Tony Bolero had gotten some sleep, but not much. He’d had to settle for the off hours when the man from Feldman’s had been willing to stay awake.
“I checked as soon as I woke up,” he told Gregor. “The body is still there. There’s nothing wrong with it that I can see. Nobody has lopped off a foot, or anything like that.”
“You had any visitors last night? Anybody try to get in to see it?”
“Nobody came down here at all except the guys from the funeral home. The guy who runs it is a real nervous Nellie. If he wrung his hands one more time, I was going to offer to chop them off for him.”
“Probably not a good idea, considering,” Gregor said. “I’m going to check this place out and come over to you. One of the people here is going to give me a ride. Don’t leave the body, even to go to the bathroom.”
“I’ll get nervous Nellie to watch if I have to use the john. Don’t worry about me, Mr. Demarkian. I have your back.”
Gregor shut the cell phone and stared at it a little. Nervous Nellie. Use the john. Got your back. Why was it that so many people, faced with an actual detective, started to sound like they were speaking dialogue from a Mickey Spillane novel.
The truck was turning in to what Gregor supposed must be the back end of the Mattatuck–Harvey Community College campus. He could see the rising girders of the new tech building as they drove. As they got closer, he could see the site itself. And that was interesting.
“Huh,” he said, moving forward in his seat to get a better look.
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Demarkian,” Nderi Kika said. “If the truck stops quickly, you’ll go right through the windshield. You don’t have a seat belt.”
“Oh.” Gregor sat back.
“Seat belts,” Shpetim Kika said. “Stupid things. Are we riding in a jet plane? No. Are we driving in some little car that could be run over by the first delivery van it gets next to? No. I do not need seat belts.”
“It’s against the law not to wear your seat belt if you’re traveling in the front seat of a vehicle,” Nderi recited, sounding resigned.
Shpetim flipped his right hand into the air. “That’s what I think of the law,” he said. “What kind of law is that? It’s Communism, that’s what it is. Did I come all the way here from Albania just to live under the laws of Communism?”
The truck came to a stop near a small shed whose roof barely reached as high as the truck’s. Nderi gave Gregor a look.
“My father,” he said, “got five tickets for not wearing his seat belt last month alone. Cost him nearly three hundred dollars.”
“Communism,” Shpetim said again.
Then he popped the driver’s side door and got out. Nderi got out the other side, and waited for Gregor to follow.
It was an interesting place, the construction site. There was a wide area of raw ground, not so much dug up and trampled over again and again. There was the building itself, which was larger than Gregor had expected it would be. There was a small stand of trees way to the back, so far back that Gregor wondered if the trees were part of the site at all.
“So,” he said. “You found the backpack, where? In those trees?”
“No,” Nderi said. “If the backpack had been in those trees, we would never have found it. Well, maybe not never. But it would have been days. The trees are technically part of the site, but they’re not really part of the site, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” Gregor said.
“We were given a specified area to work in,” Nderi said, “and that included that little stand of trees. But they’re just a cushion. We’re not doing anything over there. We’re just leaving them alone.”
“So where did you find the backpack?”
“Over here,” Nderi said.
He started walking off over the rough ground. Gregor and Shpetim followed him. They got closer and closer to the building itself, then, just as they were about to run into it, veered off a little to the right. There were gigantic concrete tubes stacked in pyramids, idle pieces of construction equipment with tarps thrown over them, big square stacks of concrete block. Nderi stopped in the middle of it all and pointed at the ground.
“Right there,” he said. “You can see the depression in the ground. It was right there.”
Gregor looked to where Nderi was pointing. It took him a while to find the depression, but it was there. It did not amount to much.
“That’s a very shallow hole,” he said.
“That isn’t a hole at all,” Nderi said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. Maybe I’m stupid. And I know I haven’t trained as a detective. But I can’t believe anybody thought he was going to hide something in that. It’s a little dent in the ground that somebody threw some dirt on top of. We’d have discovered it first thing in the morning except we were working on the other side most of the day.”