“Much,” Julie agreed. “So, did he say what made him kill Joey?”
“Yes, it’s all down on paper now, signed and sealed.”
“Had he known about Edgar’s murder, was that it?”
“Yes,” Gideon said, “and no.”
He returned to his lunch and continued. Joey had been staying, Julie would remember, in the Marianus Napper Room, which was next to Rudy’s room, the John Biddle Room, which was at the end of the hall. Late on the last night of the first consortium, after the squabble with Pete Williams at Methodist Hall and the nightly poker game, according to Rudy, a still-seething Villarreal had banged on Rudy’s door, sick of being needled by him all week, and determined to get down to the source of it. Or perhaps he had just needed to vent some more after the Methodist Hall incident, or to argue some more. Whichever it was, their voices were soon raised and Joey, trying to sleep in the next room, had thumped on the wall and told them to keep it down.
They had, but it had done nothing to stem their feelings. Villarreal, of course, couldn’t have had any idea of the real reason for Rudy’s hatred, or of its passionate depth, or of the danger in which he had placed himself. After it had gone on for twenty minutes or so, and Villarreal had talked one time too many about how people attacked by animals in the wild had nothing but their own stupidity to blame, Rudy had had more than he could stand. He—
“In other words, he’s saying that he didn’t plan to kill him? It just sort of came on him?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I do. At that point he excused himself, went down to the kitchen for a knife—”
“‘Excused himself’? Strolled downstairs for a knife? How believable is that?”
“Oh, I can imagine Rudy doing it. He’s pretty good at not showing his feelings when he doesn’t want to. Besides, it doesn’t make sense for him to make up something like that. His barrister never would have let him say it if it wasn’t true, because it shows premeditation. He may not have planned to kill him in the first place, but if you walk down two flights with the intention of getting a weapon and then walk back up and use it, you can hardly claim you hadn’t thought about what you were doing.”
“True.” She finished her first piece of fish and went on to the second. “Go on.”
“Well, he came back upstairs with the biggest kitchen knife he could find, slit Villarreal’s throat after first telling him who he was and why he was doing it, and then couldn’t stop stabbing him, he says.”
Julie looked at her last half dozen fries and decided against them. “I don’t know why, but I don’t quite have the appetite I thought I did.”
“Same here. What do you say we take a walk? The sun’s getting hot anyway.”
Between the back lawn and the Park Service maintenance yard a few hundred yards away was a shade-dappled path that curved through a bit of Pacific Northwest primeval landscape: fragrant wild blackberries and huckleberries in profusion, ferns, salal, vine maple, Oregon grape, and high above everything the cool, green canopy of the firs.
“Ah, this is better,” Gideon said, as they entered. “Smells wonderful in here. So, do you want to hear more?”
“Yes. But no need for additional graphic detail, if that’s all right.”
“That suits me. Okay, once it was over, he goes back downstairs to the toolshed out back for a hacksaw and a supply of garbage bags, and he spends the rest of the night . . . well, doing what had to be done. Then he takes Kozlov’s car—the key was on a rack in the office—up to Halangy Point and a couple of other places—he doesn’t remember them all—and buries everything in five or six locations. That leaves him time to get back, clean up the room and himself, and catch the ferry with you and Liz in the morning.”
She shook her head. “I’m trying to remember if anything seemed different about him in the morning. I really can’t say I noticed anything.”
“No, of course not. If people acted different after they killed someone, the cops would have an easy job of it.”
“What about Joey, though? Wasn’t Rudy worried about his having heard?”
“No, not then, because what had he heard? The murder had been virtually silent, according to Rudy, so all Joey knew was that they’d argued, which was nothing new.”
“And no one knew Edgar was dead at the time,” Julie said, “and when they finally did find out, they thought he’d disappeared from his camp in Alaska.”
“Right. But once enough of the skeleton turned up for me to come up with the fruit-picker connection, Rudy knew that was the end of that. It was only a question of time until the police were all over Star Castle, interrogating everybody in sight. ‘When was the last time you saw Villarreal? ’ ‘Where were you on the night of . . . ?’ And so on.”
She nodded slowly. “And Joey would have been sure to say he heard him arguing with Rudy late that last night, and Rudy couldn’t risk their starting to look into that.”
“That’s it.”
