Flowering Judas(117)

“I touched it,” Kyle Holborn said. “Just for a second. It just didn’t look real. I want to see, you know. I wanted to see if it was bone or plastic or what. I couldn’t believe it.”

“I didn’t see you touch it,” Jack said.

“I touched it,” Kyle said. “I don’t know what you were looking at.”

“You touched it, Mr. DeVito didn’t. I’ve got it,” Gregor said. “What about the position of it. It was buried in a hole in the ground?”

“Not really,” Jack DeVito said. “I don’t think anybody ever bothered to dig anything. It was in the middle of all this stuff that was stacked up, serious big stuff but also a lot of small stuff that was probably going in the garbage, but nobody had gotten around to it yet. It looked like somebody had dumped the thing on the ground where it sort of dipped down a little and then kicked a bunch of the small stuff over it. It didn’t actually look like anybody had been trying to hide it. Not for serious, if you know what I mean. And if whoever meant for us to think the backpack had been buried there for twelve years, well, that wasn’t going to happen. People had been working at that site for months. It was in a part of the site people didn’t go to much now, but when they started work over there, people had to move all that material in. If it had been there then, somebody would have tripped over it.”

Kyle Holborn was staring at his shoes. He looked not only sullen now, but angry.

Gregor looked at the top of his head. “You both knew there was a baby connected to the Chester Holborn case?”

“I’d heard stories about a baby,” Jack said. “But they were just stories, you know. I mean, I knew Chester when I was in high school. Kyle here didn’t, because he lived a couple of towns away. And Chester was older than I was. He was a junior when I was a freshman. But I knew him. And I knew of him. Everybody did. It’s not like anybody paid much attention to stories about Chester. Half of them were true and half of them ought to have been, if you get my drift.”

“I knew he told Darvelle that he was going to buy a baby,” Kyle said. “That’s all I knew. What kind of sense does that make, anyway? Buying a baby. Who can buy a baby? Who’s gonna sell one?”

“Oh, Christ,” Jack DeVito said. “Any of those loons out at the trailer park. Those people will do anything.”

“Not everybody who lives in a trailer park is trash,” Kyle said. “Good people live in trailer parks sometimes. They just don’t have the money to live anywhere else. Or, you know, it’s their families.”

“I still say they’d sell a baby in that trailer park,” Jack said. “Honest to God, those people are crazy.”

Gregor shook his head. “Were the two of you on the night shift the night before?”

“Nope,” Jack said. “We’ve got afternoons this entire rotation. We won’t be back on nights until October.”

“There would have been other police officers checking the area out that night?”

“Absolutely,” Howard said. “That’s valuable equipment there. We have to be careful.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “Then the next thing I need is the name of the officers patroling that area at night, and I need to talk to them, too. I think we can let these two go.”

“Really?” Jack DeVito said. “But this was nothing at all. You could have asked us all this on the phone.”





FOUR

1

Haydee Michaelman was not sure what she was doing. She was not sure what she wanted to do. She was not sure what she could do. The day seemed to stretch in front of her endlessly, and there were so many things in it that she couldn’t refuse to do. She had to go to work. She had to go to school. She had to go through the routine of her day as she always did, because that was the key to everything. You could not give yourself excuses to not do the things you were supposed to do. That was how people ended up in the trailer park.

The day was bright and clear and still. It was the first day that had felt like September yet this year. She was miles and miles away from the dam, all the way on the other side of town. They did not have to go back that way to get to school.

“You’re sure you want to do this,” Kenny said, holding the door open for her as she climbed into his truck. “You’re sure? You don’t have to go to class on a day like this. There isn’t a professor on the planet who’s going to mark you down for not coming to class right after your mother was—after she died.”

Haydee climbed into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across her chest. “I’m not going to make excuses,” she said. “Everybody always makes excuses. There was a kid in my biology class senior year who made up that his grandmother died. Twice.”