Flowering Judas (33 page)

“I checked as soon as I woke up,” he told Gregor. “The body is still there. There's nothing wrong with it that I can see. Nobody has lopped off a foot, or anything like that.”

“You had any visitors last night? Anybody try to get in to see it?”

“Nobody came down here at all except the guys from the funeral home. The guy who runs it is a real nervous Nellie. If he wrung his hands one more time, I was going to offer to chop them off for him.”

“Probably not a good idea, considering,” Gregor said. “I'm going to check this place out and come over to you. One of the people here is going to give me a ride. Don't leave the body, even to go to the bathroom.”

“I'll get nervous Nellie to watch if I have to use the john. Don't worry about me, Mr. Demarkian. I have your back.”

Gregor shut the cell phone and stared at it a little. Nervous Nellie. Use the john. Got your back. Why was it that so many people, faced with an actual detective, started to sound like they were speaking dialogue from a Mickey Spillane novel.

The truck was turning in to what Gregor supposed must be the back end of the Mattatuck–Harvey Community College campus. He could see the rising girders of the new tech building as they drove. As they got closer, he could see the site itself. And that was interesting.

“Huh,” he said, moving forward in his seat to get a better look.

“I wouldn't do that, Mr. Demarkian,” Nderi Kika said. “If the truck stops quickly, you'll go right through the windshield. You don't have a seat belt.”

“Oh.” Gregor sat back.

“Seat belts,” Shpetim Kika said. “Stupid things. Are we riding in a jet plane? No. Are we driving in some little car that could be run over by the first delivery van it gets next to? No. I do not need seat belts.”

“It's against the law not to wear your seat belt if you're traveling in the front seat of a vehicle,” Nderi recited, sounding resigned.

Shpetim flipped his right hand into the air. “That's what I think of the law,” he said. “What kind of law is that? It's Communism, that's what it is. Did I come all the way here from Albania just to live under the laws of Communism?”

The truck came to a stop near a small shed whose roof barely reached as high as the truck's. Nderi gave Gregor a look.

“My father,” he said, “got five tickets for not wearing his seat belt last month alone. Cost him nearly three hundred dollars.”

“Communism,” Shpetim said again.

Then he popped the driver's side door and got out. Nderi got out the other side, and waited for Gregor to follow.

It was an interesting place, the construction site. There was a wide area of raw ground, not so much dug up and trampled over again and again. There was the building itself, which was larger than Gregor had expected it would be. There was a small stand of trees way to the back, so far back that Gregor wondered if the trees were part of the site at all.

“So,” he said. “You found the backpack, where? In those trees?”

“No,” Nderi said. “If the backpack had been in those trees, we would never have found it. Well, maybe not never. But it would have been days. The trees are technically part of the site, but they're not really part of the site, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” Gregor said.

“We were given a specified area to work in,” Nderi said, “and that included that little stand of trees. But they're just a cushion. We're not doing anything over there. We're just leaving them alone.”

“So where did you find the backpack?”

“Over here,” Nderi said.

He started walking off over the rough ground. Gregor and Shpetim followed him. They got closer and closer to the building itself, then, just as they were about to run into it, veered off a little to the right. There were gigantic concrete tubes stacked in pyramids, idle pieces of construction equipment with tarps thrown over them, big square stacks of concrete block. Nderi stopped in the middle of it all and pointed at the ground.

“Right there,” he said. “You can see the depression in the ground. It was right there.”

Gregor looked to where Nderi was pointing. It took him a while to find the depression, but it was there. It did not amount to much.

“That's a very shallow hole,” he said.

“That isn't a hole at all,” Nderi said. “I'm sorry, Mr. Demarkian. Maybe I'm stupid. And I know I haven't trained as a detective. But I can't believe anybody thought he was going to hide something in that. It's a little dent in the ground that somebody threw some dirt on top of. We'd have discovered it first thing in the morning except we were working on the other side most of the day.”

Gregor got down on his haunches. It had been a couple of weeks, and anything could happen in a couple of weeks, but he didn't think anybody had done any digging here. It was more like somebody had scuffed at the ground with a shoe or a boot, gotten some dirt out of the way, then dumped the backpack and covered it—he stopped.

“Was the backpack completely covered?” he said, standing up.

“You'd have to ask Andor to be completely sure,” Nderi said. “That's Andor Kulla. He's one of the crew. He was the one who found it. He was over here digging a run off, I think. We were having water problems when it rained. Anyway, he's the one who actually found it.”

“I'd like to know if it was covered,” Gregor said. “And if it was covered, what it was covered with. I don't suppose you have pictures of this, do you?”

“No, but the police took pictures,” Nderi said. “They took lots of them.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “I'll see if those are in my file. Where are your security cameras?”

Nderi pointed to four places in a semicircle around the site. Gregor found them. They were closer than he had expected them to be. One of them was pointed straight at the place where he stood.

“They were working the day you found the backpack?”

“Yes,” Nderi said. “And they were working the night before, which is more to the point. Look around, Mr. Demarkian. See for yourself. If our men were working over there, on the other end of the building, and going back and forth to the shed every once in a while, nobody on earth could have been here hiding a backpack in the ground. If he was a stranger, we'd have noticed him and chased him off. We're constantly having to do that. If he was one of us—well, somebody would have noticed he was where he wasn't supposed to be for work and asked him about it. But I can't see he was one of us.”

“Why would one of us do such a thing?” Shpetim asked. “What do we have to do with this Chester Morton? And as for the baby. We would never have killed a baby. We have babies that die, but we don't crack their skulls open. And we bury our dead.”

Gregor looked around again. The construction site remained open and flat. There were no real hiding places here. He looked back at the cameras.

“So,” he said, “you have some copies of the security film I can see?”

