by Aaron Elkins
“John, what are you talking about? Is that the autopsy report? How’d you get it? I thought we weren’t supposed to—”
“This is a copy that clerk made. Sarah. She gave it to us, remember?”
“And you’ve had it ever since?”
“Yeah. Why didn’t you tell me about the cartridge case?”
“The case?” He barely remembered reading about it. “It didn’t seem important. Meikeljohn thought it was just some kind of freak accident. I didn’t want to bore you.”
“Okay, okay, never mind. Let’s get back on the highway. We gotta go see Fukida.”
“I thought you were all done—”
“So did I, but I was wrong.”
“Do we have to go right this minute?” Julie said. “I was just thinking that Greek restaurant up on the corner, with the outside balcony tables, looks very appealing.”
“Forget lunch, will you? We can eat later. We gotta go to the CIS.”
“Forget lunch?” Gideon murmured. “We can eat later? This must be serious.”
“You got that right,” John said.
SIXTEEN
“TEDDY, you got a forensics library here?”
They had left Julie in Kona—where she wanted to see the old church and royal palace—and barged in on Fukida, who was having a tuna sandwich on rye and a can of Diet Coke at his desk. He had a mound of files spread out in front of him, was wearing his Colorado Rockies cap, and he was thinking hard, staring out the window with a dreamy, thoughtful look on his face. Although the sandwich was in his hand, he wasn’t eating. Gideon and John’s entry snapped him out of his reflections and into a more characteristic temper.
“What is this, more Torkel-Magnus crap? What do you people think, I don’t have enough to keep me busy?”
“You got a forensics library?” John repeated.
“Sit down a minute. I got a little news for you two.”
“I got news for you, Teddy,” John said. Hands on his hips, he shifted from foot to foot, while they stared at each other. “So, I guess you’re not gonna tell me if there’s a forensics library?”
Fukida sighed and slapped down his sandwich. “Sarah!”
“My master’s voice,” floated over the partition from the clerical bullpen and in a moment Sarah herself followed. “You bellowed, sire?” She’d been having lunch, too. She was still chewing.
“Take this guy to the library, will you please?”
“Uh . . . the library?” she said doubtfully. “It’s lunch-time. The boys have their poker game going.”
“I’m not gonna bother them,” John said. “Oh, and I also need the report from ballistics, if there is one, Teddy. On Torkelsson.”
“What do you mean, if there is one? What kind of outfit do you think we run here?”
“I’m starting to wonder. So, can I look at it or not?”
“Give the man whatever he wants,” Fukida said with a magisterial wave. “Mi casa es su casa.”
As John left, Fukida motioned Gideon to a chair. “Sit, chief. You want a Coke or something?”
“No, thanks.”
“So what’s the big guy all excited about?”
“I have no idea, Sergeant. But it was important enough to skip lunch, so, whatever it is, hold on to your hat.”
Fukida went back to his sandwich. “May as well call me Ted,” he mumbled.
“Thanks, Ted.”
“As long as you’re going to be coming in here every day.”
“Not every day, I hope,” Gideon said, smiling. He saw now that the folders spread across Fukida’s desk were from the Torkelsson file. Now that was interesting. “You said there was some kind of news?”
“Plenty, but wait’ll Lau gets back. I don’t want to have to go through it twice.” He swiveled his chair to look out the window and chomped methodically, as if he were counting chews. “I wonder what he wants the ballistics report for.”
“Beats me. I don’t know if you know it or not, Ted, but one of John’s specialties at the Bureau is ballistics. He really knows his stuff. He lectures on it in Quantico every couple of years.”
“No, I didn’t know. I’m impressed. That’s a good outfit, the Academy. I took a fingerprint technology course there a little while ago; learned a lot. The kid’s come a long way. I knew he would. Don’t tell him I said that.”
At which point John came barreling into the room with an open book in one hand and a green folder in the other. “Here it is. Listen.” He held up the book so they could see the cover. “This is Di Maio, Gunshot Wounds. He’s talking about this case where this guy got shot in the knee, okay? Here’s what he says—”
“The knee?” Fukida exploded. “Who gives a shit about a guy who got shot in the knee?”
“The point is—”
“Sit down, Lau,” Fukida commanded. “I got something important to tell you.”
“Well, this is important, too. You think I—”
“Johnny, for the last time—”
“Okay, okay,” John said, taking the remaining chair. “You want to tell me? Tell me. See? I’m sitting down.” One conspicuous fore-finger remained in the book, marking his place.
“And listen.”
“I’m listening.” He closed the book and held up the finger for inspection. “See?”
“Okay. Now. Dagmar and Inge Torkelsson were in to see me a little while ago. Apparently, you two guys scared the bejesus out of Axel with that ‘discreet’ interviewing, and Axel called Inge, and Inge talked to Dagmar, and the two of them decided the best thing was to make a clean breast of it right now, before they got in even deeper.”
He folded his hands, started his thumbs circling around each other, and leaned back. “The brunt of it is, they all knew about the Torkel-Magnus switch from Day One—all of them, the whole damn family, and they all conspired to cover it up. They sat right here and admitted it.”
