Nine Fingers Read Online Free Page B

if we didn’t like his
     playing he’d sit his ass right back down. He looked like a very sober sort of guy. I checked with Vinnie,” he cocks his long
     neck toward the guy by the equipment, “and he agreed. He played fine on the first tune, so we let him play another. We had
     just started in on that, and were in the middle of the second chorus when there was this noise. Then there was glass and blood
     everywhere and he was dead. None of us knew him at all. I don’t think he had ever been here before. At least, not when we
     were here.”
    There are people who will tell you that this detecting thing is like filling in a puzzle. Don’t believe them. It’s not like
     that at all. With a puzzle, you already know what the picture is—it’s right on the box. So you work from the outside in, from
     the background to the foreground. With this, you have no idea what the picture is supposed to look like. And you start with
     the central figure, because he is dead, and you work your way outward, toward the context.
    Somebody tells you, “Hey, I saw the dead guy alive around eight forty-five, on the street out front, having a fight with another
     guy,” and you ask what the other guy looks like. Someone else says, “Hey, Roger Tremblay? I met him at the convention and
     he said some guy was threatening him,” and you ask about that. It’s not like you have a pattern and you have to find the pieces
     that bring it to life. It’s like you only have this one piece, and you try to find another piece that connects to it, then
     other pieces that connect to them. So you see if there’s another piece that leads you somewhere, and another one that fits
     that one, and it may cover one little corner of the picture and it may wander all across the frame, and it may go straight
     to the piece with a picture of the killer standing in the snow with a gun. (It happens, sometimes.) And you can’t just look
     at all the pieces and see what fits where, because the pieces aren’t there, you have to find them, one by one. All you can
     see is what you already know, and when you really look at it it’s not much, a few pieces here and there. And outside of that
     is everything you don’t know, and that’s most of it. Most of that you’ll never know—what the vic was like with his wife, whether
     he was good at his job, what he did on the weekends, what he did to get to sleep at night. Most of that is part of a larger
     puzzle anyway. So it’s like you’re crawling around in the dark, feeling for one or two pieces that can maybe connect you to
     one or two more, until all of a sudden one piece locks into place and a pattern emerges, and there you are.
    Or it never does, and you never know, and you file it away with the cold cases and you move on.
    And as I am thinking about this, another cop is doing it, and chimes in:“Detective, this lady says she thinks she saw someone outside walking past, staring in the window a few
     minutes before the shooting, headed…”
    I traffic-cop my hand to him, turn to her, lean in.
    “What did you see, ma’am? What did he look like?”
    The woman volunteering this information is tall but shy about it, like a lot of tall women are, hunching her shoulders forward,
     slumping down. I squat down to get to her level. They teach you to do this, to make it a peer thing, not an authority thing.
    Her eyes flick across mine. “It wasn’t a he, it was a she,” she says. “She looked like, like a…a bag lady.”
    And just like that, a piece clicks into place, maybe a big piece, maybe half a puzzle all by itself. I feel a sudden heat
     on the back of my neck, instant sweat in the hollows of my armpits, a tightening around the edge of my scalp. A bag lady?
    “Heading which way, ma’am?”
    She points.
    I turn, single out three uniforms who are busy taking up space. “Heading south,” I tell them. “Use caution—he’s armed. And
     don’t mess up the footprints.” They reach for their weapons and