Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  She frowned. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  He laughed. “I suppose so, yes. In any case, there’s nothing suspicious about that one. But the second crack, the anterior one, ah, that one was wide open, with margins so worn and eroded—so burned— that they no longer came close to matching each other.”

  Long used to this kind of conversation, Julie was characteristically quick on the uptake. “Meaning that the second crack was exposed to the heat for a longer time, so it must have come first,” she said.

  “Right. Presumably it was there before the fire started.”

  “But how do you know it wasn’t just a question of the way he was lying?”

  “The way he was lying?”

  “Sure. He was lying on the bed, right? Which was where the fire started. Maybe that part of his head—the part that had the eroded crack—was against the mattress, so it took more of the heat for a longer time. Couldn’t that be the reason for the difference?”

  “Well, it could, yes—although the two cracks were awfully close together for a differential rate of burning. But, yeah, you could be right, it’s possible. Fortunately, there was another key. And this one was the clincher.”

  It was the simple fact that the fracture in question ran all the way down the temporal bone to its very bottom and disappeared into the auditory meatus, he explained.

  “I don’t understand,” Julie said.

  “No, of course not. Neither did Kaz, neither did Fausto. This is more new research, something we didn’t know until a few years ago. The thing is, when a skull cracks from the heat of a fire, it’s only the burned part that fractures. The crack won’t extend into undamaged bone. That’s the way it was with the second crack; it ended at the point where the sternocleidomastoideus had covered the bone and prevented it from burning. Just stopped short.”

  “But the other one didn’t stop short,” Julie said, nodding. “When the doctor stripped off the muscle, there it was underneath . . . meaning it had to have been there before the fire started. A traumatic injury of some kind.”

  “Bingo,” Gideon said for the second time in an hour. “Blunt force, from the look of it, although the actual site of the blow was gone.”

  “That’s interesting, but didn’t you say that the doctor said he died of smoke inhalation? Was he wrong, then?”

  “No, I don’t think he was wrong, but neither am I. I’m assuming Ivan was whacked over the head with something—probably lost consciousness; I hope so, anyway—and then the fire was set to cover it up, and Ivan, just about dead already, took in a few whiffs of smoke and that was the end of it. If whoever did it knew the place was full of glues and solvents, which he probably did, he also knew it would go up like a haystack. He figured Ivan’s body would be beyond any useful forensic analysis. And he was damn near right. I was lucky to find anything at all.”

  Julie suddenly shivered. “Ivan’s body,” she echoed. “It’s funny, I forgot for a while there that we were talking about a real person, a nice old man we were chatting with just a couple of nights ago.”

  “I know,” Gideon said with a sigh. “I forget too.”

  They were quiet for a few seconds, watching a gecko skitter across the path and into the bushes, taking in the bird calls— warblers, wrens, blackbirds—breathing in the flowery air. The sights, sounds, and smells of life.

  Gideon looked at his watch. “The groundbreaking for the Europa Point visitor center thing is at two o’clock. Want to come?”

  “You mean they’re still planning to have it? Weren’t they going to present Ivan with another award?”

  “Yes, they’ll do it posthumously. But you know, aside from that, this will be my first chance to see the actual cave site. They haven’t been letting anybody down there since the path to it collapsed when they had that cave-in a few years ago.”

  “When Sheila Chan got killed.”

  “Right. But Pru says it’s not really that hard to get to, and nobody really stops you. She’s going to show me around it. So I’m going. What about you?”

  “Sure, I’d like to come.”

  “Did you pick up the rental car, or will we need to get a taxi? I promised Pru a lift.”

  “No, I have the car. It’s back at the hotel. A bright red Honda. But I could use some sustenance before then,” Julie said. “How about lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  “Any preference?”