He sat back expectantly, waiting for their reactions.
Gideon wasn’t sure what his own was. Was he surprised? No, not really; not after the questions he and John had been raising the last few days. Did that mean he’d been expecting this? No, he couldn’t say that either. He’d known that a lot of the Torkelssons’ story was bogus, but he couldn’t say that he’d explicitly formed the theory that they were all involved in the switched identities. At the same time, he was conscious of a curious sense of anti-climax, as if he’d been anticipating something more, something worse, but what that might be he wasn’t sure.
Aside from that, did he feel exploited by them, made a fool of? Well, yes. They’d trundled him off to a humid, fly-infested atoll to do his thing when they’d already known perfectly well who was in that plane. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that he’d enjoyed the day, and Waikiki had been a pleasant interlude, so what was there to be angry about?
There was one other thing. When John had suggested visiting Dagmar at home that morning, hadn’t Axel said she’d be in the hospital till three in the afternoon, two hours from now? But obviously, she wasn’t. What was that all about?
But mostly he was confused, wondering once more why, if they knew about the Torkel-Magnus switch and wanted to keep it to themselves, they would have encouraged him, first to go to Maravovo, and then to examine the autopsy report. Surely they would have realized he might come up with the truth about the identities. Had they really thought he’d fail to notice the chopped-off toes?
John’s reaction was more defined. His face had darkened, his well-fleshed cheeks had flattened, and his chin had settled almost down to his chest. He was angry and he was hurt. “All of them knew?” he asked. “You’re including Axel in that?”
“Oh, yeah. They were all in on it, every last one of them.”
“Hell.”
“Well, listen to the story before you get too tough on him,” Fukida said. “Here’s the way they say it happened.”
The first part of Dagmar’s deposition was accurate, she had said. Torkel and Magnus had gone to the hay barn after d
inner to put in some work, and there they had been attacked by two gunmen. That was so. But everything after that had been a lie. There had been no telephone call from Torkel pretending to be Magnus. Instead, he’d shown up at the house, dazed and cradling his bloodied hand. He’d explained to his sister that Magnus had been murdered, but he himself had managed to escape into the darkness, although one of the shots they’d fired after him had gone through his hand. He’d hidden on the roof of a nearby shed until well after they’d left, then walked the half-mile of dirt track back home.
“Who shot him?” Gideon asked. “Did he tell her, or was it just ‘them’ again?”
“She says he saw them, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know them. Had no idea who sent them. They just showed up out of nowhere. Two guys, both white, both on the small side, both with revolvers—”
“Revolvers?” John interrupted. “She said ‘revolvers’? Not just ‘pistols’ or ‘guns’?”
Fukida frowned. “She said ‘revolvers,’ but I’m not sure she knows the difference, or that Torkel was quick enough to see what they were carrying in the dark. She probably just meant handguns. Why, what’s the big deal?”
“Forget it,” John said. “Go ahead.” But Gideon caught a little tilt of his head that told him that he knew something they didn’t and was reserving it for later.
“Anyway,” Fukida said, absently getting a couple of thick rubber bands from a cup on his desk and slipping them over his wrist, “Dagmar telephones Inge, and Inge runs right over, and they doctor him up a little and try to tell him that the best thing to do is to go to the police right then and there, but he doesn’t want to hear it. The guy is in shock, and he’s scared to death they’re coming after him, too, and all he wants to do is get the hell out of there. Only where’s he supposed to go?”
“He had no idea who they were or why they were there, and yet he was positive they were coming back for him?” Gideon said. “Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”
“Guy was in shock,” Fukida repeated with a shrug. “That makes you strange.”
John held his counsel, looking more inscrutable by the minute.
Fukida continued: “At that point, they call the others over—Hedwig, and Axel, and the one that lives in Honolulu now—”
“Felix,” Gideon said.
“Felix, right. Felix the Cat. And they hold a war council. Everyone tells Torkel the best thing for him to do is to go straight to the police—”
“So they say now,” John said.
“So they say now,” Fukida agreed.
But nobody could convince him, Fukida continued. They couldn’t shake his certainty that he was next on the list. They finally gave up and, putting their heads together, came up with what would be their plan. Torkel would flee, heading for the tiny landing strip on the privately owned island of Tarabao, where Hedwig’s ex-husband, an osteopath turned beachcomber, now lived, and there he would stay until it was safe to return; they hoped, with luck, that it would be a matter of a few weeks or months. The idea of exchanging identities with Magnus was all Torkel’s. They had argued vociferously against it—
So they say now, Gideon thought.
—but had finally gone reluctantly along when they were unable to sway him. The leaving of the ring, the removal of the toes, and the burning of the hay barn were cover-ups following from that. And they decided that, if it was going to be done at all, it would be best if the responsibility for the deception was shared by everyone. So each niece or nephew had taken on a specific task. Inge and Hedwig had gone back to the hay barn, where Hedwig set the fire and Inge had forced the ring on his finger and removed the offending toes.
“What’d she use?” John asked.
“She used a Swiss garlic-chopper,” Fukida said.
