Where There's a Will

by Aaron Elkins

  “You know,” Julie said, “I was just thinking that now there does seem to be another one of those loose ends you two were talking about.”

  “What’s that?” Gideon asked.

  “No body.”

  “Nobody?”

  “No . . . body,” Julie said. “No Magnus. Presuming it is Magnus, he’s just a pile of ashes in a little box.”

  “You know, that’s true,” John said reflectively. “No body, no trial, no perps, a misidentified victim . . . I have to admit, that’s a lot of loose ends.” He looked at his watch. “Well, time to see if we can tie a few of them up. Doc, ready to go talk to the Waimea PD?”

  Gideon hesitated. “I guess.”

  John frowned. “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, I’m going to barge in on some detective’s turf, totally unasked, a complete stranger, a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ he’s never heard of, and tell him he botched a case he handled eight years ago, not even getting right who got killed. I’ve been there before, John, and I can imagine his reaction. I know how I’d feel.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. In the FBI, we come up against that kind of situation all the time. There are techniques for defusing it. See, the trick is you have to make them see you as helping them, not horning in. Besides, I used to work for Honolulu PD, remember? I know these people, I know how they think. Trust me. Just follow my lead, we’ll get along great.”

  “John, you have my implicit trust,” Gideon said, “but if it was the Kona CIS that handled it, why are we going to the Waimea PD?”

  “Because they would have been the first on the scene, and the ones who opened the case. And they’re the local police force. It’s a matter of professional courtesy. See what I mean? There’s a right way to do this.”

  THE Waimea Police Department was closed.

  “Closed!” John yelled through the glass front doors at the stern and preoccupied-looking woman on the other side. In response to their thumping on the glass she had grudgingly emerged into the unlit vestibule from somewhere in back to bark at them: she couldn’t let them in; the office was closed. In one corner of her mouth a cigarette jiggled up and down as she spoke.

  “How the hell can you be closed?” John shouted. “What, there’s no crime in Waimea on Sunday?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She took the cigarette out of her mouth. Her lips, thin to begin with, disappeared altogether. “Do you have an emergency, sir?”

  “No, we don’t h—”

  “Are you in immediate need of the assistance of a police officer?”

  “No, dammit, but we need to talk to—”

  “Office hours are Monday through Friday, eight to five.”

  “Look, lady,” John yelled even louder, holding his identification up to the glass. “I’m trying to be polite here. My name is Special Agent John Lau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I damn well want to talk—”

  “Monday through Friday, eight to five.” She stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and went back out of sight around a corner. John was left steaming, holding his card case up to the deserted vestibule. “Do you believe this?”

  Gideon had been prudently silent throughout. “Well, now, John,” he began as they walked back over the neatly trimmed lawns of the Civic Center toward the parking lot, “that was certainly an instructive example of—”

  John cut him off, jabbing the air with a warning finger. “Don’t . . . say . . . anything.”

  “ARE you planning to tell me where we’re going?” Gideon asked after they’d been driving a while. “At some point?”

  “Where we should have gone in the first place,” John muttered, eyes fixed on the highway ahead. “The Kona CIS.” He set his jaw. “And they better be open.”

  TEN

  THE West Hawaii Criminal Investigation Section was on a side road off the coast highway, in the flat lowland country between Kona and the airport. Its neighborhood was, to put it mildly, unprepossessing. The idea, it seemed, had been to gather up most of the necessary but unlovely community services and deposit them in one out-of-the-way place, where they would be least likely to offend the eyes, ears, and noses of the sensitive: the garbage dump with its huge, surreal pile of wrecked cars waiting to be compacted, the Humane Society holding pens . . . and the West Hawaii CIS, which doubled as the Kona police station. A trailer and heavy-equipment repair yard and two huge, steaming piles of “organic waste” rounded out the complex, adding their own distinctive touches.

  But the police building itself was reassuring: a modern, white, one-story structure, clean and well-maintained, on its own little island of concrete walkways and decorative plantings.

