Opinions Needed

Hello everyone, I've been living with OCD for many years, and I've been writing stories for just as long. Writing has always been one of the few things that helps quiet my mind. I've recently finished a story about a New York City detective who lives with OCD. While it's a crime mystery first and foremost, I wanted to portray OCD as honestly and realistically as I could. If anyone has the time to read it, I'd be incredibly grateful for your thoughts and feedback. It's around a 15–20 minute read. Thank you in advance to anyone who chooses to give it a chance. James The Davis File Detective Jack Hunter lingered in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment with his hand on the stove knob. Off. He could see the white marker aligned upward. He remembered turning it and had even snapped a photo on his phone before leaving. Still, the doubt crept in. What if you accidentally switched it back on without realizing? Jack studied the cooker. “No,” he murmured. His therapist had advised him not to argue with intrusive thoughts. Arguing only magnified them. He was meant to accept the uncertainty and walk away. Maybe it was off. Maybe it wasn’t. His chest tightened. He grabbed his coat, moved to the front door, then went back to check the knob again. After checking a third time, he finally headed into the hallway. Then another thought arrived. What if the stove starts a fire? What if the family upstairs dies because of you? Jack froze outside his door. His fingers hovered over the key. He understood what was happening. The thought was unwanted, irrational, and cruel. Knowing that didn’t make the fear vanish. He forced himself down the stairs. By the time he reached the NYPD precinct in Manhattan, he was twenty-three minutes late. Detective Kelly Lopez sat at her desk with two coffees and a cardboard box balanced on a pile of files. “You look terrible,” she said. “Good morning to you too.” “It ceased being morning for you twenty-three minutes ago.” Jack took off his coat. “There was a train delay.” Kelly observed him as he sat. They’d worked together for three years; she could tell when he was fibbing, especially when he blamed public transport. “You mean the cooker?” she asked. Jack opened one of the coffees. “I don’t want to talk about it.” “All right.” Kelly’s restraint was something he appreciated. She didn’t tell him to relax and she didn’t ridicule him for double-checking. She understood OCD wasn’t simply about cleanliness or liking things in order. Jack’s flat was often piled with laundry, old case files and unopened letters. The problem was his head, not his desk. Sergeant Ethan Anderson joined them. “Lieutenant wants you in the briefing room.” “Why?” Kelly asked. Anderson nodded at the cardboard box. “Because that dead lawyer’s been waiting a decade for someone to do their job.” The briefing room smelled of old coffee and wet coats. Lieutenant Gabriella Murphy stood by the whiteboard while Captain Liam Romano studied a thin folder. Murphy’s quiet composure made others uneasy; she rarely needed to raise her voice. Romano laid the folder on the table. “Leon Davis,” he said. “Forty-one, corporate lawyer. Shot twice in Central Park on October eighteenth, 2009.” Kelly opened the folder. The first photo depicted a man lying beside a park bench. He wore an expensive grey overcoat, and blood had soaked through the front of his shirt. “No weapon recovered,” Romano said. “No witnesses of use. No sign of robbery. His wallet, watch and phone were still on him.” “Why are we reopening this?” Jack asked. Lieutenant Murphy handed him a clear evidence sleeve. Inside was an old parking ticket. “This turned up behind the lining of the victim’s briefcase during a recent audit of evidence. It should have been found back in 2009.” Jack read the faded details. A parking garage in Queens. October 17, 2009. The night before Leon Davis was killed. “Maybe he parked there,” Kelly suggested. “He didn’t own a car,” Murphy replied. Jack looked at the receipt again. There was handwriting on the back. R. Bell. 11:30. Bring documents. “Who’s R. Bell?” Jack asked. “That,” Captain Romano said, “is what you’re going to learn.” --- Leon Davis had lived with his wife Melissa in a brownstone near Park Slope. By 2019, Melissa Davis still occupied the house alone. She led Jack and Kelly into a sitting room full of family photos. Leon appeared in many of them, grinning beside his wife at charity events, weddings and holiday gatherings. “He was a good man,” Melissa said. “Whatever the papers said after his death, he was a good man.” “What did the papers say?” Kelly asked. “That he had enemies. That he defended criminals. That he was hiding something.” “Was he?” Melissa fixed Kelly with a stare. Jack saw her right hand clinging