by Aaron Elkins
Whatever it was that had done the job, he explained, had been a sharp instrument, but sharp like a heavy chef’s knife is sharp, not like a scalpel or a surgical saw.
“See”—he pointed to the photograph—“if you look at the cut ends of the bones, you can see that they’re not clean. There’s been some crushing at the margins.”
Fukida wasn’t at all sure he could see it, but John, who’d had more experience in this line, nodded. “‘Hacked’ is the word, all right. An axe, that’d be my guess.”
“I don’t think so, John. Look at the second toe, right above the cut—those striations running laterally across the bone? They’re pretty clear.”
These Fukida was able to make out. “Hesitation marks?”
“Right. The same kind of thing you get when someone’s trying to cut his wrists and can’t quite get up the nerve, or find the right spot. I think they were the first attempts to cut the toe off, and Torkel—or whoever did it—was trying to cut through the joint, which is pretty hard to find if you’re not up on your anatomy, because the bases and the heads of the phalanges are wedged really close together; they kind of overlap, more so as you get older. So, on the next try he resorted to brute force and just chopped his way right through the bone; a single stroke each time, or maybe a single stroke to lop off both toes, but I don’t think so. Almost certainly used a hammer or something like it to drive the blade through. The weapon itself was probably some kind of small, heavy blade, something like a heavy-duty box-cutter, maybe.”
“Why couldn’t it have been an axe?” John asked.
“If he’d had an axe to start with, why would there be any hesitation marks at all? When you swing an axe, you swing it. You’re not looking for some delicate little joint to slip it through. Both toes would have come off with the first whack. Besides, you’d have to be pretty good with an axe, or with anything else big, to clip just those two and not damage the ones on either side; especially the big toe.”
“That’s true,” John allowed.
“And the reason we know it happened after he died,” Fukida said, “is because there’s no—what did you call it, Johnny?”
“Osteoporotic atrophy. And resorption, let us never forget resorption.”
“Also, the medullary cavities are wide open,” Gideon said. “No capping, no healing at all. This man had those two toes right up until he died. Ergo, whoever he is, Torkel Torkelsson he is not.”
Fukida expelled a long, disgusted breath. “Wasn’t there a ring? Do I remember right? Wasn’t he wearing Torkel’s ring?”
“Not exactly wearing,” Gideon said. “There weren’t any fingers, but the ring was near his hand, where the fingers would have been.”
Fukida nodded. “So that was a plant, too; part of the scam. And we bought it. ‘Screw-up’ is right.”
“Looks like it,” John said. “Doc, you want to tell me something? All you had to do was take one look at the picture and you spotted this. This coroner, he had the real thing right in front of him, and he never saw it? I don’t care how spaced-out he was. I mean, even I can see it—”
“Now that I’ve pointed it out.”
“Well, yeah, but I’m not a medical examiner. Jesus, Teddy, what kind of coroners do you have here?”
“Hey, give me a break,” Fukida said. “This isn’t like it was in Honolulu. People are nice to each other here. We don’t have a lot of homicides. We don’t have a real forensic pathologist. We don’t even have real coroners; the police are all deputy coroners, and the autopsies, when we do ’em, get done under contract, by local doctors. Meikeljohn was just a urologist from Waimea that was willing to do it, so we used him a couple of times. What would he know from bones?”
“True, not too many bones in the urinary tract. At least now,” Gideon said, smiling, “I know why the bladder got all that loving attention.”
“What about an ID?” Fukida asked. “The pictures tell you anything that indicates it’s definitely Magnus?”
“Or definitely isn’t?” John added.
A shake of the head from Gideon. “There’s not much to work with. The sex is right, and the age is in the ball-park somewhere. That’s about it, and that applies to a whole lot of people. So the answer is . . . I don’t know, not for certain.”
“So,” John said to Fukida, “what now?”
“Now? Now I put an addendum in the case file to the effect that we screwed up slightly.”
“And then?”
“Then what?”
“Then what do you do? Where do you go from there?”
Fukida twisted his baseball cap around so that it was backwards, leaned back in his chair, and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Beats the hell out of me. What do you suggest?”
John stared at him. “What the hell kind of—”
Gideon interrupted. “We thought,” he said mildly, “that you might want to reopen the case.”
Fukida rocked back and forth in his chair while he considered, his hands still clasped behind his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”
“But—” John began.
“No, wait.” He took off the cap, ran a hand through his thick black hair, and leaned soberly forward. “Look, Oliver, Johnny—you convinced me. The guy that was autopsied isn’t Torkel Torkelsson. This guy pulled off the scam of a lifetime, making us—making everybody—think that the body in the fire was his, so he could get away without leaving a trail.”
“Right!” John said. “So—”
“So does somebody here want to tell me exactly what crime I’m supposed to investigate? What section of the penal code applies?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “Maybe—”
“And what about statutes of limitation? This all happened ten years ago.”
“Statutes of limitation don’t apply,” John said. “This was murder—a capital offense.”
“Sure, but he didn’t kill anyone. At least, we don’t think so,” he added in an undertone.
