Title: Three in a Row
Prompt:
writerverse challenge #02 september mini table of doom
Book Title Used:
The Fourth Bear (Nursery Crimes #2, by Jasper Fforde)
Word Count: 323
Rating: G
Original/Fandom: original (
Zeke Jones ‘verse)
Summary: Sometimes the clue you need is the one that’s not there.
Note(s): originally posted to the
writerverse wv_library Three in a Row
“There’s something missing,” I said.
Howell looked up at me, over the folders of crime scene photographs spread out across both our desks. “What’s missing?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If I knew that, I could probably solve the case.”
The case was the murder of a young woman, a recent graduate of Temple University who had lived in one of Philly’s nicer apartment blocks. It looked like a pretty straight-forward burglary-gone-wrong, but there was a surprising lack of forensic evidence.
“Then,” my partner suggested, “let’s go through what we do have.”
I hummed in agreement, pulling each of the evidence photos in one at a time, but nothing particularly stood out, until I got to one of the crime scene shots showing the entire bedroom. Stuck in the frame of the victim’s mirror were some print-outs of candid shots, the young woman and several friends sitting on her bed in that same room.
“Sir, do we have all the items from the victim’s room? Or even just a better picture of her mirror.”
Howell flipped through the pictures closest to him, and handed me one. It was a shot of the blood-spatter on the mirror’s surface, with the standard ruler to measure its size, but it also had a clear image of the victim’s photos.
“What do you see, Jones?” my partner asked.
“On the shelf, sir,” I said. “In the victim’s pictures, there’s four teddy bears behind her. But in the crime scene photos, there’s only three. If it was a gift from someone, a boyfriend she dumped, maybe-”
Howell was out of his seat before I could finish, snagging my jacket from the back of my chair and shoving it at me once I was on my feet, too. “The detectives talked to an ex-boyfriend,” he said. “Look up his address on the squad car computer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Jones?”
“Yes, sir?”
My partner’s lips quirked upward. “Good work.”
THE END
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