Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

“Just get in the truck and go tell Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Yes,” Shpetim said. “Right now. Before it gets away from us.”

  SEVEN

  1

  For Gregor Demarkian, the really odd thing about Shpetim Kika was not that he’d arrived at Gregor’s hotel room at a quarter to seven in the morning, unannounced and apparently knowing the way and room number without having to ask at the desk. By now, that kind of thing was beginning to seem par for the course in Mattatuck. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew everything. And everybody went barging around into other people’s private spaces without thinking twice.

  What got to Gregor about Shpetim Kika was how much he looked like Fr. Tibor Kasparian, and how much he sounded like him, too. That was odd because Gregor had just gotten off the phone with Tibor, knowing he’d already be at the Ararat and hoping to get more detailed information about what was happening with old George.

  “No, Krekor,” Tibor had said. “Bennis is not holding out on you. Nobody is holding out on you. There is nothing to tell. Yorgi is resting. He’s comfortable. He turns down a lot of the pain medication, I think because he wants to be clear. He is not getting worse. He is not getting better. They are afraid to release him from the hospital. And that is all.”

  Gregor didn’t think that really was all, but he did think it might be all they knew. He wanted to understand what was going on with that. He didn’t know how to try. It was easier investigating crime. Nobody was trying to spare your feelings with that.

  With his son standing beside him, Shpetim Kika sat on the chair next to the desk holding a hat in his hand. It was an ancient, battered hat, and Gregor had the impression that he didn’t wear it often. The suit looked a little more lived-in, but Gregor was sure it was something that came out only on “Occasions.” He wasn’t used to being an Occasion all by himself.

  The son was wearing work clothes. He looked too embarrassed to breathe.

  “So,” Shpetim Kika was saying, “you see what I am trying to say. It is a baby that is dead, yes? There is the tiny skeleton. I saw it myself. The skeleton’s skull had a crack in it, a crack all along one side. Somebody cracked a long break in the skull. Something bad must have happened to the baby. Even if the crack in the skull didn’t happen until after the baby died, the baby still died. It’s important to know who the baby was and how it died. Am I right?”

  “I think so,” Gregor said.

  “I have been trying to tell Nderi here,” Shpetim said. “You can’t let a thing like this go. It isn’t right. You do not just let babies die and throw their skeletons away like trash. And then there is the thing that the skeleton was in a place I am responsible for. I do not want it being said in Mattatuck that the Albanians are murderers.”

  “They’re not going to say the Albanians are anything,” Nderi said. “They say that kind of thing about the Hispanics, but not about us. I don’t think there are enough of us.”

  “Albania is a very messed up country,” Shpetim said. “It has many political problems. It has not much money. But Albanians are good people.”

  “Pop, if you keep this up, you’re going to start singing—”

  “Albanians are good people,” Shpetim said. He sounded positive.

  Gregor was seated on the edge of the bed. He was having a hard time clearing his head. He’d gotten to bed fairly late. He’d gotten up very early. He’d showered and dressed and talked to Tibor. He still hadn’t had any coffee. His head was full of cotton wool.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he said. “You dug up the backpack on this construction site of yours—”

  “Yes. No. I did not dig it up myself. I was in the shed doing paperwork. My men dug it up. And Nderi was with me. He didn’t dig it up.”

  “All right. Your men dug it up. And then what?”

  “They called us over and we went,” Shpetim said. “Nderi and I went across the site to where the men were all standing around in a circle. Nderi and I were talking about his engagement. He is engaged now, to a very fine Albanian girl, a Muslim. Her family was all killed by the Communists, but she is not what you would expect a girl to be living on her own. She has great modesty. And great sense.”

  “Is that what you said at the time?” Nderi demanded.

  Shpetim waved him away. Gregor tried not to laugh.

  “Let’s get back to it,” Gregor said. “You walked over to where the men were standing. Where was the backpack? Was somebody holding it?”

  “No, no,” Shpetim said. “They had left it in the ground. They hadn’t touched it.”

  “It was because it was famous,” Nderi said. “We’d been hearing about that backpack for years. The bright yellow backpack. The only thing Chester Morton had on him when he disappeared. The only thing missing from his things. That kind of thing.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “So they found the backpack and called you over, and then what?”

  “The flap was partially open,” Nderi said, “and somebody had pulled it back. With a stick, I think, not their hands.”

