“Rot?”
‘Yes.”
“Would there have been rot after twelve years?”
“There would have been something,” Shpetim said desperately. “It didn’t make sense, I’m telling you. What if the skeleton didn’t have anything to do with the man who was hanged? Or hanged himself? Or whatever it was? What if it’s something else? Somebody put the skeleton of a baby in a backpack and then put the backpack in the ground on my building site, and I don’t know that—”
“You don’t know anything,” Lora said. “You’re jumping at shadows. This is our Nderi. That must be the girl. She’s a very beautiful girl.”
Shpetim Kika already knew that Anya Haseri was a beautiful girl. He just didn’t think it was the point.
3
For almost the last week now, Darvelle Haymes’s clients had not been clients. They had been people who wanted to get a look at—even to talk to—the woman who might have killed Chester Morton. Darvelle knew all about those particular kinds of people. She’d met a lot of them after Chester first disappeared. She’d met them everywhere. Once, she’d come home—that was to the old place, the bad place—and found one of them in her living room, crawling around on the carpet with a magnifying glass, like a goddamned Sherlock Holmes.
So far, this time, there hadn’t been much in the way of that kind of thing. There had been the “clients” who weren’t clients, but it had all been very civilized and oblique. She’d go out to show a few houses to somebody who said she was looking for a four bedroom ranch or something new with copper plumbing. Then the questions would start. They were never direct questions. The “clients” never came out and said they knew she was the one everybody had talked about when Chester went missing, or that that crazy Charlene Morton had been talking about on television and in newspapers ever since. They didn’t say anything, just “My my,” and “Oh, dear,” and “Don’t you wonder if it’s getting so it’s not safe to live here anymore.”
Darvelle had gone out on the night they found the body. She’d driven all the way over to Mattatuck–Harvey Community college and parked her car on the grassy side of the road. She wasn’t up near the billboard. By the time she’d got there, half the town had come up. There was no space up near the billboard. Still, she’d been close enough. She’d been able to see the body swaying back and forth in the wind and the guys climbing up to bring it down. Nothing about it had looked familiar to her. She didn’t know why she had thought it would.
Now she turned off her engine and looked up into the rearview mirror to make sure Kyle was pulling in behind her. He had his red pickup truck and not the police cruiser, which was as it should be. He wasn’t on duty, and even if he was, she would have insisted. She didn’t want police cruisers parked at her place, not the way things were. She didn’t want police cruisers anywhere near her place.
She got out of the car and looked around. There were no flyers taped to the telephone poles. The last of those had gone up the day Chester was finally found. There was no crazy old woman sitting on her doorstep. Darvelle kept expecting her to show up there. Threatening. Or something.
Kyle got out of his truck and looked around. “It looks quiet enough,” he said.
“It is,” Darvelle said. “Of course, we’re not inside yet. Maybe she’s in the kitchen waiting for me to come home. Maybe somebody else is. You have no idea what it was like twelve years ago.”
“I was there.”
Darvelle considered this. This was only half true. She had seen Kyle on the night Chester was supposed to have gone missing, but she hadn’t seen him again for months after that. He hadn’t even wanted to talk to her.
She went up to the front door, and opened it, and looked around. She flicked on the overhead lights and waved Kyle in. It had started to get dark earlier again. She didn’t like it when it got dark earlier.
Kyle came in and sat down on the couch and said, “Well?”
Darvelle headed toward the kitchen. “Don’t be like that,” she said. “You don’t know what that woman is like. I wouldn’t put it past her to have this place bugged.”
“She had to get a warrant to get this place bugged,” Kyle said, raising his voice so that it carried to her. “And no judge is going to issue a warrant to a civilian, and nobody in the department has asked for a bug. I’d have heard about it if they had.”
Darvelle got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator. She got a glass for herself.