Flowering Judas(31)

“People install illegal bugs,” she said. “You hear about it all the time.”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever those get, they’re not admissible as evidence.”

“They wouldn’t have to be admissible as evidence for you to lose your job,” Darvelle said. “You’re not supposed to be talking to me about this, and you know it.”

She went back into the living room and handed a can of beer to Kyle. He popped the top and drank it.

“You know,” he said, “it’s not like they don’t know that we’re together. They know that we’re together. That’s why they took me off the baby thing—”

“But you were on the baby thing,” Darvelle said. “You went out there.”

“I went out there, we didn’t know what it was. Not really.”

“They tell you it’s the skeleton of a baby in a bright yellow backpack and you don’t know what it is, not really?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what it was. You told me you’d never had a baby. You’d never had an abortion. You’d never been pregnant.”

“And it’s true,” Darvelle said. “I’ve never been any of those things.”

“I had no reason to think you’d have anything to do with the skeleton of a baby. Anyway, I wasn’t, you know, much of anything when all that happened. I was still living with my parents in Kiratonic.”

“We were going out.”

“And everybody knew about it,” Kyle said. “That idiot woman told everybody on earth that you’d killed her son because—hell, I don’t know why. Because you wanted to be with me? What sense did that make? We were all about eighteen. If you wanted to dump him and be with me, you didn’t have to kill him. You just had to do it.”

“I did do it.”

“I know.”

Darvelle poured beer into her glass. She didn’t really like beer. She used to like it, but that was before she’d gotten her life together and grown up. These days, she only kept the stuff in the refrigerator for Kyle.

“So,” she said. “What’s going on?”

Kyle shrugged. “They’ve hired this guy. Gregor Demarkian.”

“I know that. I looked him up on the Internet.”

“Then you know as much as I do. They hired him to consult, whatever that means. That’s what he is, a consultant. He’s due up here tomorrow or the day after.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know then what,” Kyle said, sounding irritated. “He’ll consult, I guess. I don’t know how he works. The clerks have been spending all their time making copies of all the files and sending him things. Every once in a while, we get a request for something from forensics. That’s a joke. What does he think this is, CSI: Miami? Forensics, for God’s sake.”

“I thought you got a lot of new stuff for forensics. From the stimulus package, or whatever that was.”

“We did. But we didn’t get the guys to run it. You’ve got to have really good guys. They cost a lot of money. We didn’t get money for that. We going to make something or go out to eat?” Kyle said. “I’m starving.”

Darvelle didn’t want to go out to eat. There would be people in restaurants. The people might not be as polite as the clients.

“I’ll make something,” she said, getting up. “I could use the distraction, anyway. Are you going to be able to spend the night?”

“I even brought a clean uniform.”

Darvelle headed back toward the kitchen. She’d make pasta and garlic bread. It would be simple and it wouldn’t take a lot of time. She would not think about that whole week after Chester was reported missing, after everybody had begun taking it all seriously. She would very definitely not think of the very night, and herself standing in the door of Chester’s trailer while the rain poured down outside and she knew Kyle was waiting for her at the side of the road.





FOUR

1

Gregor Demarkian did not know what disoriented him more: the fact that he had a hired car and a driver named Tony Bolero, or the fact that the first thing he saw when he walked into the lobby of the Howard Johnson in Mattatuck, New York, was his own face on the front page of the local newspaper.

The car and the driver made him feel odd in the way that Bennis’s ideas often made him feel odd. The woman had been born and raised rich, and it seemed that that made a more permanent impression than the ten years she’d spent poor and disinherited. She was rich again—richer than her brothers who had not been disinherited—given the fantasy novels and all that, and she spent money in a way that Gregor, who had been brought up poor in a tenement, never could.