CHAPTER 17

 

 

   “And that’s about it,” Gideon said, summing up. They were standing on the footbridge over the pond, their elbows on the railing. After three blistering days, the layer of streaky clouds in the west had risen to veil the late-afternoon sun, and with it had come a moist breeze. The temperature had dropped a few degrees to marginally tolerable. They had walked slowly around the grounds while he told her what had been going on, finally stopping on the bridge while he concluded.

Julie had been quiet through the recital, asking few questions, making few exclamations; merely shaking her head occasionally. They began walking again. At the end of the footbridge was a weathered wooden sign that said, “Limit 3 Per Day.” Three what, Gideon wondered. The pond was all of four inches deep, and he had yet to see anything move in it.

“So the skull was Jasper’s,” Julie said. She was chewing on a grass blade she’d picked up somewhere. “That explains a few things, doesn’t it?”

He looked at her, surprised. All he seemed to have was questions, not explanations. “Not to me, it doesn’t.”

“Well, it explains why those remains were taken out of the case and destroyed. Someone was afraid one of you would somehow spot that they weren’t Jasper’s.”

“Yes, that’s probably true.” The fate of those burned shards of bone had plummeted to a lower priority this afternoon. He’d forgotten all about them.

“And it gives us a reason for Callie to knock you off your horse.”

“It does?”

Now it was Julie who stopped to look at him. “Of course, don’t you see? It’s what I said—or at least it could be. She was trying to keep you from finishing the reconstruction. She was afraid you’d find out it was Jasper. Which you did. Gideon, I’m telling you—”

“Julie, we’ve already been through this. If I didn’t finish it, somebody else would have, so—”

“But they wouldn’t have; that’s what I’m getting at. You explained yourself—very publicly—why there wasn’t any real point in doing a reconstruction on that skull: If it was Salish, there were better ways of proving it; and if it wasn’t, then who was there to show it to? The only reason you were doing it was as a demonstration of the technique.”

“Well, yes—”

“So if you didn’t finish it, if she could put you out of commission just for this one afternoon, that would have been the end of it. It would have gone back to Nellie for analysis and wound up in a box somewhere, or wherever they keep unidentified skulls. There would have been no reason to reconstruct it, and certainly no reason to think it might be Jasper’s.”

They had circled the pond a second time and begun to head back toward their cottage. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

“Well—”

“In fact,” she went on excitedly, “she would have had the same reason for getting rid of Harlow to keep him from telling whose skeleton that was. Both of them could have been involved in Jasper’s murder, and she could have seen that he was starting to crack. After all, you did.”

“You know,” Gideon said, “you’re starting to make a certain amount of sense.”

“Why, thank you. It’s about time.”

“Except…”

She sighed. “I knew it.”

“Except that Callie couldn’t have had anything to do with Harlow’s murder. She was four hundred miles away.” “Oh.” The grass blade was nibbled and discarded. “Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty much, unless I’m way off on the time Harlow was killed.”

“Oh,” she said again. “You don’t suppose she only pretended to go away? Or that she snuck back, or—no, I guess not.”

“I sincerely doubt it. It’d be awfully easy to check.”

Julie shrugged and smiled. “Well, it was a pretty good theory anyway, don’t you think? I mean, except for that little detail?”

“It’s a great theory, Julie.”

At the porch of their cottage she stopped him. “Gideon, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“If that reconstruction you made was such a good one—”

“Which it was, but the skull gets all the credit. The bony landmarks were all in the right places, for a change.” He smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything else from the skull of Albert Evan Jasper.”

“And if all you people are trained professional anthropologists—”

“Which we are, certifiably.”

“Then how come none of you certified experts knew it was Jasper until Miranda revamped everything you did?”

He laughed. “You’ve put your finger on the problem with reconstruction. That’s what bothers people like Nellie so much. No matter how right you get the bony stuff, the rest of it involves a lot of guesswork, and that’s the most critical part.”

“I’m not following you. What’s the most critical part?”

“Look at it this way. Forget about reconstructions. Do you think you’d recognize me on the street if I changed just a few inconsequential, soft-tissue details on my face?”

“What kind of details?”

“Oh…different nose, different mouth, different hair, different eyebrows, different ears, different eyes—”

“But those aren’t inconsequential details. They’re what make you you.”

“Exactly. Well, I got most of them wrong, which is what usually happens—there’s no way to tell from the skull—but Miranda was sharp enough to pick up the similarity in the basic shape of the face. She just altered a few of those details and Albert Jasper jumped right out at us.”

“Hm. Impressive, but I think I’m starting to come over to Nellie’s side.”

Inside the cottage the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Julie said. “You’re being brave about it, but I can see you’re still stiff.” She took the three steps at a leap.

“What a hot dog,” Gideon called after her. But she was right. He was glad to let her make the run for the telephone.

