Flowering Judas(112)

He got Ferris Cole on the phone as soon as he was on the road. Ferris Cole was also on the road, but Gregor didn’t care. He explained the two bodies by the dam. Ferris Cole had heard of the dam.

“I’ve got them sitting out there waiting for you,” Gregor said. “I’ve told them all to stay put, and they’ll do it. I’ve done enough yelling so that Howard Androcoelho isn’t going to get in my way for a while. Do you think you could see your way to getting out there and picking them up, or sending somebody out there to pick them up?”

“Of course I can,” Ferris Cole said. “That’s what we do. We wish the locals would call us in right at the start more often. But I don’t understand. This is a different case?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right. It doesn’t sound the same as the other one. Shootings, this time.”

“What other one?”

“The murder of Chester Morton,” Ferris Cole said.

“That’s not the other one.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to go into it now. There is another murder connected to these murders, and that murder is part of the Chester Morton case, but the murder in question is not the murder of Chester Morton. Unless I’m very badly mistaken about the people in this thing, and I don’t think I am.”

“But why would you think this had anything to do with the Chester Morton case at all? Did these people know Chester Morton.”

“One of them did. One of them lived in the tailer that directly abutted Chester Morton’s trailer in that trailer park.”

“All right,” Ferris Cole said. “That’s interesting.”

“In more ways than I can begin to tell you,” Gregor said. “But even if that hadn’t been the case, I’d have suspected that the two events were connected. There’s the matter of the truck.”

“The truck?”

“Chester Morton’s black Ford pickup truck. From all the accounts of people who knew him at the time, Chester Morton was in love with his truck. Like some bad parody of a country song. Really in love with his truck.”

“And?”

“And he left it behind when he disappeared.”

“I don’t get it,” Ferris Cole said.

“It was one of the prime pieces of evidence for Chester Morton being dead or worse, instead of just some guy who took off,” Gregor said. “He left his truck. He loved the truck. He never would have left the truck behind. Therefore, if the truck was left behind, he must have been killed and the police were being idiots for not following up on it. And it wasn’t a bad argument. Even if he hadn’t loved the truck, he would have needed transportation to get wherever it was he wanted to go.”

“That makes sense,” Ferris Cole said.

“Most of these guys, the ones who take off, take off in their own cars if they have them. Every once in a while, you’d get a guy with a particular kind of problem. He knows the car is about to be repossessed anyway, say, or there’s some reason why he’s really worried about being followed. But most of them take their cars and trade them in for another used one later.”

“Makes sense.”

“It does make sense,” Gregor said, “but in this case, it doesn’t, because in this case, Chester Morton really was missing. So here’s this guy who’s taking off, and he’s out here in the middle of nowhere, at least relatively. He leaves the truck and does what? Walks? Hitchhikes? We’d have heard something if he’d been hitchhiking. Somebody would have come forward years ago. Okay, that’s only about ninety percent sure. But it is ninety percent sure.”

“All right,” Ferris Cole said, “so he left the truck. I still don’t see how that means his disappearance connects to two bodies by a dam—”

“They’re in a black Ford pickup truck.”

“The same one?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“So you’re saying that somebody had the truck—his family, what? Somebody had the truck and then … I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m not sure of what I’m saying, either,” Gregor said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the same truck. And it’s one of those things. If anybody had been paying attention twelve years ago, they should have paid attention to the truck.”

“Did his family keep it? Did the police impound it as evidence? What?”

“His mother had it in her garage and then she sold it,” Gregor said. “At least, that’s what she says. She sold it to some kid, she can’t remember his name, it was a long time ago. But there’s a black pickup truck sitting down there by the water with two bodies in it, and it’s around the right vintage and, though the plates were removed, it was registered in New Jersey.”