Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 07 - Make No Bones

by Make No Bones

  “That’s right. And finding fly larvae at the two or three-day stage of their development, instead of the one-day egg stage, would have given it away. So she—”

  “Do I really want to hear this?” Julie said nervously. She had stopped eating, but she stayed where she was.

  “It’s not that bad. She wrapped him—probably him and the chair both—in plastic before she left, to keep the flies off. When she came back to turn off the air conditioner two days later, she took off the wrap, and the flies got right to work. Result: eggs in their first-day level of development when we found him ten hours later.”

  “Ugh!” Julie said emphatically.

  “I knew there was something funny about that tear-off strip; I just couldn’t figure out what,” John said regretfully. “She must have taken the box with her, but she forgot about the strip. It’d fallen into the crack between the table and the wall, remember? Easy to miss.”

  He downed the rest of the rolled baloney slice and wiped his fingers. “Hey, what about the insecticide smell, what was that all about?”

  “Well, I’m guessing she had to run over to the general store at Camp Sherman to buy the plastic wrap. That’s a good twenty minutes, back and forth, and she knew the flies would probably start laying in that time. So she had to kill that first batch. She probably picked up the spray at the store, too, along with the plastic wrap.”

  “Yeah, good point,” John said. “I can check over there, see if someone remembers her.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean it wasn’t planned ahead of time?” Julie suggested. “If she knew she was going to use it, she’d have had it with her when she went to Harlow’s cottage. And she wouldn’t have needed the insecticide at all.”

  “What, walk in with a box of plastic wrap all ready to seal him up in?” Gideon said. “Right in front of him?”

  “Yes, why not? Normal people don’t jump to the conclusion they’re about to be murdered because somebody comes in carrying a box of plastic wrap.”

  Gideon smiled. “You’re right. Normal people don’t.”

  “Wild stuff,” John said. He drained his ginger ale and crumpled the can. “Well, I guess I ought to go fill Farrell in and see what kind of a case we can make.”

  “Wait a minute, John.” Gideon came back to the table and sat down. “What kind of a case can you make? Look, we’re assuming Callie killed Harlow to keep him from talking about Jasper’s murder, right? But what evidence do we have to connect her to Jasper’s murder? No credible motive or anything else. No more than anyone else had. For that matter, we don’t have any proof it was Callie who actually killed Harlow. Any of the rest of them could have done it the same way.”

  “She pulled a gun an hour ago,” Julie said. “That’s not bad for starters. And the whole thing—the blinds, the plastic wrap, everything—revolved around juggling the time factor. Callie is the only person who benefits from that.”

  Gideon looked at John. “Is that enough, do you think? In a court of law?”

  “In a court of law, who knows? That’s Farrell’s problem, or rather his DA’s, but I think we’re doing okay; the investigation’s just revving up. Oh, and we do have something on motive. For killing Jasper, I mean.”

  Julian Minor’s research skills had paid off again, John told them. Minor had hunted down Marie Tustin, the retired secretary of the anthropology department at Nevada State, who remembered Jasper’s mysterious telephone call very well. Jasper had demanded that Harlow mail him the department’s copy of Callie’s workbook—the record of measurement data and statistics for the dissertation project she’d begun under Jasper and completed under Harlow. Harlow had asked Ms. Tustin to retrieve and mail the copy for him, and Ms. Tustin had done so. She remembered, however, that Callie had been extremely obstructive, even underhanded, in unsuccessfully trying to keep Ms. Tustin from carrying out her commission.

  And why, Minor had asked her, would Callie have behaved that way? At this, Ms. Tustin had emitted a condescending flutter of laughter. She was revealing no secrets in telling him that Harlow Pollard was not the most exacting or interested of dissertation supervisors. Those students lucky enough to draw him tended to go their way without unduly rigorous guidance. And it had been remarked behind the back of many a hand—Ms. Tustin could not say if it was true or false—that Callie Duffer had taken more advantage than most of this circumstance and had been somewhat free in statistical manipulations. Did Ms. Tustin mean that Callie had faked her dissertation, Minor had asked. Ms Tustin had coughed discreetly. Well, as to that, she was hardly in a position to say. She was merely reporting what was common gossip.

