Flowering Judas

by Jane Haddam

  “There was a gun on the ground next to the truck when we got here,” Howard said. “Is that going to be registered in New Jersey, too?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “It isn’t going to be registered at all. Can you get me in touch with this Haydee person?”

  “Sure. We have to get in touch with her anyway.”

  “Good. I have to make a phone call. I’ll talk to you in twenty minutes.”

  Gregor left Howard Androcoelho standing where he was and marched back across the road to Tony Bolero and the car.

  2

  Gregor Demarkian got himself back into the front seat of Tony Bolero’s car and told himself that it did no good for him to lose his temper. What was worse, he knew why he wanted to lose it. He hadn’t expected this. Every part of the analysis he had made up until now said that this was not the kind of thing that was likely to happen. That meant that exactly one part of his analysis had been wrong, and it was the one part he should not have made a mistake about.

  He got out his cell phone and dialed Rhonda Alvarez’s number at the FBI, once again. He was beginning to wonder if her phone was programmed to go directly to voice mail. He reminded himself not to sound annoyed, or impatient. He wasn’t an agent anymore. The Bureau had only taken an interest in this case in the last week or two, or something like that—at the moment, Gregor couldn’t remember how that particular sequence of events had gone. He looked up and across the scene at the top of the pickup truck. The big black pickup truck. Althy Michaelman had mentioned a big black pickup truck only yesterday. He had heard her.

  Of course, there was only one big black pickup truck. There could only be one big black pickup truck.

  The call was picked up, and Gregor prepared himself to hear Rhonda Alvarez’s standard canned message. Instead, a very soft female voice with a back-of-the-throat nasal Ohio twang said, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Alvarez speaking.”

  “Oh,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to actually get you. This is Gregor Demarkian. I—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Demarkian. Everybody knows who you are. The man who started the Behavioral Sciences Unit.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “That was a long time ago. I don’t do work like that anymore.”

  “You don’t work on serial killers?”

  “Not if I can help it. They’re enormously depressing and enormously trite.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s always the same story,” Gregor said. “Haven’t you noticed that? A true serial killer, what we mean when we say a serial killer—not some woman who’s murdered her last four husbands for the insurance money, but the guys with signatures and sexual sadism. They all have the same story. Over and over and over again. You start on one of those cases and you know the beginning, the middle, and the end. The only thing you don’t know is the particular kink, and the kinks are all essentially boring, just gross. If you see what I mean.”

  “Oh,” Rhonda Alvarez said. She obviously did not see what he meant. She cleared her throat. “Kurt Delano said you wanted to know about the Chester Morton case. There isn’t much to know, not really. I mean, we did run a couple of checks, but we didn’t find much. And that was about it.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “One of those cases where it took a while to accept that a missing person might be more than a missing person. Except that in this case, your instincts were right. He was just a missing person.”

  “A grown man can go missing if he wants to,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “If he doesn’t leave a lot of debts behind, or abandon a family, and if he isn’t wanted by the police—well, there’s nothing illegal about him just taking off. There’s nothing illegal about it even if he does abandon a family. Adults get to decide where they want to be.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “I totally agree with you. At the moment, however, the man showed up and was no longer missing, but was also no longer alive. And I’m sitting not fifty yards from two more bodies, each of them shot at least three times. So I’d really like to know anything you can tell me, and I’d really appreciate it if you could run a check for me.”

  “A personal check.”

  “That’s the kind.”

  “On who?”

  “On Chester Morton. Except he wouldn’t have been calling himself that. The name isn’t going to be much use. I may have something better than a name in half an hour or so. I’m pretty sure we just found his truck.”

  “Ah,” Rhonda Alvarez said.

  “It had the two bodies in it,” Gregor said.

  “But Chester Morton couldn’t have killed them, because he’s dead. He’s been dead for, what?”

  “Close to a month, I think. Did you ever check out any of those leads the Morton family gave you?”

  “Just a minute.” There was a great rustling of papers in the background and the sound of a door being opened and shut. Then Rhonda Alvarez said, “Here it is. I was looking at this yesterday because I knew you were going to call. We don’t seem to have a contact from the Morton family here—well, no, wait a minute. There was a contact about a month and a half ago. But they didn’t contact us. We contacted them. Because of the television show.”

  “I heard there was a television show.”

  “Disappeared. It’s pretty new. All about missing persons. Anyway, somebody from their staff called here, we talked to them, then we did a little looking on our own. Then we called the Morton family and talked to them. The only contact we had before that was with a police officer down there, a Howard Andro—”

  “Androcoelho,” Gregor said. “He made the initial call? Twelve years ago?”

  There was more rustling of papers. “No,” she said. “At the very beginning, the first call we got, was from a Marianne Glew. After that, it was Howard Whatshisname. It looks like they were partners.”

  “They were.”

  “It also looks like they weren’t taking it very seriously at the time,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “The general line seems to have been that they all thought the guy had done a bunk, but the family was frantic and they had to check it out. There were some inconsistencies, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the guy had left all his stuff behind. Didn’t you say something about a black truck? He’d left the black truck behind. His mother had it in her garage. The cops said the mother didn’t think he’d leave without it. He loved it like a wife. He didn’t take anything else, either, except a bright yellow L.L. Bean backpack that he carried his books around in. He was in college.”

