Flowering Judas(129)

“All right,” Gregor said. “So, first you gave him a tattoo and then—then you must have gotten rid of the backpack. You put the backpack at the construction site, to make sure it would be found. I’ve got the security tapes from the site. I take it I’m going to find one extra, out-of-schedule police run.”

Kyle shook his head. “I just picked up the car and went with it,” he said. “Nobody asked any questions. Nobody ever does.”

“Did you take Chester Morton’s body to the billboard in a police car?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Really early in the morning, right after I dropped off the backpack. God, it was surreal. I thought somebody would see the damn thing right away, but it hung up there for hours and hours and hours. I thought I was going to go insane.”

“Wait,” Howard Androcoelho said. “I thought the medical examiner said it had only been hanging up there for two hours.”

“You don’t have a medical examiner to speak of,” Gregor said, “but the time frame would be off given the coldness of the body—”

“It was frozen stiff when I put it up there,” Kyle said. “I never realized before that that was meant literally.”

“And how could he have done it without anybody seeing?” Howard asked.

“Oh, that’s the easy part,” Gregor said. “I went over there and looked the other day. The billboard is positioned slantwise to the road. It’s very large, and its scaffolding reaches down into a dense clump of trees. You can do anything you want behind that billboard and nobody from the road can see you. The miracle was that nobody driving by saw the body as it came up over the top, because Kyle here had to be literally swinging it.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “All right. That.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “But then we’ve got the disappearing corpse. I take it the two of you see that as my fault, you removed the corpse because—”

“How were we supposed to know what was going to happen?” Kyle said. “I see those television shows. And I know the real thing isn’t that good, but you were talking about sending the body to the state medical examiner’s and I couldn’t figure out, neither of us could, what that would mean. So—”

“So,” Gregor said, “you just drove up to Feldman’s and took the body out. And it was simple, because you were in uniform and you had a police car. Didn’t it occur to either one of you that too much of the stuff you were doing could only be successful if somebody was in uniform and had a police car? Dropping off the backpack. Getting the body out of Feldman’s. Putting the body in Chester Morton’s old trailer. Try any of that in anything but a police car and you’d have been nailed midstream. It’s something of a miracle you were never nailed anyway. Is that the end of it? Are the two of you sure I’m not going to find something else wandering around that you should have told me about?”

Darvelle shook her head. “We got a little scared. Especially after moving the body. I mean, you know, from Feldman’s. It just didn’t feel safe anymore. If you see what I mean.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Wait,” Howard Androcoelho said. “Just a minute. Are you telling me that Chester Morton committed suicide?”

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

“But then, I don’t get it. I mean, we can’t arrest anybody for a suicide, well, unless they live, you know, and—”

“Those two people in that truck didn’t commit suicide,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you try wrapping your mind around that.”





SIX

1

Shpetim Kika heard the news on the little television set he kept in the construction site. The set was always on, but he didn’t watch it much, because it didn’t have cable. Once there had been a time when there was no cable. Everybody in this area and everyplace else in the United States had relied on their antennae. How had that worked? The antenna was useless as far as Shpetim could see. The set filled up with snow. It made buzzing noises. Sometimes it just went mute. It was impossible at least half the time.

It was just after lunch, and Shpetim had been watching Nderi and Anya, standing together near the edge of the site, near the new parking lot where cars would be when the building was open. Anya had taken a big box of something out of the trunk of her car. Then Nderi had taken the box from her. Now they were both walking across the site toward him, but they were walking very slowly. It reminded Shpetim of something. He wasn’t sure of what.

The television broke through its snow for a moment and someone said, “This just in. Sources inside the Mattatuck Police Department are reporting that an arrest will be made this afternoon for the murders of two local residents near Stephenson Dam just hours ago. Sources also tell us that these murders are connected to the disappearance and death of Chester Morton and that the break in the case was obtained through evidence provided by the infant’s skeleton found on a construction site near Mattatuck–Harvey Community College.”