“Well, true, but—”
“More important, anybody want to tell me who I’m supposed to investigate? Everything that’s left of Torkel Torkelsson is sitting in a shoe box on my desk. Even if he did do something criminal, I’d say that puts him pretty safely beyond the long arm of the law, wouldn’t you?”
John and Gideon both nodded. “Guess so,” John said.
Fukida sat still for a minute, snapping the rubber band against his wrist, then jumped up and shook hands with both of them.
“Great seeing you again, Johnny. Doctor, that was really something, what you did. I’m very impressed.”
He walked them down the hall, through the lobby, and up to the front doors.
“Look, guys,” he said as he saw them out, “I’m sorry I can’t help, but I don’t see anything for me to do. If there’s a prosecutable crime involved here—and somebody to prosecute—give me a call when you figure out who and what they are.”
TWELVE
“SOMETHING’S screwy,” Gideon said.
John laughed. “You’re telling me.”
“No, I mean even screwier than it looks.”
With Gideon behind the wheel of the pickup this time, they had just left Fukida’s office, turning north onto the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to head back into the uplands, toward Waimea and the ranch.
“I know,” said John, nodding. “Every time we find out something new, it just gets more confusing. Not supposed to work that way.”
“It’s the timing that doesn’t make any sense, John. It’s impossible for it to have happened the way we think.”
“How so?”
“Well, when would Torkel have had the time to do what he did—cut off Magnus’s toes, leave the ring, switch clothing with him, and the rest of it?”
“How do you know he switched clothes? That’s not so easy with a dead guy. You ever try to move a dead guy? Dead people are heavy.”
“Well, at least we know Torkel got a boot back on his foot after the toes came off, and he wouldn’t have bee
n dumb enough to put Magnus’s own boots back on him. I’m guessing he also dressed him in the rest of his own clothing.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. And he must have switched wallets and any other identifying things, too, but they probably got burnt up—except for the ring.”
“Probably so, but when did he do all that? How could he get it done between the time of the shooting and the time they burnt the place down? Did they kill Magnus, then conveniently go away for an hour or two, leaving Torkel alone to tinker with his brother’s body, and then come back later, at their leisure, and burn the place down?”
With his eyes closed and his face pushed out the open window to derive the full complement of pleasure from the oven-hot breeze, John thought about that for a moment. “Pretty doubtful,” he agreed, bringing his head back in. His stiff, black hair was hardly mussed. “So what’s your theory? I know you have to have one.”
“Oh, hey, I’m not about to call it a theory. At best we’re talking hypothesis or—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” John said, waving a hand. Finer academic distinctions were not his forte.
“Let’s call it a speculation, I’d be more comfortable with that,” Gideon said. “A supposition that’s unverified to this point, but one—”
“Doc, I swear—!”
“Sorry, sorry. John, what I’m wondering is if the killers never burnt the place down at all. I’m wondering if Torkel’s the one who came back and set the fire himself.”
“You mean to cover the identity switch.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah, could be.” He nodded to himself. “Could very well be. Fits.”
“It goes along with cutting off the toes, doesn’t it?”
“It also goes along with putting his face right on that oil-soaked matting so there’d be nothing left to recognize.” He turned things over in his mind for a moment. “And what about his fingers? Remember the photos? His fingers were—well, his hands; he didn’t exactly have any fingers, did he?—his hands were positioned up by his face, too, where they’d get all that heat. No fingerprints that way.”
“Well, possibly, but that just might be—”
“Oh, right, right, where the muscles tighten up . . . the . . . what do you call it again?”
“The pugilistic attitude,” Gideon said. “The muscle fibers dehydrate and shrink, and pull on the tendons, so the forearms flex and the hands come up around the face like a fighter covering up. The knees bend and the feet come up, too. Remember how his feet stayed in the air when they turned him over?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Okay, scratch that idea. But the rest of it holds together.” John was getting into it now. His hands were starting to chop the air. Gideon shifted left to give himself a little more protection. “The shooters kill Magnus. Torkel gets away. He knows, or thinks he knows, that they don’t know which one they shot. So after they’re gone, he comes back, chops off his brother’s toes, leaves his ring, and burns the place down. Everybody figures the bad guys did it, and the bad guys—and everyone else—think it’s Torkel’s body laying in the barn.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “I like it.”
“That’s one scenario,” Gideon said gingerly. “I have another one, too. Another possibility.”
“That nobody else was involved at all? That there never were any ‘bad guys’? That Torkel not only burnt the place down, but killed his own brother?”
“That’s right,” Gideon said, surprised. “Is that what you think?”
“No, that’s not what I think. I just know the way you think. You got this bug in your ear. First it was Magnus who killed Torkel, and since that didn’t work, now it’s Torkel who killed Magnus. What have you got against these guys?”
“John, I’m just—”
“Doc, we’ve been all over this. There’s all kinds of evidence against it. The slick, two-man execution, the statement from Dagmar—”
“Sure, but wouldn’t Dagmar have lied if it helped her own brother get away with murder?”
“Of her own other brother? I don’t know, but, yeah, okay, it’s possible. Theoretically. But look, the main thing is—why would Torkel shoot his brother? Give me one possible reason.”