  “So somebody checked it out?” Gregor said.

  “Sure, as far as we were able without anything much to go on. The cops said the guy had a thing about the West—Wyoming, Montana, like that, so we did a little looking. We never found anything.”

  “Did you check Las Vegas?”

  “Absolutely,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “I wasn’t working on this then, but I’d be willing to bet whoever was checked Vegas first. Mothers always think of their children as absolute little angels who just want to commune with nature and the good clean air, but around here we tend to think most people who disappear like to commune with casinos.”

  “There was no luck in Vegas, I take it.”

  “No,” Rhonda Alvarez said, “but you know, Mr. Demarkian, we wouldn’t have been doing a full-charge check. It wasn’t our case, and from the way these notes read, we didn’t think it was ever going to be our case. We didn’t have any reason to suspect a murder, or a kidnapping, not the way things were then.”

  “And they changed?”

  “Well, there was all that stuff he left behind,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “When the guys from the television program kept stressing that, it got people around here thinking. So we decided to give it a good go. You know how these things work. If the police had been more insistent at the time, or if the family had been bugging us—but it wasn’t like that, so we didn’t really start looking into it until about two months ago.”

  “And did y
ou find anything?”

  “No,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “Not a thing. ‘Somewhere out in the West’ is not exactly the best tip we ever got on anybody.”

  “Well, I’ve got a better one. Try Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Let’s call it a hunch, for a moment. I’m going to have the registration number and the engine number for a big black truck in a few minutes. It’s in a ditch without plates. But I’m pretty sure the plates that were on it were Jersey plates, and if we can find the name of the person who registered that truck, we’ll know what name Chester Morton has been using for the past twelve years.”

  “But I don’t get it,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “I’ve got a note here that says he didn’t take the truck. His mother was keeping it for him. In her garage.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. Could you check Atlantic City for me, and call me back sometime this evening? Am I ruining your schedule? It’s just that I might not be in a position to talk until around seven.”

  “I don’t go home before seven,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

  “If I were you, I’d check the gambling addiction groups, although I think you’re going to come up blank. And check the casinos for people they have recently, anytime in the last year, say, barred from play.”

  “You’ve practically got to murder your mother on the craps table to get barred from play.”

  “I know. But check it anyway. Something must have happened in the last few months to shake this all loose. I’ve got some pretty decent guesses as to what it was, but I’d like to know for sure.”

  “Right,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “I’ll get on it. If he did something bad enough to get barred from a casino, it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  3

  By the time Gregor got back to the crime scene, there was a small, thin, frail young girl there, shaking as if she were about to freeze to death. Somebody had thrown a windbreaker over her shoulders, but it was a thin nylon thing. It wasn’t going to keep her warm. Howard Androcoelho was towering over her, looking like a fat dragon menacing a damsel in distress.

  “You shouldn’t have come out here,” he was saying. “And they shouldn’t have let you come over here. There’s a reason we don’t let relatives wander around crime scenes. I didn’t even have to go to the law enforcement seminar to know that one.”

  The girl didn’t seem to be listening to him. She was staring straight ahead and still shaking. A little ways off, a boy was getting sick in the grass.

  Howard Androcoelho looked up as Gregor crossed to the yellow tape. “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back. This is Haydee Michaelman.”

  The girl looked up. She looked interested for the first time since Gregor came upon her and Howard. The boy who had been sick in the grass started back toward them. The closer he came, the more familiar he looked, and Gregor finally realized it was Kenny Morton.

  The girl looked at Kenny Morton and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I put you through all this. You were just giving me a ride—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Kenny Morton said. “You can’t think I’m going to be mad at you over this.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” the girl said. “They drank too much and they went out and partied but they didn’t—they didn’t—”

  “Haydee Michaelman,” Howard Androcoelho said firmly. “Gregor Demarkian.”

  “I know,” Gregor said.

  Haydee Michaelman looked up and straight at him, and Gregor reached out a hand to pull her a little farther from the scene. The forensics people were still working. Gregor doubted if they were competent. It was the stimulus package mobile crime unit at work again. It didn’t matter. He didn’t want the girl standing right there when they brought out the body bags.

  “She’s in shock,” Gregor said to Howard Androcoelho. “She needs something—”

  “It’s supposed to be brandy, isn’t it?” Kenny Morton said. “I can go get some brandy. There’s a liquor store right up the road.”

  “Let’s not go bringing liquor into this,” Howard Androcoelho said.

  “Why not?” Kenny Morton said. “I’m over twenty-one. And you can’t say she can’t have brandy if she’s in shock. Mr. Demarkian said she was in shock.”