  And it was open.

  Even better, the detective they were sent to when John said they wanted to talk about the Torkelsson case turned out to be an old acquaintance. Detective Sergeant Ted Fukida had been a new sergeant in the Honolulu Police Department when John was a young cop there, and he remembered him.

  “How could I forget you, Lau?” Fukida said, extending his hand. He was a waspish man in his fifties who looked as if he was fighting a low-grade toothache. “You’re the guy who couldn’t fill out an expense form right if his life depended on it. So how’re you getting along with the Feebies?”

  “Still can’t fill out the forms right,” John said. “Other than that, okay.”

  “Good-good. So what can I do for you? Please, tell me this is not official Feeb business.”

  He was a study in restlessness: flip, talky, and fidgety. At the moment, he was cracking gum between his teeth, bobbing back and forward in his swivel chair, and jiggling a toe against the plastic carpet protector underneath him.

  “No, actually, it’s old CIS business,” John told him.

  Fukida, they quickly learned, had not been the original case-handler. When the detective who had run the investigation had retired not long after the active phase was over, the case had been given to Fukida to oversee; more or less a pro forma gesture, inasmuch as unresolved homicide cases, while they might well go dormant, were never formally closed. There had been little to oversee, but the workmanlike Fukida had familiarized himself with the case file, which meant that it wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time bringing him up to snuff. More important, from Gideon’s point of view, since it hadn’t been Fukida’s case during the investigative phase, he had nothing to be self-protective about.

  Which didn’t mean that he was going to sit there and accept everything he was told; certainly not on the strength of Gideon’s supposed reputation. (When John had somewhat effusively introduced Gideon as the world-famous Skeleton Detective, his response had been a laconic, gum-cracking, “Yeah, I think I might have heard of him.”) Indeed, when Gideon began by stating—maybe a bit too baldly—that the skeleton in the Grumman was not that of Magnus Torkelsson but of his supposedly murdered brother Torkel, Fukida had interrupted before Gideon had gotten out his first complete sentence.

  “What? You’re out of your mind. What is this supposed to be, a joke? We had an autopsy, we took depositions, we had a—how the hell did you come up with a royally screwed-up story like that?”

  “There was a royal screw-up, all right,” John told him levelly, “but you guys made it.”

  Fukida’s head rolled back and then round and round on his neck. Gideon caught a waft of spearmint.

  “All I can say is, you two better have a good reason for wasting my time.”

  “It’s all yours, Doc,” John said. “Just wait, Teddy, you’ll love this, this is great.”

  Thanks a lot, John, Gideon thought.

  “Mmf,” Fukida said, his eyes closed, continuing to stretch his neck muscles.

  Gideon was generally good at telling when a cop was going to be open-minded about what forensic anthropology could do and when he was going to dig in his heels and resist, and Fukida didn’t strike him as a promising student. Happily, however, the sergeant proved him wrong, although he was anything but an easy sell. With the foot bones laid ou
t in their anatomical relationship on his desk blotter, he had put Gideon through a detailed show-and-tell drill, interrupting with questions and argument, until he had more or less satisfied himself that the old talus fractures were really there and they meant what Gideon said they did. By the time they were through with it, he seemed a happier, more engaged man, his toothache perhaps gone.

  “Okay, I’ll buy it,” he said, handing the talus back to Gideon, who wrapped it in a Kleenex from Fukida’s desk and put it in the box. “I like that. And I like the age stuff. It’s interesting. But you want to know what I don’t get? I don’t get why this has got to be Torkel. Why isn’t it Magnus? They both rode horses, right? They were both the same age, right? As far as I can see, it could be either one of them, or am I missing something?”

  “Yeah, you’re missing something,” John said. “Maybe if you’d shut up for one minute, Doc here could get to it. You sure haven’t changed, Teddy.”

