Flowering Judas(99)

“Partners?”

“Howard Androcoelho and Marianne Glew,” Ferris Cole said. “Didn’t you know that? They both used to be on the police force. Well, Howard still is, I suppose. But they were partners, detectives and partners. They were the ones who originally investigated—”

“Chester Morton’s disappearance,” Gregor said. “I did know it was Howard Androcoelho who did that investigation.”

“Well, but it was Marianne who really did the investigation,” Ferris Cole said. “She’s light years smarter than he is. Which doesn’t take much, I’ll admit, but she is. They caught a couple of big cases in their time, and it was always Marianne who made it work. If it hadn’t been for Marianne on the Warren case, Howard would have botched the thing from start to finish.”

“The Warren case?”

“Biggest thing to happen in Mattatuck before Chester Morton went missing and Charlene Morton went ballistic. Still the biggest thing to happen in Mattatuck, if you ask me. Local pharmacist by the name of Dade Warren. He had a wife and three kids. He drugged them all with Thorazine, then shot them all, and propped them up against the couch in the living room. Then he wrote the suicide note to end all suicide notes and shot himself in the head. It was an absolute, utter, and bloody mess. You really have no idea.”

“It sounds like it,” Gregor said.

“Anyway,” Ferris Cole said, “it was almost something of a police scandal. Howard was the first one into the house, and he got spooked. He ended up discharging his firearm all over the place when there were nothing but dead bodies in the room. Marianne had to haul his ass out of that one. She had to haul his ass out of a lot of things over the years.”

“Interesting,” Gregor said.

Ferris Cole seemed to shake himself out of a reverie. “Well,” he said, “let me get my people in here and we’ll take this guy out and give him a going over. Like I said, I don’t know if it’s going to do you any good, but at least you’ll have tried. Howard and Marianne are just going to have to accept the fact that Mattutuck needs a thoroughly professional morgue these days. They can’t go on pretending it’s thirty years ago forever.”

Ferris Cole ran up the basement steps, meaning to call for help in moving the body. He was stopped halfway up by a frantic Jason Feldman rushing down. Of course, Jason Feldman was always frantic, but this time he was really beside himself.

“Mr. Demarkian, Mr. Demarkian,” he kept saying sounding as if he’d empty his lungs of breath minutes ago. “Mr. Demarkian, it’s Howard Androcoelho on the phone and he says you have to come. You have to come right away because there are two bodies, two of them, and there’s blood everywhere—”





PART III

Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them.

—Theodore Dalrymple





ONE

1

The location of the emergency was not possible to find on Tony Bolero’s GPS. “At the fork near the dam” was not something the GPS understood, and even “the dam” proved difficult to find.

“There have to be six dams within a twenty-five-mile radius of this place,” Tony said. “There are two in the Mattatuck town limits. Can that be right? I thought dams were big things and you had one for an entire region. Unless, you know, we’re talking about beaver dams.”

Gregor wouldn’t have put it past Mattatuck to have special designations for its beaver dams, but he didn’t say so. He allowed a patrol car to lead the way. The officer in the patrol car obviously wanted Gregor to come along with him, but Gregor wasn’t having any of that. Even dead tired, Tony Bolero meant independence, and Gregor needed as much independence as he could get. It was even one of those times when he wished he could drive himself.

On their way out of town, Gregor put in another call to Rhonda Alvarez at the FBI, but still got nothing but her voice mail. This annoyed him only slightly. She was, after all, a working agent with a caseload. He’d had those himself once. Still, there were things he wanted to know. They were things he thought he did know, but he wanted to be sure.

The route to the dam turned out to be familiar. It went past the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the McDonald’s, the Burger King, and the nearly empty shopping center. It went past the trailer park and the low brick building with the Department of Social Services in it. Gregor found himself wondering about that name. Social Services. Everybody used it. Everybody knew what it meant. It was still very odd. What was “social” about welfare?