David Jackson: The Helper

He pauses and surveys his class. Waits for the question which doesn’t come. The seasoned detectives here know Chin’s routine only too well.

‘Ask me how I know,’ Chin says. ‘About her being right-handed. Go on, ask me.’

Clearly a glutton for punishment, the same cop plays along.

‘Okay, so how do you know she’s right-handed?’

Chin points again with his pencil. ‘Ink on the fingers. Plus, I sent someone out to ask the bookstore owner.’

He gets a laugh, and revels in it. The cop who posed the question gets jostled playfully by his colleagues.

‘Next question,’ says Chin.

The cops go quiet. Nobody wants to run the risk of asking a dumb-ass question, or even to be made by Chin to look a dumb-ass when posing a perfectly sensible question.

‘Come on, come on. There’s something obvious you should be asking me here.’

When the silence continues, Doyle offers his two cents.

‘The cuts on the forearm. You said they were done first. How do you know the order?’

Chin jabs his pencil toward Doyle. ‘Correctimundo! Excellent question. Give that man a banana.’

Gingerly, Chin takes hold of the girl’s left arm and raises it. ‘There are pressure marks here, right around the wrist, like it’s been held onto, tightly. Also, these smears here are where the blood has been dragged down and over the hand. I’d say that the perp grabbed her wrist while he made the first few cuts, and then she managed to pull her arm away. After that, he just hacked at her any way he could.’

Like every other cop in the room, Doyle is thinking this through, building the picture. The killer didn’t just pull out a knife and start slashing. He grabbed her arm and held on tight while he severed the veins in her wrist. Why did he do that?

Deep in thought, Doyle and the others start to turn away. There is work to be done.

‘Wait a minute!’ Chin calls. ‘You hear me say class dismissed? No, you did not. You want me to earn out the lousy small change the city pays me for this job, you need to listen some more. I was just getting to the interesting part.’

Doyle cannot help but smile as he focuses on Chin again. You gotta love the guy, he thinks. What a showman.

Chin picks up a small flashlight and shines it on the inside of the girl’s wrist. ‘There’s something written here in pen. Looks like a telephone number. Before I tell you what it is, you need to know it was written before the girl was killed.’

A snort of laughter from the audience. ‘Be a neat trick if she did it after she was dead. Unless she’s a ghost writer.’

Chin whirls. He shines the flashlight directly into the eyes of the joker. Doyle almost expects Chin to send the guy to the principal for detention.

‘Who says it was written by the girl?’

‘Well, wasn’t it? I write stuff on my arm all the time.’

‘My opinion, it’s a wonder you can write at all. Now listen and learn, knucklehead. Some of the blood has run down over the numbers. If the writing had been done after the attack, the killer would have had to wipe the blood away first, and there’s no sign of that.’

The cop persists. ‘That still doesn’t say the girl didn’t write it.’

‘Upside down?’

‘What?’

‘When you write things on your arm, do you do it so you can read them, or so that other people can read them?’

Now the cop goes quiet.

Chin continues: ‘This number was written by someone facing the girl, and it’s right next to the site of what I think was the first incision. I’m not saying it was put there by the killer, but my guess is that the girl probably didn’t get out of bed with this on her arm, and she probably hasn’t met a substantial proportion of the city’s population working in a place like this. Maybe it’s important, maybe it’s not. If you want to check it out, here it is. Notebooks at the ready, guys, because I don’t think your meager brains are capable of retaining something as complicated as a phone number.’

As Doyle listens to the sound of pages being flipped, his mind is racing ahead with possibilities. Did the killer write that number? If she let him, that means she trusted him. And that means either she knew him, or she had a thing for him. Was he hitting on her? Did he offer to give her his number? And if she was willing to allow a perfect stranger to write on her skin, to invade her personal space so intimately, what does that say about someone who could charm her in that way?

‘All right,’ says Chin, examining the girl’s wrist with his flashlight again. ‘Area code is three-five-three.’

The cops look at each other.

‘Anybody know where that is?’ asks Kravitz.

He gets shrugs and headshakes.

‘Next,’ says Chin, ‘we have three, six, and I think it’s a two.’

Coincidence, thinks Doyle.

‘And finally — check your lottery tickets — we got. .’

The first of the remaining four digits reaches Doyle’s ears. Then the second. No, he thinks. Surely not. Coincidence is one thing, but this. .

When the third digit falls neatly into place, Doyle just knows what’s coming next. A four. It has to be a four.

‘A six,’ says Chin.

Doyle blows air. Jesus. For a minute there-

‘Scratch that,’ says Chin. ‘It’s a four. Definitely a four.’

What? WHAT?

For a moment, Doyle sees the funny side. ‘Hey, guys,’ he wants to say, ‘replace that area code with two-one-two and you got my home number. How fucking freaky is that?’

But he keeps quiet. There’s something else about that number. Something that tells him this isn’t entirely coincidental.

Chin is still talking, breaking into his thoughts.

‘Now ask me how tall our killer is.’

The area code, Doyle thinks. It’s familiar. Have I dialed it before?

‘All right, Norm. What’s his height?’

Shit! I know this. I have definitely used this area code.

‘How the fuck should I know? You’re the detectives. Do some fucking detecting!’

The audience breaks up, streams around Doyle. He stays rooted, staring at the body of the girl but not seeing it.

And then he gets it. He dialed it not so long ago when his great-uncle died. Three-five-three. Not an area code. At least not that he knows of. It’s a country code. The number you dial to specify a foreign country when you’re making an international call.

Three-five-three is the country code for Ireland, the place of his birth.

It could still be coincidence, he tells himself. But his inner voice is weak and lacking in conviction.

A few minutes ago he was wishing he could play more of a role in this case. Now he’s beginning to fear that he could be center stage.

Be careful what you wish for, Doyle.

Doyle in the squadroom. Not relaxed. Not relaxed at all. A part of him still wanting a bigger piece of this investigation. Needing to be out there, talking to people. Trying to find out what possible connection there could be between a butchered girl in a bookstore and his telephone number.

And yet he also has the feeling that he wants nothing to do with it. He wants to sit here at his desk, shuffling papers and staying the hell away from whatever dark things might be swimming in the depths of this case.

He tells himself to relax. If there was a link to him, they’d have found it by now. Wouldn’t they? Yes, of course they would. They’re good detectives. They’d have found it.

So it must be a coincidence. And anyway it’s not really his number. Not exactly. Only the last seven digits are his. The area code is way off, and just happens to be the country code for Ireland. Surely you can take any string of numerals and read meaning into it that isn’t really there? People do it all the time. They do things like adding up the positions of the letters in the name ‘Adolf Hitler’ and coming up with 666. They find codes hidden in passages of the Bible that tell them when the world will end. It’s all hooey.