Flowering Judas(116)

“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?”