  Gideon expected Fukida to flare up at that, but he laughed instead; a not-unfriendly noise somewhere between a snuffle and a one-note giggle. “Okay, ‘Doc,’ get to it. I’ll try and be quiet. But that’s not a promise.”

  “It’s the toes,” Gideon said. “The toes are the clincher.” He pointed to the foot. “The two that go here are missing. The distal phalanges of the second and third toes. They were amputated decades ago, the result of an accident that Torkel had forty years ago. Magnus didn’t have any missing toes.”

  Fukida stared at the remaining bones. He was frowning and working his lips; he seemed surprisingly disturbed; the gears spinning in his mind seemed just short of audible. In the silence, the low hum of conversations drifted from the other cubicles. “You’re sure you never saw his face?” a detective asked kindly. “You wouldn’t recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “Okay, how do we know the toes just didn’t get lost after he died, like just about every other damn bone in his body?” Fukida finally demanded. “What makes you so sure they were amputated?”

  “Because—” Gideon began.

  “Because,” John cut in, “when the distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges are removed, the bone that’s left, that is, the, uh, proximal segments of the, of the middle phalanges, undergoes, um, osteoporotic atrophy and becomes resorbed.” He gestured at the bones. “I mean,” he said blandly, “it’s obvious, really.”

  “Yes, it seems that way to me, too,” Gideon said, suppressing his smile.

  “I’ll be damned.” Fukida wasn’t looking at the bones, he was rocking lightly back and forth in his tilting chair, looking through a window behind them at the compost piles and snapping a rubber band that was around his wrist. The look on his face was part befuddlement, part amusement. “And so that’s how you identified him as Torkel? That’s the whole bit?”

  “That was the main thing, yes,” Gideon said. “There were some other things, but . . . why? What’s the matter? Is there something funny about it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hilarious.” He stopped rocking, gave the rubber band one more vigorous snap, and looked directly at Gideon. “The corpse in the burned building, that’s how they identified him as Torkel. Otherwise, he was unrecognizable.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He was missing two toes, too. The same two frigging toes, I’m pretty sure.”

  “But Magnus didn’t . . . but Torkel was the one . . .”

  “Right you are, champ,” said Fukida. “And what does that tell us, I asks myself? It tells us, I replies, that we got ourselves one too many Torkels.”

  “And not enough Magnuses,” said John after a moment. He rolled his head back, working his neck muscles the way Fukida had. “I could sure use a cup of coffee.”

  IN the snack room, over cardboard cups of watery vending-machine coffee (“Can you believe it?” Fukida said sourly. “Here we are in the middle of the goddamn Kona Coast, and this is the crap they expect us to drink.”), they talked about what was to be done and agreed that the place to begin would be to do what Gideon had come for: to look at the case’s medical records to see what he could make of them.

  “Okay, but between us,” Fukida told them, “the guy who did the autopsy, old Doc Meikeljohn, he’d been having a serious affair with the bottle for a while, so by that time he was maybe, let’s say, a couple of tacos short of a combination plate, you know? What I’m saying is, those two missing toes might have been in his head. I mean, considering the fire and all, the body was in pretty bad shape. Could have just been sloppy work. Or maybe the toes got burned off.”

  “But those exact two toes?” John said. “The same ones Torkel was missing? How likely is that?”

  “Not very,” Fukida admitted. “But then, the autopsy wasn’t performed for a couple of days. By that time they had the old lady’s deposition and everybody, including Meikeljohn, knew . . . well, they thought they knew . . . that it was Torkel. For all I know, he also knew Torkel was missing a couple of toes—he probably did. So, I mean, when you consider the condition of the body, and the fact that Meikeljohn wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer—”

  “He jumped to the wrong conclusion,” John finished for him. “He expected amputated toes, and so that’s what he found. Yeah, Doc says that happens to him all the time.”

  “John, when did I ever say—” Gideon began, then laughed. “Never mind.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me, Johnny,” Fukida said. “But if you want to know what I think, I think we got ourselves a whole’nother scenario.”

