by Aaron Elkins
"Just like this one," he concluded, handing it to Joly. "You were right about Ely's not going down in that plane, Lucien. The plane crash was a sham, all right, but it wasn't Carpenter who pulled it off. He was right here; he never left. That's his left thumb you're holding."
"Mm." Joly gave it barely a glance, and a doubtful one at that, before putting it on the table.
"You don't buy it?" Gideon asked, a little deflated in spite of himself.
Silently, Joly rolled the unlit cigarette back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. "It's not that I doubt you Gideon—not necessarily—but there are others I have to convince, and to take such a leap—such a leap—on the basis of a single small bone…"
"What difference does it make how big it is? Would you be more comfortable with it if it was some kind of skull fracture?"
Joly shrugged.
"The point is, it's almost certainly a rodeo injury, so unless you think there might be any other ex-rodeo cowboys around—missing rodeo cowboys, that is—that just about has to mean it's Ely Carpenter."
"We don't have rodeos in France," a grumpy Joly said. "Not your kind of barbaric rodeos, riding wild bulls and such things. "
"Well, then—" He blinked. "What did you just say?"
Joly looked at him. "I merely said we don't—"
"Of course!" Gideon exclaimed, his mind racing. "Why didn't I—"He reached excitedly for the right ulna. "That does it!"
Joly took the bone from him and turned it uncomprehendingly from one side to the other. "And what's wrong with this one?"
"Nothing; that's the point."
Ordinarily it would have been another golden opportunity for showboating, but Gideon, taking his cue from a low warning rumble somewhere in Joly's chest, explained succinctly what it was that he himself had only just realized. It was Joly's mention of wild bulls that had done it. Gideon had been to a couple of rodeos in Arizona, and he remembered that in bull-riding competition, bareback-riding rules allowed only one hand to come in contact with the rigging that was cinched to the bull. The other had to wave free. That meant that one forearm, and one forearm only, suffered hard, repeated pounding, rodeo after rodeo, against the bull's spine and the cowboy's thighs and pelvis. "And that," he told Joly, "was more than enough to account for the inflammation in the left ulna but not the right.
Joly squinted at him. "And you're positive nothing else could account for it?"
"No, of course I'm not positive—how could I be positive of that?—but I sure can't think of anything else that makes sense under the circumstances, can you?"
"Nothing comes immediately to mind," Joly allowed, apparently on the edge of being persuaded.
"All right, then. That makes two rodeo-related injuries found in a body buried here in rural southwest France—where there aren't any rodeos—approximately three years ago. And if we take into account the fact that Ely Carpenter, former rodeo competitor, disappeared from sight, from this very area, three years ago and his body was never found, what would you say the odds are against its being anybody but him? A thousand to one? A million to one?"
Joly picked up the metacarpal and studied it again, silently shaking his head.
"I hope you'll put that someplace safer than Marielle's back room," Gideon said. "Safer than the St.-Cyprien morgue too."
Joly nodded. "These will go to Périgueux with me this afternoon." He wrapped the metacarpal in a paper napkin, put it carefully in the folder with the rest of the fragments, and rewound the string around the grommets, then continued to sit there, motionless and contemplative. "So then, what happened to the plane?" he murmured at last.
"What do you mean, what happened to it?"
"Where is it?"
"Well—what you said. The pilot probably landed it in some farmer's field in the dark."
"And then what? Where is it now?"
"Who knows? Gotten rid of some way or another. Maybe it really was ditched in the ocean to get rid of it."
"A $150,000 airplane? I think not."
"All right, the black market, then. What difference does it make?"
"Perhaps none. Still…" He sank into another long, heavy silence, emerging to mutter: "Did we have it backwards then? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter, and not the other way around?"
"Maybe, but I don't see why you want to limit it to Bousquet."
"Yes, you're right about that," Joly agreed. "All right, whom would you suggest?"
"Well, remember, this thing happened while feelings about the Tayac hoax were still running pretty high. There was a lot of tension in the air, a lot of anger and recrimination."
