Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  And what had happened? With only two measly weeks on the job under his belt, he had been confronted with one. It had been a terrible experience, the worst experience he’d ever had. No doubt it had taken years off his life, and it was a marvel that he hadn’t developed ulcers.

  A group of Canadians who had been staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Teotitlán had been hiking in the dry hills near the village. One of them, in falling down the shaft of a long-abandoned silver mine, had discovered the body—the skeleton, really—of a young girl. He had reported it to Sandoval, who had brought in old Dr. Bustamente, the district’s médico legista (or médico forense, as he had taken to calling himself since CSI had started appearing on Mexican television), who had declared that she’d been murdered: a savage series of blows to the head, a finding that was soon confirmed by the state médico legista in Oaxaca.

  So in had come the swaggering policía ministerial, thuggish and intimidating, to take charge, issuing commands, making threats and accusations, frightening old men and women, interrogating respectable people with terrible sexual questions, things people in Teotitlán never even thought of before. The worst of it was that for a whole month the policía ministerial worked on it, terrorizing the whole village, and in the end they never did solve it. And so the poor child’s bones now lay in a box in some grisly police storeroom somewhere in Oaxaca, instead of in a Christian grave in the Teotitlán cemetery, where Sandoval and the elders wanted to inter it.

  And so the mere thought of the possibility of having to deal once more with those arrogant, overbearing bullies in their sinister black uniforms straight out of some old Gestapo movie (and very fitting that was) had his stomach churning now.

  But, happily, it appeared that this was not to be. The reply from the police chief of Santiago Matatlán was waiting for him when he came in the next morning:

  This man, Manuel Garcia, is not a resident of Santiago Matatlán. He appeared here two days ago, unable to give a satisfactory reason for his arrival. He has committed no crime of which I am aware, but his appearance and manner are not wholesome. I sent him on his way, and I suggest you do the same.

  Nothing could have suited Sandoval more. At 8:10 A.M. he stood with Garcia in the parking area between the church and the covered market, having first fed him a jail breakfast of buttered tortillas, re-fried beans, and cocoa. At 8:15 the Oaxaca-bound bus rattled in its predictable fifteen minutes late. Sandoval handed Garcia a fifty-peso note he’d signed out from the treasury—the fare was ten pesos—and told him to keep the change.

  “Thanks.”

  He watched as Garcia mounted the steps into the bus. “Better if you don’t come back here,” he called after him, not unkindly.

  Garcia turned and laughed. “Back here? Not a chance. You won’t see me again, not in this lifetime.”

  “God willing,” Sandoval mouthed to himself, watching with relief as the bus got on its dusty, noisy way.

  TWO

  Six months later. Strait of Juan de Fuca, aboard the ferry Coho

  “FOLKS, if you look out the windows, you’ll see a pod of orcas only a hundred yards off the port side, at about eleven o’clock.”

  At the announcement, most of the starboard passengers arose en masse to make for the windows on the other side. Ordinarily, Julie Oliver would have been among the first, but this time she simply sat there, her eyes glued to the laptop on the table in front of her. She and Gideon were returning from one of their periodic weekend “city fixes”—a concert or opera at the Royal Theatre, a walk in the gardens, a good restaurant or two—in Victoria, British Columbia, closer by forty miles to their home in Port Angeles, Washington, than Seattle was. Like the cyber-enlightened twenty-first-century couple they were, their noses had been buried in their laptops since the MV Coho had left Victoria’s Inner Harbor, the Empress Hotel—that grand, old, ivy-covered dowager—had disappeared behind the headland, and the ferry had slipped into the pale, thready winter fog of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

  “Julie,” Gideon said, “did you hear? There are orcas on the other side.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said instead of answering and then didn’t wait for his reply. “Can you tell me what in the world made me think this Hacienda thing next week was a good idea?”

  “Sure. You said it would be nice to go somewhere warm and sunny for a week. You said it would be a snap, a free vacation; you said there would be good food, interesting surroundings, and exotic ruins. You said it involved next to no work for you and none at all for me.”

