by Aaron Elkins
“But he finally got his degree?”
“Oh, he got it, but his marriage came apart during the struggle, and I understand Harlow’s always blamed Jasper for that. In his own quiet way, of course. Had two kids, I think, but he never talks about them. Never remarried either, as far as I know.”
John weighed this. “Well, I guess it’s a place to start.”
With Gideon, he stood at the entrance to the lodge building. “This where your round table is?”
“Yes, it started ten minutes ago.”
“Well, don’t let me hold you up. When’s it over?”
“Five o’clock. But the later it gets in the week, the earlier the sessions seem to let out. It’s a natural law. I’d say four-thirty.”
“Good enough. I’ve got some stuff to write up, and Harlow’ll keep till then.”
“I guess so. He’s kept for ten years.”
“Yeah.” John took the last, cold french fry from the bag he’d carried from the car and crumpled it into his mouth. “Boy, am I ever gonna spoil his day.”
With blinds drawn against the sun and air conditioners groaning, the meeting room’s temperature was wonderfully cool, but the atmosphere was heated with hypothesis and conjecture. The startling news about Jasper had quickly spread, and knots of academics had turned their chairs around to face each other, the better to argue over what it might mean.
Gideon made his way to the front, where seven of the nine participants in the odontology round table were seated: Miranda, Les, Leland, Callie, and three others. Gideon, taking the empty chair next to Leland, made eight. The ninth, Harlow, had yet to arrive to take his place as moderator.
“HAAAR-lowww,” Les was singing softly to the ceiling, “where AAARRRE you?”
Leland looked irritably at the wall clock, then at Callie. “Yes, where is he?”
It took a few seconds for Callie to look up from her notes. “What are you asking me for?”
“Well, he came back with you, didn’t he?”
She laid down her notebook and concentrated on getting a cigarette out of its slim metal case. “From where?” she asked absently.
Leland looked at her. “From where?”
They stared at each other with the bafflement of communication gone askew.
“From Nevada,” Leland finally said. “Where else?”
Callie had gotten her cigarette going. She squinted at him through the first acrid explosion of smoke. “Leland, Harlow didn’t go to Nevada with me.”
“Of course he did.’
“Are you telling me?” Her voice was beginning to rise. “I’m telling you, he didn’t go. He didn’t feel well, he didn’t want to fly.” She had taken only two puffs of the cigarette, but she jammed it out angrily against a flat metal ashtray, smoke pouring from her nostrils. “A year’s planning, and he misses the whole damn thing. How is he going to hold up his end of the reciprocal contracting if he doesn’t share ownership ‘u the development process, tell me that.”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Leland had a way of looking at people as if he were examining them through a lorgnette. Callie was briefly subjected to this scrutiny before he spoke again.
“Well, then, where’s he been?”
Callie’s attention had returned to her notes. With a sigh she closed the binder. “Leland,” she said between set teeth, “I already told you—”…
Gideon got up and left the room, crossing the lawn and taking the footbridge over the pond toward Harlow’s cottage. Halfway there he hesitated, changed his mind, and made for John’s cottage instead.
“Harlow hasn’t shown up at the meeting,” he told him. “I think we ought to check his cottage.”
John had come to the door with a legal pad in his hand and his mind obviously elsewhere. “I don’t know, maybe he’s—”
“Nobody’s seen him since Tuesday. Two days.”
“I thought he went to, where was it, Utah, with Callie.” “Nevada. And she says he never went.”
“Well, maybe he—”
Gideon blurted it out. “John, I’ve got a hunch he’s killed himself. I think he may have realized it was all over when we found the burial,”
John eyed him. “What’s this, another ‘feeling’?”
“I guess that’s what it is, yes. I’m telling you, he looked like absolute hell when we found the grave. And he practically started shaking when we talked about bringing in the police. Nobody’s seen him since, and—look, I’m probably making too much out of it, but let’s check it out anyway, all right?”