“Come again?”
“A Swiss garlic-chopper. Like a miniature cleaver. With an old branding-iron paperweight as a mallet.”
John glanced at Gideon. “Score one for you, Doc.”
Gideon modestly shrugged it off. “Easy when you know how. I wonder what she did with them—with the toes.”
“I asked her that,” Fukida said. “They had pigs at the time. She said she tossed them in the trough.”
Gideon shuddered. “Tough lady.”
Axel’s job had been to drive the fainting Torkel to the airport, get the plane out of the hangar and gassed up, and get his uncle into it to await the arrival of the pilot. Felix had stayed the night with Dagmar to provide moral support and assistance once the fire and the body were discovered and the police and fire departments got into the act.
As soon as the Grumman had taken off, everyone but Felix had gone back to their homes. The spouses—Malani and Keoni—had been kept in the dark and fed the same story that the police were shortly to hear. Torkel was to call Inge the next day to let them know he was safe, but of course that never happened.
Fukida, now chewing a couple of sticks of spearmint gum, tipped his chair back and clasped his hands behind his neck, signifying that he had come to the end.
“It all fits,” John said half to himself. “It all goddam fits.”
“I don’t quite get it,” Gideon said. “Were they ever going to tell the police what really happened, or did Torkel plan on being Magnus for the rest of his life?”
“At the time, I don’t think they had it all worked out,” Fukida said. “They weren’t exactly doing a lot of long-range planning. They were all scared, not just Torkel.”
“And what about the wills?” John asked sourly. “Don’t tell me it didn’t occur to them that they were whole lot better off if Torkel was supposedly dead, gone, and out of the picture, and Magnus’s will would be the one that counted. They all profited from the switch.”
“I don’t know. They say that didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“And you buy that?”
Fukida stretched the thick rubber bands on his wrist. Gideon braced himself for the snap, but the sergeant just eased them back. “I think I do, yeah. I’d guess it didn’t cross their minds at the time.”
“Well, then, you have more faith in people than I do.”
“Not much. Because I would also guess it damn well did cross their minds later on, especially when they never heard anything from Torkel—and that it had a whole lot to do with why they stuck to their story. Right up until today.”
“Another reason being,” John said, “that it also occurred to them they’d committed all kinds of prosecutable offenses, jail-time offenses.”
“That, too.”
“What’s going to happen with the wills now?” Gideon asked.
“Not my worry. Question for the lawyers.”
“Are you going to reopen the criminal case?”
“Counsel’s checking the various statutes of limitation now. If there’s anything still actionable, you bet we are. I don’t like being jerked around like that.”
“They did come forward on their own,” Gideon pointed out, wondering why he was defending them.
“Yeah,” John said hotly, “but only because they were scared. And there’s something still actionable, all right. There’s no limitation on murder.”
Now rubber thwapped against flesh. “You see these people as accessories after the fact now?”
“Maybe before the fact.”
Fukida eyed him. “Now wait a minute. Are you saying you think they had something to do with the murder itself? I thought these were your buddies.”
John sighed. “Teddy, are you done? Can I tell you what I came here to tell you?”
Fukida crossed his arms, uncrossed them, turned his cap around backward, which made a boyish shock of black hair pop ridiculously out of the opening, and crossed his arms again. “I wish you would, already, instead of sitting there like the goddamn cat that ate the canary.”
“Okay, then, let me read what I was going to read before.”
“About the guy that got shot in the knee,” Fukida said with a sigh. “Sure, what else do I have to
do today?”
“Just shut up and let me read.” He found his place in the book, cleared his throat, and began to read aloud, something he did clumsily.
... on surgical exploration there were found to be two bullets and a cartridge case in the knee joint. All three missiles entered through one entrance wound. The bullets were .32 ACP and .380 ACP caliber and the case was .32 ACP.
He looked up, scowling. “You guys following?”
“No,” said Fukida through his sandwich. Gideon had never seen anyone take such small bites, or work his way around the edges the way he did. The thing looked as if it had been nibbled by a family of rabbits.
“I’m following,” Gideon said. “It’s pretty much the same situation described in the autopsy report.”
“It’s the exact same situation.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. Two bullets through the knee is not the exact same situation as two bullets through the heart.”
John brushed this aside. “I’m talking about the situation with the bullets and the cartridge case. That’s the same.”
“Okay, so?”
“So this.” He went back to the book.
It was hypothesized that a .32 ACP cartridge was inadvertently put in a .380 automatic. The cartridge slipped forward, lodging in the barrel. A .380 ACP cartridge was then chambered. On firing, the .380 bullet struck the .32 ACP primer, discharging the cartridge. The whole complex of two bullets and one case was swept down the barrel, emerged from the muzzle, and entered the victim.
He slapped the book closed, tossed it onto the files on the crowded desk, and loomed over Fukida. “In other words, piggyback bullets!” he yelled, arms spread. “Tandem bullets! You ever hear of those before?”
“No!” Fukida yelled back up at him.
“Me neither,” Gideon said slowly, as John’s point sank in, “but I see where you’re going with this. You’re saying—”
