Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  Fausto nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “This cave-in business, though . . . I’m out of my element here. Is it really that simple to trigger something like that? How would you do it, dynamite?”

  “Dynamite, gelignite, something like that. And the cliff was unstable to begin with, from all the rain we had. So I’d say it wouldn’t have been that hard, no.”

  “Can you just buy explosives in Gibraltar, or do you need to get a license or something? What I’m wondering is, could there be a record of who bought any around that time?”

  “Well, yeah, you need a license, but you have to be a construction or demolition company to get one. If I remember right, there are only two companies that have them. I can check that angle out. Problem is, if the guy had any brains, he’d have skipped the license thing and sneaked the stuff in from Spain, or even better, Africa. If I were him, that’s what I would have done. I love my country, but I have to say we’re about the easiest place in the world to smuggle anything into. Or out of. But don’t get me started on that.”

  Gideon leaned back in his chair. “Fill me in on the case, will you, Fausto? When did you know she was missing? What made you check out the cave? Do you know if she had any—”

  “Whoa. I told you, I was just helping out. It wasn’t my case, so I don’t have all the details in my head.”

  “Well, can we talk to the guy whose case it was?”

  “Sure, if you want to go to the Falklands. But we ought to be able to get what information there is right here.” He picked up the telephone. “Conrad, I need the file on Sheila Chan. It’ll be in the dead files. Thanks.”

  He hung up and rotated his chair to face Gideon. “I can give you the general picture while we’re waiting, though.”

  The call to the police had come from Corbin. Sheila had been scheduled to present a major paper at the conference, but she had failed to show up for it. Moreover, no one seemed to have seen her since the morning of the day before. Concerned, Corbin had already checked with the desk at the Eliott Hotel, where she’d been staying, and had learned that her room hadn’t been slept in the previous night and no meals had been charged to her account since breakfast on the morning of the day before.

  The police had taken it seriously, and in conducting their interviews, it hadn’t taken them long to put together two highly pertinent facts: (a) the cave-in at Europa Point had occurred exactly two days earlier, only a few hours after anyone had last seen Sheila, and (b) despite the clearly posted warnings, she had been spending a lot of time at the risky site. Guessing that she might have been caught in the slide, and hoping that she might be alive under the rubble, they had quickly mobilized an emergency rescue squad to dig for her. And after four hours of burrowing holes in the dirt, they had uncovered those shrunken, reaching fingertips.

  “Uh-huh. I don’t suppose there’s going to be an autopsy report in that file?”

  “I’m pretty sure there isn’t. Why would we do a postmortem on something like that? It was all pretty cut and dried, no suspicion of foul play . . . or so we thought.”

  “That’s what I figured. And the body was cremated, so I can forget about actually looking at it.” He sighed.

  The case file Fausto had asked for was brought in and laid on the desk: an unpromisingly thin manila folder with CASE CLOSED stamped on the front. As Fausto opened it, the telephone rang again. With a cluck of irritation he picked it up. “Chief Inspector Soto—” He listened, rolling his eyes. “Again? Can’t you handle it?” A long, melodramatic sigh. “Okay, yeah, I’ll deal with him. Hell, no, I’ll come down there. Once we let him in we’ll never get rid of him.”

  He stood up, unfolded his cuffs and effortlessly slipped in the links (something that Gideon had never gotten the knack of; invariably, it took him half a minute of fumbling) and shrugged into his Armani jacket. “Got one of our best customers out front. This time he’s griping about his neighbor’s budgie driving him nuts. I better talk to him.”

  “Budgie?” said Gideon.

  “Budgerigar. Bird. Parakeet.” He fluttered his fingers in front of his mouth. “Tweet-tweet?”

  Gideon looked at him in surprise. “A complaint about a parakeet? I wouldn’t have thought—”

  “Yeah, I know, not exactly DCI material, but this clown’s sister is married to the chief minister, who happens to be my boss’s boss, so . . .” He spread his hands.

  “Say no more. I understand completely.”

