Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “Charlene.”

  Charlene stretched out her legs. They felt stiff. Her ankles hurt. “Howard Androcoelho, of all people,” she said. “He couldn’t even get Marianne to marry him, and it’s not like she’s going to get any other offers. You spend your whole life building up. Building up a family. Building up a business. Building up a life. You work and you work and you work and in a moment it’s gone.”

  “Nothing’s gone,” Stew said. “Except Chester. Chester is gone. He was more troubled than we realized. He ran away. He got himself in some kind of trouble. He was depressed. It’s a sad thing, but it doesn’t mean that everything is gone.”

  Charlene smiled. Out past the tall, thin windows that flanked the double doors, there was no sound on the street at all.

  3

  Howard Androcoelho was moving very slowly. He was moving so slowly that it felt as if the air around him had turned into molasses. Nothing made sense, except it might—and if it did, that was worse.

  Marianne was still in the building, waiting in his office. He came up to her and closed the door. Of course, the door didn’t have a lock. Anybody could walk in at anytime. He still felt better with the door closed.

  “Well?” Marianne said.

  Howard leaned against the door, as if that could keep somebody out. “He says he knows who killed Althy and Mike,” he said.

  “Is that all he knows?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Crap,” Marianne said.

  Howard didn’t usually have trouble being short of breath. He was a fat man, but he thought he was also a fit man. Maybe that was not true. He was having trouble breathing now. “We’ve got a call in to Charlene,” he said. “Well, to all the Mortons, I guess. He wants to go over there.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m going over there,” Howard said. “Of course I’m going over there. He wants to bring a patrolman. Or a couple. Or something. I don’t know. Do you remember me telling you about that thing, about the ground around the trailer being all dug up about the time we found Chester Morton dead?”

  “I think so.”

  “I included a picture of it, some pictures of it, in the material I sent him when I asked him to come up here,” Howard said. “I was just trying to cover all the bases. It was that trailer and it was the timing so I threw the pictures in there. He was just looking at him and that’s when he said he’d made a mistake, but we’d better go see Charlene and the Mortons first. I don’t like this. I don’t like the way this works.”

  “Nobody likes this,” Marianne said. “I kept trying to tell you. Every department that works with him has reason to regret it, even when they get what they want and then have him back again. He sees things. He sees things that nobody else does because he isn’t used to them, so they stand out for him where they wouldn’t for us. Do you get it?”

  “I think we’re going to end up having to have a regular medical examiner,” Howard said. “And a morgue.”

  “That was going to come eventually.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I thought maybe it could come after we’d both retired.”

  “Where is he and what is he doing?”

  “He’s upstairs looking through his file,” Howard said. “It’s incredible how much time he spends doing that. He looks through the file and looks through the file and looks through the file. Then he moves pictures around. It makes me want to scream.”

  “Get back to him,” Marianne said. “I’d better get back to the office. You can’t have the mayor away from her desk for half the day, not even in a little town like this. We’ll think of something. Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”

  “You don’t have to think about it,” Howard said. “It was my fault, wasn’t it? It was all my fault. If I’d suggested it instead of just losing my mind, you wouldn’t have gone along with it. You’d have knocked some sense into me.”

  “If you’d been able to think ahead to it, you wouldn’t have done it,” Marianne said, “and I helped you in the end, so I do have to think of something. But for God’s sake, Howard, don’t do that thing where you just shoot your mouth off and—”

  “I won’t do that,” Howard said.

  “Good.” Marianne got her purse off the floor and walked across the room to where Howard was still leaning against the door. He moved away to let her pass. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said.

  Howard watched her walk out into the main part of the station. He’d known her all his life. They’d met in kindergarten, when they were both five. Maybe they should have done something about it sometime along the way.

  Marianne left and Gregor Demarkian returned, almost simultaneously. He was carrying photographs in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Howard wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.

  “Mr. Androcoelho,” Demarkian said. “Come look at this for a minute.”

  Howard moved aside so that Gregor Demarkian could go through the office door without interference. “I made the call to the Mortons,” he said. “Charlene says she’ll meet us at the house. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t blame her for not wanting to gum up the business with a murder investigation.”

  Gregor Demarkian went over to the desk and dumped the photographs on it. They were the same photographs of the ground being dug up around Chester Morton’s trailer he had been looking at before.

  “Nobody ever mentioned this,” he said. “But it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” Howard said.

  “I was wrong about New Jersey,” Gregor said. “I knew this all had to be about the baby, but I thought Chester must have taken the dead body of the infant when he left here. He took it. He stashed the body somewhere it would not give itself away, in a plastic bag in other plastic bags, in the ground, somewhere so that it wouldn’t smell. And then when he wanted to come back here, he dug it up and took it with him. I was so sure of that, I got a Bureau agent to go talk the police in Atlantic City into getting a warrant for Chester Morton’s place of residence to check for traces of it.”

  “Chester Morton was in Atlantic City?” Howard said.