  “I was just comng home,” Haydee said. “I had a class, and Kenny was driving me home, because it’s a long walk, and I don’t have a car. And we pulled in and Kenny was about to drop me off, because I didn’t want to ask him in. The trailer is always a mess. They leave clothes and garbage everywhere. So I didn’t want to ask him in, but he was walking me down there, and then Krystal Holder came out and said—said that—that they were here—that they were dead—”

  “I’m going to go get brandy,” Kenny Morton said.

  He didn’t actually move to go. Everybody else ignored him.

  “Didn’t you notice that they hadn’t come home last night?” Gregor asked. “I’m assuming you lived with your mother, and with—”

  “With Mike?” Haydee said. “I do. More or less. I sleep there. I spend most of my time at school or at work or somewhere. I just can’t stand the whole thing there. It’s not just that eveything’s a mess, you know, or that kind of thing. It’s the whole attitude. The whole ‘there’s no use doing nothing about nothing.’ Anything about anything. It’s just the way they were, you know. Just the way they wanted to be.”

  “And you didn’t notice that they hadn’t come home last night?” Gregor asked again.

  Haydee shook her head. “I didn’t go home myself last night. I stayed with Desiree, my friend. Desiree Skarm. She lives way in the back of the park. They were really crazy, yesterday. They had money, I don’t know where they got it—”

  “I thought it must have been yours,” Howard Androcoelho said. “You know, like last time.”

  “Oh, no,” Haydee said. “I put my money in the credit union. Well, I did that yesterday. Before that I had it hidden. But Kenny,” she looked over at Kenny, still standing half-poised to go for brandy, “Kenny told me about the credit union. Where there aren’t fees or anything for keeping your money in the bank So he took me there and I put my money in. For my car. You know. I want to buy a car.”

  “She should have a car,” Kenny said.

  “Anyway,” Haydee said. “I didn’t want to be around it. Mike can be really crazy when he drinks. Especially when he drinks for serious, and they had some serious stuff. A bottle of, I don’t remember what it was called. Johnnie Walker. That was it. They had that and they were really working themselves up. And they were going out, and I knew it was only going to get worse.”

  “Did you know where they were going?” Gregor asked.

  Haydee looked up and nodded in the direction of the main road and the dam. “There’s a place down there. It’s supposed to be a biker bar, but it isn’t really. It’s just a lot of pathetic people pretending they’re some kind of hip. Older people, mostly. Kids go into Mattatuck to the clubs. They’re pathetic, too.”

  “So you don’t know when they went out last night?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, I know that,” Haydee said. “I was home for that. It was about, I don’t know, eight o’clock. They had to walk to get to the bar. They didn’t have a car, either. Half of everybody at the park doesn’t have a car. They get all their food at the convenience stores. Going the other way, you know, toward Mattatuck. They get all their stuff there. And at Kentucky Fried Chicken. There isn’t a real grocery store in two-and-a-half miles, and what would they do if they got there? How would they get anything home? All the frozen stuff would melt. But that’s not why, you know. There used to be a grocery store. All anybody bought was potato chips and beer, so it moved out and went to Sherwood Forest.”

  Gregor let all this flow over him. “So you think they left about eight.”

  “Eight or eight-thirty.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I went over to Desiree’s
place,” Haydee said. “Her mother was at work. Her mother doesn’t like me hanging around. She thinks Mike is going to come and bust up the place someday, because I’m there, you know, and he’s mad at me. But she was at work, so I just stayed there and then I went to sleep in Desiree’s room. I didn’t want to be back at my place when they got home. I thought they’d be, that they’d be—”

  “Violent?” Gregor suggested.

  “They’re never really violent,” Haydee said. “They’re just sort of—sort of crazy. And Mike punches things. Not usually people. You know. He breaks walls. He’s always angry about something. But last night he wasn’t angry, he was just nuts. And they had money. They had money to get the Johnnie Walker bottle, and they had money to go to the bar. Even though it’s the wrong time of the month for it.”

  “The wrong time of the month?” Gregor asked.

  “Disability,” Howard Androcoelho put in. “That pays on the third.”

  “And it’s gone on the fourth,” Haydee said. “But they had money last night. They had a lot of it, for them.”

  “Do you know where they got it?” Gregor said.

  Haydee shook her head. “I thought they might’ve gotten lucky on a scratch ticket. That happens sometimes. But they didn’t say so. They usually tell me when they get lucky on a scratch ticket.”

  “But they didn’t this time?”

  “No,” Haydee said. “They didn’t. They didn’t say anything at all. They just kept flashing money around, and the bottle, and then they took off for the bar. And I didn’t think anything of it. I really didn’t. I just—I don’t know. And then it’s so strange, because I was telling Desiree about Chester Morton. And Chester Morton is dead.”

  “For God’s sake,” Kenny said. “You don’t have to worry about Chester. You really don’t. Not at a time like this.”

  “What about Chester?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

  Haydee shrugged. “It was just that I was telling Desiree about it. Chester Morton used to spend a lot of time at our place. I don’t know how much, really, you know, I was only six. But he used to come over and sit around with my mother, and my mother would go over there. And I remember the day he disappeared, or when everybody finally decided he’d disappeared, or whatever, because that was the first time I was ever taken into foster care.”