A waist-high, moss-covered, fallen trunk blocked their way and they walked along it until it was narrow enough to clamber over and return to the path.
“But how could he be sure that Joey was the only one who heard?” Julie asked. “What about whoever was on the other side of his . . . oh, that’s right, the John Biddle Room. It was at the end of the hall. No other neighbors. And nobody across the way.”
“Right. Only Joey, poor unlucky Joey. He had no idea Rudy’d murdered Villarreal. He didn’t know there’d been a murder at all. He died not knowing what he was being killed for.”
They walked on for a while without talking, until Julie said: “Gideon, this all must be pretty awful for you, what with Rudy being such an old friend.”
“Well, it was at first, I guess, but now I’ve separated them into two different Rudy’s. The one I knew, my old pal Rudy—before Fran died, before Mary was killed—wasn’t a murderer. But he doesn’t exist anymore.”
“But in a way,” she offered after a few more steps, “it’s not hard to understand how he felt, how terrible it must have been for him to listen to Edgar going on and on the way he did, so smug, so self-righteous. I’m not excusing murder, of course, but, well, in a way, he brought it on himself, didn’t he?”
“Maybe,” Gideon said softly. “But Joey didn’t.”
“No.” She looked at her watch. “Time for me to get back.”
“Me, too, I guess.”
All the same, they walked another minute or two until they came to the abrupt end of the path, the chain-link, barbed wire-topped fence that surrounded the maintenance yard and the equipment sheds.
“I do have a question, though,” Julie said as they turned back.
“Mm?”
“If Rudy was smart enough to know you’d figure out the bones were Edgar’s, why did he kill Joey the way he did? Why wasn’t he smart enough to know you’d be able to tell from his skull that it wasn’t just a fall, that he’d been murdered?”
Gideon considered the question, then responded with a shrug and the faintest of smiles. “I guess he should have gotten that Ph.D.”
Acknowledgments
As usual with my books, there is plenty of blame to go around, primarily to my old friends, the eminent scientists of the Mountain, Desert, and Coastal Forensic Anthropologists Association, who continue to permit me to attend their annual “bone bashes,” even though they know full well that I’m there with theft expressly in mind. For Unnatural Selection, I owe thanks in particular to Walt Birkby and Stan Rhine for their patient management of my continuing education in forensic anthropology; to Krista Latham for answering my questions on DNA and making the technology almost comprehensible; and to Bruce Parks for keeping me honest on autopsy procedure.
It was a landmark paper by Curtis Wienker of the University of South Florida, Tampa that served as the kernel from which Unnatural Selection grew, and Dr. Wienker then provided counsel to make sure I got it straight. Adela Morris of the Institute for Canine Forensi
cs and her dog Rhea were my enthusiastic guides on all matters canine. My fellow writer, fellow anthropologist, and friend Brian Fagan kindly read the manuscript to help me eliminate the more egregious awkwardisms in my rendition of Britspeak.
In England, Sergeant Alan Mobbs and Sergeant Tom Holmes, both of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, were my consultants on local law enforcement, and Amanda Martin of the Isles of Scilly Museum was also generous with her help.
The Star Castle that is owned in the book by Vasily Kozlov is really there, but Kozlov isn’t. The sixteenth-century fortified structure continues its existence nowadays as St. Mary’s premier restaurant-hotel, and I wish to thank Robert Francis, its managing director, for his hospitality and his ready agreement to permit murder on the premises—with the provision that I didn’t kill anybody via restaurant-induced food poisoning.
Other Titles by Aaron Elkins
Gideon Oliver Novels
LITTLE TINY TEETH*
UNNATURAL SELECTION*
WHERE THERE’S A WILL*
GOOD BLOOD*
SKELETON DANCE
TWENTY BLUE DEVILS
DEAD MEN’S HEARTS
MAKE NO BONES
ICY CLUTCHES
CURSES!
OLD BONES*
MURDER IN THE QUEEN’S ARMES*
THE DARK PLACE*
FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR*
Chris Norgren Novels
OLD SCORES
A GLANCING LIGHT
DECEPTIVE CLARITY
Lee Ofsted Novels (with Charlotte Elkins)
ON THE FRINGE
WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDIES GONE?
NASTY BREAKS
ROTTEN LIES
A WICKED SLICE
Thrillers
TURNCOAT
LOOT
Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 13 - Unnatural Selection Page 25