The call was from John. The on-scene processing was done, the body was on its way to the morgue. Dr. Tilton, the deputy medical examiner, had come to his preliminary conclusions. Would Gideon like to join them for a drink in the bar to talk about them?

“Hot enough for you?” Dr. Tilton asked. He pulled the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth, put it in the right corner, twirled it as if to set it in more firmly, and with a noisy sigh rearranged himself more deeply in the wooden lawn chair. “Great God-o-mighty.”

Forensic pathologists, in Gideon’s experience, tended to be lively sorts, and Deschutes County Deputy Medical Examiner Floyd Tilton was no exception. A sweating, balding cabbage of a man with a hopelessly scroungy beard that failed to disguise the absence of discernible chin, he was a nonstop talker with the astonishing ability to gnaw on a toothpick, chew gum, and eat popcorn at the same time. All without missing a word.

They had gotten their drinks in the bar—Scotch and soda for Gideon, beer for John, rum and Coke for Tilton—and taken them outside, to a shaded spot on the edge of the lawn, near a rust-mottled children’s play set that looked as if it hadn’t seen any use for a decade or two.

“I tell you,” Tilton said, “when I heard we had ourselves a deceased in some out-of-the-way cabin in this heat, I expected the worst. You know, everybody gets used to looking at decomposing bodies after a while—”

“Not this guy,” John said, directing a thumb at Gideon. “—but nobody ever gets used to the damned smell. God-o-mighty. So I came armed.”

He lifted a small plastic bag halfway out of the pocket of his damp plaid shirt. Oil of wintergreen, Gideon saw, and a couple of gauze plugs to saturate and insert into the nostrils. A lot of people in the field did that. Others preferred Noxzema, or Vicks Vapo-Rub, or strong cigars. Most, like Gideon, found that nothing really helped.

“As it was,” Tilton continued, reaching into the cardboard bucket of popcorn he’d carried from the bar—did he chew the popcorn and the gum on different sides of his mouth? Tuck one of them in a cheek while he worked on the other?—”the putrefaction process’d hardly gotten underway. Whoo. Thank the Lord for small favors. Well, what can I tell you gentlemen?” He raised his glass to Gideon. “Much obliged.”

“Cause of death?” John asked.

“Blunt-force trauma, it would appear, inflicted by the table leg. The blows were delivered from behind, the victim being seated at the time. Either three or four of them, any one of them sufficient to cause death.”

John nodded. “Can you give us a TOD estimate?”

“Ali, time of death; every policeman’s favorite question. Well, there’s lab work to be done, but I think you’d be on pretty safe ground assuming it happened sometime yesterday.”

“You couldn’t make it any more specific?”

Tilton closed one eye and squinted at John with the other. He fiddled with the toothpick, sliding it in and out between two teeth.

“Maximum, twenty-four hours; minimum, eighteen hours. That’s counting back from four o’clock today.”

“Between 4:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. yesterday,” John said.

It was what Gideon had guessed, but narrowed down to a degree that surprised him. Time-of-death estimation was tricky work, especially when it came to establishing the early part of the range, and most pathologists would have been leery of pinning themselves down to a six-hour span.

“That’s cutting it pretty close, isn’t it?” he asked.

He could see that Tilton was happy to get the question. “Most of the time it would be, yes,” he said spiritedly, “but we’ve got a few things going for us here, and what they add up to is eighteen to twenty-four hours.” He chuckled. “Between us, nineteen to twenty-four, but I hate to sound cocky.”

First of all, Tilton explained, there was the rigor mortis to be considered, or rather the passing of it. A notably unreliable indicator, but it was surely safe enough to conclude that Harlow had been dead a good twelve hours or more, putting the latest possible time of the murder at four that morning. The other extreme was established by the general lack of putrefaction; there had been no bloating yet, no overall discoloration of the abdomen; merely some blue-green marbling of the lower-left quarter. Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean that the death had occurred less than thirty-six hours ago. Given the heat, it was reasonable to make that thirty hours in this case. Would they agree with that?

They agreed.

“So,” Tilton said, “that puts it somewhere between twelve and thirty hours, are you with me? This is supported by the ocular changes—advanced corneal cloudiness, but nothing like opacity yet. Now, let’s see if we can narrow it some more. Let us consider…” He paused.

…carrion insect activity.”

That was another thing about forensic pathologists. To a one, they loved to lecture when they got a willing audience. Possibly that came from the infrequency with which they got hold of willing audiences. Julie, for example, although invited to this conversation, had known enough to beg off and have her predinner glass of wine with some of the others.

“You noticed the arthropodal deposits in the nostrils, the mouth, the wound?” Tilton asked.

Gideon nodded, fighting off a shudder. He was beginning to think he should have gone with Julie.

“Sure,” John said, “all over the place.” He helped himself to a fistful of Tilton’s popcorn.

