I've been looking at kiddy porn all morning.

I figure I have one more year of this before I'm so burned out on it that I can't function any more. My captain totally understands; he used to work juvenile sex crimes and he said that he had to stop when he started having nightmares of red ants crawling all over him. One of my lieutenants when I was working on the road said the same thing about the nightmares when she was working in juvenile--except her nightmares were about white rooms that she couldn't get out of.

And I find that it's much harder to do this work now that I have a daughter. Some of these kids are so young... god almighty, they're just babies. Their lives have been stolen, and you just know they end up as drug addicts or porn stars or just plain dead. And I can't decide which is more tragic: the little girls who are in obvious distress when they're being raped, or the ones who have obviously been through it so much and have been so well trained that they act like the most experienced of porn stars with the licking of lips and the come hither gestures.

No nightmares for me yet, but I told my captain that when they start I'm going to come to him and say, "I can't do this anymore." He understood.