  Gideon thought for a moment. “Anything but steak,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  THE farther one goes from the center of Gibraltar town, the less English the landscape becomes. Driving south toward Europa Point in their rented red Honda, Gideon and Julie watched as the buildings— modest, single-story homes mostly—became more and more Spanish, with red tile roofs predominating, and pastel-colored stucco walls replacing stone ones. Even the Rock itself, along the diminishing flank of which Europa Road took them, became rockier, drier, more austere; putting one more in mind of the stony windmill country of Man of La Mancha than of William Blake’s “green and pleasant” England. After a mile and a half or so, the Rock petered out altogether, plunging into the sea at Europa Point, the very tip of the peninsula.

  This was not quite the southernmost point of Europe (Punta de Tarifa, a few miles to the east in Spain, had that honor, being one-tenth of a degree of latitude lower), but it was supposedly the closest point in Europe to the coast of Africa (also by one-tenth of a degree), and it was, as Adrian had volunteered on the plane, the historic point at which General Tarik and his invading Moors had first set foot on the continent thirteen hundred years before.

  This information was provided by one of the line of informational posters set up on easels at the cleared, windswept cliffside site that was to become the Ivan S. Gunderson Visitor Center. Pru, on reading it, tilted her head to gesture behind her and said, “Looks to me like they’ve returned.”

  She was referring to the blindingly white Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim Mosque, the gleaming new dome and slender minaret of which dominated the area, dwarfing the red-and-white lighthouse that had stood for almost two hundred years, serving as a sentinel over the narrow neck of water that separated the tranquil Mediterranean from the roiling Atlantic.

  Other than the lighthouse and the mosque, there wasn’t much on this craggy, blustery plateau that swaddled the tail of the Rock. Down near the water, of course, was the famous rock shelter itself, the Europa Point Cave—still mostly buried under the landslide that had killed Sheila Chan—but up here there was little to see. A parking area, some low, winding stone walls, a few trails, a historical marker, a few nondescript outbuildings, and a lot of desolate, rocky land swathed here and there with scraggly ground cover. A bus had come with a load of Asian tourists who wandered disconsolately around, obviously wondering why this desolate spot was on their tour, and politely trying to look interested as their guide pointed out Africa across the water and chattered away.

  The group of archaeologists and anthropologists that stood at the cliff-top site of the dedication wasn’t much larger—perhaps thirty in all—and certainly no more animated. They had dutifully wandered the line of posters, looking at historical notes, architect’s renderings, and photos and paintings of Gibraltar Boy and his Neanderthal mother. They had solemnly watched as the governor-general turned over a gold-plated shovelful of earth, as the Freedom of the City Award, Gibraltar’s highest honor, was posthumously bestowed on Ivan (accepted in his place by Rowley), and as a bronze plaque with Ivan’s profile in bas-relief was unveiled by the deputy minister of culture, to be installed later in the entrance rotunda of the center.

  And they had stood, shifting from foot to foot, listening to the inevitable speeches. The governor-general made one, the minister of culture made one, Rowley made one, and the president of the historical association made one, all extolling the manifold virtues of Ivan Samuel Gunderson. Adrian made one too, of course, and of course it was the longest of them all. Once he’d delivered the obligatory eulogy, he lapsed i
nto one of his mellifluous, erudite lectures, going on—and on, and on—about ecological conditions at Europa Point in the Pleistocene’s waning years, forgetting, or more likely ignoring, the fact that almost everybody in his audience knew as much about it as he did.

  “Inasmuch as the northern ice sheets had not yet melted, the sea levels would have been far lower at that time. Thus, our cave dwellers would have looked out, not on the water we see today, but on a marshy seaside plain harboring a rich array of game—rabbits, birds, foxes. Fish, shellfish, tortoises, all would have been there within easy reach for the taking. Up here on the coastal plateau there would have been horses and deer, and higher up on the Rock they would have found ibex. Taken all together, our First Family and their clan surely lived what would have passed for a life of ease in—”

  Gideon’s attention wandered. He peered down the face of the cliff trying to pinpoint the location of the rock shelter but couldn’t find it. The particular part of the cliff face they overlooked was not a clean, vertical wall of rock plunging straight down to the sea, in which a cave would have been easy to spot, but a wide, deeply eroded gorge that had been more or less dammed up with mounded earthen detritus that ran all the way down to the water in a sloping incline. Clearly, the cave-in of four years ago had been only the latest, and probably not the last, of the Europa Point land disturbances.