  “Yes, he was,” Gregor said. “But the body of the baby wasn’t. The body of the baby was here. All these years.”

  “And we never noticed it?” Howard said. “What was it, out in the woods, or what?”

  Gregor Demarkian shook his head. “It would have made sense, wouldn’t it, to have taken it out into the woods somewhere? But then, maybe not. Kids stumble over stuff in the woods. Hunters do, too. So if you absolutely did not want it found, if you did not want anybody to connect you to the death of an infant, maybe it would make more sense to keep it where you could keep an eye on it. Like in the ground around the trailer.”

  “So that’s where it was? Buried under the trailer? Chester went and buried the body of an infant under his trailer? I think you’re crazy.”

  “I’d think I was crazy, too, if that was the kind of thing I was going with,” Gregor said. “In the first place, Chester didn’t bury the body. In the second, the body wasn’t buried around the trailer. It couldn’t have been. People in that trailer park will hide from the police. They’ll close their blinds and play dead while Kyle Holborn runs around doing whatever he wants to do with a full-grown adult corpse, because he’s got a uniform and a patrol car and they don’t want anything to do with the law. But if one of their own was burying something in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day for that matter, they’d have been all over it.”

  “He wasn’t one of their own,” Howard said reflexively.

  “He lived in the park,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That was as close to being one of their own as he needed to get. Let me shove some of this back in my briefcase and then let’s go. I need to talk to Charlene Morton.”

  “But where did he bury the body?” Howard said. “You’ve still got the corpse of an infant wandering around. Where did he put it?”

  “He didn’t put it anywh
ere,” Gregor said. “He didn’t bury it and he didn’t know where it was buried. Although I think he might have thought he did.”

  “He thought it was in the ground around the trailer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But maybe it was,” Howard said. “I mean, maybe he found it when he went looking for it. Look at those pictures. The ground is dug up everywhere. Maybe—”

  “If he’d known where the body was buried,” Gregor said, “if he’d buried it himself, he’d have had a better idea of where to dig. Those are pictures of a blind search. Everything is uprooted everywhere. And not just around his own trailer, but around the one next door. If he’d found the body, he’d have stopped digging. But he never stopped digging. Not until he had the whole area completely unearthed. So he didn’t find it there.”

  “It wasn’t a body anyway,” Howard said. “It was a skeleton.”

  “Let’s go over and talk to the Mortons,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I need to get back to Philadelphia for a birthday party.”

  SEVEN

  1

  Gregor Demarkian did not go out to Charlene Morton’s house in Howard Androcoelho’s car. He’d had enough of Howard Androcoelho on any level. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in a small space while the man asked him questions while trying not to actually ask him and pumped him for information he didn’t actually need.

  Instead, Gregor sat next to Tony Bolero and punched numbers into his cell phone one after the other—to Bennis, because he wanted to hear her voice; to Ferris Cole, to find out what could be found if you searched a place where a body had decomposed; to Rhonda Alvarez, to explain why the police probably weren’t going to find what he’d hoped they’d find in wherever Chester Morton had been living in New Jersey.

  “I really wish the world was like CSI,” Ferris Cole said, “but it isn’t. Of course, it’s to our advantage if criminals think it is. The death penalty may not be a deterrent, but fear of exposure through test tubes certainly is. Although I wish it were more of one. I’m so sick of exploding meth labs, I could give up this work to run a Dairy Queen.”

  “So we wouldn’t be able to find anything at all?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Ferris Cole said. “I haven’t had a look at the skeleton, but you keep telling me it has a crack in the skull. Cracks leave fragments, or they frequently do. Of course, it depends on just how young an infant this was. If it was just a day or two, the skull would have been fairly soft. That wouldn’t get you what you wanted. If it was a couple of weeks old, though, you might get fragments. And the fragments would have been left in the soil when the skeleton was taken out. It’s a long shot. The police would have to shift through the soil with a flour sifter. But at least it’s possible.”

  “I’m with what you said,” Gregor said. “I wish the world were like CSI, too.”

  “You’ve got to understand, it’s not that there would be no evidence at all of a body having decomposed there,” Ferris Cole said. “There would always be something left behind. It’s just that it would be incredibly hard to detect, and even if you did detect it, it isn’t likely that it would tell you anything more than that something had been there. Then it would depend first on the judge, to let the prosecution enter evidence that was that vague, and then on the jury. The jury watches CSI, too. When you can’t nail it the way they do on television, juries are likely to decide that that amounts to reasonable doubt.”

  “Marvelous,” Gregor said. “Half the time they ignore evidence because it’s not like the science fiction stuff they see on TV, and half the time they convict without evidence because they’re sure that nobody could be arrested if they hadn’t done something wrong. Tell me again why this is the best possible judicial system.”

  “It is, though,” Ferris Cole said. “Let me get this stuff going and see what I can find. You should try to come up with an alternative approach, that’s all. Something that doesn’t rely on the skeleton.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “But it annoys me. The aesthetic is wrong. This whole thing, from the beginning, was about the baby. Well, no, not from the absolute beginning. But—oh, never mind. I’ll explain it all later. I’m in a car.”

