A Great Day for the Deadly(45)

“I did come to the front door and ring,” Josh Malley said. “You didn’t answer.”

“I’m not going to answer now,” Sam told him. “Go away.”

Josh Malley looked up at the sky above his head and sighed. “I can’t go away, Mr. Harrigan,” he said. “I have something I have to talk to you about. Something that has to do with snakes.”

“I’m a herpetologist,” Sam said. “I don’t have to talk to anybody about snakes.”

“You have to talk to somebody about these snakes,” Josh said.

Then he moved very close to the screen, as close as he could get considering the fact that it was elevated, and smiled.

It was the coldest smile Sam Harrigan had ever seen on a human face, and it made him want to run. He’d met cannibals with better arrangements of facial muscles.





Three


[1]


WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD still been with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had never been called in to a crime scene that was still a scene. No matter how vitally involved the Bureau was supposed to be in any subsequent investigation, they left the bottom-line work of discovery and classification to the locals. Since Gregor had retired, he had been at a number of crime scenes, but he hadn’t made up his mind about them. He was always happy for the chance to see a body before anybody else touched it. Once the photographers and the forensics team and the lab men came, it was touch and go. Of course, Pete Donovan and Maryville hardly had that sort of sophisticated assault at their disposal. What showed up in response to Pete Donovan’s radioed message for help with a homicide, was a small pack of young-looking, scared-looking, suspicious-looking boys who looked too small for their uniforms. Gregor got a strong impression that they hadn’t counted on things like this when they’d signed up for the force. He wondered what they had counted on. Since he’d been in Maryville, he’d heard about slums and dope and he didn’t know what else. Surely that meant that there had to be violence in these people’s lives every once in a while. Maybe Pete Donovan only hired the naive, and then the naive quit on him as soon as they saw a little action.

It was now half past one in the afternoon, and the naive young men were finished with what Pete Donovan had asked them to do. They had taken the body out of the laundry sink and bagged it. There was only one ambulance in Maryville, and it was delivering a burst appendix to the county hospital. There was a funeral van, but it was picking up a paying customer in the Adirondack Mountains and the roads were bad. Since there was nothing anyone would ever be able to do for Don Bollander ever again, there was no hurry about getting him moved to the county morgue. Gregor had watched the young men lift the body out of the sink and try to lay it down on the floor. The body was curled, stiff and unyielding. Every time they tried to move one of its limbs, it resisted. Gregor wanted to tell them they had no choice. They were going to have to break something. He didn’t say it. He could just imagine what kind of reaction it would have gotten. Instead, he stepped back a few paces until he was even with Pete Donovan and said,

“Look, the body was here before rigor set in.” Pete Donovan cleared his throat. He had been clearing his throat a great deal since he had walked in to find an actual body. He had been explaining a great deal, too. Gregor understood the explanation—although he still couldn’t forgive Donovan his behavior—and was even interested in it. There were a million small things like that in this case, bits and pieces, confetti evidence. Logically, most or all of these things were going to turn out to be nothing. From experience, Gregor knew that one or two of them might turn out to be important. Which one or two couldn’t be established in advance, or even by decree. The confetti had to be sifted through and examined. Gregor fully intended to examine it, but he didn’t want to do that now. He also didn’t want to listen to any more of Donovan’s embarrassed blithering.

“Look,” he said again, to forestall what he was sure was looming apology number sixty-seven, “it’s not just that the body was moved before rigor, it’s that it was moved before death. Of course, we need the forensic report to be sure—”

“Don’t we always?”

“—but all the signs are there. Or all the signs are not there. There’s nothing on his clothes.”

Pete Donovan shot Gregor a skeptical look, no apology in it at all. “You don’t know what’s on his clothes,” he said. “Most of the stuff labs find is microscopic.”

“I know,” Gregor told him, “but look at his suit.”