Flowering Judas (39 page)

“I don't know who you expect is going to pick it up,” Howard Androcoelho said. “I mean, it's where the officers can get it. They have to be able to get it. They have to put things in here. You can't tell me that big city police departments keep their own officers out of their own evidence rooms.”

“No,” Gregor said. “Big city police departments have staff running their evidence rooms, so that everything is filed and everytime anybody comes to look at it the visit is noted, and a lot of other things get marked down to make sure that nobody can tamper with anything.”

“But who would tamper with anything here?” Howard said. “Why would anybody want to tamper with the evidence?”

Gregor sat down at the table. “You're going to have evidence from that double murder coming in here any minute, aren't you?”

“Of course we are,” Marianne Glew said. “We have a brand new mobile crime unit. We got it with the stimulus money. And—”

“You need to keep somebody down here at all times,” Gregor said. “As soon as that evidence comes in. You're going to need to be able to prove that nothing has happened to it while it's been in your possession. Now, let me see the backpack, and whatever it was that was in it.”

“Except the skeleton,” Howard said quickly. “I told you we don't have the skeleton.”

“I know you don't have the skeleton,” Gregor said.

Marianne Glew sat down, too. “Howard was telling me that you think the murders of these two people are connected with what happened to Chester Morton, whatever that was. But I don't understand it. Oh, I mean, I know Chester lived at the trailer park, and this woman, this Michaelman woman—”

“Althy Michaelman, Marianne, you really do remember her. We all went to high school together.”

“Yes, of course, Howard, but I didn't really know her know her, did I? It's not like we were friends. You'd think that in a small town like this one everybody would know everybody just because there aren't that many people to know, but it wasn't like that. We all had our groups. And Althy Michaelman. Well.”

Howard came back from where he had been rummaging in the shelves and dropped a big, heavy cardboard box in the middle of the table.

“There it is,” he said. “That's everything we found out at the construction site, except for the skeleton. The backpack and everything that was in it. And it's a bright yellow backpack, just like the one Chester took with him, and it had books in it—”

“Was the backpack dusted for prints when it was found?” Gregor asked.

“I don't know,” Howard Androcoelho said, “but it doesn't really matter, does it? By the time we got to it, the guys at the construction site had been all over it—”

“No, they hadn't,” Gregor said. “Both Shpetim and Nderi Kika told me that nobody touched the thing as soon as they saw what it was. I take it your officers did touch it?”

“Well, they must have, mustn't they? I mean, they brought it here,” Howard said.

Gregor stood up a little and looked into the box. The yellow backpack was indeed very yellow. He could see what the Kikas had meant about it looking brand new.

He took the backpack out of the box and put it on the table. It was empty. Its contents had been dumped out into the cardboard box and left there.

Gregor turned the backpack over once, twice, a third time. There were no worn spots or frayed spots anywhere. There were no faded places in the yellow canvas.

“Back in the car,” he said, “I've got a briefcase full of notes you sent me on the Chester Morton case. Several of them mention that when he disappeared the only possession that disappeared with him was his bright yellow backpack. His bright yellow L.L. Bean backpack.”

“Yeah,” Howard said. “That's right. So?”

Gregor pointed at the backpack. “That's not an L.L. Bean backpack. It doesn't have the L.L. Bean logo on it.”

“L.L. Bean doesn't sell backpacks with other people's logos on them?” Marianne asked.

“No,” Gregor said.

“Ah,” Howard said.

Gregor reached into the box and came up with the copy of
Current Issues and Enduring Questions.
He turned the book over and over in his hands. The cover was very white. There were no marks on it. The pages were very stiff. They crackled in that odd way very thin pages do when they've never been turned.

Gregor looked at the spine and said, “Shrink-wrap.”

“What do you mean?” Howard Androcoelho asked.

“Shrink-wrap,” Gregor said again. He pointed to the spine, to the minute little piece of plastic still attached to it. “It's just come out of its shrink-wrap. You can see a bit of the plaster there.”