  “Pru, what do you say?” he murmured. “Could you show me around the site a little?”

  “You mean right now, this minute?” she asked. “Please”—she inclined her head toward Adrian, who showed no sign of approaching this close, and cathedraled her fingers in front of her chest—“say yes.”

  “Yes,” Gideon said, smiling. “Adrian’s not going to notice.”

  “That’s for sure. Julie, you want to come too?”

  “What? No, I think I’ll give it a skip. Actually, I find what he’s saying pretty interesting.”

  “That’s because you’re the only one here who hasn’t heard it before. ”

  Corbin, protected from the sun by a floppy, broad-brimmed hat that was tied under his chin, was standing nearby. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Corb, I’m going to show Gideon around the site down there. Wanna come?”

  He turned. “What is there to see? It’s not there anymore.”

  “Well, you know, just give him some idea of where stuff was, that kind of thing. Come on, you were the assistant director, you should be the one to give the tour.”

  Corbin’s lips pursed. “What I was, was the chief deputy director.”

  “Whatever. Come on already, you’ve heard this crap from Adrian a million times.”

  “Adrian is a very great archaeologist,” Corbin said reprovingly. “He’s always worth listening to.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Pru. “Come on, Chief Deputy Director, let’s get a move on.”

  Corbin glanced with something like amused resignation at Gideon—What can you do with a woman like this?—and said, “Very well,” with a put-upon but amicable sigh, and led the way.

  Julie touched Gideon’s arm as he followed. “Be careful,” she whispered. “Watch your step. Pay attention when you’re climbing around. Don’t stargaze.”

  “How can I? No stars.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I promise not to fall off.”

  “Now where have I heard that before?”

  With the path to the cave blocked by debris from the most recent landslide, getting to it required slipping under a “Danger—Do Not Cross” ribbon, clambering over some broken stone walls, and negotiating the rough earthen fill, most of which was covered with a slippery, uneven mat of ground cover. Pru, in jeans and wearing cowboy boots with heels that dug in, managed it easily, but Gideon, in Rock-port joggers, and Corbin, wearing brown oxfords, had to slip-slide their way down to the relatively level ledgelike area that was almost at the bottom. Once there, Gideon could see the cave, which had been invisible from above; a cavern perhaps fifty feet wide and, in the parts that hadn’t been obstructed by the recent landslide, about twenty feet deep.

  “So this is it,” he said with the near-mystical pleasure he always felt at times like this: Here, where I stand right now, on this rocky ledge, on this very spot, Neanderthal creatures—almost but not quite humans—once worked, and played, and went about their lives. On the cave ceiling, toward the rear, he could make out the sooty smudges from their fires, still plainly visible after 24,000 years.

  “What’s left of it,” Corbin said. “Well, let me give you the two-bit tour.” He walked them up and down the ledge, explaining the excavation strategies they’d resorted to (rock shelters were trickier than ordinary digs on open land), what kind of grid system they’d used, where they’d found various materials: a firepot over here, a couple of Mousterian tools over there.

  “Where was the First Family burial?” Gideon asked. Corbin, dyed-in-the-wool archaeologist that he was, was deep in his analysis of the stone tool technology, and it looked as if it might be a while before he got around to the human remains.

  “Unfortunately, you can’t see it anymore,” said Pru. “It was in a crevice about a foot off the floor of the cave, over there, under all that mess.” She pointed at an area to the right, where the overhang had come down altogether, so that it was no longer a rock shelter at all.

  “We lost about half the cave in the landslide,” Corbin said. “There was another fifteen meters of it right there, but that’s where the worst of it hit. Unfortunately, it was where most of the important finds were made. What a shame to see it covered over like that; such an important site.”

  “Well, I gather they’re planning to dig it out again for visitors,” Pru said.

