“Now,” he whispered, “I will wait for the constable, who is not twenty feet away from us, to light his next cigarette, and we will sneak across while his eyes are still affected by the brightness of the flame.”
I refused to crouch down, but I did step closer to him to make sure I was well hidden. Sherlock stood too and, without a word, grabbed the sleeve of my coat to pull me along behind him. We wove through the trees, then around the back of the crime-tape circle, but that apparently wasn’t close enough for Sherlock. Before I could stop him, he had slipped under the tape. Once more, I followed him, this time into a life of crime, as I was pretty sure it was against the law to breach a crime scene. I knew we had come to the spot Sherlock had in mind when he stopped short and sank into the shadows between two trees.
I glanced at the scene, which was no more than a bunch of men in suits and uniforms, with booties over their shoes, wandering around and taking photos. One of the men popped up from behind an open umbrella holding a poofy black finger-print brush and frowning. He tossed the brush into his kit and picked up the umbrella, which was glossy wet, despite the lack of rain, and had a gash in the top. He closed the umbrella and started wrestling it into a giant plastic sack, revealing a man’s body behind him, slumped into a pool of blood that stained the ground beneath a tree.
It occurred to me that I should probably be shocked or repulsed at the sight—or, at least, should compose my face to appear so—but when I looked over at Sherlock, he didn’t seem to be much bothered either. In fact, yet another version of the boy came out while he studied the scene of the crime. He appeared much older, his eyes keen and focused, shifting up and down and side to side. It was as if he were painting the view with his gaze, carefully, so as not to miss a spot. I thought perhaps I even saw a bit of color in his cheeks as he worked.
“Do you see it?” he asked me in a soft whisper.
I tried to see whatever “it” was, but all I saw was the body, and the only odd bit of the body was how the man was slumped over on his side. There was something about that . . . awkward, like he hadn’t tried to brace the fall.
I knew nothing about solving crimes. I’d only ever associated that kind of work with my father, and we had never really gotten on, even before he became . . . this. But perhaps there wasn’t any real trick to it after all. I supposed solving one thing was nearly like solving another. And if there was one thing I was good at, it was solving for X.
I decided to think of the crime as the steps in an equation, to sort how he could have fallen into that position. Equations were easy. Put a pin into each of the things you know and then write rules between the pins, like strings, connecting one pin to the next until you can solve for the missing parts. But in this instance, I couldn’t seem to move along the string of the first unknown. After all, if what my father had said was right and the man did die the evening before, the bigger question was why in the world he would’ve wandered into the darkest part of the park at night. There was nothing to see where we stood. And while there was no bench where he fell, there was one just a few trees away, where a lamp would have offered some light.
I counted off the steps, starting with the man running from something. He could have seen his attacker coming and hoped to find a place to hide in the dark. But that didn’t fit either, because of the way the body was positioned. It was as though he’d been leaning casually against the tree, and just slumped down and then teetered over. If he’d been running away, he’d have been tackled, sprawled out on the ground, not slumped. I started again with him running and hiding, somehow getting backed up against the tree. But even trapped, he would have tried to block the attacker with his hands. I tried to find his hands, to see if there were cuts or some other sign of his fighting back. I even traced the angles of his arm to a bright, golden watch, but that hand was tucked away. So was his other hand. His hands were still in his pockets.
I had no idea that was even possible, for a man to die with his hands in his pockets. It meant he couldn’t have known he was being killed until the wound was already in his chest.
When I started my equation again, I had a few important pins. The dead man trusted his killer to get close and personal. The man had obviously come there on purpose. He wasn’t afraid when he walked into the woods—into the dark to meet his fate. He leaned back against the tree, his hands in his pockets to show just how casual he felt. In contrast, his eyes were wide in death, surprised as the killer used his weapon.
“He knew the killer,” I whispered to Sherlock.