“Right now?” Shpetim said. “If you want to. We can go to the shed—”

“He doesn't want to see them now,” Nderi said. “He has someplace to go. I'll send copies to his computer. He just has to give me his e-mail address. That's right, isn't it, Mr. Demarkian?”

Gregor took his pen and little notepad out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, wrote down his e-mail address, and passed the paper to Nderi. “That's exactly right,” he said.

“But you can see,” Shpetim Kika said. “You can see, can't you? It is ridiculous, that this is the baby from the Chester Morton case, that Chester Morton buried the baby here, all of it. I do not know what this is, but it is not that Chester Morton came here and dumped his backpack with the baby skeleton in it. That is not what happened here.”

“No,” Gregor agreed, looking around again. “That isn't.”

3

Nderi Kika dropped Gregor at The Feldman Funeral Home on East Main Street, instead of around the back in the parking lot. Gregor went in the front door, into a foyer that was, today, entirely empty, as if Jason Feldman had deliberately refused to schedule any more memorial services as long as Chester Morton's body was in his basement. Jason Feldman was both absolutely furious and just exasperated, alternately. He kept turning on and off like a defective light bulb.

“There are dozens of people in my basement,” he told Gregor when he was ushering him to the stairs. “
Dozens.
And not the kind of people we want here. You people just don't seem to understand. A funeral home is in a very delicate position. The families who come to us are bereaved. They've lost the people they love. They don't want to be confronted with policemen, and they most certainly don't want to be confronted with coroners. Not even if you call them medical examiners. Coroners. Autopsy. The departed cut up like meat in a butcher shop. It isn't acceptable.”

Gregor wanted to say that Jason Feldman had volunteered his services as Mattatuck's morgue, but then it occurred to him that it might not be true. Feldman could have been dragooned into this business by a city council with the ability to influence a zoning board. All city councils had influence with their zoning boards.

Gregor allowed himself to be shown downstairs, but he was relieved that Jason Feldman disappeared immediately afterward.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Tony Bolero said. He looked exhausted. “It's still here. Safe and sound.”

“And I'm Ferris Cole,” a tall, thin, aggressively bald man said, coming out of the shadows to hold out his hand. “I'm a little early, I know, but I thought that, under the circumstances, it might be a good idea.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said. “It was a good idea. I take it there were no disturbances at all last night?”

“Not a thing,” Tony Bolero said. “I'd say it was as quiet as the grave, but you'd probably hit me.”

“What about Howard Androcoelho?” Gregor said. “Isn't he supposed to be here.”

“He called,” Tony said. “He's running late. He'll be here about half past nine. He didn't sound like he was running late. He didn't sound like he was rushed, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Gregor said.

Ferris Cole laughed. “Howard never sounds rushed. And I mean not ever. It doesn't matter what kind of an emergency there is. But you have to wonder how long they're going to be able to go on with this. It's not 1950 any more. It's not even 1980. Some nasty things happen in Mattatuck these days.”

“They got a slum,” Tony Bolero put in helpfully. “Jason Feldman told me.”

Ferris Cole brushed this off. “Every town has a slum,” he said. “Even the smallest one. There's always someplace where the houses are small, or they're trailers, and the people who live there don't bother to pick up their own garbage, and they're always out of work, and there are too many mind-altering substances. Alcohol, mostly, around here.”

“There was a meth lab a couple of years ago,” Tony said. “It blew up.”

“Yes, well,” Ferris Cole said. “That's what happens when people who couldn't pass high school chemistry try to do high school chemistry. I've given the body a quick look over, if you're interested. I don't think I'm going to be able to get you what you want.”

The body was still in the cold locker. Gregor went to it and pulled it out. Chester Morton looked very much as he had looked when Gregor first saw him, much as he had looked in the big stack of photographs Howard Androcoelho had sent him, except that now he seemed a little worse for wear. There wasn't anything definite Gregor could put a finger on, but there it was. The body looked older—older as a body.

Gregor stepped back. “Well,” he said.

“We'll take him off your hands and give him a good thorough autopsy,” Ferris Cole said, “but if you ask me, we're going to end up finding that suicide is just as likely as murder, and maybe more likely. And yes, I know, he didn't hang himself off that billboard. But my guess is that he was dead when somebody else hung him. A toxicology screen might be interesting. If he was drugged before he was hanged, that might prove murder for you. It's going to be touch and go, though.”

“That's all right,” Gregor said. “What about the tattoo?”

“You mean the
MOM
thing? I think after death is a good guess, and definitely not much before. That's a hairy chest and the area of the tattoo is absolutely clean. Someone either shaved him and tattooed him after he died, or he got that within a few hours of dying. Weird thing to find there, don't you think? It's like one of those ones the guys do to themselves and each other in prison. You know, no proper equipment. Ink and safety pins or sewing needles or whatever they can get their hands on.”

“If somebody did tattoo him after he died, maybe the somebody wasn't a professional,” Gregor said. “Or even if he was, maybe he wasn't within reach of his equipment.”

“True enough,” Ferris Cole said. “Do you really think you have a murder here? I don't know. Usually I'm crazy about getting Howard to ask for help. You have no idea what kind of trouble he's caused for himself over the years, what kind of trouble they've both caused for themselves—”

“Both?”

“Howard and Marianne Glew. The mayor. Haven't you met the mayor, yet? She almost certainly had to okay your coming here. Nobody spends money in Mattatuck without Marianne having her say about it. Which is largely why nobody spends money in Mattatuck. I can complain about Howard, but it's Marianne who's running the show. It always was. Even back when they were partners.”

“Partners?”

“Howard Androcoelho and Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “Didn't you know that? They both used to be on the police force. Well, Howard still is, I suppose. But they were partners, detectives and partners. They were the ones who originally investigated—”