  “And the skeleton was right there,” Shpetim said. “You could see it, with the crack in its skull. It was all right there to see. And the skeleton was white. Bright white, like it had been cleaned. Everything looked as if it had been cleaned.”

  “But it was lying on the ground,” Gregor said. “Or in the ground. In a hole.”

  “It wasn’t much of a hole,” Nderi said. “It was—” He shrugged.

  “Everything looked as if it had been cleaned,” Shpetim insisted. “Or better than it had been cleaned. Like it was new. It was a bright yellow backpack, it was so bright, it could have been bought from the store the same day. It was blazing yellow. There were little pieces of dirt on it from being in the ground, but it wasn’t dirty. And nothing inside it was dirty. There were books. Current Issues and Enduring Questions, that was one of them. And The Everyday Writer. I recognized them because Nderi had them when he was in school.”

  “For English Composition,” Nderi said. “They’re the textbooks for that course. Or they used to be, when I was in school, and that was about the same time Chester Morton was in school. I think somebody may have said it, that he was taking English Composition.”

  “Of course somebody said it,” Shpetim said. “Everybody said it. Last seen in his English class. But, Mr. Demarkian. The books were new, too, just like the backpack. They were clean, white, and stiff. You could have sold them in a bookstore. They didn’t look like they’d been carried around for even a day. They couldn’t have been stuffed in a backpack with a skeleton for twelve years. And nothing could have rotted on them for twelve years.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “the official findings were that the skeleton hadn’t been in the backpack. I mean, the body hadn’t decomposed in the backpack. It had decomposed somewhere else and then the skeleton had been put in the backpack.”

  “Even without the skeleton,” Shpetim said, “those books could not have been carried around. They were new. They were brand new. And the backpack also. And that is a problem. I think all the police, everyone, they are trying to solve the death of Chester Morton. They think the baby is part of the death of Chester Morton. What if it isn’t? What if someone went out and bought all those things, bought them new, to make the baby look like it had something to do with Chester Morton, and now nobody is thinking about the baby because they are all thinking about Chester Morton.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “You mean you think the baby’s skeleton has nothing to do with Chester Morton at all?”

  “That’s right,” Shpetim said. “It is, I think, a—a frame.”

  “You think somebody is trying to frame the dead Chester Morton for the death of this baby?”

  “Exactly,” Shpetim said.

  “I think that somebody must have brought that backpack to the construction site with ghosts,” Nderi said. “That’s what I can’t get over. I heard on the news that the police think it was buried out there in the middle of the ni
ght, but that isn’t possible. I mean, not without somebody seeing. We’ve got security cameras out there. We have to. People steal material and equipment. But I’ve looked at those tapes, and the police have, too, and there’s nothing on them except the usual patrol cars checking up every once in a while to make sure nobody’s doing something they shouldn’t.”

  “Here, the police guard your property,” Shpetim said. “In Albania, you have to worry they’re going to take it.”

  “I thought you didn’t want people to think that the Albanians were bad people,” Nderi said.

  “The Albanians are not bad people,” Shpetim said. “Only their government is bad. Maybe you can come out to the site with us now, and we can show you. We can show you where the backpack was. We can even show you the security tapes. We have them on the computer.”

  Gregor blinked. “I’ve got to be at The Feldman Funeral Home at nine,” he said. “And I need a taxi. The desk says that if you call a taxi it takes a while for him to get here. So—”

  “We can take you to Feldman’s,” Nderi said. “And you don’t have to hang around watching hours of tapes if you don’t want to. I can e-mail them to you and you can watch them on your own computer. It’s better to have lots of copies anyway. That way, they won’t all disappear.”

  “That’s it, then,” Shpetim stood up. “You’ll come with us to the site, and you will look around, and then Nderi will take you to your appointment. I don’t envy you. I don’t like any appointment in a funeral home.”

  2

  Gregor called Tony Bolero while he was being driven down to “the site,” as the Kika men both called it. He found it hard to listen to a cell phone while he was being squished between the two men in the middle of the bench-like only seat of a pickup truck cab. He didn’t even know they made trucks with bench seats anymore. It worried him to think that the truck might be as old as it looked. It had a logo on the side that read: MATTATUCK VALLEY CONSTRUCTION. Gregor supposed it sounded better than “Kika Constuction,” but he thought that any Armenian-American he knew would have gone with “Kika” and been done with it. The name was very important.

  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.”

  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.”