John looked gravely at him for another moment, tossed the pad onto a sofa, and closed the door behind him. “Let’s go. We’ll get a key from the office first. Just in case we need it.”
Most of the cottages at Whitebark Lodge were on the main lawn, in a cluster that curved around the big pond, but an additional half-dozen trailed away from these along the first few hundred feet of the bridle path; into a clump of woods, then out again into the sun, beside the stream. Harlow’s cottage was the last in this row, all alone on a grassy, creekside bank, forty feet from its nearest neighbor on one side, and with nothing but ponderosa forest on the other.
“He sure got himself an out-of-the-way place,” John said as they approached it.
“That’s why we had our poker game there, remember?” “How can I forget?”
As if by agreement, they stopped before climbing onto the porch. Behind them the creek burbled happily over stones and gravel, and from the woods on the opposite side floated a lovely, fluid trill of bird song, but the cottage itself seemed hunched in its own aura of torpor and decay. Sunlight glinted dustily from dirty windowpanes. Around the knob on the door a flyspecked “Please-do not disturb” sign had been hung.
“Who’d he think was gonna disturb him?” John said. “We’re not getting any room service.”
Gideon pointed to a stack of linen on top of the firewood box. “They changed the towels and things yesterday.”
“That’s right. Except it looks like they didn’t get in here.” He blew out a long breath. “Well, we better have a look.”
They stepped up onto the porch and John thumped on the door. “Harlow! Hey, Harlow!”
The footsteps, the thump, John’s voice all seemed unnaturally loud. There was no answering sound from inside, and none expected. Had Harlow actually answered John’s call, Gideon would have jumped.
John tried again. “Harlow, you in there?”
Gideon went uneasily to the front window beside the door, putting his hand against the dusty pane to shield his eyes from the glare. Near his ear a comatose fly roused itself, buzzed thickly, and fell back into a crack in the casement. Gideon’s view into the room was hampered by a basket of dried flowers at eye level, just on the other side of the window. Whatever color they had originally been, years of exposure to the thin mountain sunlight had bleached them a ghostly white. They looked as if they might crumble to dust at a touch.
He moved his head to try to peer around them. “See anything?” John asked.
“No, I…oh, Christ, yes.”
Wordlessly, he stepped back to allow John room. The FBI agent took a long, sober look, his mouth tight.
“Well, I tell you one thing,” he said. “He sure as hell didn’t commit suicide.”
CHAPTER 16
The armchairs in the cottages were of walnut-stained rattan, with white seat cushions and relatively high, broad backs. In one of these battered but handsome chairs, about fifteen feet from the window and in full sunlight, Harlow Pollard was sprawled, head thrown back and to one side, eyes closed, mouth hanging open.
In the immediate aftermath of death, Gideon had noticed, people tended to look smaller than they had in life; shrunken, imploded, somehow less substantial. “As if someone let the air out of them,” he’d once heard someone say. But in Harlow’s case the opposite was true. The anthropologist’s limbs were outflung with an expansiveness never exhibited when he was alive. His legs were extended, fe
et spread, heels on the pine flooring, one brown shoe half off. One hand lay in his lap, palm up; the other dangled extravagantly over the arm of the chair, the loosely curled fingers almost resting on the floor.
Gideon’s eyes shied instinctively from the bloodied head, but even glimpsed briefly through the unwashed window and the screen of dried flowers, the cause of death was unmistakable. His skull had been bashed in with sickening force. The right-front upper quarter of his head simply wasn’t there. Where it should have been was a bowl-shaped, stomach-turning concavity, almost down to the eyebrow.
“No,” Gideon said tersely, “he didn’t commit suicide.” “Let’s have a look,” John said, turning the key in the lock. “Don’t touch anything, doc. Especially the body.” “Don’t worry,” Gideon said under his breath.
He steeled himself as the door swung open. If Harlow had really been lying there since Tuesday morning—well over fifty hours in ninety-degree temperature—the decomposition process would be well along. They stepped over the threshold.
