I started the Death and the Detective series from the writing prompts challenges at Creative Copy Challenge. The words in bold are the writing prompts from the challenge.
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Challenge #89
The musty smell wrapped invisible fingers of pain around the brightly colored bottles that held an apothecary’s dream. Eyes brightened with the madness of remembering the trace of blood the minx had left behind. He loved when they struggled.
He mixed a puree of nature’s evil elixir of the gentle daffodil, the majestic Lily of the Valley, and wrapped it all with the reverent touch of foxglove. So common, so innocuous, yet few knew their deadly kiss of poison. He felt a shimmer of anticipation as his eyes moved to his wall of luscious victims. He felt the need to linger on his ultimate target. How would he play it?
The naked sound of silence awakened to his rasping breath as he grew more and more excited – excited where he’d been and where he had to go. He would show the world. The echoing sound of childhood rants drummed in a relentless beat, “Willy, Willy, bananas and nuts, lives in his mother’s house of sluts.”
“Stop it. Shut your face or I’ll cut out your tongue like the whore before you,” he sobbed like the slender, wand of a child lost so long ago. There was no treacle for the poison of memories burnt in the wheat field of forgotten dreams.
Challenge #91
In his own form of keyword search, Detective Brett Connors scribbled the words across the lined, yellow tablet with the curling pages.
Jane Doe #1
Brunette
5’9”
Slender build
Coffin
Die whore
Drug user
Mission Bay
Tongue cut out
Jane Doe #2
Blonde
5’9”
Slender build
Electrode burns
Drugs in system-user?
Doc’s balcony
Eyes cut out
“You know if you would reinvest your paycheck, you could probably get a second-hand laptop.”
“You’re a real card, McNeill. What do you want?”
“Aren’t we the cranky one,” his fellow detective, Pat McNeill, responded. “Have another run-in with the lady shrink?”
“McNeill, some of us are working here. So, unless you’ve got a sustainable reason for being here, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”
“You don’t have a door. Okay, okay,” he said, raising his hands in surrender at Brett’s curled lip. Tossing a folder on Brett’s desk, Pat remarked, “I think this will give me a preemptive pass to your undying gratitude.”
Moving the folder off his badge that lay on top of his desk, Brett flipped open the folder.
“We got a hit on the DNA.”
“Our killer finally made a mistake.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not.”
“What the hell does that mean? Are you purposely trying to obfuscate this discussion or does it just come naturally?”
“Obfuscate? Have you been reading again? I told you that was dangerous for your health. Okay, shit, you used to have a sense of humor. We got a hit on the DNA, but here’s the thing. It’s some dead guy’s.”
“Someone they just brought in?”
“No, someone who’s been dead for five years.”
“Have you been hitting the bourbon again, McNeill?”
“That is an unsubstantiated rumor. I would never relinquish my love affair with the King of Kings’ Beer for rot-gut whiskey. The rumor holds absolutely no credence.”
“%#& you, McNeill.”
“I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you,but thanks for the offer.”
Challenge #93
“Soon they will understand, ” the killer silently spoke to one no longer there.
He was tired of all the rhetoric in the news. Couldn’t they come up with something more creative than the “torturer of women”? Journalism was not what it used to be. So-called writers would embalm words in placid replication, whipping the public with the senseless flagellation of mediocrity.
“There is no sense of pride in one’s work, Robert,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?”
Frustrated at the interruption, he calmed himself as Robert offered a soothing response in his ear.
“No, I’m fine, thank you.”
“Did you want another margarita or more guacomole?”
Battling for control, he wrapped his hand around the bougianvillia, surrounding the outside patio. Crushing it, he imagined it to be the skinny neck of the unattractive, annoying waitress. She was not worthy of his passion.
“I’m fine. Just bring me the check please.”
“We should have dined at home with the fine bottle of pinot noir, Robert,” he mumbled, tracing the stigmata wounds left by the the sharp thorns of the bougianvillia, “instead of enduring the impudent behavior of someone so beneath us.”
Flicking his coat in disgust, he rose – the incident soon forgotten.
The waitress tracked his exit with a cautious look at the man who had dined alone.
“Freakin’ nut case.”
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