“You mean—I don't know what you mean,” Howard said.

“Can you get in touch with the two officers who picked this up?” Gregor asked him. “I'd like to talk to both of them. And I do mean both of them.”

3

Kyle Hoborn came up first. He was in the main office overhead. Jack DeVito had to come in from patrol. Gregor motioned Kyle to a seat and went back to making a list of what he wanted the Mattatuck Police Department to do.

“Go to Walmart,” he said, “assuming there's one close. Go to every store that sells backpacks, the big chains, the little local things. That,” he pointed to the yellow backpack, “will have been bought there sometime on the day Chester Morton's body was found hanging from that billboard, or maybe the day before. I don't think it could be longer than that, but be safe. Ask back at least a week, just in case. The big chains have a few things going for them. They're cheap, they tend to carry wide varieties in color and style. They've also got some drawbacks. They're usually out on the road somewhere. The little local places are close, but they don't always carry a lot of variety in color and they're expensive. It all depends on what was most important to our people, speed or price. But the color was nonnegotiable.”

Kyle Holborn looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at the floor. Gregor ignored him.

“Paydirt is finding somebody who remembers the backpack being bought,” Gregor said. “You've got a better chance of that at the local places. At the big stores, you're going to have to track some people down. And then, my guess is that they won't remember unless the person who bought it was a man.”

“Why a man?” Howard asked.

“Because yellow is more likely to be bought by women,” Gregor said.

“But Chester Morton was a man,” Marianne Glew said.

“I know he was,” Gregor said. “But you'll notice everybody remembered that backpack. There were probably half-a-dozen girls in school with him who also had yellow, and nobody thought twice about it. If you don't come up with anything, you need to check the second ring, the next set of big-box stores just a bit farther away. Just in case the most important thing was making sure they wouldn't be noticed.”

“They?” Howard Androcoelho said.

“Probably,” Gregor said.

There was a clatter on the stairs. They all looked up to see a uniformed patrolman coming through the door, his hat tucked under his arm the way officers did it in the army. Gregor looked from him, to Kyle Holborn, and back again.

“Officer DeVito?” he said.

The man nodded. “Jack DeVito,” he said. “They told me to come down here. They pulled me right off patrol. What's going on?”

“Take a seat,” Gregor said.

Jack DeVito sat down. He did not look happy about it.

Gregor went back to his list for the Mattatuck Police department. What he did not put on it was anything about the security tapes for the construction site for the night before the backpack was discovered. Shpetim and Nderi Kika had told him that the tapes were available, and that they had been sent to the police department. Gregor thought he'd just let them do what they wanted with them while he looked through his own copies. If he was right about what was on those tapes, and what wasn't, it would be all that much easier to do the thing he had to do after this.

Kyle Holborn and Jack DeVito were both sitting down, looking at him expectantly. Gregor finished his list and passed it over to Howard.

“That's it,” he said. “It would be a good idea if most of that got done in the next couple of hours.”

“You can't go asking in all those places and hunting down clerks in a couple of hours,” Howard said.

“I know. There are other things on there. Do those. Get started on the clerks. These are the two men who were called to the construction site when the backpack was discovered?”

“Yes,” Howard said.

“We were,” Jack DeVito said. “Kyle and me, we're partners. Usually, you know. It's just that, with all this, you know—”

“I really don't think it's fair,” Kyle said. “I mean, for God's sake, all that was twelve years ago, and it didn't have anything to do with me anyway. And don't tell me that it had to do with Darvelle, because Darvelle never killed Chester Morton and we all know it. He came back. He wasn't even dead.”

“You had a fight with him, though, didn't you?” Gregor asked. “The last night he was in class, an English class, that you and he and Darvelle Haymes all attended?”

Kyle looked away. “I punched him out in the parking lot. He was being a jerk. Darvelle had dumped him on his ass, which she had every right to do, and he was harassing her. So when he wouldn't leave her alone, I punched him. And that was it. It's no reason to keep me off patrol and sitting in the station doing paperwork for two weeks.”