With his eyebrows lifted, Joly studied him. "You think he was killed over the hoax, then."
"No, not necessarily over it. I'm just suggesting that there's a link between the two."
"And your basis?"
"Look, murders and hoaxes aren't exactly everyday occurrences, and here they are happening at the same time, in the same little town, involving the same people. The probability of their being two completely separate, completely unrelated incidents seems pretty remote to me. There has to be a connection."
The unlit cigarette that Joly had been playing with finally came apart in his fingers. He made an annoyed clicking sound, tongue against teeth, and scooped the tobacco into an ashtray, automatically taking another Gitane from the pack, but not lighting that one either.
"Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem," he intoned in bishoplike cadence.
Gideon couldn't help laughing. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words, always choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Occam's Razor, the law of parsimony. What made it funny was that he knew exactly where Joly had gotten it—from Gideon himself at the forensic seminar he'd conducted in St. Malo.
"Well, what do I know, Lucien," he said good-naturedly, "I'm just the guy who looks at the bones."
"The bones," Joly repeated, shaking his head slowly back and forth. "Cowboy thumb," he muttered, his tone somewhere between wonder and reproach. "The things you tell me."
Chapter 17
Situated in a pleasant, wooded valley lined by low cliffs, Préhistoparc wasn't nearly as bad as Gideon had feared; neither seedy nor phony-baloney, although there was a definite Disney World feel to it. One paid an admission fee and then walked along a footpath that meandered through the natural forest, where two dozen life-sized, extensively labeled groupings of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men and women going about their lives were artfully placed. The Neanderthals were perhaps a little exaggeratedly brutish-looking and the Cro-Magnons were maybe a tad over-clean and refined for people who lived in muddy rockshelters and wore animal skins, but on the whole the displays were interesting and within the bounds of scientific knowledge.
"So what's your opinion, Gideon?" Julie asked after he had filled her in on the day's bizarre developments while they strolled between the exhibits. "Did we all have it backwards? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter and not the other way around?"
"Maybe, but there are other possibilities." He stepped aside to let a couple of French kids waving rubber "Neanderthal" axes bought in the gift shop romp by hooting Plains Indian war whoops out of North Dakota by way of Warner Brothers.
"All we know for certain," he said, getting back on the path, "is that it's Ely Carpenter, not Bousquet, who's dead. But who killed him—that's anybody's Just because he had problems with Bousquet doesn't mean he didn't have them with somebody else."
"Somebody else at the institute, you mean."
"Well… yes. I didn't want to think so at first, but there's sure something funny going on. It's not just that everybody's playing it so cagey and close to the vest—well, everyone except Émile, who may just have his own axe to grind. There's also the theft of the bones from the morgue in St.-Cyprien, what about that? We assumed it was to keep me from identifying the skeleton as Bousquet's—which might conceivably have implicated Ely—but now we know it wasn't Bousquet's skeleton, it was Ely'
s, so what was that all about?"
"Oh, that," said Julie. "I already explained that."
"You did? When? Where was I?"
"It was right after we got back from the hospital, and you were right there. You brushed it off at the time. I can even give you your exact words: you said no way, impossible, uh-uh, couldn't be, you knew these people, they thought like scientists, and so forth. You went on for quite a while. If I'm not mistaken there was even a 'whereas' and a 'therefore' in there somewhere. It was quite impressive."
"Oh, gosh, did I really do that? I'm sorry, it must have been the concussion. Um, what was it you said again?"
"It wasn't the concussion, it was just you being professorial and smarter-than-thou," she said pleasantly. "You can't help it; I'm used to it. Anyway, what I said was that the bones might not have been Bousquet's at all—and that was exactly what someone didn't want anybody to know."
"I have admit, that has a familiar ring," Gideon said. "It's also starting to make sense, given what we know now." They paused briefly to take in the next scene, a messy but probably fairly accurate rendition of "Dismembering the Reindeer with Stone Implements."
