Can anyone tell me how this sounds so far?
It was a cold and rainy night when Detective James Morrison was called to investigate a crime scene. It was a small apartment, two rooms, a small kitchen, and one bathroom. It was modestly decorated with paintings and some furniture. Detective Morrison stepped into the spare room turned studio, his eyes sweeping over the chaos of overturned stools and scattered tools. The blind artist, Cecil Woods, lay slumped in his chair, fingers splayed across a blank canvas as if still searching for shape. In the corner, a glass sculpture lay, shattered across the floor; Morrison’s shoulders loosened at the sight, a small breath leaving him that no one around him noticed.
His eyes were fixed on the shattered pieces of stained glass. Crimson, aqua, gold, and silver lay scattered across the floor like broken thoughts, each fragment catching the light. He moved slowly toward them, kneeling as if to study, fingers hovering just above the glass, tracing shapes he didn’t need to see. Anyone watching would think he was trying to imagine what the finished piece might have been. When he finally looked back at Cecil Woods, the man’s eyes were locked wide open, frozen in a terror Morrison refused to acknowledge. Morrison slowly rose to his feet and stepped closer to the body.
“You never saw them coming, did you, Cecil?” he murmured, as if speaking to the room more than the corpse.
His deep mocha eyes flicked to the artist’s hands again, each finger sliced to ribbons, the torn skin stiffening in the air. He let his gaze linger there a beat too long before straightening, his expression already smoothing into something professional as he turned toward the nearest officer. Officer Raven, a young woman still new to the force, approached Detective Morrison, notebook in hand.
“Sir, there is no sign of a break-in or a struggle. Nothing of value was taken,” she reported, glancing past him at the shattered glass.
“This was not a robbery gone wrong, then,” Morrison said softly. For a second, his gaze drifted back to the destroyed sculpture, something almost like regret passing through his features before he smoothed it away. “Good work, Officer.”