“All right,” Gregor said. It was actually a pretty good reason, but he was not here to argue. He wondered a little about Kyle Holborn, that telltale, sullen “It isn't fair.” This was a grown man he was looking at. At what age do you expect a grown man to stop protesting that life isn't fair?

He filed it away for later. “You two went out to the construction site,” he said, stating the already obvious. “Why?”

“We got the call,” Jack DeVito said. “Somebody there phoned nine-one-one, and the dispatcher called us because we were closest.”

“That's part of your regular patrol?”

“In the afternoons it is,” Jack DeVito said. “And on the night shift, too. We swing through the site at night just to make sure nothing's being boosted. You'd be amazed at what people will take. Copper tubing? You can sell copper tubing, if you can believe it. People sell it to buy drugs.”

“Not that we have a big drug problem in Mattatuck,” Marianne Glew said.

Jack DeVito, Kyle Holborn, and Gregor Demarkian all gave her a disbelieving stare.

“Morning shift,” Jack DeVito said, “we go by there, but we don't go in. We get in the way when they're just gearing up for work.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “So, you got the call and you drove on out there. What did you find when you arrived?”

“There were a lot of people standing around,” Kyle said. “All the work had stopped. There weren't any machines going or anything like that. And the guys were all standing around. So we parked the car and got out and went to see what was going on.”

“And what did you see?” Gregor asked.

“It was the backpack,” Jack DeVito said. “The yellow backpack. The one everybody had been looking for. Or, you know, at least one like it. Everybody knew about that backpack. Charlene Morton must have been on the local news a dozen times talking about that backpack. So there was a yellow backpack, and there was a skeleton inside it.”

“I thought it was fake,” Kyle Holborn said. “When I first saw it. It looked fake, like it was made of plastic. Like it was from one of those places, you know. Those Halloween places. It was absolutely clean. Like somebody had washed it.”

“Did you touch it?” Gregor asked.

“Of course I didn't,” Jack DeVito said. “What do you take me for?”

“I touched it,” Kyle Holborn said. “Just for a second. It just didn't look real. I want to see, you know. I wanted to see if it was bone or plastic or what. I couldn't believe it.”

“I didn't see you touch it,” Jack said.

“I touched it,” Kyle said. “I don't know what you were looking at.”

“You touched it, Mr. DeVito didn't. I've got it,” Gregor said. “What about the position of it. It was buried in a hole in the ground?”

“Not really,” Jack DeVito said. “I don't think anybody ever bothered to dig anything. It was in the middle of all this stuff that was stacked up, serious big stuff but also a lot of small stuff that was probably going in the garbage, but nobody had gotten around to it yet. It looked like somebody had dumped the thing on the ground where it sort of dipped down a little and then kicked a bunch of the small stuff over it. It didn't actually look like anybody had been trying to hide it. Not for serious, if you know what I mean. And if whoever meant for us to think the backpack had been buried there for twelve years, well, that wasn't going to happen. People had been working at that site for months. It was in a part of the site people didn't go to much
now,
but when they started work over there, people had to move all that material in. If it had been there then, somebody would have tripped over it.”

Kyle Holborn was staring at his shoes. He looked not only sullen now, but angry.

Gregor looked at the top of his head. “You both knew there was a baby connected to the Chester Holborn case?”

“I'd heard stories about a baby,” Jack said. “But they were just stories, you know. I mean, I knew Chester when I was in high school. Kyle here didn't, because he lived a couple of towns away. And Chester was older than I was. He was a junior when I was a freshman. But I knew him. And I knew of him. Everybody did. It's not like anybody paid much attention to stories about Chester. Half of them were true and half of them ought to have been, if you get my drift.”

“I knew he told Darvelle that he was going to buy a baby,” Kyle said. “That's all I knew. What kind of sense does that make, anyway? Buying a baby. Who can buy a baby? Who's gonna sell one?”