When The Spirit Moves You (The Jeff Resnick Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

before I narrowed it down to two, but both of them were listed on that social network as living in the Buffalo area. Now to figure out which one was the dead guy. Not such an easy task, since one of the profile pictures was of Popeye the Sailor and the other was a 1989 orange Corvette.
    Since I wasn’t their “friend,” their personal info pages weren’t available to me. I couldn’t friend them as myself—Madam Zahara knew my name and wasn’t likely to approve my friendship request—so I went to Google and set up a phony email address, then went back to Facebook and set up a new account. And why hadn’t it occurred to me to do this before now? I had a feeling I’d be able to use this bogus name and history for snooping in the future.
    While I waited to see if my friend requests would be granted, I studied their info pages, but neither had allowed much information to be made available to non-friends.
    Gut feeling told me the picture of the Corvette represented Mr. Plaid Shirt, although from the looks of his clothing and his hair, and the condition of the home on Main Street, he’d fallen on hard times long before his demise. That made the idea of someone killing him for that crappy house even more appalling.
    To kill time, I friended a bunch of Buffalo institutions, including the library, the Bills, the Sabres, and any other sports-affiliated thing I could think of, a few restaurants, and microbreweries, figuring what the hell—it would give my fake persona a little credibility.
    I Googled Madam Zahara and found her listed in the Buffalo online phone directory—she’d even paid for an ad—but that didn’t tell me who she really was or what her connection to Fred Butterfield was.
    It was after three and I already had twenty friends when I looked back to my profile page to see that Mr. Corvette Butterfield was now my friend, too. I clicked onto his pictures. Bingo! There he was in a number of shots, first looking some twenty years younger with said orange Corvette, and then a few of him looking pretty much as he had when I’d seen him at Madam Zahara’s. He’d apparently never had the opportunity to become older.
    I clicked back to his wall and found that his last post was made just two days before. “Watching the Mets on TV.” I did a quick Google search and found the team had played two days before. (They’d lost—five to three.)
    So, who was updating the dead guy’s page—Madam Zahara or her long-distant trucking son? And when it came down to it—I had no proof that either of them had done anything wrong, and no real proof that Fred Butterfield was actually dead. Just that funny feeling in my gut that I had learned to trust during the past five months.
    I figured I’d gone about as far as I could go on my own without doing some face-to-face interviews and possibly stirring up a hornet’s nest, so I called my friend Sam Nielson at The Buffalo News .
    Sam and I go back to high school days. He was the editor of the school newspaper and I took the photos. We didn’t talk much back then, but we’re now . . . maybe not friends, but we had a mutual understanding when it came to crime. He reported it, and I seemed to keep finding it. Since he’d helped me out a couple of times, there was no reason not to ask for his assistance once again.
    “ This sounds pretty lame,” he said when I finally got a hold of him late that afternoon.
    “ Have I been wrong so far?”
    I heard him sigh. “No. Okay, what do you want me to do?”
    “ See if this guy has paid taxes.”
    “ You got a social security number? Date of birth? Anything like that?”
    “ According to Facebook, he was born on April twelfth—no year given.”
    “ And if that’s a bogus date?”
    “ Then I’m shit outta luck.”
    “ You’ll be on my shit list, that’s for sure.” He was quiet for a moment, and I could hear the rustle of paper. “Okay, give me a day or two and I’ll get back to you.”
    He hung up.
    A day or two. It was