Flowering Judas(15)

“I can’t tell for sure,” he said finally. “But I can guess.”

“And you guess it’s him?”

“I guess it’s him.”

“Then what does that mean, Howard? Is that good news? Has he been dead for twelve years? What do you think is going on here?”

“If he’d been dead for twelve years, he’d be a skeleton by now,” Howard said. “Unless he was embalmed, of course. Somebody could have embalmed him and kept the body in a refrigerator all this time. He’d be pretty solid then.”

“For God’s sake, Howard, I mean it. I’m going to murder you.”

“Marianne, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to say? I mean it. What am I the hell supposed to say? He’s up there. I’m pretty sure it’s Chester Ray Morton. I don’t know how long he’s been up there. I know it hasn’t been twelve years. I don’t think it could have been all of twenty-four hours. There were day classes at the college today. Somebody would have seen him. After that, I haven’t got a clue, and I’m not going to have a clue until the tech people get done with what they do. I’m not a clairvoyant. I don’t know what happened here.”

This time, the cell line was not silent. There was a click, click, clicking sound. Howard knew what that was. That was Marianne tapping the top of her pen on her desk. She used to do that when they were both detectives and she was his partner. It had always driven him crazy.

“Listen,” Marianne said. “We’re not going to be able to do it. We’re not going to be able to say it was suicide.”

“We don’t know that it was suicide.”

“His body hanging off the billboard? What would it be except suicide?”

“He could have been killed first,” Howard said. “Somebody could have shot him, or strangled him, or stabbed him, and then bundled up the body and hung it off the billboard.”

“And you think that’s what happened? How could anybody have done that? That billboard is right out in front of everybody and everything. Somebody would have seen.”

“Well, you’d think somebody would have seen if he hanged himself from it,” Howard said, “but they didn’t see that, either. There are people running all over here. As far as I know, they haven’t found anybody who saw anything yet, except the security guard who called it in.”

“I’ll bet a dozen people saw it,” Marianne said. “They just didn’t bother to phone it in.”

“People see things without seeing them,” Howard said. “They see a vague thing and they’re not sure what it is and their minds are on something else. You know how it goes.”

“We’re still not going to be able to say it’s suicide,” Marianne said. “I don’t care if the guy left a video message saying he was going to off himself, we’re not going to be able to go with that. We’ve going to have to investigate it as a murder whether it makes sense to do it or not. And you know that.”

“I do know that,” Howard said.

“That woman will be around any minute, if she isn’t already. She’ll be on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and all the local stations and she’ll be screaming bloody murder.”

“Yes,” Howard said.

“She’ll do that even though we were right,” Marianne said. “He wasn’t dead. We said that at the time. He wasn’t dead. He’d gone off somewhere. And we were right. But it won’t matter. Because he’s dead now. Do you see?”

“Yes, yes, I see,” Howard said. “You don’t have to yell in my ear. I know what the ramifications of this are. I’ve always known what the ramifications of this would be. I knew as soon as they told me about the call. Give it up, Marianne.”

“This could be big trouble,” Marianne said.

“I know.”

“This could be lethal trouble. For both of us.”

“I know that, too.”

“I think we need some help,” Marianne said.

Howard leaned forward a little. The body was going up and up. There was a man on the ladder with a hook holding it from one side and what looked like two other men on another ladder pulling carefully upward. One of the men at the top had hold of the rope and was trying to saw through it. The weird lighting made everything look wrong.

Howard could still remember the day that he and Marianne had searched the trailer for the first time—the dust on all the surfaces, the bed made up with hospital corners, that small thin line of caking blood that had snaked across the top of the kitchen counter. They’d never been able to connect that blood to anybody.