Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

“Gideon’s a scientist through and through, John,” Julie said. “You’re never going to get him to agree to zero probability about anything.”

  Gideon nodded. “That’s true enough, but this one has to be way down there, right around .001. I’ll buy it.”

  “But . . . but that’s wonderful!” Rafe exclaimed, still blinking away. “What you’re really telling me is that it couldn’t have been my father! You’ve essentially cleared him—ha-ha!—just like that. And you haven’t even had to look at any of the evidence yet!”

  “Well, you know, I’ve been at this awhile,” said John with a modest shrug.

  “I can’t believe it! If only I’d gotten the two of you involved years ago! You have no idea—John, old man, could you pass that lovely clotted cream this way? Ah, thank you, thank you.”

  He sliced a scone in half, lathered on the thick cream and a layer of cherry jam, and went to work. “Nothing in the world like Jersey cream,” he said, looking up happily. “And this is from Carlisle cows—the very best!” But he caught a fleeting shadow crossing John’s face, and his elation visibly withered. “John? Is there something else? Is something wrong?”

  “Nah, nothing wrong. I was just wondering if you’ve told the police that Gideon’s going to be working on the bones.”

  Rafe let out a soft, unvoiced “Whoo.” Oh, is that all. “No, I didn’t see the need. I can’t imagine there being any interest. We’re talking about a case that hasn’t been active for forty years. And anyone who worked on it back then has been gone from the department for at least twenty of them, probably more.”

  “Yeah, that’s all true, but I still think it would be a good idea—before Gideon gets to work. A courtesy, you know? They’ll appreciate it, trust me.”

  Rafe looked unconvinced, but he shrugged his acquiescence. “All right, if you think it’s best, certainly, I’ll let them know. The head of the CID is a friend. I’ll ring him tonight.”

  “I don’t mean to push you, Rafe, but I think what you really ought to do is bring Doc over to meet him.”

  “I agree, Rafe,” Gideon put in. “In case I do come up with something that they need to look into—not that I expect to, but if it did happen—it’d be nice not to spring it on them as a surprise.”

  Rafe inclined his head. “Gentlemen, I yield to your superior knowledge and experience. I’ll stop by headquarters on my way home to arrange it, for tomorrow morning, if possible, and I’ll ring you later to let you know.” He finished off the scone, took one more obviously final swig of his coffee, and got to his feet. “Well, then . . .”

  “One more question before you go, Rafe,” Gideon said. “How exactly did the police know the bullet came from that crag? Did they find some evidence up there? A cigarette? A footprint?”

  “Oh, no, as I understand it, it was a simple matter of geometry. The entry wound was just above the collarbone, after which the bullet traveled down through his heart and lodged in his hip bone, well below where it entered. Ergo, its starting point had to have been somewhere well above his collarbone, and the only such place in the vicinity would have been up on the crags.”

  “Ah, I see,” Gideon said.

  “And now,” Rafe said, “I think I’d better be on my way. I’ll see you all at dinner Wednesday, if not before. John, thank you again for those remarkable insights, and thank you all for being so good about coming here.”

  “We appreciate the hospitality, Rafe,” Julie said. “We’re all looking forward to seeing something of the island.”

  “Yes, do. Oh, I should mention that we’re extremely proud of our bus system. Frequent busses, clean, not too crowded, and you can get absolutely anywhere. There are cars for hire as well, of course, but honestly, if I were new to the countryside, I’d put myself in the hands of the public transportation system rather than deal with our narrow, tricky, nameless little lanes on my own—especially with hedgerows hemming you in and cutting off your vision on every side.”

  “Particularly when everybody’s driving on the wrong side of the road,” Julie said.

  “Amen to that,” said Gideon, who tended to be an abstracted driver and had had a close call or two when driving on the right side of the road when his mind was elsewhere. Busses suited him fine.