"And," he continued as they moved on, "the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Somebody—one of those five people at the institute—didn't want it known that the body in the cave was Ely's, that he hadn't gone down in the plane, or even left Les Eyzies—that he'd been murdered right there and the plane crash never happened." He took her hand as they walked. "You had it right, Julie; you were way out ahead of Joly and me. We should have paid attention."
"Apology accepted," Julie said, "if that's what that was."
"It was," Gideon said, "abjectly offered."
"You think Carpenter found out who was behind the hoax and threatened to expose him, and that's why he was killed?" She frowned, wrinkling her nose and looking askance at him in a way that never failed to make him laugh. "What, is that too melodramatic?"
"It's melodramatic, all right, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be true. You notice I've learned my lesson. I'm not brushing off your ideas any more—no matter how far-fetched they are."
Julie didn't bother to respond, and they continued companionably along the path, stopping to admire "Pursuing the Woolly Rhinoceros," "Harpoon Fishing During the Magdalenian Era," and "Prehistoric Artists at Work."
"I do have a question, though," Julie said as they walked on. "I understand Lucien's theory of how Carpenter could have gotten away with a fake crash, but this wasn't Carpenter. So who was in the plane? Did it go down, or didn't it go down?"
"Joly thinks the whole thing was a set-up, that the crash was faked just the way he thought before, except, of course, that it wasn't Ely at the controls. With Ely supposedly dead in a plane wreck, nobody was going to get suspicious and start looking into his disappearance in Les Eyzies; the killer was off the hook. As to who was piloting it, that's anybody's guess. Not Ely, that's all we can say for sure."
"And the 'Tell them I'm sorry'—what would have been the point of that?"
"Probably just a little added fillip to give it credibility."
"Pretty ambiguous, though," Julie said. "It could mean so many things."
"Yeah, I imagine the idea was to not overdo it by making everything too cut-and-dried. This way it seems more natural, more real. I'm guessing, you understand."
"Yes, but it makes sense—except don't pilots have to file a log or a flight plan or something? Could someone really get away with pretending to be someone else."
"Apparently yes. According to Joly, you can file your flight plan over the phone, just by calling ahead. If you have all the details on the plane right—tail number, air speed, probable route, fuel, that kind of stuff—no one's going to question who you say you are."
"It must have taken a lot of planning," Julie said.
"True, but Joly thinks that came later; that the murder itself wasn't premeditated—and I think he's probably right."
"Not premeditated? How do you come up with that?"
"Well, apparently he was shot with his own rifle."
"So?"
"People who have murder on their minds generally bring their own weapons; they don't rely on whatever happens to be at hand—and especially not on exotic Korean air rifles."
"I see. Yes, that makes sense."
They had stopped at "A Magdalenian Hunting Scene," with a spear-holding, loincloth-clad man and a tawny, crouching, cougarlike animal staring at each other across the face of a low ridge.
"Who's hunting who?" Julie said. "Whom."
"Hey, you know who that is?" Gideon gestured at the feline. "That's Felis spelaea herself—the cave lynx; that's the animal those four perforated bones at Tayac came from."
"Oh, that's interesting," Julie said. But she didn't quite manage to stifle a yawn; after almost two hours she'd had her fill of Paleolithic daily life.
So had Gideon, if he was going to be honest about it. "Want to go?"
She nodded. "Seeing all this activity's worn me out: killing mammoths, hunting bears, painting caves, picking berries, fighting tigers… do you suppose these people ever had time to just sit around?"
"And do what? Read books? Watch TV?"
"Sure, what's the matter, you never saw The Flintstones?"
"Well, that's a point," Gideon said laughing and throwing an arm around her shoulders. "Come on, it's getting a little chilly. Let's head back; I'm ready for a drink and some dinner."