  Fausto slid the file across the desk. “Help yourself. Not much there, though.” He squared his trim, narrow shoulders and stalked out the door, his mutters fading away as he headed down the hall. “I’m gonna kill him. This time I’m gonna . . .”

  Gideon opened the file and fanned out the thin sheaf of papers inside. There was an initial report from the investigating officer, a case summary, a list of Sheila’s outgoing telephone calls from the hotel, a number of uninformative interview accounts (Adrian, Corbin, Pru, and Audrey had all been contacted during the brief missing-person phase, as had the Eliott Hotel staff), and various forms and records. Only one of them held his attention for more than a few seconds.

  ROYAL GIBRALTAR POLICE PROPERTY RECORD FORM LISTING OF PERSONAL EFFECTS

  Case # 2005-44

  Name of deceased: Sheila Laura Chan

  Property recorded on: 24 August 2005

  Property recorded by: Anthony Burns, Sgt., Jesse Figueroa, Clerk

  Found on and in immediate vicinity of deceased:

  Cash:

  GBP £24.77

  US $5.59

  Jewelry:

  “Swiss military” wrist watch, ankle bracelet.

  Clothing:

  Deceased was clothed in shirt, cap, walking shorts, belt, socks, sandals, underwear.

  Other:

  Trowel, sunglasses, ballpoint pen, wallet, comb, purse, credit cards (Visa, MasterCard), other cards (California Driver’s License, Social Security, Berkeley Public Library, Safeway, Pier 1).

  Found in deceased’s lodgings, Room 434, Eliott Hotel:

  Cash:

  None.

  Jewelry:

  None.

  Clothing:

  3 shirts, 2 prs walking shorts, 1 pr jeans, 1 pr slacks, 1 pr walking shoes, 1 pr running shoes, 1 pr bedroom slippers, 4 sets underwear, 3 prs socks, 1 pr pyjamas.

  Other:

  Suitcase, ballpoint pen, gel pen, Hi-Liter pens, nail clippers, scissors, 2 plaster vertebrae, 2 books (The Neanderthal Legacy; Neanderthals & Modern Humans in Late Pleistocene Eurasia), shoulder bag, purse, lipstick, toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, sunscreen, 4 bottled drugs and medicines (aspirin, Ambien, Prozac, multivitamins, Lipitor).

  Is property of evidentiary value?

  No.

  Released to:

  No known relatives or claimants. Property donated to local charities or destroyed, 29 August 2005.

  He was still studying this sheet, intently and protractedly, when Fausto returned, hanging up his jacket and coming to look over Gideon’s shoulder. “Find something interesting?” He slipped out his cuff links as deftly as he’d inserted them, and crisply refolded his shirt sleeves.

  “Uh-huh,” Gideon said thoughtfully. “A couple of things. What were these, do you remember?” He tapped one of the entries with his finger: 2 plaster vertebrae.

  “Oh, yeah. They were models, not real. What about them?”

  “It says at the bottom it was all given away or destroyed. There wouldn’t be any way of tracing what happened to them, would there?”

  Fausto slowly shook his head. “Not if it doesn’t say there. Why, you think they might be important?”

  “Well . . . yes. Considering how light she was traveling—how little else was on that inventory, they must have been important— maybe something to do with the paper she was going to give. You have to admit, they’re funny things to carry around with you and keep in your hotel room.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them in your hotel room.”
>
  “That’s a point,” Gideon admitted with a smile. “But you know, what’s equally interesting is what isn’t there.”

  “What isn’t there?” Fausto said, scowling down at the sheet.

  “Let me ask you, can I assume this inventory is absolutely complete? I mean, would it include every single thing you found on her, or at the hotel?”

  “If she had it, it’s on the list. Why, what isn’t there?”

  “Think about it a minute. She was going to give a presentation, right?”

  “Right, yeah.”

  “A major paper, you said.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So how about just telling me?” Fausto said irritably. “I guess I’m just too dumb to see it on my own.”

  “Where’s the paper?”

