Flowering Judas by Jane Haddam Page B

he said finally.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt was an old skeleton,” he said again, getting his courage up. “It had been there a long time. It had—the skin and the flesh had rotted away from the bone, it had done that naturally. Do you see?”
    â€œOf course I see,” Lora said. “But I still don’t see why I should care, or why you should. Of course it was an old skeleton. The television said it had been in that backpack for twelve years. Really, you have to wonder what goes on with these people, the way these people live. They have no morals.”
    Shpetim tried again. “It wasn’t in the ground there, where we found it,” he said. “It wasn’t there for twelve years.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBecause we’re working that ground,” Shpetim said. “I’ve been walking over it every day for months—”
    â€œBut it was buried. You wouldn’t know if you walked over something buried.”
    â€œIt wasn’t buried deep,” Shpetim said. “They found it—they didn’t do anything, practically, and it was right there. And I walked over that ground just the week before. And—”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd it didn’t smell,” Shpetim said. “There. I’ve said it. I’ve been biting my tongue, not to say it to the police. But that backpack couldn’t have been buried in the ground like that for twelve years. It couldn’t have been there a week. And we’re the only ones there. We’re the ones who are on that ground every day. What if one of us put it there?”
    â€œPut a skeleton of a baby?” Lora said.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIn a backpack that belonged to that man who went missing? That’s what the television said. The backpack belonged to that man who went missing, that they found hanging from the billboard.”
    â€œThe skeleton couldn’t have been in the backpack all that time,” Shpetim said. “There would have been—I looked into the backpack and there was nothing in it. No … no—”
    â€œRot?”
    â€˜Yes.”
    â€œWould there have been rot after twelve years?”
    â€œThere would have been something,” Shpetim said desperately. “It didn’t make sense, I’m telling you. What if the skeleton didn’t have anything to do with the man who was hanged? Or hanged himself? Or whatever it was? What if it’s something else? Somebody put the skeleton of a baby in a backpack and then put the backpack in the ground on my building site, and I don’t know that—”
    â€œYou don’t know anything,” Lora said. “You’re jumping at shadows. This is our Nderi. That must be the girl. She’s a very beautiful girl.”
    Shpetim Kika already knew that Anya Haseri was a beautiful girl. He just didn’t think it was the point.
    3
    For almost the last week now, Darvelle Haymes’s clients had not been clients. They had been people who wanted to get a look at—even to talk to—the woman who might have killed Chester Morton. Darvelle knew all about those particular kinds of people. She’d met a lot of them after Chester first disappeared. She’d met them everywhere. Once, she’d come home—that was to the old place, the bad place—and found one of them in her living room, crawling around on the carpet with a magnifying glass, like a goddamned Sherlock Holmes.
    So far, this time, there hadn’t been much in the way of that kind of thing. There had been the “clients” who weren’t clients, but it had all been very civilized and oblique. She’d go out to show a few houses to somebody who said she was looking for a four bedroom ranch or something new with copper plumbing. Then the questions would start. They were never direct questions. The “clients” never came out and said they knew she was the one everybody had talked