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SOLVE THE CRIMES

In the near future, television shows that fictionally create murders such as CSI and Law and Order will be replaced by real-crime investigative shows. Production crews race to the scene of top-trending homicides to show the blood and tragedy uncut and unedited.

Detective David Armstrong and his team, investigate, present, and then try to solve the case with the help of their viewers who clamor for each new case so that they can win money and prizes if their clues help bring the perpetrator to justice.

The crimes, however, must be solved in one week or the case is shelved forever. David is continuously conflicted because of his desire to do right by the victims and their families while trying to placate a television network that is profiting royally from pain and suffering.

By Roger Arsht and Caitlin Hawker

excerpt

Darcy Tucker was lying on the floor of her parent’s living room, blood encircling her icy-blonde hair and staining the plush carpet. She was on her back, her eyes wide open and clogged from the contents of the hole that gaped from her forehead. The obvious answer to the cause of her death was that she was killed from the bullet that had carved that particular chasm, but it was Detective David Armstrong’s job to examine every possibility.

The detective stared out of the living room’s picture window at the chaos assembling on the Tucker’s front lawn. His care-worn, rugged face didn’t resemble the young, handsome detectives that populated the usual television dramas. He was sloppily dressed and curmudgeonly, with a weariness evident only in people who were so committed to their work that certain social niceties had been discarded as irrelevant. David’s rawness and no-nonsense attitude was what helped him solve crimes, and that was why he had recently been voted by viewers as the ‘most trusted man in America.’ 

David found it ironic that television shows had given viewers the impression that brilliant, suave investigators with unlimited budgets solved crimes. David could never be described as brilliant or suave. He was an old bull who knew that crimes were solved when alibis were cracked and inconsistencies in a suspect’s story were leveraged.

Darcy Tucker’s dead body had been discovered two hours earlier by her parents and David’s team had moved in quickly to secure the evidence at the crime scene. Meanwhile, an almost equal number of video and sound technicians manned the perimeter of the Tucker’s living room. For almost an hour, viewers watching online and on television were treated to a partial view of Darcy’s face advertising the premiere of a brand new One Week Window episode.