  “So what do you make of it, Doc?”

  “Interesting,” Gideon said. “You think Jasper suspected that Callie fudged her results? Maybe went over her workbook and satisfied himself that she had? Confronted her at Whitebark?”

  “Could be. The workbook disappeared, along with his clothes and everything else. Everybody figured they were burned up in the bus crash. But of course he never got on the bus, did he?”

  “You’re saying she killed him for that?” Julie said. “Why? She already had her degree. Jasper couldn’t take it away, could he?”

  “Maybe not,” Gideon said, “but she was just beginning her career. She had a new assistant professorship at Nevada State. Her dissertation was being published as a major monograph. If Jasper went public—and he was the sort of man who would have—it would have ruined her, right at the start. No decent university would touch her.”

  “All right, I can see that, but why would Harlow get involved? He was already established. Being a little careless wouldn’t have cost him his career.”

  “You know,” Gideon said, “my guess is that Harlow had nothing to do with the actual killing, that Callie came to him afterwards and got him to fake the dental records.”

  “Why in the world would he agree to that?”

  “Well, she could easily have cornered him the next morning, after they heard about the bus crash, and told him: ‘Look, I gave him a little push and he hit his head and died. Now help me! I saved your reputation too—you were supposed to be overseeing my dissertation. Anyway, he’s dead, isn’t he? What difference does it make?”’

  “Yeah, I could see it happening like that,” John said. “In fact, it could be she really never did mean to kill Jasper. Maybe she went to see him after the roast to make a last try at keeping him quiet; you know, throw herself on his mercy.”

  “With Jasper?” Gideon said. “Good luck.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean. Maybe she just lost control; shoved him or something. Or maybe he fell; he was pretty drunk, from what everybody says. You said those cracks in his head were from a fall, didn’t you? Could have been unintended.”

  Gideon nodded. “But not the garroting.”

  “No, not the garroting. And not what happened to

  Harlow.” John stood up. “Thanks a million, Doc. I’m

  gonna get over to Bend and see where we go from here.”

  Gideon stood with him. “John, this thing about her motive, the dissertation. It sounds good, but, you know, at this point it’s just—”

  “Unverified supposition.”

  Gideon laughed. “Well, yes. Maybe even unverifiable, what with the workbook gone.”

  John grinned back at him, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Well, as a matter of fact, the great Julian has turned up a little something that might help. A copy of her dissertation in the library stacks—with a 125-page appendix full of statistics. In small print. I was hoping I, uh, might convince some trustworthy, public-spirited anthropologist to, uh, sort of go through it in the next few weeks and see if he could turn up anything. You know, see if the statistics match what she says, or whatever the hell you do.”

  “I hate statistics.”

  “It’d really be helpful. It might make or break the case, Doc.”

  Gideon wilted. “How long is the dissertation?” “Long.”

  “What’s it about?”<
br />
  “Good question.” John took his notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it, and handed it to Gideon. “Here’s the title,”

  It was printed in careful block letters. Cephalometric Sexual Dimorphism in Four Related Populations (n= 572): A Multifactorial Study Using Discriminant Function Analysis.

  Gideon sagged back down into his chair with a moan of self-pity. “Great God-o-mighty.”

  By the time they walked slowly back to their own cottage it had gotten dark. Another rainstorm was building; they could feel it in the heavy, damp air and see occasional pallid flickers of lightning in the northwest, probably up around the stark, lonely lava flows of McKenzie Pass. It was a long way off. The rolling booms of thunder were like echoes, faint and grumbling, and reached their ears long seconds after the lightning had flared.

  They stood on the porch, looking out toward this distant display, Gideon’s arm around Julie, Julie’s head tipped to his shoulder, her hand resting in his back pocket. To their left they could see the shimmer of firelight through the trees and hear night-muffled murmurs of conversation and laughter. A few diehards were still in the cookout area, perhaps unwilling to leave before they were sure that every weird thing that was going to happen, happened.