  CHAPTER 10

  They remained in the bar for a while, then walked half a block back down Kensington Place to Casa Mia, a cozy, busy little restaurant they’d seen from the car on the way in. The tea at the hotel seemed to have stimulated their taste buds rather than satiated them, and the aromas inside the restaurant got their salivary glands going. They ordered tricolor salads and two pizzas: a Margherita—the simple, basic archetype of all pizzas—and a more elaborate pizza pescatore, with artichokes, shrimp, and clams. And a bottle of the house Chianti (wicker basket and all) to drink.

  While they were waiting for their food, they sipped wine and chewed contentedly on slices of Italian bread dipped in olive oil and salt.

  “Red wine and bread,” John said. “I could make a meal of just this.”

  “You and Omar Khayyam,” said Julie. “And me. Gideon, what was that about, when you asked Rafe how they knew the shot was fired from the crags? I could see you had something on your mind.”

  “I did, yes, and I was afraid that he was going to say what he did say—that they figured it out from the trajectory. But he was so thrilled by what you told him, John, that I didn’t have the heart to bring him back down to earth.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be thrilled?” John demanded. “What do you mean, ‘bring him back down to earth’? What I told him was right; there’s no way his old man—”

  “What you told him was right, and it was good thinking. But it was based on false assumptions.”

  John put down his bread. “Hey!”

  “No, not your assumptions, the police’s—back when it happened.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Like thinking they could figure out where a shot came from by tracing its trajectory through the body. It enters at the collarbone, takes a downward path through his body, and lodges in his hip bone. Ergo, it came from above his body.”

  “And that’s wrong?” Julie said, her eyebrows going up.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, jeez!” John said, loudly enough to turn heads at nearby tables. “Of course it’s wrong.” He sighed. “I guess I was so impressed with how brilliant I was that I didn’t even think to ask about how the cops came up with . . . I can’t believe I didn’t . . . damn.” He sounded like an old-fashioned vinyl record winding down, slower and slower, deeper and deeper, until it just faded away.

  “I know the feeling, John, believe me,” Gideon said. “It’s—”

  “Quit it, you two,” Julie said. “I’m totally in the dark. Are you really both saying that a bullet’s path doesn’t tell you what direction it came from? Sorry, but that’s—”

  “The path it took through the air, yeah, that would tell you something,” John explained. “But, see, Doc’s point is we don’t know what that was; nobody does. All we know is the path it took through his body, and based on that, you can’t . . . Doc, maybe you should explain this.”

  “Yeah, Doc, maybe you should explain it,” Julie said. “I’m still in the dark.”

  “Well, think about it,” Gideon said. “What the trajectory of a bullet through a body does give you is the placement of the gun barrel relative to the body, and that’s all—not where the shooter was and not where the victim was. A shot like that could have come from absolutely any direction at all: maybe from above him, maybe from alongside him, even from under him.”

  Now even John looked uncertain. “I know you’re gonna turn out to be right, Doc, but I have to say I’m having a hard time seeing how that could be. From under him?”

  “Look—either of you have a pencil? Not a pen—a pencil, with an eraser.”

  John produced a mechanical one, and Gideon used a paper napkin to draw two stick figures, one o
n a small rise, the other one standing what would have been a few feet below him. A crude gun was then put into the upper figure’s hand and a straight line drawn from its muzzle through the lower figure’s torso, necessarily taking a downward track. “This is essentially what the police said happened, right?”

  Nods all around.

  “Well, the crag must have been a lot higher than that, but, essentially, yes,” Julie allowed.

  Gideon now erased the rise and drew a straight line down the shooter’s back, as if he were standing against a wall. “All right, presto-chango—” He rotated the napkin ninety degrees, so that the line was now at the bottom of the drawing, and scrawled, “This is the ground” under the line.

  “Now we have a new scenario. They’ve been fighting, wrestling. The shooter—that is, the one who’s about to be the shooter—has been thrown to the ground onto his back. He’s managed to hold on to the gun, though. The victim, standing at his feet, launches himself onto him, hoping maybe to get a hand on the gun. He flings himself full-length through the air, okay? Like a swimmer diving into his lane. And just as he gets himself airborne and roughly horizontal, and his head even with the shooter’s waist, say, the shooter manages to get off a shot . . . from underneath. The shot enters under his collarbone—”

  “Of course!” Julie exclaimed. “Horizontally or vertically, the relationship between the gun and the body is the same. The bullet goes downward through his body, even if it goes upward through the air.”