to the arm of the chair. "Mrs. Davis," he asked, "did your husband ever mention someone called R. Bell?" Her grip grew firmer. "No." The reply was too swift. Jack felt that familiar tug in his head. He wanted to ask the question again. Then again, slightly reworded. He wanted to be sure she was lying. Maybe you read her wrong. Maybe you're accusing an innocent widow. Maybe you'll ruin her life. The thoughts started to loop. Kelly carried on with the interview while Jack kept looking at the same photograph on the mantel. Leon and Melissa standing outside a restaurant. Leon wore a dark suit. Partially cropped by the frame was another man. Jack leaned forward. "Who is this?" Melissa looked at the photo. "A client of Leon's." "Name?" "I don't remember." Jack studied her face. Kelly leaned in toward the picture. "That's Victor Bell." Melissa shut her eyes. Victor Bell had been an enforcer in the Moretti crime family. He had disappeared in 2011 and was thought to be dead. "Your husband knew him," Jack said. "He once represented him." "The parking receipt says R. Bell." "I don't know anything about that.” “Victor’s brother was Raymond Bell,” Kelly said. Melissa’s expression shifted. Only a little, but enough. --- Back at the station, Kelly combed the crime database while Jack plastered a wall with photos, bank records and past interview transcripts. Sergeant Anderson lingered in the doorway. “Don’t lose yourself in it,” he cautioned. “I’m on it.” “I know what you call it.” Jack paid him no mind. Years before, he had once spent thirty-six hours straight re-reading witness statements because he was sure a confession was buried in an otherwise ordinary sentence. There had been no confession. He had collapsed in the precinct bathroom. Anderson had been the one to find him. Jack examined Leon Davis’s bank statements. In the six months prior to his death, Leon had withdrawn almost eighty thousand dollars in cash. The cash never turned up. Kelly leaned back. “Raymond Bell died in 2014. Liver failure.” “So we can’t question him.” “No. But he ran a social club in Queens until 2010.” “The parking garage was three streets over.” Kelly nodded. “Seems our lawyer kept interesting company.” Jack sifted through the older files again. Leon had been employed at one of the city’s biggest commercial law firms. On paper he handled property disputes and corporate takeovers. Off the books, he’d represented Victor Bell twice without recording the billing. Jack read the line over. And again. Then he pulled the original document to confirm the typed copy hadn’t been altered. Kelly noticed. “You already checked that.” “I’m verifying it.” “You verified it five minutes ago.” Jack felt irritation creeping up. “I know how to read a file.” "I never said you didn't." "I'm trying to stop us from making a mistake." Kelly stood up. "And I'm trying to stop you wasting the whole day looking for a sentence that's already there." Silence fell over the room. Jack stared away from her. Kelly dropped her voice. "You're not the only one who has to make this right." He found that hard to accept. His OCD argued that responsibility could never be shared; if anything went wrong it would ultimately be his fault. "I need some air," he said. --- The Queens social club had been turned into a phone repair shop. The current proprietor let Jack and Kelly into the basement, where abandoned furniture and shattered display cabinets had been left. Jack trained his torch along the brick. "What exactly are we looking for?" Kelly asked. "I don't know." "Very comforting." They searched for almost an hour and found nothing. Then Jack spotted four screw marks framing a neat rectangle in the wall. "Something was mounted here." Kelly shrugged. "Maybe a picture. Maybe a mirror." Jack pressed his hand to the bricks. The clean patch was about the size of a security monitor. He glanced toward the basement stairs. "Maybe they had cameras." The shop owner knew nothing about them, but the old landlord remembered an archived recording system tucked in a locked cupboard. Most tapes had been discarded when the club shut. Most, but not all. Three dusty boxes had been stored in the Bronx. Two days later Jack and Kelly sat in a dim evidence room watching silent surveillance footage from 2009. Hours slipped by. Jack's eyes burned. Every time he tried to speed ahead, an intrusive thought warned him he might skip the precise moment they needed. What if the killer shows up for a single second? What if you miss him? What if this is your only chance? He started rewinding and replaying segments. Kelly reached out and stopped the video. "We're speeding it up." "I could miss something." "We both could. That doesn't mean we spend three months watching an empty hallway." "You don't know what's on