  “Good luck,” Gideon murmured, looking at the mass of earth in front of him. “That’s a lot of dirt.” It was as if one of those monstrous, three-story-tall earth-moving machines had been excavating some vast crater somewhere up above, and had dumped its huge bucket down here time after time, with the express purpose of burying the rock shelter. The enormous pile of soil, now pocked with struggling vegetation, completely plugged up any access to this part of the cave.

  “What are those, do you know?” he asked, pointing at an unlikely row of a half dozen evenly spaced holes dug into the base of the pile. Five were deep but relatively small; about four feet in diameter. The fifth, the last one in the row, was big, a good ten feet in diameter and ten feet deep. All had been made some time ago, their margins no longer sharp-edged. And all had been dug with tools, not naturally formed; the piles of backfill lay all around them.

  Before the question was out of his mouth, he realized what they were. “Is this where they dug Sheila Chan out?”

  Pru responded with a somber nod. “Yes.”

  “Interestingly,” said Corbin, “they do it the way we might do test-trenching. The smaller holes, those were a uniformly spaced series of exploratory probes. The deep one—”

  “Is where they found her,” Gideon said.

  “Yes,” Pru said again. “I was here. Well, not down here, but up above, with some of the others. I stayed the whole dreary, cold, rainy miserable day. You were there most of the time too, weren’t you, Corb?”

  “I was. I felt as if it was my . . . responsibility, as if I owed it to her somehow. I suppose I hoped, in some obscure way, that, by being there, by simply assuming they would find her, that somehow—” He finished with a shrug.

  “You understand, Gideon,” Pru said, “at that point we thought— we hoped—she still might be alive.”

  “Ah,” said Gideon. He had gone up to the largest hole and was fingering its weathered margins. He picked up a chunk of backfill from it and broke it easily apart with his hands. A mixture of claylike earth with a little humus and some gravelly rock fragments mixed in. Pretty ordinary soil, in other words. But something about it had started the gears of his mind turning. Something gnawed at him, just out of reach. . . .

&nbs
p; “But of course, she wasn’t,” Corbin said gravely. “She was buried so very deeply. In fact, they were about to go on to dig the next probe when someone spotted her outstretched fingertips just coming through the dirt, way down in the hole.”

  “Me,” Pru said. “I spotted her.”

  “How deep in the hole?” Gideon asked. Why he wanted to know he wasn’t sure, but there was something . . . something . . .

  “Pretty deep,” Pru said, “and even then it was only her fingers we could see. The rest of her was much deeper, probably eight or ten feet down, so of course there was no chance.”

  Gideon rubbed his palms together to get the dirt off them. A gritty residue remained. “Do you happen to know what the cause of death was?”

  Pru looked strangely at him. “Offhand, I’d say that having had a hundred tons of dirt come down on her might have had something to do with it.”

  “No, I mean the actual cause of death, the immediate cause. Asphyxiation? Brain injury? Crushing chest injuries?”

  “I have no idea. Why is it important?”

  “Just wondering,” he said vaguely.

  It was the best he could come up with.

  BACK at the top, Adrian, the final speaker, had finished up and the ceremony was winding down. Pru went to join Audrey and Buck, who were climbing into Rowley’s van for the ride back. Corbin, who was driving Adrian, waited politely while his mentor accepted compliments and answered questions from a few hangers-on. Julie was waiting for Gideon, sitting on one of the rough stone walls at the edge of the cliffs, looking out over the glittering strait.

  “The mountains that rise before us,” she intoned, “are part of the chain known as er-Rif, geologically speaking a component of the great cordillera that once stretched southward from the Iberian Peninsula into what is now Africa, which was not separated from the European continent by the Strait of Gibraltar until the Tertiary.”

  “Good gosh,” Gideon said, “you keep listening to Adrian and maybe you can start giving me some competition at Trivial Pursuit.”

  “Nobody can give you competition at Trivial Pursuit. Gideon, you got a call from Fausto on the cell phone. The lab said the wires in the lamp cord were definitely filed, not just worn down.”