reaction much, but denial is a typical coping factor when the matter concerned is the murder or suicide of someone a person may have actually loved or appreciated on a level above friendship and below romance. People die, and people mourn, as unnecessary as it may feel, to me, to spend so much time concerned with memories and the past which can not be reversed, people do it all the same. I long since realised that what had happened to me, has happened to me, and can not be undone. I have long since realised that the only thing I can control is my own future, and, as such, I continue.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 596


What question do you most dread?


“Are you married yet?”

The question was never that explicit, but the old Greek ladies who liked to crowd around him when he made a particular point of standing alone after church, which was often, would always find a way of hinting at it. While his aunt could offer no such pretence of having forgotten his marred past in concerns to affairs of a marital nature, these women, these harpies of social inquest, had a firm grasp of such a luxury. He was the prodigal son after all, the man who had survived such tragedy that they so often conveniently forgot, one of the only men of his generation left in the church who had not married himself off to some beauty queen and embarked about producing legions of children. Or so the antiquated thought process of rabidly interested, aging, Greek female senior citizens went.


“Where did you learn all this?”

This question was often directly asked, because friends of friends would want him, desire him, to lead their younger dance students in private lessons when they themselves were too busy. Or they might want him to briefly fill in the role of a missing dancer, an ill dancer, an injured dancer, the list went on and on. Inevitably, he would sometimes end up leading inexperienced dancers in a salsa, a merengue, a waltz, and they would inquire, desiring to know where and how they could learn what he had spent an entire lifetime crafting into existence. The answer he gave, if he could be bothered to do so, was always short, and always indicated that they needed to apply themselves, that they needed to practice more, preferably without him.


“Why don’t you move on?”

This question was never asked, it was never spoken, because Grissom himself already knew the answer. Ecklie and Grissom had known each other long enough, Ecklie had hated Grissom long enough, had put up with him for so long that they both knew why the other, at that precise moment in their shared lives, was not moving on with things. Grissom was too attached to what he had in Las Vegas, and the Dayshift himself, had been swallowed by it all at the age of eight, never to escape, never to move on or leave. He was destined to die in the very city he had been born in, without ever having had the chance to be free from it, or to change himself for the better. It wasn’t like he ever bothered to answer the question, because he had long since stopped caring about such things, and Grissom, although Conrad saw the inquiry flash occasionally in his eyes, knew better to pry into areas that would never be resolved within any imaginable lifetime.


“Why don’t you just die?”

The viciousness of his mind would run itself around the inside of his head, only to be silenced under the weight of too many years of resolve not to feel anything, no happiness, no survivor’s guilt, no pleading desire to fix all the issues of un-repenting anger. It was not a question he did dread, none of them were questions he dreaded, because Conrad Julius Ecklie felt no fear, not anymore, not ever to come, never ever. This question though, it had an answer that he never acknowledged, but which sung itself to the heavens all the same, or at least what was left of his darkened, blackened, numbed heart. He lived, because Michelle had lived, and because Michelle had lived, he would continue to undergo life as long as humanly possible.

Name: Conrad Ecklie

Fandom:
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Word Count: 669


"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who watches the watchmen?)


Crouching on the top of the wall, he watched the procession of men below him, the careful organisation of their footfalls and their guarded faces, the way their guns were held high, flags raised against the upcoming battle. He had seen this before, and it wasn’t unusual, some drug fuelled man, his paranoia hyped by some new concoction on the street. The suspect had guns, people like this always had guns, they believed in their twisted fundamental rights after all.

The bottom of his coat fluttered in an empty wind as the man leapt down from his perch. The wall was not built that high and he landed soundly on his feet before blending in with the rest of the living shadows that stood watch nearby. There was nothing incredulous about the situation, nothing that surprised him, not after all these years, not after all the time he had spent watching and studying the stupidity of humanity. It was a simple thing, that situation, it was not new, it was familiar, it was, not a regular happening, but it happened enough that he knew of it and remembered the style of what was to come. The shouting, the negotiation, the touch and go persuasion of words against shouts, hands against guns, all of it simple procedure, the orderly absence of normal order and function.

The back door came tumbling down and bouncing lights illuminated a horrid inner cityscape constructed out of dirty dishes and piles of clothing, or rubbish, it could have been either. Heavy boots crunched over unidentifiable refuse on the floor, and the Dayshift briefly wondered if he would ever get the smell out of his shoes, the all pervading stench of rotten food, of waste and ignorance. The men ahead of him spread out, clearing rooms and stamping up stairs with him following close behind, not near enough to be the first one in, but the person who would follow soon after, able to relish in the action nonetheless.

They came across the individual of the hour in an upstairs room, his arms flailing themselves around rapidly as he worked some large metal construct that rested in the middle of time worn floorboards. Completely naked, he stood there, tool in one hand, gun clasped in the other, two women huddled in the corner, waiting, watching, hoping perhaps, for an imminent salvation. As long as they didn’t interrupt him, the suspect seemed content to continue work on his monstrosity, but the moment one of the living shadows moved forward, the second he made to touch the man’s arm, the addict lashed out. A whip quick fist containing a wrench launched itself into rapid motion, yet it was over in seconds, all the action, the fighting, the disarming, the handcuffing.

It was all so simple. For all the build up, as long as they got access to the person at hand, as long as they were able to corner whoever it turned out to be, the wait to move on with the process, it never took that long. The Dayshift finished his shift some hours later and went home, got on with doing his regular life, his daily schedule, and nothing changed. The criminals who were criminals today would be criminals tomorrow, except tomorrow, there may be, probably would be, just a handful more or a handful less, who knew. No one would watch him though, no one would shift against him, the ever watching man, because he was only one of hundreds of public servants, ever moving to restrain crime, to try and halt it and always, always, failing to snuff it out completely. In the grand scheme of things, he was only one part. He could do his own best, but his own best would never be enough to stop everything, it would only ever contribute to how it was managed. One man against many, one team of people, his team, against all that there was in their domain, and it would never, ever, be enough.