  “Gideon?”

  “Mm?”

  “Do you really have to stay through tomorrow?”

  He tilted his head to look at her and smiled. “Had enough rest and relaxation already?”

  “I don’t know if I could stand any more. Wouldn’t it be nice to go home tomorrow morning?”

  “Mal.”

  “Is that yes?”

  “Yes.”

  She hugged him. “Let’s get an early start, so we can drive in the morning. How about eight?”

  “How about seven?” Gideon said.

  CHAPTER 22

  By morning, the sky over the Cascades had cleared, but about the time they crossed the Columbia into Washington, the rain started again; not the mountain thunderstorm of the previous night, but the normal, misty, cool, gray-green rain of the coastal lowlands. Even to Gideon it looked good. He’d had enough heat and sun to last him for a while.

  And you didn’t get bluebottle flies in this kind of weather.

  “How would she have gotten a gun on the plane?” Julie said suddenly.

  “Oh, I talked to John just before we left. She probably never did have it on the plane. She’s had a permit for a long time, and she had the gun with her in the car when she drove to the conference in the first place. That’s what she says, and John believes her.”

  “She’s talking to the police, then?”

  “Nope, that’s about all she’d admit to. She’s waiting for her lawyer before she says anything else.”

  “Or maybe for the true-crime writers to come buzzing around. What a book this will make.”

  Gideon laughed. “Probably so. Listen, I have a question for you; two, really. I can’t understand why Callie—or, who knows, maybe it was Harlow—stole those burnt bones out of Miranda’s display. What would be the point?”

  “Obviously, to keep you from finding out they weren’t really Jasper’s.”

  “Julie, there wasn’t a ghost of a chance I’d have figured that out, not just from seeing them in the case. They knew that.”

  “I don’t mean you alone, I mean all of you. Put yourself in Callie’s and Harlow’s place. How would you feel with those telltale bones sitting out there under the beady-eyed gaze of forty professional anthropologists—people like you and Nellie—”

  “Hey, thanks.”

  “Wouldn’t you worry that maybe you’d forgotten something that somebody would see, something you hadn’t even thought about? You wouldn’t want to take that chance.”

  “You know what? You’re right.”

  “Well, you don’t have to sound so amazed. What’s your other question?”

  Gideon pulled over to let a seventy-five-mile-an-hour logging truck scream by, spewing chips and dust. “This one’s harder, I think. Assuming it was Callie who stole those bones, why would she have dumped them in the creek where she did, right alongside the nature trail? She could have gotten rid of them someplace where no one would ever find them.”

  “Why didn’t she crush-and-flush, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh, I think I know the answer to that.”

  He looked at her. “You do?”

  “Sure. It was a kind of insurance policy, just in case anyone was able to trace the theft to her. She picked a place where she could take people later on and say: ‘Don’t you see? The only reason I removed them from the museum was to give him a decent burial—here in the outdoors he loved so well, in this rippling brook among the whispering pines…oh, and look! Here are a few fragments that just happened to catch on this bush, thereby verifying my claim.”

  He nodded his approval. “Could be. I never thought of that.”

  “But you notice that none of the teeth—the only parts that could prove it wasn’t who it was supposed to be—happened to catch on the bush, did they? No, they were nowhere to be found.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “You used to be such a nice, unsuspecting type. When did your mind start working like this?”

  “Well, it didn’t before I met you, that’s for sure.”

  Just before Port Angeles they rounded a broad curve that opened into a stupendous view of the Olympics, looking up the wide, densely treed Elwha River Valley to the vertical green wall of Klahane Ridge in the national park; Julie’s turf.

  “Isn’t it good to be home?” she said with a sigh. “My God, what a week. WAFA will never live it down.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There’s one good thing to be said for it. Aside from wildly increased registration in 1993, I mean.”

  “What would that be?”

  He laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re going to have any problem picking the wildest, weirdest case of the last ten years.”

  «——THE END——»