it." "Neither do you." Jack kept his eyes on the screen. The anxiety was physical, a pressure under his ribs. Kelly changed the playback speed. Jack wanted to stop her, to grab the mouse and go back to the beginning. Instead he hid his hands beneath the table. "Fine," he said. It didn't feel fine. But he let the footage run. At 11:42 p.m. on October seventeenth, Leon Davis walked into the club. Raymond Bell appeared thirty seconds later. Then a third man came into view. Kelly froze the image. The man was heavyset and wore a long coat; as he turned toward the camera half his face was visible. Jack recognised him from an organised crime file: Anthony Moretti, son of family boss Salvatore Moretti. "He met with the mafia the night before he died," Kelly said. "Why?" --- Leon’s former assistant, Claire Benson, was now working at a legal aid office in Lower Manhattan. She looked afraid when Jack showed her the photograph of Moretti. "I told the detectives in 2009 that Leon was acting strangely," she said. "It's not in the report," Kelly replied. "They said grief was affecting my memory." "What did you see?" Jack asked. Claire folded her arms. Leon maintained two datebooks. One stayed at the office; the other was a black leather book he carried with him everywhere. "No second book was recovered," Kelly said. "I know." "Did you ever look through it?" "Once. It had initials, addresses, entries about payments. I assumed he was seeing someone." "Was he?" Claire paused. "He kept another apartment." Melissa Davis had never told them about it. The flat was in Washington Heights and had been leased under the name Daniel Lewis. The lease had lapsed nine years ago, but the building manager remembered Leon. "He’d come at night," the manager recalled. "Sometimes men visited him. Men in suits. Men who looked like they didn’t need suits." Police files showed a locksmith cleared the apartment after the rent stopped being paid. Most of Leon’s possessions had been moved into a storage unit. The account that paid for the unit remained active, funded automatically from a trust set up before his death. Inside the storage space, Jack and Kelly found legal texts, old suits and boxes of paperwork. They also discovered the black appointment book. Jack wore gloves as he flipped through it. There were entries for payments from companies tied to Moretti, appointments, and mentions of court cases. "He wasn’t just representing them," Kelly observed. "He was laundering information." Jack kept seeing the same other name: Caruso. The Caruso family had been battling the Morettis for construction contracts in Queens and Brooklyn through the late 2000s. At the back of the notebook Leon had scrawled: "A.M. knows. Wants files returned. Caruso offering protection. M says leave city." Kelly read the note twice. "Leon was working for both families," she said. "And both sides knew," Jack added. He flipped to the next page; it had been torn away. A faint impression remained on the sheet beneath. The book went to the lab and technicians were able to recover part of the missing line: "Meet C.P. Bethesda Terrace. Ten p.m. Bring ledger." Leon was murdered near Bethesda Terrace at about 10:15 p.m. Captain Romano summoned Jack and Kelly to his office. "C.P. could be anyone," he warned. "Carlo Pagano," Kelly answered. "He was the Caruso family enforcer in 2009." "Where is he now?" Romano asked. "He's in a federal prison in Pennsylvania." Lieutenant Murphy, standing by the window, observed, "Pagano won't confess just because you have a damaged notebook." "He might if we can prove Moretti set up the meeting," Jack said. "And how do you plan to prove that?" Romano asked. Jack spread several enlarged crime-scene photos on the captain's desk — shots of Leon's coat, the park bench, and a close-up of the mud on Leon's shoes. "I saw something in the original photos," Jack said; Kelly looked surprised — this was the first she had heard of it. Jack pointed at the mud. "There are pale fragments mixed in with the dirt. The 2009 report calls it gravel." "And?" Romano asked. "The path near Bethesda Terrace used dark crushed stone in 2009. Those pale pieces couldn't have come from the scene." The lab analyzed the preserved shoes. The fragments were identified as limestone dust mixed with red brick — the same material used at a Caruso-owned construction site near the Queens social club. Records showed that Carlo Pagano had been in charge of that site. A former crew member remembered seeing Leon Davis there the afternoon before he was killed. Pagano had argued with him beside a portable office. The witness had kept quiet for ten years because he feared the Caruso family; by 2019 most of its senior figures were dead, imprisoned, or retired. Jack and Kelly drove to Pennsylvania. Carlo Pagano