  “The paper,” Fausto echoed. “What paper, I don’t—”

  “Fausto, these were professional, highly academic meetings. At a conference like that, people don’t just get up and talk off the tops of their heads, the way I did at the cave. Everybody reads their papers. Aloud.”

  “That must make things really stimulating.”

  “It’s awful, but that’s still the way it’s done. Well, where’s the paper? For that matter, where are her notes? She’d almost certainly have had notes with her. Maybe handouts too. And chances are, she would have brought her laptop with her, full of background material and details, and maybe so she could make a PowerPoint presentation. Where’s any of that?”

  Fausto took the folder from him, went around the desk, and sat down again, studying the inventory form line by line. “I see what you mean. Not there, all right.”

  “Someone took them,” Gideon said flatly.

  “Maybe someone took them. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s one of your mottoes, isn’t it?” He was thumbing restlessly, abstractedly, through the rest of file, not really looking at it.

  “Fausto, look at the facts. One—” He ticked the point off on his thumb. “—Sheila Chan’s all set to give a big paper, but before she can do it she gets killed and all her notes disappear. Two—” This one on his index finger. “—I’m scheduled to give a big speech, and somebody does his best to kill me . . . and comes a lot closer than I like. Three—” The middle finger. “—Gunderson’s scheduled to make some kind of speech at the Europa Point ceremony, but somebody kills him before he can do it and burns his house down to boot. Are you telling me you don’t see a pattern here?”

  “I don’t know . . . yeah, maybe, okay.” Fausto nodded his reluctant agreement, then unexpectedly produced his bark of a laugh. “Hoo boy. Talk about interconnected monkey doodoo. Little did I know that archaeology was such a dangerous profession. Thank Christ these meetings are only once every four or five years. Otherwise we’d be up to our eyeballs in homicides.”

  “You probably are up to your eyeballs in homicides,” Gideon said a little grumpily. “You just don’t know it because you don’t have an obliging expert like me around to help you out.”

  “Yeah, that must be it,” Fausto said, thinking. The file was still open on his desk. He was drumming his fingers on the topmost form. “Look, I think the place to start with Chan—” He snapped his fingers with a sharp clack that Gideon, an ineffective fingersnapper, envied. “Hey, I just remembered—I think I might know— come on.”

  In a flash he was out of his chair, through the door, and hustling down the corridor with his quick, short, decisive steps, heels clicking on the linoleum tiles. Gideon followed, his longer legs allowing him to keep up with a more moderate stride. They went to the booking room, where Gideon had been fingerprinted. The woman who had rolled his prints was sitting at a metal desk, still humming while she used a metal ruler to pencil lines onto a flow chart. As they came in, she stopped humming and sat up straight. “Can I help you, Chief Inspector?”

  Fausto’s eyes were hunting around the room, searching for something, not finding it. “Rosie,” he said after a moment, “you used to have a kind of little vase in here. You made it out of a couple of plaster vertebrae that were part of the property inventory from the cave-in out at Europa Point. I don’t see them.”

  Rosie swallowed. “Inspector Pullen said it was okay to take them, sir,” she said nervously. “I did ask. I mean, I know that’s not according to the books, but they were just going into the dustbin anyway, and I thought they’d be cute for, you know, a single rose or something, so I just glued them together—”

  “I know, I know,” Fausto said in what was as close as he ever came to a soothing tone. “There’s no problem. I just wanted to know where it is. Professor Oliver here wants to have a look at them.”

  “It’s not here anymore.”

  Damn, Gideon said to himself.

  “It’s at home.”

  Ah, Gideon said to himself.

  “My ten-year-old—she’s interested in bones. She wants to be a medical illustrator—she has it on her desk now. She uses it to hold her favorite pen.” She was half out of her chair. “Do you need it right now, sir? Shall I run home and collect it?”

  Fausto looked at Gideon. “Gideon?”

  “No, not this minute,” Gideon said. “If you bring it in with you tomorrow, I’ll come by at some point and have a look at it.”

  “So how come they decompose?” Fausto asked as they walked back to his office.

