Flowering Judas(126)

“You think old George is dying,” Gregor said. His mouth felt very dry.

“Of course I think old George is dying,” Tibor said. “And so do you. And so do Martin and Angela. And so do the doctors. And so does old George, if it comes to that.”

“That’s horrible.”

“No,” Tibor said. “What you are dealing with there, that’s horrible. Murder. Torture. Rape. The things we do to cause each other pain. Those things are horrible. So are the diseases that make people die before they’re ready. Cancer. But this is not horrible. This is a natural end of a human life on this earth.”

“I’m not convinced that there’s any other life but the one on this earth.”

“I know, Krekor, but for me it is simpler. I am convinced. But either way, this is not horrible. This is the end of a long good life. You should go now and deal with the things that are horrible. Your murders were breaking news on CNN not twenty minutes ago.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “Of course they were. How do they do these things so fast?”

“They have local partners,” Tibor said promptly. “You hear them talk about it all the time. Go do some work, Gregor. You should come back for the birthday party if you can get here.”

“There’s going to be a birthday party? For old George?”

“With a cake and those popper things that pop and then throw out streamers,” Tibor said. “Angela and Bennis and Donna and Lida and all the rest of them have been planning. And I think that the day after that will be the end.”

“Maybe he won’t want to go until he sees me,” Gregor said. “Maybe that way I could just stay away and he’d live forever.”

“Krekor.”

Gregor closed the phone and sat back, thinking. Okay, that last thing had been bad. It had been worse than bad. It had been stupid.

He picked up the phone again and found Rhonda Alvarez’s number in his address book. She picked up on the first ring, sounding a little out of breath.

“I just got the first news in from Atlantic City,” she said. “I would have called you, I really would have. I just wanted to go through it.”

“Go through it after you give me an overview,” Gregor said. “I may have to get some things done here before I get the full report. Did you find the truck?”

“Absolutely. That was easy. Black Ford pickup, approximately twelve years old, registered to a Charles Mason, and an address. Could he really have taken a name so much like his own as Charles Mason?”

“Don’t they usually?”

“Not since those true crime shows have been all over TV,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “They learn all kinds of things from those shows. Although it’s hard to tell. There’s that To Catch a Predator thing, been on forever, but the guys keep falling for it, over and over again. Maybe it’s a good thing so many criminals are stupid.”

“I’m sure it is,” Gregor said. “Did you run a check on Charles Mason?”

“Absolutely,” Rhonda Alvarez said again. “And I got a nice preliminary haul. Worked the casinos for several years and kept getting fired. My guess would be petty theft that they couldn’t quite prove, if you know what I mean. Ended up without a job, but I don’t see any record that he’d been homeless or anything like that—”

“No,” Gregor said, “he wouldn’t have been.”

“Looks like he had a gambling problem,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “A lot of this is squishy. He definitely had a drinking problem, but it never amounted to much. A few arrests for public intoxication, one for possession of an amount of marijuana too small to get a cat high, little things like that, lots and lots of them. Only one serious arrest, for assault. He got into a fight with this guy who does tattoos. The guy called the cops. There was a plea bargain. He got probation. He was still working then, so that was probably why. There really doesn’t seem to be much here.”

“I didn’t expect there to be,” Gregor said. “But what I think we do have now is probable cause for a warrant to search his place. It’s his truck that was sitting up here with two bodies in it. Do you think that, given that circumstance, you could convince the local cops to get that warrant and search that house?”

“I don’t think it would be any problem at all,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “Is there something you want them to be looking for?”

Gregor thought about it for a minute. “Try for a bright yellow L.L. Bean backpack. After all these years, it might not be so bright yellow anymore. Look in the basement, in the crawlspace if that’s what it is—he has to have kept the body of that infant all this time. Either that or he’s been murdering babies systematically for twelve years, and I’m nearly a hundred percent certain that isn’t true. He’s got to have hidden it somewhere. And he has to have had it with him when he came up here, so it either had to be in the house he was living in at the time or he had to have hidden it somewhere else. I think if it was somewhere else, we’re probably screwed.”