Trufant

Travis is finished and sitting with an editor at the moment. But I’ve already made an outline for the sequel, Trufant.

Here’s the opening Chapter.

He walked towards the car picking his way through the minefield of tiny blue-green fragments of broken glass that had once been the driver’s window. He had been told the path towards the car had been cleared of any possible evidence but experience told him otherwise. The Cardinal Rule of a crime seen; never leave anything on it and never take anything from it; a difficult task when the evidence could be microscopic.

Most of the shattered window’s safety glass was still in the frame but the center section had blown inwards towards the victim and onto the passenger seat of the Passion Red Kia Sorento.

Trufant had been back in San Francisco for three weeks and today was his first day on the job, and in the first hour he had already broken his promise to his wife, Adelaide. “I’m a captain now,” he had said. “I’ll probably never leave the office.”

Sitting upright in the driver’s seat with his head leaning on his right shoulder was the man he had despised for twenty years, the man who had reconciled differences he had never imagined possible, the man who had promoted him six weeks ago on the last day of his career, Chief Bartholomew Lozano.

There was a gaping hole in Lozano’s left temple and a small rivulet of dried blood running down and around his ear disappearing behind the white collar of his shirt. He imagined a larger hole on the other side based on the gore coating the inside of the passenger window. 

“Trufant, I need to run something by you. Look me up when you get back in town,” Lozano’s  simple text had said. Simple words he knew would haunt for the rest of his life.

He reread the message several times in his head trying to make the words link up with the scene in front of him but found nothing. Was there an urgent context hidden in it? Was there something he missed?

 “I should have come sooner, ” he whispered.