Oh my God.
Okay, so first comment: I'm dying over the whole penguins and knees thing. I love it, although the way this is written it almost makes Detective Baxter seem incompetent. He's completely ignoring his partner, doesn't use gloves to touch evidence, immediately dismisses many details in the bedroom as "obvious," and is so fixated on penguins and their potential knees that it's entirely possible that he's actually the one missing evidence, even though he's pretty sure his partner is.
But it's funny, and it's an interesting twist on a detective character--rather than a hardboiled gumshoe, we already have someone who's a little different. Penguins and knees? Animals bigger than whales? It makes me wonder if this is his way of dealing with the harsh realities of his job, or if it's just a little character quirk.
Second comment: Do you have any idea how many times in this short part of your story you use the word obvious?
Answer: 4. I counted.
And the whole thing is less than 1000 words long. It doesn't seem like repeated use of one word would be a big deal--and in some ways, it's not. Easy example: "the." You can use words like "the" as many times as you want in a story, because your readers' brains won't register it. It's the kind of word we skim over as we read, the kind of word we'll read when it's supposed to be there--even if you forget to include it--because it's such a normal part of our language.
But a word like "obvious," well...the story started sounding like it was being written by Sherlock Holmes, leaving me a clueless Watson.
"It's obvious."
"...not to me?"
You don't necessarily have to be specific about what "obvious" things the narration is passing over. If your intent in using phrases like "passing over the things that were fairly obvious" was to avoid bogging down the story with inane details, that's cool...but we still need some idea of WHAT was fairly obvious, since the average reader is probably not a homicide detective.
Here is an example where you DO do this:
All of it was fairly obvious: the girl had been taken early that morning and had been discovered missing (an odd phrase) when her mother came to wake her for school.
In this case, you could simply get rid of "all of it was fairly obvious" and leave us the description of the girl's disappearance. If you feel a need to show us that Detective Baxter feels like the details his partner is spouting are useless, you could show us in a different way, i.e.:
The girl had been taken early that morning and had been discovered missing (an odd phrase) when her mother came to wake her for school, blah, blah, blah...
or:
The girl had been taken early that morning and had been discovered missing (an odd phrase) when her mother came to wake her for school...I tuned out my partner's voice, focused on the details of Darcy's bedroom.
(In other news, I love that the detective notices and comments on the contradictory nature of the phrase "discovered missing.")
Anyway, the other problem with "I skipped over the obvious details" with no other hint as to what those details are (for example, as Detective Baxter skims over the pictures, "quickly noting the obvious") is that it makes it sound as if you, the writer, have no idea which details would be obvious. Maybe you do, but completely skipping them this way makes it sound like you don't. Thus, it's to your benefit as well as the readers' to delete this phrase and replace it with a little more detail.
Hope this helps!
Blue
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