  Gideon bowed his head and spread his arms, the magician waiting for his applause.

  “Oh, hell,” John said with a shrug, “it’s pretty obvious, really. I don’t know why you had to go through that whole rigmarole to explain it.”

  Gideon sighed. Magicians had it better than forensic anthropologists, he thought. Anthropologists had to explain how they did it . . . with predictable results.

  “So what you’re saying,” Julie said, “is that, based on nothing but that trajectory, there’s no way of telling where it came from.”

  “Right. You can’t rule anything out . . . or in.”

  The pizzas came then, and they each put a couple of wedges on their plates. “I see why you thought this might depress Rafe,” Julie said as she applied knife and fork to a slice of Margherita. “It doesn’t help his father’s case, does it? If the bullet had come from up on the crag, that would have essentially let Roddy off. He never could have made that shot; John made that very clear. But from close up—the way you’ve drawn it, for example—he’d be just as capable of doing it as a marksman would.”

  “You gonna bring this up with Rafe?” John asked Gideon.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I think you have to. You can’t let him keep thinking that I got his father off the hook, when I didn’t.”

  “Julie?”

  “I don’t agree, Gideon, not entirely. You’re not saying Roddy did do it, you’re only saying that it’s possible he did it. I say wait a day or two, let him stay up there on his cloud. Who knows, by then you might have something more definite to tell him that does absolve Roddy.”

  “That’s true. I think I’ll hold off for the moment and let him be happy. Once we get into the skeletal remains themselves, there’s no telling what’ll come out of them. There’s almost always a surprise or two.”

  “Especially with you working on them,” John said with a honk of laughter.

  Afterward, back to the Revere for their first look at their suite, which John found a little dowdy but for Gideon and Julie was welcome, especially after the depressing postmodern hotel they’d stayed at in Málaga, with its straight-line, right-angle, minimalist decor and its eyeball-scorching excess of ultrabright primary colors.

  Here at the Revere, there were earth tones; clean if slightly tired carpets; soft, comfortable, unfashionable chairs; and, in each bedroom, a handsome four-poster bed. A sizable sitting room with an up-to-date TV set was between the two bedrooms, and there was a small, open kitchen and a plain, uncarpeted little room off to one side as well, the old valet’s room that Rafe had told them about. All in all, a welcoming, homely place, just about what you’d want from an old coaching inn.

  They listened to a telephone message from Rafe, who had arranged a 9:00 a.m. meeting for John, Gideon, and himself with the detective chief inspector in charge of the police’s criminal-investigation department. Police headquarters were only a few blocks from the Revere, and Rafe would show up at the hotel at eight thirty so that they could walk over with time to spare.

  Winding up the day, they read or worked individually for an hour, after which the three of them grew sleepy watching a Blue Bloods episode, until Julie and Gideon said good night, leaving a dozy John in front of a Hawaii Five-O rerun—not the new series but the original 1970s version.

  “Jack Lord,” he’d muttered, nodding his approval of the original McGarrett, “now that’s my kind of cop. ‘Book the fucker, Danno!’”

  Julie smiled. “Um, I’m not sure you got that quite right, John.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Rafe showed up at the hotel at eight thirty on the dot, just as Julie left for the museum. He was still elated over John’s conclusion the day before that, whoever pulled that trigger, it wasn’t Roddy Carlisle. Gideon was a little uneasy about it but couldn’t bring himself to spoil things yet. And Julie was right: Who knew what he might turn up in the next day or two?

  “Rafe,” he said as they left for police headquarters along with John, “any problem if I use someplace else to look at your father’s remains?”

  “Oh? Won’t the dairy plant work for you? I can have someone take you there and back whenever you like, if that makes it easier.”

  “No, it isn’t that, but that little valet’s room would be a perfect place to lay out the bones. There’s already a table in it. Much more convenient than the dairy, especially if I get an idea in the middle of the night that I want to check out. Which does happen.”

