Flowering Judas(128)

Kyle stirred for the first time. “You have no idea,” he said. “God, but Chester was an asshole. Really. And I could just see it. Darvelle’s life ruined. Everything a mess, and why? Because the guy was a lunatic?”

“Was he a lunatic?” Gregor asked. “Do you think Chester Morton was crazy?”

“I wouldn’t know how to tell,” Kyle said, “not the way a psychologist would. But he was sure as hell the ordinary kind of crazy, if you know what I mean. He did incredibly risky, dangerous crap all the time, and he sucked people into it.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s get back to the present. You came home, you found him dead and hanging in a doorway, and then you called Mr. Holborn here. And Mr. Holborn came over.”

“Right away,” Darvelle said. “He wasn’t working, thank God.”

“My guess this was about two days before Chester Morton’s body was found hanging from the billboard. Which means you must have stashed it somewhere cold.”

“We put it in my freezer in the basement,” Darvelle said. “I’ve got one of those big long ones. I buy things in bulk and freeze them. It’s cheaper. Except there wasn’t much of anything in there, which was good, because after the body was in there I had to—I had to throw everything out. I had to. I couldn’t.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “So you put the body in the freezer, and then you tried to figure out a way to point suspicion of any kind away from yourselves.”

“People would have thought she’d killed him,” Kyle said. “Or they’d have thought we both had. We weren’t being entirely stupid.”

“You were, indeed, being entirely stupid,” Gregor said. “But let’s see how this goes. Chester Morton either didn’t have the yellow backpack with him or he had it but it was unusable for some reason—”

“He didn’t have it,” Darvelle said. “He didn’t have anything. We searched the truck later, and there wasn’t anything.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “So one of you went out and bought a bright yellow backpack somewhere.”

“Kmart,” Kyle said.

“—and put the skeleton of the baby in it. Also the books. Where did you get the books?”

“They were mine,” Kyle said, “I still had them from the class. They weren’t even out of their shrink-wrap yet. They were brand new.”

“Did you two think to wear gloves when you were handling them?” Gregor asked.

“We wore latex gloves the whole time, when we were handling everything,” Kyle said. “I don’t think you could have found a thing to trace us to the—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “Of course we could have found stuff to trace to you two. You can’t pull as much nonsense as you did without leaving something behind. Experts would leave something behind and neither of you are experts. You bought the backpack. You put the skeleton and the books in it. You did what with the note?”

“I flushed it down the toilet,” Darvelle said.

“Then you had the truck. Was it parked in your driveway?”

Darvelle shook her head. “If it had been in the driveway, I’d have known he was around before I came into the house. We had to go looking for it. I mean, we knew he had to drive something and we didn’t want it near the house. But it was the same truck. At least it looked the same. It was parked around the corner. And the keys were in Chester’s pocket, so we—”

“I drove it over to the place, you know, the business,” Kyle said. “Morton Rubbish Removal. Whatever it’s called. I drove it over there and left it in the employee parking lot way in the back near the brick wall.”

“I followed him in my car and after he’d parked he just got in and we left,” Darvelle said. “It wasn’t hard. There aren’t any security cameras or anything.”

“And all this time, the body was in Ms. Haymes’s freezer,” Gregor said.

They both nodded.

“So,” Gregor said. “You went back to Ms. Haymes’s house, and you tried to figure out a way to dispose of the body, and a way to dispose of the backpack. But first you shaved off a small amount of hair near his nipple and spider-tattooed MOM onto it. Why?”

“That was me,” Kyle said. “I thought, all along I thought, we were safest the more bizarre it all was. If it was really strange, people would pay attention to the strange instead of just looking for the obvious, if you see what I mean. And then there was Charlene, you know. I can’t stand Charlene. Nobody can. So I thought—well, let’s get everybody thinking about Charlene. But it was just a little thing. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes, some ink and a straight pin. It wasn’t like he was going to call out in pain.”