Flash Fiction: Cold Coffee

PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz for Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers. Other stories featuring the prompt can be found here.

Missing persons. Cold case. Presumed dead. So many. Now all that is left are black and white photos of a time long gone, waiting in a trash basket to be disposed of, like victims’ bodies so long ago.

Detective Black, assigned to every case, found hunched over his desk. Heart attack the perpetrator. Some say the guilt ate at him. Too many killers free, too many families waiting in agony for answers, dependant on him.

Photographs stored in his locked desk. Trophies of a crooked cop. The mug on his desk, half drunk coffee laced with justice. The cleaner been and gone. Another murderer free. Black’s case turns as cold as the coffee.