What might have been....

When Superintendent Vetter retired, they threw her a party.  Everyone was there—not just her current peers and subordinates, not just the Chief, but everyone going back to the very start of her career.  Her old training officer had driven down from the Kawarthas; Captain Reese had flown up from Florida; Dan Carruthers, who had been her partner for eight years in Robbery, had taken a couple of vacation days from his security job in Ottawa.
Her father almost put the kibosh on the good feeling by roasting her for never making Chief.  He'd long since parlayed his job on the Police Commission into a political career, got a cabinet post, and finally retired from the Senate.  Never let her forget it.
She'd never cared for politics.  As far as she was concerned, it was the downside of promotion.  Well, one of them:  the truth was, she'd always preferred getting out in the field.  Supervising while others did the real work was hardly a substitute for interviewing witnesses, deducing guilt, making the arrest, and interrogating the suspect into confession.  There was real satisfaction in a high clearance rate when you'd done it yourself.  Nevertheless, she was enough her father's daughter to know that, if you wanted to influence the way the force evolved, you had to have the rank to make the changes yourself.
So, although she missed working the cases she'd had to delegate to others, she had no regrets about the Metro Police she was leaving for the next generation.  Nor did she have personal regrets:  she'd married (if not as soon as her mother would have liked), and had two kids, now in college.  Both had come back, skipping classes in mid term, in order to attend their mother's retirement.  She looked at them, and her husband, and her old colleagues; and saw their pride.
She received the gold watch from the Chief, and made her little speech.  Her family clapped and beamed.  They all knew, even Dad, that her career had been worthy of a Vetter.
(Mind you, there was always that case.  The double homicide, so soon after she'd made detective.)
Oh, from anyone else's point of view, it could hardly count against her career.  But still...it bothered her:  the mysterious death of her first partner in plainclothes and a pathologist from the Coroner's Office.  Their bodies had been found in his loft, the blinds close shut, the bodies chill, the blood dry.  From the position of the stab wounds, there was no way it could have been murder-suicide, though that would have been the simple way to close the case.
She'd been in hospital at the time, yearning to be part of the investigation.  Impossible, of course:  she'd been convalescent for weeks; and, by the time she passed the physical, there was only a cold, cold trail.  And it was not her case, anyway:  by then, she had been transferred to Robbery and partnered with Carruthers, with their own crime scenes to keep them busy.
But she never forgot.  (It wasn't exactly something to forget.)  When she made Chief of Detectives, she'd put some new pair of hotshot officers on the case, in the hope....
Vain hope.
It still remained on the books, still open after all these years:  the cold case she'd never been able to crack.  The case she could never forget....
Well, they all have that one case, don't they?...every retired cop.