“How would I know that? Because of the will, maybe? To get full title to the ranch?”
“No, how does that add up? If that’s what he wanted, why pretend he was dead? How would that get him the ranch?”
Gideon nodded, worn down by John’s more than reasonable arguments. “Yes, you’re right about that, too. Okay, forget it. One more unverified supposition bites the dust.”
“One more crackpot theory,” John said.
They were climbing now. The breeze flowing in the driver’s-side window was laced with pine and eucalyptus, and was refreshingly cool. John, finding the chill unwelcome, rolled up his window, leaned his head against it, and settled his body as comfortably as he could. After a few minutes he began to slip into a doze but then sat up with a sudden “Damn!” He turned with an earnest look at Gideon.
“Doc, maybe you’re on to something after all. They have been lying to us. I just realized it. Well, holding back, anyway.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“The family. The whole damn family. They knew it was Torkel in the plane all along!”
Gideon frowned. “How do you figure that?”
“Look, when we told them the body in the plane was Torkel’s, how come nobody mentioned the ring? How come nobody jumped up and said, ‘No, that’s impossible, it can’t be Torkel; we know the one that burned up was Torkel because he was wearing Torkel’s ring’? Or at least brought it up?” He pounded his thigh with a fist. “Wouldn’t you have said something? But there was nothing, not a peep. Why not?”
“Is it possible they didn’t know about it?”
“No, it isn’t. The file said it was family members that identified it, remember?”
“Well, yes, but it didn’t say which family members.”
“What’s the difference? Even if it was only a couple of them, why would they keep something like that to themselves? No, I’m telling you, somebody should have said something.”
“Somebody should have,” Gideon agreed.
“What do you say we go talk to Axel about it?” John suggested. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
For the next few minutes they retreated into their own thoughts. At the gate to the Little Hoaloha, it was John who got out to swing it open. When he climbed back into the truck, Gideon wore a look on his face somewhere between confusion and exasperation, with emphasis on the former.
“What?” John asked. He had the worried expression that meant he knew in his heart that his friend was about to complicate things even more.
“None of that makes any sense either,” Gideon told him.
John exploded. Out shot his arms. He banged an elbow hard into the doorpost and winced. “I knew you were going to say that. I knew it’d be too simple for you. What’s the problem, not enough loose ends?”
“No, I’m serious. Look.” He waited for John to settle down before going quietly on. “If they all knew what really happened—that Magnus wasn’t Magnus and Torkel wasn’t Torkel—then why would they ask me to look at the autopsy report? Why did they ask me to go out to Maravovo Atoll and check the plane in the first place? They’d have to be crazy to take chances like that. There was no reason they had to do that. They could have just let the salvage company bring the bones back, buried them, and left me out of it. None of this would have come up.”
“Yeah, but . . . well, maybe they . . .” John sagged against his seat. “My head hurts.”
“John, what do you say we forget about going up to see Axel? What do you say we turn the truck around and go back and talk to Fukida again? Tell him what we’ve been talking about, see what he thinks.”
“Dump it in his lap, you mean.”
“Absolutely. It’s his baby, not ours.”
Now John hedged. “All the way back to Kona? It
’s not like we have anything definite here, Doc. There might be a simple explanation for everything. We might be stirring up a lot of trouble for everybody for no good reason. These are good people, basically.” He scowled down at his hands. “I think these are good people.”
“Well, you’re the cop. I’ll leave it up to you. If you just want to drop the whole thing—”
“Nah,” John said wearily, “you know better than that. Okay, let’s go. Imagine how happy Teddy’ll be to see us again.”
SERGEANT Fukida looked anything but happy. From across his desk, he eyed them with the wary expression of the barnyard rooster looking at a couple of smiling foxes come calling. He was wearing two rubber bands on his wrist now, wide ones, and was snapping them both with a forceful little twist of the thumb. That’s got to hurt, Gideon thought. His baseball cap was still on, but no longer backward.
“I knew you guys would be back,” Fukida said. “I could feel it in my bones. I just didn’t think it would be today.”
“This is serious, Teddy,” John said. “There are some problems.”
Fukida heaved a colossal sigh. “Okay, let’s hear’em.”
The possibility that Torkel himself had set the hay barn fire to obscure his escape left him unconcerned and impatient (“You came back to tell me this?”), but the question of why no one had brought up the ring after Gideon had identified the body in the plane as Torkel’s did catch his interest, and for few minutes they tossed possibilities back and forth. It didn’t take long to narrow the likely explanations down to one: When the Torkelssons had learned that Gideon knew the body in Maravovo Lagoon was Torkel’s, they realized that mention of the ring would make it clear that the confusion of identities had not been accidental, but purposeful; that Torkel had left his ring on Magnus’s body in a deliberate, premeditated attempt to mislead the police.
And if they were afraid of bringing that out, didn’t it mean that they’d been aware of the switch from the beginning? That they’d known all along that Torkel had actually outlived Magnus? That they had kept it to themselves because they much preferred their lives under the provisions of Magnus’s generous will? (And who wouldn’t?) If Torkel’s will had gone into effect instead, the great bulk of the estate would have gone to the Swedish Seamen’s Home.