was seventy-two and moved around with an oxygen tank. He smiled when they brought up Leon Davis. “Lawyer thought he was smarter than everybody.” “Did Anthony Moretti pay you to kill him?” Kelly asked. Pagano laughed until he started to cough. Jack felt the urge to repeat the question—maybe Pagano’s face would give him away, maybe a different phrasing would crack him. Instead, Jack let Kelly take over. She laid copies of the appointment book, the security footage, and the laboratory report on the table. “Leon was stealing from the Morettis,” she said. “Then he offered their financial records to the Carusos. You arranged the meeting in Central Park.” Pagano’s smile faded. “Moretti wanted his documents back,” Kelly continued. “The Carusos wanted Leon silenced before he switched sides again.” “You’ve got an old man in prison,” Pagano said. “Congratulations.” “We’ve got enough to put Anthony Moretti in here too,” Jack replied. “Unless you tell us who pulled the trigger.” Pagano stared at him. Doubt filled Jack’s head. You said it wrong. You pushed too hard. You ruined it. He wanted to correct himself, to start the interview over. He stayed silent. After nearly a minute, Pagano spoke. “Moretti funded the meeting. We all agreed the lawyer had become a liability to everyone.” “Who pulled the trigger?” Kelly asked. Pagano glanced at the corner camera. “That was me.” --- Anthony Moretti was taken into custody outside his Staten Island house three weeks later. He denied commissioning the killing, but bank records revealed a transfer to a company linked to Caruso two days after Leon’s death. Pagano accepted a deal to testify in return for being moved to a medical prison. After the arrests, Melissa Davis arrived at the station. She sat opposite Jack and Kelly, clutching the black appointment book. “I knew about the apartment,” she confessed. “I knew Leon was mixed up with dangerous people. He told me he was trying to get away.” “Why didn’t you go to the police?” Kelly asked. “He said they’d kill me too.” Her voice broke. “For ten years I kept telling myself he was innocent.” Jack understood the impulse to make something definite out of uncertainty. He also knew the price of that need. “Your husband took part in the crimes,” he said softly. “But he didn’t deserve to be killed.” Melissa nodded, though the reply offered little solace. Some facts aren't comforting. --- That night Jack returned to his Brooklyn apartment. He stood before the stove. The control was turned straight up. Off. He pulled his phone out, then stopped before opening the camera. Anxiety spiked. What if you forget? What if you touch it later? What if someone dies? He turned away. Three steps later he came back. He checked once. Disappointment washed over him. For a moment he thought about checking again because he’d already failed. Then he remembered his therapist’s words: recovery isn’t ruined by a single compulsion. It isn’t linear. There’s no flawless attempt. Jack went into the living room and sat with the anxiety. It didn’t leave. His hands shook. His imagination produced images of smoke, flames and people screaming from upstairs. He didn’t go back to the kitchen. After twenty minutes the fear hadn’t vanished, but it had eased enough for his breathing to steady. His phone rang. Kelly. “You home?” she asked. “Yeah.” “How many times?” Jack looked at the kitchen. “Once.” “That’s good.” “It doesn’t feel good.” “It doesn’t have to.” Jack eased back onto the sofa. For a decade the Davis file had sat boxed up, waiting for someone to see it differently. His OCD had created hold-ups, arguments and nights when he could barely function. It hadn’t solved the case. Evidence, teamwork and people finally choosing to talk had. He had noticed the limestone on Leon’s shoes, but he could just as easily have trapped himself re-reading the same report until the real investigation passed him by. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kelly said. “Tomorrow.” Before he could end the call another name popped up: Sergeant Ethan Anderson. Jack answered. “You still at the precinct?” Anderson asked. “No.” “Good. Don’t come back tonight.” Jack sat up. “Why?” Anderson paused. “A demolition crew opened a sealed wall in a Bronx apartment building. They found a suitcase inside.” Jack waited. “There are children’s clothes in it,” Anderson went on. “And a photograph of a family reported missing in 1997.” “Who’s got the file?” Jack asked. “Lieutenant Murphy.” Jack closed his eyes. His mind was already racing through possibilities, questions and mistakes that hadn’t happened yet. He let them run through his head without answering. “I’ll be there in the morning,” he said. Then he set his phone down and stayed seated, leaving the next case where it belonged. On the horizon…