Flowering Judas(22)

It was a very odd scene. In the background was what appeared to be a part of a billboard. In front of it, a body was hanging, the neck bent and obviously broken, the head obscured by what looked like a burlap sack.

“Well,” Gregor said.

“That’s how we found him,” Howard Androcoelho said. “Just like that. As if he’d been executed.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Had he been?”

Howard Androcoelho shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. The medical examiner wants to call it a suicide and get it over with. I don’t think there’s any physical evidence that anything else happened. Except for the hood on his head, or the hood-ish thing. It was just a feed bag. But suicides don’t usually do that, do they? Put something over their heads like that.”

“Not usually,” Gregor said. “If the medical examiner thinks it’s suicide, what makes you think it’s not?”

“I don’t think it’s not,” Howard Androcoelho said. “It’s just that—the circumstances are kind of odd. We tried to work it out after we cut him down, you know. As far as we can tell, he’d been hanging there for hours, hanging off this billboard all lit up by the nightlamps, you know, the way billboards are. And nobody noticed.”

“Was it in an out of the way place?”

“It was right on the corner of the entrance to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College,” Howard Androcoelho said. “The place is huge, and it was evening. Students and teachers were going in and out all the time. The ones going out wouldn’t have noticed anything necessarily, but the ones going in had to pass right by the thing. There are evening classes, starting at seven, all fall term. People were going in and out. Nobody saw him.”

“Maybe he wasn’t there,” Gregor said. “Maybe he got there, I don’t know, when did you find him—”

“We cut him down, it was a little after nine.”

“So maybe he got there a little before nine.”

“Not according to the forensics,” Howard said. “Not that we’ve got the kind of forensics you people have down here. We don’t. But we got a bunch of money from the Homeland Security people after 9/11, so we’ve got a mobile crime lab, and a lot better equipment than we used to have. Anyway, our guy says he’d been up there a minimum of two hours. Which means that people were passing back and forth in front of him for—well, forever.”

Gregor looked at the picture again. The lights around the body seemed to turn it into a display, something you were supposed to look at, something calling attention to itself.

“I wonder if he expected it,” Gregor said.

“Expected what?”

“Not to be found for at least two hours,” Gregor said. “Not everybody who tries to commit suicide is trying to commit suicide. Some of them are just trying to get attention. Maybe he hanged himself there because he expected people to notice him right away, and then, when they didn’t, he died.”

“If he hanged himself there, that won’t be the only reason he did it,” Howard said. “And if somebody else hanged him there, that won’t be the only reason they did it, either. Let me show you something else.”

Howard reached back into the briefcase, shuffled more papers around, took more papers out and put them on the table, and shuffled other papers around. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen a police officer this disorganized about his evidence. It was a wonder that this man had ever solved any case at all.

Howard finally found what he was looking for and pulled it out. It was another photograph, also of the body and the billboard behind it, but taken from farther out, so that the billboard as clear. It was an oversized photograph, too, so that the billboard was very clear.

CHESTER RAY MORTON ran across it in outsized capital letters. Gregor looked above those and saw the words HAVE YOU SEEN

Below that, there was a phone number, also in outsized letters, and then, underneath that:

AWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO DISCOVERY OF HIS WHEREABOUTS

Gregor sat back. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“It’s more than interesting,” Howard Androcoelho said. “That billboard? The guy they’re looking for there? That’s the guy that we found hanging.”

2

When Linda Melajian came back to take Howard Androcoelho’s order, he had it ready. Gregor listened in fascination as the man ordered a double stack of pancakes with butter, syrup, sausages, and hash browns, as if he were the star of a television commercial for IHOP. Linda did not bring Gregor’s own order—which really wasn’t much better—although everybody else at the window booth had been served. Maybe she was trying to do the professional thing and make sure Gregor and Howard ate together. Gregor had had a talk with Linda once about the professional side of waiting tables. There was a lot more to it than he would have suspected.