More flies buzzed, their bright blue bodies shimmering handsomely in the sunlight. Bluebottles, he’d called them when he was a kid, and he’d had fun catching them in his hand and letting them go. Now he knew them as blowflies or flesh flies, and he no longer caught them in his hand. He shuddered as he brushed them away.
“There’s the weapon,” John said matter-of-factly. He pointed at a heavy table leg lying on the floor a few feet from the chair. There was a similar one in Gideon’s cottage, propped against the fireplace to serve as a poker. This one, like his own, was coated with ash at both ends. One end, however, was overlain with ugly smears that left little doubt about what it had last been used for.
“Mm,” Gideon said. He hadn’t yet gotten himself to look directly at the body again, but he drew a tentative breath as they neared the chair. He smelled nothing but a general staleness. That and a faint residue of insecticide, barely perceptible. And no longer doing its job, judging from the flies.
“He hasn’t been dead two days,” Gideon said.
“How do you know that?”
“If this body’d been sitting here two days, you’d know.” “Oh, the smell. Yeah, that’s true.”
John was leaning over the corpse, peering attentively at the ruined head, his wide back blocking Gideon. “Blood’s pretty well dried out, though,” he said. “And there are some maggots here. Doesn’t that mean he’s been dead a while?”
“Eggs, or larval stage?”
“How the hell do I know?” He looked more closely, getting his face nearer to Harlow’s than Gideon would have cared to do. “Gray little guys. They don’t have any legs. Does that tell you something?”
“Hard to say.”
John turned irritably. “Are you gonna come and look, or not?”
Gideon sighed. “Yes, I’m going to come and look.” But he moped over, taking his time about it.
“Jesus,” John said, “you are the most squeamish guy I know. How’d you ever get into this line of work?”
“I was just wondering the same thing. As I recall, you had something to do with it. And those are eggs,” he said, finally looking but not quite focusing—an ability he’d perfected only since getting into this line of work. “They haven’t hatched yet.”
“Which means what, timewise?”
“John, my line is bones, not bugs. Aren’t you going to call in the ME?”
“Yeah, or rather you are. I don’t want to touch the phone in here, so I want you to go over to your place and call Honeyman. But first tell me what you think. About the bugs.”
“Well, I’m not sure how long these things take to hatch either. A day or so, I think. If that’s right, he’s been dead less than twenty-four hours.”
“Uh-huh.” Crouching, John pushed experimentally against the freely hanging arm with a finger. It swayed limply back and forth. “Maybe a lot less?” he suggested knowledgeably. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.”
John, whose many strengths did not include forensics, never gave up trying. Unfortunately, he rarely got things altogether right.
“Urn, not exactly,” Gideon said. “I think it’s already set in and gone.”
“In less than a day? How the hell could—”
“It’s hot, John. In this kind of weather all the degenerative changes are speeded up. Besides, look at his hand.”
He gestured at Harlow’s dangling hand, suffused with the bruiselike purple of well-advanced liver mortis, the slow after-death settling of the blood due to gravity. “That’d take eight or ten hours at least.”
John nodded and straightened up. Hands on his hips, he studied the body. “Boy, that is what you call a massive head wound. Three separate blows. Look at that; you can see the damn dents, one, two, three.”
Gideon stood a couple of feet away, studying the toes of his jogging shoes. “I guess I ought to go call Farrell.” “Right.” John began walking with him toward the door. “So he’s been dead eight hours minimum, twenty-four hours max, is that what you said?”
“About,” Gideon said uneasily. “But go with what the ME says.”
“So he got killed somewhere between yesterday afternoon—Wednesday—and early this morning.”
“I guess.”
“So where was he from Tuesday morning to Wednesday? Nobody saw him all that time.”
“According to Callie, he was sick.”
“Is that right?” John strode into the kitchen, inserted a ballpoint pen into the handle of the refrigerator, and pulled it open. He did the same with the two cabinets. All were empty of food. There were no used plates or silverware in the sink or dish drainer, no wrappers in the lidless kitchen garbage can. There was no sign of anything edible in the cottage.
