CHAPTER 22
By morning, the sky over the Cascades had cleared, but about the time they crossed the Columbia into Washington, the rain started again; not the mountain thunderstorm of the previous night, but the normal, misty, cool, gray-green rain of the coastal lowlands. Even to Gideon it looked good. He’d had enough heat and sun to last him for a while.
And you didn’t get bluebottle flies in this kind of weather.
“How would she have gotten a gun on the plane?” Julie said suddenly.
“Oh, I talked to John just before we left. She probably never did have it on the plane. She’s had a permit for a long time, and she had the gun with her in the car when she drove to the conference in the first place. That’s what she says, and John believes her.”
“She’s talking to the police, then?”
“Nope, that’s about all she’d admit to. She’s waiting for her lawyer before she says anything else.”
“Or maybe for the true-crime writers to come buzzing around. What a book this will make.”
Gideon laughed. “Probably so. Listen, I have a question for you; two, really. I can’t understand why Callie—or, who knows, maybe it was Harlow—stole those burnt bones out of Miranda’s display. What would be the point?”
“Obviously, to keep you from finding out they weren’t really Jasper’s.”
“Julie, there wasn’t a ghost of a chance I’d have figured that out, not just from seeing them in the case. They knew that.”
“I don’t mean you alone, I mean all of you. Put yourself in Callie’s and Harlow’s place. How would you feel with those telltale bones sitting out there under the beady-eyed gaze of forty professional anthropologists—people like you and Nellie—”
“Hey, thanks.”
“Wouldn’t you worry that maybe you’d forgotten something that somebody would see, something you hadn’t even thought about? You wouldn’t want to take that chance.”
“You know what? You’re right.”
“Well, you don’t have to sound so amazed. What’s your other question?”
Gideon pulled over to let a seventy-five-mile-an-hour logging truck scream by, spewing chips and dust. “This one’s harder, I think. Assuming it was Callie who stole those bones, why would she have dumped them in the creek where she did, right alongside the nature trail? She could have gotten rid of them someplace where no one would ever find them.”
“Why didn’t she crush-and-flush, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, I think I know the answer to that.”
He looked at her. “You do?”
“Sure. It was a kind of insurance policy, just in case anyone was able to trace the theft to her. She picked a place where she could take people later on and say: ‘Don’t you see? The only reason I removed them from the museum was to give him a decent burial—here in the outdoors he loved so well, in this rippling brook among the whispering pines…oh, and look! Here are a few fragments that just happened to catch on this bush, thereby verifying my claim.”
He nodded his approval. “Could be. I never thought of that.”
“But you notice that none of the teeth—the only parts that could prove it wasn’t who it was supposed to be—happened to catch on the bush, did they? No, they were nowhere to be found.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You used to be such a nice, unsuspecting type. When did your mind start working like this?”
“Well, it didn’t before I met you, that’s for sure.”
Just before Port Angeles they rounded a broad curve that opened into a stupendous view of the Olympics, looking up the wide, densely treed Elwha River Valley to the vertical green wall of Klahane Ridge in the national park; Julie’s turf.
“Isn’t it good to be home?” she said with a sigh. “My God, what a week. WAFA will never live it down.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s one good thing to be said for it. Aside from wildly increased registration in 1993, I mean.”
“What would that be?”
He laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re going to have any problem picking the wildest, weirdest case of the last ten years.”
