The Helper Read Online Free PDF Page B

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