Flowering Judas(41)

“It’s not like it was me that put that backpack in the field,” he said out loud.

Across the desk, Sue Folger looked up. “Did you say something?”

Sue Folger was a clerk. She never went out on patrol. She never did anything but shuffle papers. Kyle thought she looked old.

“I was talking to myself,” he said.

“You ever intend to get back in a patrol car, you’d better watch that,” Sue said.

She was old, really old. She was probably over forty.

“It’s not like I did anything wrong,” Kyle said. “I mean, I didn’t tamper with evidence, or anything. And I wasn’t even a part of all that. All I did was answer a call, right there with Jack, because we were the closest ones to it.”

Sue took her glasses off. Nobody ever wore glasses anymore. People wore contacts. “It’s the Morton family,” she said, sounding so infinitely patient Kyle wanted to punch her. “You know what Charlene Morton is like. She’s screaming to high heaven. Not that I blame her. All this time, and now her son’s here and he’s dead like that.”

“Murdered,” Kyle said.

“That seems to be the word,” Sue said. “Don’t ask me what it’s all about, though. The man hasn’t even seen the body, and the next thing you know, he’s on the telephone saying Chester couldn’t have hung himself off that billboard. You have to ask yourself where that sort of thing comes from.”

“They’ve got stuff,” Kyle said vaguely. “You know, in bigger places. They’ve got stuff we don’t have to help them figure things out. He’s from Philadelphia.”

“I still say you don’t throw around things like that if you aren’t sure about what you’re saying, and I can’t see how he’s going to be sure about what he’s saying. What if he gets here and sees the body and decides he was wrong? What then?”

“The body isn’t here, is it?”

“No,” Sue said. “It’s over at Feldman’s Funeral Home, locked in a freezer or something. I don’t know. Howard was absolutely losing it this morning, running around, making sure of I don’t know what. And Charlene’s called three times. Why Howard thinks you can keep anything secret in this town is beyond me.”

“Shouldn’t the body be in, like, a morgue or something?” Kyle asked.

“We don’t have a morgue,” Sue said. “The last time we had a murder in this town was in 1948. We’ve had dead bodies before. All those kids drinking and driving in the springtime, you’re going to have bodies. And Dade Warren committed suicide a couple of years back. Okay, maybe twenty. I forget how fast time goes. Didn’t you ever hear about Dade Warren?”

“Twenty years ago, I was ten,” Kyle said.

“Oh, well. It was famous around here for awhile. It wasn’t like this. There wasn’t any mystery to it. Dade Warren ran a drugstore, a little independent mom-and-pop drugstore. He’d gotten it from his parents when they died. Anyway, Rite Aid wanted to come in, and Dade fought like crazy at the zoning board, but you can’t keep businesses out of a community just because somebody already living there doesn’t want the competition. Dade took a bunch of sedatives from the pharmacy and drugged the hell out of his wife and children during dinner. Then he took his rifle and shot them all in the head. Then he shot himself. He left a note, but it was more like a letter. A really long thing. It’s like I said, there wasn’t any mystery about it.”

“Damn,” Kyle said. “You’d have thought I’d have heard something about that sometime.”

“We don’t talk about it around here,” Sue said. “It was Howard’s last case before he became a detective. It drives him crazy to talk about it. So we don’t bother.”

“Chester Morton was Howard’s case, too,” Kyle said. “That’s got to be odd.”

“Chester Morton wasn’t anybody’s case,” Sue said. “Nobody but Charlene ever thought he’d been murdered, and as it turned out, nobody was right. I wonder where he’s been all this time, don’t you? Twelve years. He had to be somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I don’t think of it that way, though. It’s like he vanished under an invisibility cloak, or something.”

“People ask why I never let my children read Harry Potter,” Sue said, “and there it is, that’s it. It’s not that Harry Potter encourages witchcraft. It’s that it encourages nonsense. Don’t you have work to do, or something?”