  “Did I?” she said grimly, still staring at an e-mail. “It appears I may have misspoken.”

  The “it” they were talking about was the result of a telephone call from Julie’s cousin Annie, who managed the Hacienda Encantada, a small, rustic/luxury dude ranch and resort, mostly patronized by Americans and Canadians, located in the hills above the peaceful little weaver’s village of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. Annie, it seemed, had to go back to Winston-Salem in mid-December to clean up the final details of a messy divorce, and could Julie fill in for her for a week or so? It was the slow time of year, so there really wouldn’t be much to manage. Julie would live right there at the Hacienda—best room in the place—so lodging and food would be taken care of. And Gideon was more than welcome to come along if he wanted to. The food alone, Julie assured him, was worth coming for. They had a wonderful Oaxacan chef that he would love. Dorotea’s cooking was famous. Her recipes had been featured in Sunset and Gourmet.

  It meant that Julie would have to take vacation time off from her supervising park ranger post at Olympic National Park, but December was a slow time of year in the Olympics—not many wayward hikers to rescue—so it had suited her fine. As icing on the cake, the Hacienda would pick up the round-trip airfare—for both of them.

  It hadn’t been hard for Julie to convince Gideon to join her. Not only did it sound terrific, but mid-December would be during his winter break from the University of Washington-Port Angeles, and so Julie had called Annie back the next day to tell her the deal was on.

  It wasn’t as outlandish a proposition as it seemed on the surface. The Hacienda Encantada was owned by a man named Tony Gallagher, Annie’s uncle, a long-time expatriate American, who ran the place pretty much as a family affair, with the managerial staff made up of fellow expatriate Gallaghers, and one or two in-laws. One of the in-laws was Julie’s favorite uncle, Carl Tendler—Annie’s father—who had lived and worked there as head wrangler and stockman for well over thirty years, since its preresort existence as a working ranch. He had first come as a twenty-two-year-old in 1972 for a summer job, had fallen in love with and married Tony Gallagher’s sister in 1975, and had settled down. Annie had come along a few years later and had lived her early life there, attending an American boarding school in Oaxaca City. But in 1997, at nineteen, she’d fallen for a sharper named Billy Nicholson, a flashy, good-looking yoga instructor from North Carolina who was conducting a workshop at the Hacienda, and had followed him back to North Carolina and married him, against her father’s warnings. When they broke up five years later, she returned to the resort, remorseful and contrite, to gratefully take on the job of resident manager.

  As for Julie, she had spent her high school vacations helping out at the Hacienda and had found the life so exotic, so glamorous—to say nothing of having a schoolgirl crush on her handsome, taciturn, Gary-Cooper-like Uncle Carl—that, against the advice of her parents, she had entered a community college to study hotel management with the aim of eventually working full-time at the resort. Although a year in the program and a bit more maturity made her conclude that the hospitality industry might not be her cup of tea, she had at least a basic grounding in the field.

  Thus, taking over for a week—or so she said at the time of the phone call—was a no-brainer. True, she hadn’t been there since she was nineteen, but all she’d have to do was coordinate meals and meal times for the guests, arrange transportation from the airport for them, p
lan recreational outings, handle intake if any new guests came along, and one or two bits of administrivia that might or might not require her input . . . in other words, a piece of cake. There’d be plenty of time to do things with Gideon. She expected that her afternoons and evenings would be virtually free.

  And then had come this new e-mail from Annie. Tony’s brother, Jamie Gallagher, who was their accountant/bookkeeper, would be leaving for Minnesota in a couple of days, a long-awaited opening for arthroscopic knee surgery at the Mayo Clinic having popped up. Would Julie mind keeping an eye on his part of the business too?

  “So now,” she said, “I’ll have to post expenses to the ledger, record income, make sure the peso-dollar conversions balance, pretty much all-around handle the revenue and expense streams, really. I hope the Hacienda survives.”

  “I’ll help out,” Gideon said gamely, although he didn’t see how.

