Flowering Judas(114)

Howard was moving them into the building as he talked. Gregor and Marianne Glew followed him. The halls were just as dingy and uninspiring as Gregor remembered them. He had never understood why police departments always wanted to paint their hallways vomit-pea-soup green and very-vomit-yellow beige.

But they all did, half and half, every time.

Howard Androcoelho got them down to the end of a long corridor. There was a door there. He opened it and stepped back to let them pass.

“This is our evidence room,” he said. “It isn’t very big, but we don’t usually have much use for it. We don’t usually have much evidence, I mean. There’s not that much crime in Mattatuck.”

“No,” Marianne Glew said positively. “There isn’t. It’s one of the great virtues of a small town. Not much crime, and too much gossip.”

There was a big wooden table in the middle of the room with chairs all around it. The chairs were the metal and wood kind found in a lot of high school cafeterias. Gregor looked around.

“You don’t keep somebody on duty here?” he asked.

“On duty?” Howard said. “What would somebody do here on duty?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “he, or maybe she, might watch over the place and make sure nobody comes in and tampers with evidence.”

“Oh, we know about tampering with evidence,” Howard said. “We keep the room locked. It was locked right now. I mean, before we came in. I had to use my key to open it.”

“How many keys are there?” Gregor said.

“Just three,” Howard said. “I’ve got one. The town prosecutor’s office has one. And there’s one upstairs in the main office.”

“Where upstairs?”

“In the drawer at the front desk, I think.”

“So, in a drawer, out where anybody could pick it up,” Gregor said.

“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—”