Flowering Judas(36)

“Yes,” Gregor said. “But there’s something. In the meantime. What do you do for forensics up here?”

“It’s funny you should say ‘up here,’” Howard said. “I always think of us as ‘down.’ You know. Because we’re in the southern part of the state. We’re practically in Pennsylvania. Of corse, they’re a lot more south than us in Westchester, but—”

“Forensics,” Gregor said. “What do you do for forensics?”

“Oh, I told you,” Howard said. “We’ve got a new mobile crime lab. Because of the stimulus money.”

“And you’ve got a medical examiner? A coroner?”

“Oh, yeah, we do. Well, we’ve got somebody on call, if you know what I mean. We don’t have much use for one most of the time. We don’t get a lot of murders. And, you know, things.”

“Is there a state medical examiner you can appeal to?” Gregor asked. “Does the state have something set up where you could send things that are a bit out of the ordinary, just in case? Some states do that, you know—”

“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I—it’s not that. I mean, we don’t have much call for—”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “All right. There are a few things that need checking out. You need to look into the possibility that the state or the county has a professional forensics lab you could use, somebody who’s used to doing autopsies on possible murder victims. There are some things, at least as far as I can tell from the photographs—”

“You mean he didn’t commit suicide?” Howard Androcoelho sounded shocked. “You mean we were wrong all this time? But how could somebody have done something like that in broad daylight in the middle of a busy intersection?”

Gregor tried counting to ten and letting the words flow over him.

“Listen,” he said finally. “It might help if I could see the body. What I think I’m seeing might just be a trick of the photograph. It might not be anything. You do still have the body, don’t you? You haven’t released it to the family?”

“Oh, no, I haven’t released it to the family,” Howard said. “We were waiting for you to get here to do that. We’ve been saying we needed to hold on to it as long as we were doing our investigation, but I didn’t think, none of us thought—”

“None of you thought it was going to be anything but suicide?”

Howard Androcoelho sounded defensive. “You’re wondering why we called you in, if we thought it was suicide all the time. Well, we can’t just go calling it suicide. The family would have a fit, and they’re good at having fits. Especially Charlene. And they’re a big noise up here. And we’ve made enough mistakes with this already. So—”

“Never mind,” Gregor said. “It would really, really, really help if I could see the body. And if I could talk to your medical examiner.”

“Because you don’t think he committed suicide,” Howard said.

“I don’t know if he committed suicide or not,” Gregor said. “I do know he didn’t commit suicide by hanging himself over that billboard. At least, I know that if this photograph is accurate, which I can’t know unless I actually see the body. So if you would—”

“You saw something in a photograph that makes you think Chester didn’t hang himself off that billboard? How could you know that? What could you see?”

Gregor looked down at the photograph. Again. “Well,” he said. “I see a tattoo. On his chest.”

“Chester had a million tattoos. He was decked out better than Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”

“He didn’t have them on his chest,” Gregor said. “He has a very hairy chest, from what I can see. Maybe that was why. But there’s one little tattoo there now, and it’s bright red.”

“So?”

“So it’s next to the holes of a nipple piercing, and the holes are large. Meaning he was used to wearing something in there. But whatever that is, is gone, and the tattoo is bright red.”

“So?” Howard said again.

“I’m going to come over to central station and see you,” Gregor said, “right now. Get something going with the medical examiner or whoever you have to talk to to let me view the body. Because looking at this, I’m willing to bet that this thing was put on the body after it was dead. And I don’t think anybody could have done that hanging off a billboard.”





FIVE

1

Althy Michaelman would have listened to all the news about Gregor Demarkian, but by the time she got up that afternoon, the cable had been cut off again. Althy didn’t think it was fair. Back when she was growing up, you didn’t need a cable box and a lot of money to watch the television. There was an antenna on the roof, and that was it. Of course, sometimes the screen was full of snow, and sometimes the signals got so badly crossed you picked up a station in Cleveland, but at least it was free. Althy approved of free. She thought everything should be free.