  She responded with a gentle smile. “Thanks, honey, but I don’t see how. You have many wonderful strengths, but keeping expense accounts isn’t one of them.”

  She was putting it nicely. He was hopeless with money. Before Julie came into his life, he had stopped even trying to balance his checkbook. Whatever the bank told him his account contained at the end of the month (and it often came as a great surprise), that’s what he compliantly posted.

  “I could be your enforcer,” he offered. “You know, the strong-arm guy if they don’t want to pay up?”

  “I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” she said with a smile. “Oh, heck, it won’t be that bad. The place is going to be practically empty. Only a few rooms booked. Frankly, I’m more worried about you.”

  “About me? What’s to worry?”

  “Well, if I have less time available, what are you going to do? You can’t spend all your time visiting the archaeological sites.”

  “I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to vegetate. That’s the point.”

  “So you say, but I’ve yet to see you do it. You’re not taking along any work at all?”

  “Nope. My prep for next quarter is done, the paper on Neanderthal locomotor biomechanics has already gone off to Evolutionary Biology, and I have no outstanding forensic cases. Nothing.”

  She closed the laptop’s lid. “Well, I don’t know why I should be worried. Some old skeleton will turn up for you; it always does.”

  “No way, not this time. I’m not bringing any tools with me; no calipers, no nothing. Nobody will even know how to find me, so what could happen?”

  “Something will happen,” she declared. “Come on, let’s see if we can still see the orcas.”

  He got up to go with her. “What could happen?” he repeated in all sincerity.

  THREE

  EVEN at the best of times, Dr. Bustamente, with his bald, bony head, scrawny neck, and narrow, hunched shoulders, bore a remarkable (and frequently remarked-upon) resemblance to a vulture. But never so much as at this moment, thought Flaviano Sandoval. The old buzzard had been leaning over the leathery carcass for twenty minutes, probing, prodding, scrutinizing, his beaky proboscis almost buried in the dried-out cavity that had once held a full complement of internal organs.

  Not that the thing on the table would have held interest for any but the most starving of vultures; not anymore. It had been out in the sun a long—a very long—time, and had been found the day before by old Nacho López while he was out in the hills gathering firewood a couple of kilometers from the village. Findings had been scarce, so with his burro, he had strayed from the usual paths, paths that had been in use for a thousand years and more, since the days of the Old Ones. He had seen the thing from a distance, lying in an arroyo that ran along the base of a line of low cliffs, and he had thought he’d struck gold: a gnarled madrona trunk, he’d thought, something that had washed down from the wooded areas higher up during the last rainy season. Madrona was the best of all firewood, rarely found and hard to chop, but how it burned! Not only that, but this was a big trunk, thick as a man. It would save him an additional four-kilometer, mostly uphill trek to where the trees started, and his legs weren’t what they once were. He hurried to it, hauling along the braying, increasingly stubborn burro. But Nacho’s eyes weren’t what they’d once been either, and he was almost on it before he grasped its real nature. So shocked was he that his eyes had rolled up in his head and he had fallen down on the spot in a dead faint.

  It wasn’t as if the old man had never seen a mummy before. Anyone who spent any time in these parched hills and valleys had come across them: shriveled, sun-blackened mice, rabbits, birds, even the occasional goat that had strayed from its herd and been lost. But a man? A withered, grinning mockery of a man still dressed in a few shreds of human clothing? It was the devil’s work, enough to make anyone swoon.

  When he had come to, he had hurriedly untied the two old canvas feedbags from the burro’s back with shaking hands and had ridden the animal home to tell his wife, who had sent him to tell the priest, who had told the jefe.

