“It wasn’t a body anyway,” Howard said. “It was a skeleton.”
“Let’s go over and talk to the Mortons,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I need to get back to Philadelphia for a birthday party.”
SEVEN
1
Gregor Demarkian did not go out to Charlene Morton’s house in Howard Androcoelho’s car. He’d had enough of Howard Androcoelho on any level. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in a small space while the man asked him questions while trying not to actually ask him and pumped him for information he didn’t actually need.
Instead, Gregor sat next to Tony Bolero and punched numbers into his cell phone one after the other—to Bennis, because he wanted to hear her voice; to Ferris Cole, to find out what could be found if you searched a place where a body had decomposed; to Rhonda Alvarez, to explain why the police probably weren’t going to find what he’d hoped they’d find in wherever Chester Morton had been living in New Jersey.
“I really wish the world was like CSI,” Ferris Cole said, “but it isn’t. Of course, it’s to our advantage if criminals think it is. The death penalty may not be a deterrent, but fear of exposure through test tubes certainly is. Although I wish it were more of one. I’m so sick of exploding meth labs, I could give up this work to run a Dairy Queen.”
“So we wouldn’t be able to find anything at all?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Ferris Cole said. “I haven’t had a look at the skeleton, but you keep telling me it has a crack in the skull. Cracks leave fragments, or they frequently do. Of course, it depends on just how young an infant this was. If it was just a day or two, the skull would have been fairly soft. That wouldn’t get you what you wanted. If it was a couple of weeks old, though, you might get fragments. And the fragments would have been left in the soil when the skeleton was taken out. It’s a long shot. The police would have to shift through the soil with a flour sifter. But at least it’s possible.”
“I’m with what you said,” Gregor said. “I wish the world were like CSI, too.”
“You’ve got to understand, it’s not that there would be no evidence at all of a body having decomposed there,” Ferris Cole said. “There would always be something left behind. It’s just that it would be incredibly hard to detect, and even if you did detect it, it isn’t likely that it would tell you anything more than that something had been there. Then it would depend first on the judge, to let the prosecution enter evidence that was that vague, and then on the jury. The jury watches CSI, too. When you can’t nail it the way they do on television, juries are likely to decide that that amounts to reasonable doubt.”
“Marvelous,” Gregor said. “Half the time they ignore evidence because it’s not like the science fiction stuff they see on TV, and half the time they convict without evidence because they’re sure that nobody could be arrested if they hadn’t done something wrong. Tell me again why this is the best possible judicial system.”
“It is, though,” Ferris Cole said. “Let me get this stuff going and see what I can find. You should try to come up with an alternative approach, that’s all. Something that doesn’t rely on the skeleton.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “But it annoys me. The aesthetic is wrong. This whole thing, from the beginning, was about the baby. Well, no, not from the absolute beginning. But—oh, never mind. I’ll explain it all later. I’m in a car.”
“You’re not driving, I hope. Not while you’re talking on a cell phone.”
Gregor let that go by. He never drove—or almost never—but everybody wanted to tell him not to do it on his cell phone.
Rhonda Alvarez was nearly out of breath. “I’m here,” she said, when she picked up. “I was just thinking of you. I’m here, we’re all here, we’ve been here for half an hour.”
“Where?”
“Chester Morton’s house,” she said. “It’s a house, too, not an apartment. Out in the country in this little town. He was renting it and he still is, technically. He didn’t give up the lease or anything. Anyway, I yelled and screamed and acted hysterical and insisted this was priority and rush and all the rest of it, and the locals got a warrant in no time flat and we came right out here. We’ve been here for half an hour. God, the place is a mess.”
“A mess?’
“Forget vacuuming. The man never picked up his garbage. You wouldn’t believe it. Fast-food wrappers and boxes everywhere, and some fast food still in them, going to mold. Old magazines. Those magazines, if you know what I mean. He loved beaver shots. Everything’s trashed. The bathroom stinks.”