The short drive back to Les Eyzies took them first through the tiny village of Tursac, clumped at the base of its massive, forbidding Romanesque church, and then along the valley of the Vézère, through a landscape of willows, poplars, and occasional stone houses, rimmed by low, white, mineral-streaked cliffs, and always threaded by the green, slow-flowing river. It was the same route they had taken to get to Préhistoparc only a couple of hours earlier, but then Gideon had been so absorbed in telling her about Carpenter, and Julie so engrossed in listening, they they'd hardly noticed the scenery. Now, with Julie driving (she was both the better driver and the jumpier passenger; they had discovered long ago that they both tended to be happier when she was the one behind the wheel), they took advantage of having largely talked themselves out to take in the sunny, fresh, agreeable countryside.
She had pulled the Peugeot into a parking slot in front of the hotel and turned off the engine before they returned to the subject of murder.
"Gideon, does Lucien think there's a connection between the Tayac hoax and Carpenter's death?"
"No. Or at least he prefers not to consider it yet. He actually quoted the law of parsimony to me. In Latin, yet."
"And what about you?"
"Sure there's a connection," Gideon said as they climbed out of the car, "I don't know what it is, but I'd bet twenty bucks it's there."
"So would I," Julie said with vigor, "unless somebody's decided to repeal Goldstein's Law."
At that they both smiled. Abe Goldstein had been Gideon's professor at the University of Wisconsin, a brilliant, eccentric Russian Jew, and the only person on whom Gideon was whole-heartedly willing to confer the title of mentor. Later, as an old man, he had become a close friend, of Julie's as well as Gideon's, and his loss was still deeply felt.
His Law of Interconnected Monkey Business—so named by Abe himself—was simply that when a lot of unusual or suspicious incidents occurred in the same place, at the same time, to the same people, the odds were that a relationship existed between them. And in Gideon's opinion, a string of events involving an elaborate archaeological hoax, the murder of the director of the archaeological institute that was involved in it, and his burial in one of that same institute's sites qualified as sufficiently unusual, suspicious, and connected to bring Goldstein's Law into play.
In Abe's own words: "In real life—I'm not talking about theory-construction, but real life—interconnected monkey business trumps parsimony. Every time."
But later on, in the wood-beamed hotel dining room, as the
y sat digesting a relatively simple (for France) à la carte dinner of pumpkin soup, medallions of veal, and green salad with warmed goat cheese, Gideon had second thoughts.
"You know," he said over coffee, "I wonder if we've been just a little too quick to invoke Interconnected Monkey Business. I've been thinking: there might be other reasons—other things besides the Old Man of Tayac—for somebody's wanting to kill Ely."
Julie looked up from the log fire into which she'd been contentedly and a little sleepily staring. "Mmm?"
"Did I ever mention to you that when he got the directorship he wasn't the only one in the running?"
"Yes, you said the board was considering Jacques and Audrey too."
He nodded soberly. "That's right."
She came fully awake. "Oh, wait a minute! You're not seriously telling me somebody killed him over the promotion, are you? That's crazy, why? Academic jealousy? Gideon if you people went around murdering each other over that, there wouldn't be a department head left standing in America."
"Well, that's true enough," Gideon said. "All the same I keep thinking about Jacques; I keep coming back to him."
"Jacques Beaupierre," Julie said, laughing. "Now there's a vicious, bloodthirsty killer if I ever saw one."
"I know, but the thing is—"
"Yes, you told me; he couldn't think of the name of the museum the bones came from. Sorry, I don't think that would hold up as evidence of foul play—not with anyone who actually knew anything about him…" She trailed off, peering into his eyes. "Why, you are serious, aren't you?"
"Well… not in the sense of accusing him of murder, no, I suppose not, but as something to think about, or rather for Joly to know about…" He stared down into his demitasse cup, rotating it on its saucer. "Julie, this whole thing is pretty painful to me. I mean, sitting here saying 'Let's see, which one of my old friends, people that I know—and like, for the most part—which one of them would I want to help Joly catch for murder and put away for the next thirty years? But somebody did do it, somebody blew apart Ely Carpenter's heart with that gun of his, and covered his body with dirt in the cave, and faked that crash to cover it—and I think it's going to turn out to be one of them. I wish to hell it wouldn't, but…"
