Flowering Judas(97)

Gregor got down on his haunches. It had been a couple of weeks, and anything could happen in a couple of weeks, but he didn’t think anybody had done any digging here. It was more like somebody had scuffed at the ground with a shoe or a boot, gotten some dirt out of the way, then dumped the backpack and covered it—he stopped.

“Was the backpack completely covered?” he said, standing up.

“You’d have to ask Andor to be completely sure,” Nderi said. “That’s Andor Kulla. He’s one of the crew. He was the one who found it. He was over here digging a run off, I think. We were having water problems when it rained. Anyway, he’s the one who actually found it.”

“I’d like to know if it was covered,” Gregor said. “And if it was covered, what it was covered with. I don’t suppose you have pictures of this, do you?”

“No, but the police took pictures,” Nderi said. “They took lots of them.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “I’ll see if those are in my file. Where are your security cameras?”

Nderi pointed to four places in a semicircle around the site. Gregor found them. They were closer than he had expected them to be. One of them was pointed straight at the place where he stood.

“They were working the day you found the backpack?”

“Yes,” Nderi said. “And they were working the night before, which is more to the point. Look around, Mr. Demarkian. See for yourself. If our men were working over there, on the other end of the building, and going back and forth to the shed every once in a while, nobody on earth could have been here hiding a backpack in the ground. If he was a stranger, we’d have noticed him and chased him off. We’re constantly having to do that. If he was one of us—well, somebody would have noticed he was where he wasn’t supposed to be for work and asked him about it. But I can’t see he was one of us.”

“Why would one of us do such a thing?” Shpetim asked. “What do we have to do with this Chester Morton? And as for the baby. We would never have killed a baby. We have babies that die, but we don’t crack their skulls open. And we bury our dead.”

Gregor looked around again. The construction site remained open and flat. There were no real hiding places here. He looked back at the cameras.

“So,” he said, “you have some copies of the security film I can see?”

“Right now?” Shpetim said. “If you want to. We can go to the shed—”

“He doesn’t want to see them now,” Nderi said. “He has someplace to go. I’ll send copies to his computer. He just has to give me his e-mail address. That’s right, isn’t it, Mr. Demarkian?”

Gregor took his pen and little notepad out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, wrote down his e-mail address, and passed the paper to Nderi. “That’s exactly right,” he said.

“But you can see,” Shpetim Kika said. “You can see, can’t you? It is ridiculous, that this is the baby from the Chester Morton case, that Chester Morton buried the baby here, all of it. I do not know what this is, but it is not that Chester Morton came here and dumped his backpack with the baby skeleton in it. That is not what happened here.”

“No,” Gregor agreed, looking around again. “That isn’t.”

3

Nderi Kika dropped Gregor at The Feldman Funeral Home on East Main Street, instead of around the back in the parking lot. Gregor went in the front door, into a foyer that was, today, entirely empty, as if Jason Feldman had deliberately refused to schedule any more memorial services as long as Chester Morton’s body was in his basement. Jason Feldman was both absolutely furious and just exasperated, alternately. He kept turning on and off like a defective light bulb.

“There are dozens of people in my basement,” he told Gregor when he was ushering him to the stairs. “Dozens. And not the kind of people we want here. You people just don’t seem to understand. A funeral home is in a very delicate position. The families who come to us are bereaved. They’ve lost the people they love. They don’t want to be confronted with policemen, and they most certainly don’t want to be confronted with coroners. Not even if you call them medical examiners. Coroners. Autopsy. The departed cut up like meat in a butcher shop. It isn’t acceptable.”

Gregor wanted to say that Jason Feldman had volunteered his services as Mattatuck’s morgue, but then it occurred to him that it might not be true. Feldman could have been dragooned into this business by a city council with the ability to influence a zoning board. All city councils had influence with their zoning boards.