Flowering Judas(134)

“I won’t do that,” Howard said.

“Good.” Marianne got her purse off the floor and walked across the room to where Howard was still leaning against the door. He moved away to let her pass. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said.

Howard watched her walk out into the main part of the station. He’d known her all his life. They’d met in kindergarten, when they were both five. Maybe they should have done something about it sometime along the way.

Marianne left and Gregor Demarkian returned, almost simultaneously. He was carrying photographs in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Howard wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.

“Mr. Androcoelho,” Demarkian said. “Come look at this for a minute.”

Howard moved aside so that Gregor Demarkian could go through the office door without interference. “I made the call to the Mortons,” he said. “Charlene says she’ll meet us at the house. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t blame her for not wanting to gum up the business with a murder investigation.”

Gregor Demarkian went over to the desk and dumped the photographs on it. They were the same photographs of the ground being dug up around Chester Morton’s trailer he had been looking at before.

“Nobody ever mentioned this,” he said. “But it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” Howard said.

“I was wrong about New Jersey,” Gregor said. “I knew this all had to be about the baby, but I thought Chester must have taken the dead body of the infant when he left here. He took it. He stashed the body somewhere it would not give itself away, in a plastic bag in other plastic bags, in the ground, somewhere so that it wouldn’t smell. And then when he wanted to come back here, he dug it up and took it with him. I was so sure of that, I got a Bureau agent to go talk the police in Atlantic City into getting a warrant for Chester Morton’s place of residence to check for traces of it.”

“Chester Morton was in Atlantic City?” Howard said.

“Yes, he was,” Gregor said. “But the body of the baby wasn’t. The body of the baby was here. All these years.”

“And we never noticed it?” Howard said. “What was it, out in the woods, or what?”

Gregor Demarkian shook his head. “It would have made sense, wouldn’t it, to have taken it out into the woods somewhere? But then, maybe not. Kids stumble over stuff in the woods. Hunters do, too. So if you absolutely did not want it found, if you did not want anybody to connect you to the death of an infant, maybe it would make more sense to keep it where you could keep an eye on it. Like in the ground around the trailer.”

“So that’s where it was? Buried under the trailer? Chester went and buried the body of an infant under his trailer? I think you’re crazy.”

“I’d think I was crazy, too, if that was the kind of thing I was going with,” Gregor said. “In the first place, Chester didn’t bury the body. In the second, the body wasn’t buried around the trailer. It couldn’t have been. People in that trailer park will hide from the police. They’ll close their blinds and play dead while Kyle Holborn runs around doing whatever he wants to do with a full-grown adult corpse, because he’s got a uniform and a patrol car and they don’t want anything to do with the law. But if one of their own was burying something in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day for that matter, they’d have been all over it.”

“He wasn’t one of their own,” Howard said reflexively.

“He lived in the park,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That was as close to being one of their own as he needed to get. Let me shove some of this back in my briefcase and then let’s go. I need to talk to Charlene Morton.”

“But where did he bury the body?” Howard said. “You’ve still got the corpse of an infant wandering around. Where did he put it?”

“He didn’t put it anywhere,” Gregor said. “He didn’t bury it and he didn’t know where it was buried. Although I think he might have thought he did.”

“He thought it was in the ground around the trailer.”

“That’s right.”

“But maybe it was,” Howard said. “I mean, maybe he found it when he went looking for it. Look at those pictures. The ground is dug up everywhere. Maybe—”

“If he’d known where the body was buried,” Gregor said, “if he’d buried it himself, he’d have had a better idea of where to dig. Those are pictures of a blind search. Everything is uprooted everywhere. And not just around his own trailer, but around the one next door. If he’d found the body, he’d have stopped digging. But he never stopped digging. Not until he had the whole area completely unearthed. So he didn’t find it there.”