  “Just ask Julie if you don’t believe it,” John said.

  “All right, then,” said Rafe, “that’s what we’ll do. I’ll have the bones brought to the Revere this very morning.”

  They walked up Kensington Place toward the Parade, Saint Helier’s closest thing to a boulevard, after crossing which Kensington became Elizabeth Place for a few hundred yards, then underwent another of those name changes between English and French when, for no discernible physical reason, it changed to Rouge Bouillon, meaning red broth. A few hundred yards along this queerly named old street was a plain, two-story, brown brick building that couldn’t have been more nondescript, except for the distinctive blue-and-white-checkered sign on the sidewalk in front. States of Jersey Police Headquarters.

  A fast walker, Rafe had easily kept pace—sometimes even setting the pace—with John and Gideon, even though he had to take almost two steps to their one. As a result they were fifteen minutes early. They weren’t made to wait, though. In the tiny, cluttered lobby, the woman at the “Enquiries” desk recognized Rafe at once and reached for a telephone. “He’s expecting you, Senator. I’ll—”

  “Don’t bother, Marie. We’ll just go on up.”

  “Certainly.” She pushed a button that buzzed and opened the waist-high gate into the interior. “I assume you know the way?” It was meant as a joke, and Rafe laughed accommodatingly.

  As they passed her, John and Gideon were handed visitor badges. Rafe apparently didn’t need one. They walked into an open work area with five or six people sitting at desks, most of whom looked up with pleasure to see Rafe and called greetings.

  “Hullo, Senator!”

  “How are you, Mr. Carlisle?”

  “Nice to see you, sir.”

  “I thought nobody even knew who he was,” John murmured.

  “Modest guy,” said Gideon. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  As they walked through, Rafe responded in kind to the calls, sometimes with surprising intimacy. “Elmer, old man, glad to see you looking yo
ur old self. . . . Hullo there, Bea, give my best regards to Charlie. . . . Why, Johnno, you old miscreant, I thought they’d sacked you long ago.” His shining face made it obvious that he enjoyed the exchanges.

  Toward the rear was a stairwell with a placard on a stand beside it. Criminal Investigation Department, it said, and in case anyone should miss its intent, a prominent arrow pointed up the stairs.

  “So what’s he like, this detective chief inspector?” Gideon asked as they climbed the steps.

  Rafe replied with an amused but otherwise enigmatic smile. “Let’s save it for a surprise, shall we?”

  The upper floor could have been the upper floor of just about any police station in the world: a slightly tacky corridor smelling of disinfectant (but less so than the ground floor), with flickery, buzzing fluorescent tubes above, linoleum flooring below, and office cubicles with shoulder-high walls that were glass from waist-level up and scuffed, colorless fabric below that. The surfaces facing the hallway were blanketed with tacked-up, dog-eared official notices and lists a dozen deep, scrawled Post-it notes, newspaper cartoons, and one big, plastic-coated grease pencil calendar and schedule.

  Gideon had been in enough places like it by now so that he was feeling right at home. At the end of the corridor was the lone “office” in its traditional sense—walls you couldn’t see through all the way up to the ceiling and an actual, genuine, closable door made of real wood: the throne room, obviously, the lair of the Boss.

  With the door ajar, enough of the office was visible to see that it was a sizable, airy, high-ceilinged place with windows that must once have looked down on the avenue below. Now, however, they stared straight into the dense foliage of the trees that had grown up out front, the ends of the upper branches close enough to touch. Not an unpleasant prospect, really, restful and somehow removed from both the nastiness and the humdrum routine of police work. But the room itself was so neat compared to the cluttered hallway that there was something cold about it. If there was anything on its walls besides another schedule—a bit fancier one, on whiteboard—Gideon couldn’t see it. Two small tables were also bare of anything but paperwork and its accoutrements. The closest thing to decoration was a limp standing flag in one corner: the simple red diagonal cross that was the emblem of the States of Jersey. None of the usual plaques or commendations or pictures taken with VIPs or family photos. Nothing personal, nothing to suggest the tastes or values or interests of the entity that lived here.