Flowering Judas(115)

“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?”