  “What?”

  “How come they decompose?” Fausto asked again. “Bodies that get buried where the flies can’t lay their eggs on them? Why don’t they just shrivel up or something? What, the worms get into them? Is that what does it?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. That’s a bum rap that worms have had to live with for centuries. When people first saw maggots wriggling away on corpses they thought they were worms, and it seems to have stuck. But worms don’t eat dead bodies.”

  “But bodies still decompose, no matter how deep they’re buried. What makes that happen? What’s the cause, technically? Why don’t they just turn into mummies? Is it the moisture, or . . . ?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, you already have all the enzymes and bacteria needed to do the job crawling around inside you—well, enzymes don’t crawl—right now. When you’re alive they help you digest and assimilate foreign substances—food, primarily. When you’re dead they help digest and assimilate you.”

  “Sort of like recycling.”

  “Exactly like recycling,” Gideon agreed after a moment’s thought.

  NINETEEN

  “YOU know,” Gideon said, with his feet up on the railing of the balcony, his hands comfortably clasped at his belt buckle, and a tumbler of Scotch and water on the table beside him, “this interconnected monkey business thing—well, the term is meant to be funny, of course, but it’s not as obvious or as simple—as simplistic— as it sounds. When Abe would get to talking about it, he very quickly got over my head in mathematics, but basically, what he was describing, as much as I could understand of it, was an application of set theory. The sets of people involved in the events, or the events themselves, or the places they happen, or the circumstances they happen in, are all subsets—A, B, C, and so on, of a larger set of people, or events, or whatever: S. And what you’re searching for when you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on is whatever it is that the particular subsets involved have in common; that is, the intersection that they all share; that is, the set of all things that are members of A, B, and C. At the same time, of course, you want to exclude intersections that ...”

  He frowned, paused, and sighed. “Julie, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I got lost about two sentences ago. Is this making any sense at all?”

  “Well, let’s just say I still understood it pretty well ten minutes ago, but the more you talk, the fuzzier it gets.”

  “Ah, well, math never was my strong point, was it?”

  “Don’t feel bad about it. It makes you more human. If you were perfect, you’d really be hell to live with.” />
  He raised a lazy eyebrow in her direction. “I don’t know that I appreciate the emphasis on that really.”

  It was a little before dusk. They were on the balcony of their room at the Rock, looking down on the green palm fronds and winding paths of the Alameda Gardens just below, and farther out, across the Bay of Gibraltar, at the hazy, amber-tinted coast of Spain. Another glorious sunset over Algeciras was on the way. As before, the preprandial miniature twin decanters of sherry and Scotch had been waiting for them when they’d come in, golden and beckoning in the slanting, late afternoon light, along with a pair of stemmed glasses and another of small highball glasses. Although they’d passed on them the previous two days, today they flung open the French doors and took them out onto the balcony to unwind before dinner.

  There was plenty of unwinding to be done, what with the latest twists and turns in the matter of Sheila Chan’s demise. They had split the contents of the decanters, each starting with a small glass of sherry and then moving on to the Scotch, and Gideon was halfway through his Scotch by the time he’d finished telling Julie what had developed.

  “Anyway,” she said now, “if what we’re looking for is what all these bizarre things have in common—Sheila’s murder, Ivan’s murder, the attacks on you—it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The Europa Point dig—Gibraltar Boy, the First Family, and all that.”

  “Yes, that’s true enough, but everything that’s happening here right now has that in common. Every archaeologist in town—and there must be a hundred of them—is here for the meetings, and the meetings are in commemoration of Europa Point. So it doesn’t tell us anything. See, you want to exclude those intersections that every subset shares simply by virtue of being part of the larger set, S—”

  She gave him a warning look.

  “What we’re looking for,” he said, “is something that applies more specifically to Sheila, Ivan, and me.”

  She sipped her Scotch and gazed across the bay. “I can’t think what that would be.”

  “I can. I was talking to Fausto about it. We were all just about to make speeches, presentations.”