“Well,” Tilton went on, “I’m sure you observed the stage of development of the deposits—”

“Eggs,” John said knowledgeably. “Not larval stage yet.”

“Right, yes, true. Bluebottle fly, Calliphora vicina. And I think we can take it for granted they were laid about the time he died, because in this kind of weather, with those kinds of nice, juicy wounds, the flies would have found him and started laying in about five minutes. Kapish?”

John and Gideon both nodded.

Tilton nodded back at them. “So what does that tell us, hm?” Bright-eyed, chipper, in his element, he looked at them, twirling the toothpick, his jaw muscles working vigorously. He chewed the gum in the front of his mouth, Gideon noticed, like a hamster, repositioning it with quick, twiddly movements of his lips. Was that his secret? Popcorn on the molars, chewing gum on the incisors?

“It tells us,” he continued, as Gideon had no doubt he would, “that those li’l suckers were laid sometime in the last twenty-four hours because that’s how long the egg stage lasts, and even that’s pushing it. Well, now; we can knock twelve hours off that straight out, because we already know your man was killed more than twelve hours ago, that is, before four this morning—”

“We do?” John said.

“Rigor, rigor,” Tilton said. “It’s already had time to loosen up.”

“Right, I forgot.”

“And, likewise, we can rule out any possibility of those eggs being laid after, oh, mm, nine o’clock last night—” “We can?” said Gideon.

“Sure, because the lights in the cottage were off, and that’s about the time it gets dark, and flies don’t lay eggs in the dark. They don’t do anything in the dark.”

“They don’t?” Gideon said.

Tilton laughed. “You ever hear a fly buzzing around in a dark room?”

“I guess not.”

“I know not,” Tilton said. “So there you have it, my friends. Death occurred no earlier than four yesterday afternoon, no later than nine yesterday evening. Nineteen to twenty-four hours.” He grinned happily at them and mopped his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. “Whoo. God-o-mighty. Ain’t science wonderful?”

“How positive are you about all this?” John asked. One of his more frequently employed questions.

“Let me put it this way. On a scale of one to ten, we’re up at about a forty, okay? I mean, maybe—maybe—I’m off by three or four hours at the far end, but that’s it. And I don’t think I am.”

John tilted the bottle for a thoughtful swig of beer. “Scratch Callie,” he said to Gideon.

“Unless she wasn’t really in Nevada,” Gideon said. He told them about his talk with Julie and raised the possibility of Callie’s trip being faked.

John was more receptive than he’d expected. “It’s possible,” he said reasonably. “She could have fudged it. Julian Minor’s going to give me a hand from up in Seattle. He loves to get into stuff like that. If there’s anything funny about it, he’ll dig it out.”

Gideon agreed. Julian Minor was another special agent who was often teamed with John. A reserved, methodical black man of fifty who spoke like a 1910 secretary’s handbook (“At the present time…” “At a later date…” “In regard to your request…”), he was a whiz at unearthing facts and pinpointing contradictions. And somehow, he did it best from his desk on the seventh floor of the Federal Building in downtown Seattle.

Tilton had followed the conversation restlessly. “Who’s Callie, one of your anthropologists?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, “one of the few who was here for both murders.”

“Nape, uh-uh, forget it. If a forensic anthropologist did this, I’ll eat my hat. My fur-lined hat with earflaps, the one I wear when it snows.”

“What makes you say that?” Gideon asked.

“Well, the method,” he said, as if it were obvious. “I mean, really—simple blunt-force trauma?” His mouth curled contemptuously around the toothpick. “What kind of way is that for a forensic scientist to kill somebody?”

“Too unsubtle?” Gideon asked.

“Too physical, too risky, too much likelihood of getting caught. All that blood. Whoo.” He shook his head. “No, sir, these people are trained, just like you and me. They know things your everyday killer doesn’t.” He leaned forward, jiggling the gum between his front teeth. “Knowing what I know, I could come up with half-a-dozen ways to commit an absolutely perfect murder if I had to. Untraceable. Couldn’t you? And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“I haven’t,” Gideon said truthfully, “but I see what you’re getting at. If I wanted to get away with murder, I certainly wouldn’t bludgeon somebody with an old table leg and then just leave him sitting in his chair, waiting to be found. Along with the table leg.”

“You’re darn tootin’ you wouldn’t. And neither would any of the rest of them.” Tilton twirled his toothpick, brushed popcorn from his paunch, and got to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, I leave you to it. John, I’ll have a report to you by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay, thanks, Dr. Tilton. I’ll be in touch.”

John watched him go. “Doc, you buy this expert-murderer bit?”

“I think he’s got a point.”

“Well, I don’t.” He stood up and yawned, stretching. “Let me tell you, smart people do the goddamn dumbest things all the time.”

“You said a mouthful there,” Gideon said with a smile. “Great God-o-mighty.”