  “Which is?” John asked.

  “That Torkel Torkelsson—the real Torkel—cut those two toes off his dead brother before he took off so that everybody would think he was the dead one, and the shooters would forget all about him.”

  “Yes, we were thinking along the same lines,” said Gideon.

  “One thing, though,” John said. “How do we know for sure that the guy you autopsied is really his brother Magnus? Okay, it’s not Torkel—Torkel was in the plane, we agree on that—but this guy here could be just about anybody, couldn’t it? I mean, he was unrecognizable, right?”

  “Real doubtful, sport,” Fukida said. “Who else could it be? That was the last night anybody ever saw old Magnus alive. He sure hasn’t been around since, and we don’t have anybody else who’s missing from then. No, I think we can be sure it’s Magnus, all right.”

  “Yeah, like until twenty minutes ago you were sure it was Torkel.”

  Fukida scowled. “Wise guy. That was because—”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gideon interjected. “That’s what I’m here to try and clear up. If there are any clear photos of the foot, and there’s not too much damage from the fire, I might be able to tell for sure that the toes were lost after he died. That’d give us a starting point. And who knows, maybe I might come up with something else.”

  “Okay, chief,” Fukida agreed with a shrug. “Do your shtick. What do you need?”

  “Any pictures you have. The crime scene photos, the pre-autopsy photos, and the photographs from the autopsy itself, if there are any.”

  “No problem,” Fukida said.

  “And I probably should look at the autopsy report itself, even if you think it’s suspect. The coroner might have noticed something helpful.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” He stood up and poured most of his coffee into the sink. “Look, I have to run into Kona for a while, but I’ll set you guys up in a quiet room and have Sarah bring it all over to you.”

  “How about sending the whole case file while you’re at it?” John said. “I wouldn’t mind looking through it.”

  “You’re talking about a lot of paper.”

  John shrugged. “It’ll give me something to do.”

  “Okay, but I can’t let you guys take anything away with you, you understand that. It all has to stay here.”

  “No problem,” John said.

  Fifteen minutes later, with Gideon and John deposited in a pleasant conference room with comforta
ble fauxleather chairs, a dark, gleaming table, and windows whose views artfully managed to avoid the compost heaps and wrecked cars, instead looking over the lava fields, past the Boeing 717s floating down to the nearby airport, and onto the massive, cloud-wreathed hump that was Maui, an affable, carrot-topped clerk lugged in a rolling cart bulging with hanging folders and set it next to the table, between their chairs. A thick, yellow nine-by-twelve clasp envelope was plopped on the table as well.

  “There you are, boys. The case file’s in the folders. The envelope has the crime scene photos. If you need anything else, pick up that phone and dial forty-four. I’m Sarah Andersen.”

  “Is the autopsy report in with the case file?” Gideon asked.

  “No, it wouldn’t be in there. His Majesty didn’t tell me you wanted it. Be back in a sec.”

  In the envelope was a stack of black-and-white eight-by-ten photos and a neatly printed log numbering and describing them; a hundred and sixty-five in all, as usual starting with the exterior of the building and working inward, gradually going from long- and intermediate-range shots to close-ups. Gideon was at the hundred and thirtieth before he got to the first relatively close full-length image of the body, which had been found lying half on its side, half on its face.

  It made him close his eyes.

  ELEVEN

  BONES were one thing: smooth, clean, ivory-colored, usually suggesting little that brought one up against agony or violent death. A nick here, a tidy, round hole there, a few harmless-looking cracks. Even when there was more extensive breakage bone seemed to have more in common with broken pottery than with bloody, broken heads and spilled brains. His most timid, queasy students had no trouble glueing together a shattered skull or a crushed pelvis. But horribly maimed bodies like this one . . . crispy critters, his colleagues called the burned ones, and while Gideon had no quarrel with the use of black humor to distance oneself from horror, for him it didn’t work. Neither did anything else.