This series is a form of creative writing known as fan fiction. Detective Robert Goren is a regular character on the Dick Wolf television show, Law & Order: Criminal Intent. What follows is one longtime viewer's breath of life into an already popular character.

Last Sunday I woke a bit later than usual. Sleeping late always leaves me feeling out of sorts. It's as if my body realizes just how tired it really is and I end up feeling exhausted instead of refreshed. I was fumbling around trying to make coffee when bits and pieces of a nightmare started coming back to me. Something about a little boy found in the river. Somehow I knew that his father was responsible and had tossed him off the bridge alive because in the dream there was a struggle, a kid screaming and then a boy's body being pulled. That was pretty much the sequence or at least it was how I remembered it to be. It was vivid and I knew it was so real to me because well, it triggered me but I tried to let it go. Awhile later I went out to grab a paper and there on the front page I read:

Boy Thrown From Bridge By Father Feared Dead

I was off of work and apparently this had transpired late the night before. By morning they were still searching for the boy's body.

This kind of thing has happened to me before, I don't know why. Maybe I've been doing this for so long that I instinctively know the patterns of crime waves and sense what hasn't happened in awhile. Maybe it's a fluke or maybe it's because my dreams are so frequently frightening and disturbing that sooner or later I have to get it right.

I don't know but it really is my secondary thought.

My first thought was knowing, absolutely knowing how frightened that boy was.

I spoke with my mother last night - a normal occurrence. I always check in with her when I get home from work. This week she has been a bit clearer than I've seen her in awhile. I'm used to her illness kind of going in cycles. She has a rough patch and then slowly comes out of it and seems fine. Almost like she doesn't even belong in Carmel Ridge. Her lucid weeks are spent with her inhaling every bit of reading material that she can get her hands on. It's almost as if she makes up for the time she lost while being sedated or heavily medicated. No matter how much I bring her to read, the next week she'll have moved on to a pile of stuff that other patients or nurses have given to her.