“I wish people would stop getting so worked up about the stark naked,” Kyle said. “I mean, of course he was stark naked. He was in a cold locker at Feldman’s. You don’t put clothes on a body in a cold locker. At least, you don’t until you want to put him in a casket. And what did they expect? That whoever took the thing was going to dress it up before he put it somewhere?”
There was a long pause on the line. Kyle knew that Darvelle was thinking it through. Then she said, very cautiously, “All right. I can see how that would work.”
“I’d think the real problem would be the time,” Kyle said. “I mean, the body disappeared from Feldman’s last night, we know the approximate time, sort of, you see what I mean? And now the body is in the trailer. So the question is, did the body go directly to the trailer, or did it get there later. You know, did someone hang on to it for a while.”
Darvelle did some more considering. “And that’s one of those things they can figure out?”
“Maybe,” Kyle said. “It depends on where the body was when it wasn’t in the trailer.”
“Why?”
Kyle shrugged. He knew she couldn’t see his shrug, but, he didn’t care. “Bodies leave things behind. You never get them away completely clean. They leave fibers, and blood, and DNA, and stuff. Except I don’t think there would be any blood in this case. But they leave things. Forensics.”
“I thought you said that was all a lot of bunk,” Darvelle said. “CSI and all that stuff. I thought you said it was all a lot of crap.”
“It is a lot of crap,” Kyle said. “I mean, they make up half the stuff they do on CSI. But forensics isn’t a lot of crap. There really are forensics. So, you know, if somebody had the body someplace for a while before they put it in the trailer, there’d be stuff left behind. And that stuff lasts. It can last a really long time.”
“What’s a really long time?”
“Months,” Kyle said. “Years, sometimes. Fibers. That kind of thing.”
“Crap,” Darvelle said again.
Kyle looked up and around the station. There was still nobody near the front desk. They were all huddled in the back, telling each other stories. There was nobody coming through the front door. He might as well have been alone.
“If I was the person who moved the body,” he said, “the best thing I could do would be just get rid of whatever I moved it in. Sell the car or the truck or whatever. Junk it if I had to. But that’s not as easy as you’d think. Everybody keeps records these days. So the next best thing would be to clean out the space with something strong. Lye, maybe.”
“Wouldn’t the police be able to detect the lye?” Darvelle said. “I mean, for God’s sake, Kyle. Detecting blood with some chemical that lights up purple in the right kind of light sounds like science fiction, but detecting lye is a job I could give to a cat.”
“They’d be able to detect the lye,” Kyle said, “but they wouldn’t be able to detect anything else.”
The pause this time was even longer. Kyle looked down at his fingernails. His fingernails looked awful. There was dirt under them, and the edges were ragged.
“You’re out of your mind,” Darvelle said finally. “You really are. I don’t know what it is you think you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that I’m sick of Gregor Demarkian,” Kyle said. “I’m sick of everybody running around acting as if he’s God. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t cause this stuff he runs into. Maybe he moved the body himself. Maybe this is some big plot to turn this into a sensational case that will make all the magazines and get him on television again. Maybe there are a lot of reasons for people to want to move that body that have nothing to do with whether they murdered Chester ‘Goddamned’ Morton.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Darvelle said again. “I’m going to get off the phone now. I’m going to go get some work done.”
“That Albanian guy who owns the construction company was in here this morning,” Kyle said. “He was asking about the baby.”
This time, Darvelle was angry. “I told you what I was going to do about that, and I did it. I talked to Gregor Demarkian this morning. And no body of any baby has anything to do with me, and you know it. You are not going to get me worked up over this again.”
“I’m not trying to get you worked up over anything.”
“Yes, you are, Kyle, yes you are. And I’ve had enough. And if you don’t leave it the hell alone, I’ll ambush Demarkian at breakfast again tomorrow and give him chapter and verse of my suspicions about everything. Because if you think I don’t know what’s going on, you’re even stupider than I think you are.”