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, feet 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.”

“John, 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.

Which brought up an almost equally disturbing thought. Whoever had killed him was surely an old friend as well, or at least an old acquaintance. There couldn’t be much doubt that Harlow’s murder was connected with Jasper’s, and the list of suspects in Jasper’s death was a small and circumscribed one.

And getting smaller. There was Callie, there was Leland, there was Les, there was Miranda, there was Nellie. That was it; all the people who had been at Whitebark Lodge when Jasper had been killed, and who were here now. Nobody else met both those all-important criteria. One of them, it would seem, had somehow been involved with Harlow in Jasper’s death and the subsequent cover-up, had realized Harlow was starting to come apart, and had killed him before he gave it all away. That, at least, was the best guess of the moment.

Callie. Leland. Les. Miranda. Nellie.

Some were better bets than others. Miranda, he was glad to think, was among the least probable. If it hadn’t been for her, they’d still all be under the illusion that the garroted man was Chuck Salish. And even if they’d eventually discovered that it wasn’t—which probably wouldn’t have taken long—the outlandish idea that it might be Jasper would never have crossed anyone’s mind. Without Miranda, the skeleton would have remained an unidentifiable John Doe, and that would have been the end of it. No uncomfortable old questions raised about Jasper or anything else.

And Callie would seem to be off the hook too, assuming his guess at Harlow’s time of death was anywhere near correct. Despite what Julie saw or didn’t see during the trail ride, Callie had left for Nevada on Tuesday, a full day before he’d been killed. And she hadn’t returned until this morning, long after it had happened. Or could she have planned it all ahead of time, made an unannounced, unseen return visit on Wednesday, killed Harlow, flown back to Nevada, then returned here on Thursday morning…? No, that was getting too fanciful. People might do such things in books, but he’d never known an actual killer to try it.

That left Les, Leland…and Nellie. Reluctantly, it was Nellie he kept coming back to. Nellie, who had pressed everyone to keep the disastrous roast a secret from the beginning; Nellie, who had headed the forensic team after the accident and signed off on the final report; Nellie, who had been so quick to suggest—to insist—that the skeleton was Salish’s and not Jasper’s; Nellie, who was even now maintaining that Jasper had been killed in the crash; Nellie—

He jerked his head with irritation, angry at himself. Nellie Hobert garroting Albert Jasper? Bringing down that table leg on Harlow’s collapsing skull, not once but three times? No, he could hardly make himself imagine it. It simply wasn’t credible. Not for any of them, really, but especially not for Nellie. True, he’d been a little cranky lately, but who could blame him, with the formidable Frieda hovering protectively around him, straightening his collar for him, stuffing frayed Kleenex down into his pockets when they stuck out, holding her hand out for his keys or coins when he unthinkingly jingled them…

Well, wait a minute. Combing his damp hair in front of the mirror, he paused. What about Frieda? She’d been there for the first meeting too, hadn’t she? According to John, Leland had come to him with a story about her having a thing with Salish. Was it possible that Jasper had found out about it, and she had killed him to keep him from telling Nellie? For a moment he managed to seriously consider it, but even if he could make himself believe it, how did Harlow figure into it? Why had he been killed? Why would he have engineered—as he surely had—the dental-chart fakery that had led to the misidentification of Jasper?

“Hi, there,” Julie said. “Gorgeous, isn’t he?”

Buried in thought, he hadn’t noticed her come into the cottage. She had found him in front of the bedroom mirror, stock-still, staring at himself.

He turned to smile at her. As always when she came in from the outdoors, she had a way of bringing some of it in with her; some indefinable freshness of skin and hair and fragrance. His spirits lifted.

“Did I ever tell you you’re extremely wholesome-looking?” he said.

She laughed. “Just when you get carried away on the wings of passion.” She came up behind him, hugged him gingerly, avoiding the scrapes, and stretched to kiss him on the back of the neck. “Do you feel okay?”

He reached around, drawing her head closer. “I love you.”

“Munn,” she said, nuzzled him a moment longer, gave him a final hug that made him grunt, then flopped into an armchair and kicked off her shoes.

“So,” she said, “how’d it go this afternoon? Anything interesting happen around here?”