© Yvette Prior

“Between the booze and the coffin nails, it’s like a monument to death, right Turner?”

Detective Gerard Harrington waved his hand over the desk of the deceased while nodding at Officer Dawn Turner.

“I guess so, Sir.” She wasn’t a fan of the flamboyant homicide investigator’s style, but everyone in the department knew he was the best in the business. “So this was a murder?”

“Nah. It’ll take an autopsy, but I’m betting these leaky cigarette lighters he collected did him in. Lung disease didn’t help, but it was the butane fumes that killed him.”

I wrote this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields flash fiction challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 95. Do you know how hard it is to write a murder mystery in less than 100 words?

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.