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Flowering Judas(14)

By:Jane Haddam


“I’ve seen it already,” he said. “I’m not in a hurry to see it again.”

Kyle headed across the site himself. He wished it wasn’t so close to dark. He wished the site didn’t feel so much like a graveyard. He wished he’d told Darvelle something, or that he’d told somebody something. He should not be out here. He should not have anything to do with anything to do with anything about this case.

He got to the little group of men. Jack was standing there in the circle of them, looking down.

“Damn,” he said, as Kyle walked up.

“If we thought there was anything important inside it, we would have left it alone. Still, no one actually put their hands on it,” one of the men said. “It was just that we didn’t know what to do. It was all zipped up when we found it. It wasn’t like we could see anything.”

“It wasn’t like that guy’s body could have fit in it,” another man said.

“It made sense to open it,” a third man said, and Kyle knew this one. It was Nderi Kika. It was funny the way things worked. Nderi had been born in Albania, but he was now so American nobody would think he hadn’t been here forever.

The crowd of men stepped away a little, and Jack pointed at the ground.

“Look at that,” he said.

At first, all Kyle saw was the yellow of the backpack. He took his flashlight out. He turned it on and aimed it down. It wasn’t really dark. The flashlight helped but it almost didn’t. Kyle ran the light up and down the now-open pack, up and down the bones half crushed and lying there, some of them bent, not quite the way they ought to be.

The tiny human skull was cracked in half.

9

The last person to see the body hanging from the billboard on Mattatuck Avenue was Chief of Police Howard Androcoelho, and he was paying more attention to it than he thought he could ever pay to anything.

By then it was almost full dark, and the lights across the top of the billboard were glowing. Traffic on Mattatuck Avenue had turned into a communal parking experience. Traffic in and out of the front entrance of Mattatuck–Harvey Community College had come to a halt. There were a good half-dozen patrol cars, a good thirty uniformed police officers, four plainclothes detectives, two EMT vans, the coroner’s van, and seven mobile news trucks clustered around the bottom of the billboard. There were newspeople doing stand-up reports in the middle of the street.

Howard Androcoelho was sitting in his car, looking up at the body hanging there, twisting a little as three men did what they could to bring it down. They couldn’t just cut the rope. It could fall. There was always a chance that the man was still alive. There was always that chance even if there wasn’t one.

Howard’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and opened up.

“Well?” the voice on the other end of the line said. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Marianne Glew, the mayor of Mattatuck.

“We won’t know for sure until we bring him down.”

“Don’t do this to me, Howard.”

“I’m not doing anything to you. We won’t know until we bring the body down and they can do the tests. DNA. Fingerprints. Dental records.”

“He’s dead?”

“Whoever is up there is definitely dead.”

“You don’t need to do tests for that one?”

“They’ll do tests for it,” Howard said. “I don’t need tests to know. You ever seen the face of somebody’s been hanged? Their tongue sticks out—”

“All right, yes, Howard. I was with you on the Keith Marbury case, for God’s sake. It might have been a million years ago, but it’s the kind of thing you remember.”

“Yeah, well,” Howard said.

There was that odd dead silence on the cell that happened whenever nobody was talking, or when somebody had hung up. Except that you couldn’t really hang up a cell phone, not in the way you used to hang up the real phone. Howard thought of all those old Forties movies his wife liked to watched so much, the black-and-white ones where Fred MacMurray was a villain and the cops were all overweight. If he was in one of those movies right now, he’d be carrying a hip flask full of whiskey.

Which would not be a bad idea.

Marianne coughed. “Howard?”

“I’m still here,” Howard said.

“It was all a million years ago,” Marianne said. “But you’ve got to remember it. You’ve got to remember him. He’s hanging off the billboard with the goddamned picture on it. Are you really telling me you can’t tell if it’s him or not?”

Howard considered his left hand. It looked the way it always looked. Then he looked out at the scene going on above him. Somebody had hold of the rope. They were pulling the body upward.