“So sick he didn’t even come out to eat?” John said. “For over a day?”
Gideon shrugged. “Maybe he came out and nobody saw him.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think we’ve got something funny going on here, Doc. I think if he was that sick he wouldn’t be sitting up in a chair, dressed in his clothes, wearing his shoes.” He gestured with his head toward the open bedroom door. “I think his bed wouldn’t be all made up.”
Gideon nodded. “You’re right. That is odd.” John might misconstrue a forensic indicator here and there, but all the same he never failed to notice some things that got by Gideon.
John’s eye was caught by something else. “Now what the hell is that?”
Gideon followed John’s line of sight. At the back of a small table near the door, caught between the edge of the table’s surface and the wall, was a foot-long strip of cardboard about a third of an inch wide, with scalloped edges and a slight curl to it. One side, the outside of the curl, was plain gray cardboard with some dabs of dried glue on it. The other was bright yellow, with a few printed messages in blue and red: “Clingier, clearer, stronger”…“250 sq. ft. (1 ft. x 83.3 yds.)”…“E-Z Open. Just pull off, starting here.”
They leaned over it, not touching it. “It’s just a tear-off strip from a box of plastic wrap,” Gideon said.
“Yeah,” John said thoughtfully. “Now that’s interesting.” Gideon looked up. What was getting by him now? “What is?”
“Well, for one thing, does Harlow strike you as a guy who’d just tear open a box and toss the strip onto a table? I mean, look around.”
John was right, of course; Harlow wasn’t the kind of man who had much effect on his surroundings. Except for the table leg—and Harlow himself—nothing was messy, nothing was disturbed. Even the living-room wastepaper basket was empty.
“For another thing,” John said, “what would a guy who doesn’t have any food want with a box of plastic wrap?” After a moment he added: “And where’s the box?”
“I don’t know, but what does it matter? For all we know, this has been here for months. Whitebark isn’t the best-maintained place in the world.”
“Mm.”
“J
ohn, does this have some sort of significance I’m not seeing?”
“I don’t know, Doc. It doesn’t fit, that’s all.”
Gideon straightened up, his head swimming. He’d been leaning over too long. He felt suddenly empty, drained of energy and acutely aware of Harlow behind them, of the caved-in skull and the wide-open mouth, and the hideous splatter.
He moved wearily toward the door. “I’d better go call Farrell,” he said.
As soon as he’d given Honeyman the unwelcome news, Gideon did what he’d been wanting to do since the moment he’d stepped into the bloody nightmare of Harlow’s cottage. He got under a hot shower, his second of the day, and scrubbed himself remorselessly down, sparing only his scraped shoulders. This urge to wash was something that asserted itself whenever his work took him away from dry, brown bones and brought him anywhere near the more gruesome bodily remains that too often came along with forensics. Gooies, anthropologists called them among themselves in moments of macabre but sanity-saving levity; gooies, or greasies, or sometimes crispy critters, depending on the particular kind of messiness involved.
Harlow most assuredly fit into the gooey category, but he was far from the worst case Gideon had seen. Yet the need to get himself clean had been unusually strong, a crawling, physical itch. He’d have tried some sandpaper on himself if he’d had it, and he’d never even touched Harlow. He stepped out of the shower stall and toweled himself dry, feeling better. Then, also for the second time, he changed clothes, unwilling to put back on what he’d been wearing. He shivered slightly when the cool, fresh cloth of the shirt touched his skin, and turned the air conditioner down a little.
It hadn’t been just the physical ugliness of the scene that had gotten to him, he thought, although that had been awful enough in its own right. But this time there was more. The butchered corpse was no stranger, but someone he’d eaten with, laughed with, played poker with. True, Harlow had never been one of his favorite people, but a day or two ago he could have truthfully described him as an old friend. Today, of course, things had changed. In less than two hours the bumbling, plodding Harlow had metamorphosed into a cunning and resourceful murderer—and now into a murder victim himself.