  That had been late yesterday afternoon, too late to do anything about it before dark. But this morning, Sandoval, old Nacho, and the burro had gone out into the hills to retrieve the body. They found it where Nacho said it was, in an arroyo at the base of a cliff, not more than a hundred meters from where the little girl’s skeleton had been found earlier (a bad omen, Sandoval thought at the time). Pepe, the junior of Sandoval’s two policemen, had come along to help with the lifting that would be necessary. But in the end, Sandoval had had to get it up onto the burro by himself. Young Pepe, although he offered to assist, looked so pale and faint-hearted that Sandoval hadn’t the heart to ask him. As for Nacho, once he’d pointed the thing out, he had crossed himself and retreated, refusing to come within ten meters of it. Sandoval wasn’t feeling at his most stout-hearted himself, but the remains were so light and so rigid that he had had no trouble getting them onto the animal without assistance.

  He was much relieved that the smell (almost nonexistent) and the feel (like parchment) of the thing had been nowhere as bad as he’d expected. It was terrible to look at, all right, but then it wasn’t necessary for him to look very closely to set it on the burro’s back and quickly cover it with a tarpaulin, during which he did a great deal of squinting and eye-averting. Still, by the time he’d gotten the tarpaulin tied down, he could feel his stomach acting up.

  As soon as he had assured himself that what Nacho had seen the previous day was truly a body, he had used his cell phone to alert old Bustamente, the district médico legista. Bustamente had immediately driven in from Tlacolula and was now waiting impatiently—almost avidly, Sandoval thought unkindly—in the cemetery, at the door of the two-room concrete-block building, one room of which served as municipal tool and equipment storage, and the other as the village mortuary. Once the body was in the windowless mortuary room and on the ancient, enameled-iron embalming table, Bustamente had taken charge of it, a responsibility Sandoval was all too happy to relinquish.

  He had planned to remain there with the doctor, having steeled himself to do what he regarded as his duty. And indeed, he managed to last through the cutting away of the tattered clothing and even to assist in a gingerly fashion. But his resolution began to fade when the boots came off to reveal not the hide-like tissue that covered the rest of the body, but horrible, greasy skeleton feet: eaten-away bones held together by rotting ligaments. Still, Sandoval held his ground, despite the noises coming from his stomach.

  Not for long, however. When the leathery skin proved too tough for Bustamente’s scalpels, the doctor had gone grumbling into the storage room and emerged with a pair of heavy-duty pruning shears. “Ha, these should do the job,” he said, clacking them together and advancing on the corpse. That had been too much for Sandoval, who fled.

  He took the opportunity to walk the few blocks to his office in the municipal building to swallow a couple of spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol and sit quietly with the shades down for twenty minutes to settle his stomach. It didn’t help much
. Beyond even the revolting physical aspects that were bothering him, he just didn’t have a good feeling about this business. Maybe the corpse itself didn’t have a bad smell, but everything about it did.

  He remained in the office as long as he could, long enough to swallow another dose of the Pepto-Bismol. The second one did calm some of the roiling that was going on inside him, but it did little for his frame of mind. He returned with sinking heart and dragging step to the mortuary as Bustamente was just straightening up from the body, from which the entire front wall had been removed, so that it was wide open, like a picture in a medical book. On Bustamente’s face was a look of pinched satisfaction that struck terror into Sandoval’s heart. God help him, he’d known this was going to be trouble.

  “Well?” he said gruffly.

  “This man has been murdered,” Bustamente pronounced, relishing every word and speaking as if he were on the stand, somberly addressing the court as an expert witness. It was something the old fellow couldn’t have had the opportunity to say very often in his long tenure.

  “Murdered,” Sandoval repeated hollowly from the depths of his chest. It was exactly what he’d been praying not to hear. What had he done to deserve this? How could this be happening to him again? It was incredible: only two murders in the last half-century, and both of them during the one-year tenure of Flaviano Sandoval, whose stomach fluttered at the idea of looking at a corpse. It was unbelievable, unfair, not to be borne.

  However, once more he steeled himself to face the matter head-on, as the responsibilities of his position demanded. “What makes you think he was murdered?” He could hardly get the words out.

  Bustamente bridled. “I don”t think, I know.” He crooked a bony finger at the police chief. “Come over here,” he commanded and led him to the sink. “Look at this.” When Sandoval realized he was looking at a man’s chest just sitting there in the sink like a slab of raw-hide, his insides started gurgling again.