  “You’re not driving, I hope. Not while you’re talking on a cell phone.”

  Gregor let that go by. He never drove—or almost never—but everybody wanted to tell him not to do it on his cell phone.

  Rhonda Alvarez was nearly out of breath. “I’m here,” she said, when she picked up. “I was just thinking of you. I’m here, we’re all here, we’ve been here for half an hour.”

  “Where?”

  “Chester Morton’s house,” she said. “It’s a house, too, not an apartment. Out in the country in this little town. He was renting it and he still is, technically. He didn’t give up the lease or anything. Anyway, I yelled and screamed and acted hysterical and insisted this was priority and rush and all the rest of it, and the locals got a warrant in no time flat and we came right out here. We’ve been here for half an hour. God, the place is a mess.”

  “A mess?’

  “Forget vacuuming. The man never picked up his garbage. You wouldn’t believe it. Fast-food wrappers and boxes everywhere, and some fast food still in them, going to mold. Old magazines. Those magazines, if you know what I mean. He loved beaver shots. Everything’s trashed. The bathroom stinks.”

  “Could somebody have been trying to search the place?”

  “It doesn’t look like that, no,” Rhonda said. “It’s not that kind of mess. And anybody who had been trying to search the place would have found what the police found, because it wasn’t like it was hidden.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Guns and ammo,” Rhoda said. “Two rifles under the bed—just under it. Not in cases or bags or anything, just shoved there. Several, I made at least four, handguns. A double-barrelled shotgun. Three tasers.”

  “For God’s sake,” Gregor said. “What was the idiot doing? Had he joined the mob? Did he owe money to the mob?”

  “He owed money to everybody, from what we’ve been able to tell,” Rhonda said, “but I don’t think that’s what this is. There’s a lot of ammunition in boxes, but I’m willing to bet, even after just a first look, that most of these things haven’t been fired in years. And some of them are brand new. They’ve never been fired.”

  “I don’t suppose he bought any of them legally and registered them,” Gregor said.

  “We haven’t checked yet, but my guess would be no. He doesn’t seem the type, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “I would say, though, that you had a good call that the gun you’ve got up there would be a gun he brought with him and not anything somebody up there had. My guess is that he was packing most of the time. It probably made him feel important.”

  “Probably,” Gregor said.

  “And we also found drugs,” Rhonda said. “Not a lot. Not a little, either. It’s not impossible that he was dealing a little on the side, some marijuana, maybe some cocaine, but it wouldn’t have been anything dramatic. He was definitely using. And his refrigerator was full of beer. And there was an entire bookshelf of the hard stuff, Patrón, Johnnie Walker. Most of those were better than half empty.”

  “Was there any money?”

  “Nope. Were you expecting us to find any?”

  “Not really,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t know if any of this helps,” Rhonda said, “but this guy was in no way the kind of person who loves the outdoors and wants to go hiking all the time. If he was doing even half the stuff there’s evidence of him doing around here, he wouldn’t be able to hike for half a mile without falling over dead. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the house being out in the country means he was fond of the wilderness, either. I think it just means—”

  “That he wanted to be far away from people who could pry into what he was doing?”

  “Like that,” Rhonda said. “You can’t
think this guy killed your two, right? Because this guy was dead first.”

  “I know who killed my two,” Gregor said, “I’m just trying to find a way for the prosecution to make their case.”

  “Well, good luck with that. I’m going to go now. They’re going to take out a wall in the bathroom.”

  Gregor didn’t ask what they wanted to take out a wall in the bathroom for. He sympathized with the landlord who was going to have to clean up at least some of it when all this was over.

  Tony Bolero was making his way through the tree-lined streets of a neighborhood that practically screamed “best place to live in town.” The houses were all large, if vaguely old-fashioned: ranches; split-levels; “contemporaries” that must have been built in the Sixties.

  Tony pulled into a driveway that already had too many cars in it, but not enough for Gregor. There was no patrol car here. There was no Howard Androcoelho.

  Tony pointed ahead to the long, low ranch. “This is it,” he said.

  Gregor was looking at something else. The yard was wide and deep. What he was looking at was almost invisible from the driveway. He got out of the car and went to the side of the garage. Then he just stood there and stared.

  “My God,” he said.

  “What is it?” Tony Bolero materialized at his elbow.

  Gregor pointed across the back lawn. “It’s a greenhouse,” he said.

  It wasn’t just a greenhouse.

  It was a big one.

  2

  The other cars drove up almost immediately—Howard’s, and then the two patrol cars. Nobody’s siren was blaring. Nobody’s lights were pumping. It was all very quiet, as if what was about to go on here was a pool party or a barbecue, the kind of thing people who lived in the kind of place Sherwood Forest was did on any given weekend.

  Except that it wasn’t a weekend.

  “Did you bring a search warrant?” Gregor asked.