Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  This naturally prompted interest all around, and she was prevailed upon—it didn’t take much prevailing—to continue. “Do you remember the last time we were all in this pub?” she asked. “Well, everybody but you and Gideon, Julie.” She waited, slowly rotating her wineglass on the scarred table, but no one came up with an answer.

  “It was the final night, after Edgar gave that talk at Methodist Hall, remember? The one where he got into it with that Pete Williams guy, that writer who hung around all week.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Cheryl said, her first contribution. “Edgar was livid. Deservedly so, if you ask me. That reporter was vicious.”

  Her attention seemed to have returned to the conversation, but she was paying no attention whatsoever to Gideon. She wasn’t even working at not paying him attention. It was simply as if he weren’t there. She’s written me off as a dud, he thought, not certain whether he ought to be relieved or offended. A moment’s consideration told him he was relieved. I am getting old, he thought.

  “That reporter treated him in exactly the way he deserved,” Rudy said to Cheryl. “Edgar had it all coming to him, and then some.” He muttered on a little more, but all Gideon was able to hear was “… arrogant, condescending…”

  Rudy and Villarreal had not gotten along, Gideon remembered Julie telling him. “If you think Donald and Joey get under each others’ skin, you should have seen Edgar and Rudy,” she’d said. Apparently their views on the American wilderness—“open it up to everyone and everything,” according to Rudy, and “shut it down to everyone and everything,” according to Villarreal—were too much at odds for them to stomach one another, and potshots and barbs had flown between them all week long, with Rudy doing most of the needling. But Villarreal had been possessed of a ready, caustic wit, Julie had said, and, generally speaking, Rudy had gotten the worst of it.

  There had been a time, Gideon thought sadly, when Rudy had had a sharp and ready wit, too.

  “Whether he had it coming to him or not is not the point,” Liz said now, gathering steam. “The point is that he said he wanted to kill him, do you remember? He said it right in front of us. Twice, if I remember right. Well, who’s to say…”

  “Liz!” Julie exclaimed. “You’re not serious. You’re suggesting Edgar actually did kill him? I mean… murder}”

  “That’s just what I’m suggesting.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Rudy said, but it was hard to tell if he was serious.

  There followed a general chorus of doubt and incredulity. Gideon, silent, reflected that, as cheerful and kindly as Liz was, getting her back up was obviously not a good idea, even if you went out and got eaten by a bear afterward.

  And she stuck to her guns. “I am serious. Hear me out now. Has anybody heard anything about Williams since that night?” She stared challengingly at each of them in turn, and everyone admitted that they hadn’t.

  “Don’t look at me,” Gideon said. “I never heard of him at all until the day before yesterday.”

  “All right,” Liz said. “Nobody’s heard of him since then. Has anyone heard anything about the book he was working on? Has it come out? We all keep up with the environmental literature, we’d certainly have read about it. A book like that, it would have made a splash.”

  No, they allowed, they hadn’t heard news of the book. Still…

  “Cheryl, let me have your BlackBerry,” Donald said to his wife.

  “What for?”

  “Just let me have it.”

  “Jesus,” she sighed, digging it out of her purse. This was definitely not a marriage made in heaven, Gideon thought.

  Donald took the device. “It should be easy enough to settle. We’ll Google him and see if he turns up.”

  “Google a name like ‘Pete Williams’?” Rudy said. “You’ll get a million hits.”

  Donald frowned. “That’s a point. Does anybody know where he’s from?”

  “London,” said Liz. “But that’s not much help either. Does anybody remember the name of the book? No? Well, does anybody know the names of any of his other books?”

  “There weren’t any other books. This was his first one,” Victor said.

  “You mean he wasn’t a professional writer?” Donald asked. “I assumed—”

  “He published a few magazine articles,” Victor said, putting down his ginger beer, “but he was… What was he?… An auto mechanic.”

  “An auto mechanic?” Donald said, deeply aggrieved. “I gave him hours of my time!”

  “Yes, he worked in a garage,” said Victor, “but he was a student at one of the colleges. He’d been working on that book of his in his spare time for years. We got to talking about it when he interviewed me. He asked me for advice on publishing, and I gave him some suggestions for—”

  “Movers and Shakers of the Earth,”“ Cheryl said. ”That was the name of it.“

  “That’s it,” Donald agreed. Using his pinky he punched it in on the tiny keyboard and waited. “Yes, it’s—no, it’s nothing. It was a chapter in a book by Alistair Cooke, that’s all. But it’s not a book title on its own.” His serious expression as he looked up at the others suggested he’d discovered something of significance. “It never came out, and it’s not scheduled to come out in the foreseeable future.”

  “Is that right}” Victor said, eyes wide, head swiveling from person to person.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Julie said. “A lot of books never come out. That doesn’t mean the author’s dead. And a lot of books take more than two years to write.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Gideon muttered.

  Liz turned to him. “Look, you said the bone was from an adult male. Why couldn’t it be him?”

  “I didn’t say it couldn’t be. I don’t have any real reason to think it isn’t. But I also don’t have any real reason to think it is. You have to admit it’s an awfully long shot, based on pretty flimsy evidence—or rather nonevidence.”

  “You don’t have any other hypotheses to go on,” Liz said.

  “That’s true enough.”

  “You could always mention it to Sergeant Mike tomorrow,” Julie suggested. “He’ll certainly know how to look into it if he wants to.”

  “Very good, I’ll do that,” Gideon said, searching for another subject to move on to. “So how’d the poker game go after I left last night?”

  “Awful,” said Donald at the same moment as Victor said “Great,” which effectively answered Gideon’s question.

  “Will you be joining us tonight?” Donald asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Gideon said with a grin. “Can’t afford it.”

  TEN

  THE strands of fog continued to thicken and spread through the night, so that in the morning several of the interisland commercial boat operators called off nonessential operations for the day, and there was some doubt about whether it would be possible to get Hicks and his dog from St. Agnes to St. Mary’s. But Ron, the pilot of the police launch/water ambulance was up to the task, and shortly after 10:00 a.m., Truscott Hicks and Tess the Border collie were deposited on the Hugh Town quay, where they were met by Gideon, Clapper, and Robb. At Gideon’s request, Robb had brought a couple of trowels for digging (although Gideon was privately counting on the sand’s being soft enough for bare-handed retrieval); a toothbrush and paintbrush for cleaning; some large paper bags and marking pens; and, from Islands Home Hardware, a few doors down from the police station, a three-foot length of large-gauge wire screening and a five-gallon bucket. He would use the last two items to sift the sand around and under any finds that were made, hunting for anything that might turn up.

  In addition, Robb, on his own, had brought a pad of graph paper, a folding ruler and tape measure, the office digital camera, several pairs of disposable gloves, and a sleeve of plastic envelopes for incidental items that might be found.

  “It’s the boy’s first likely homicide,” Clapper told Gideon, sounding like an amused parent, “and he’s determined to do
it up right.” His next thought seemed to catch him by surprise. “Well, so am I, if it comes to that.”

  They walked a few steps from the quay to where the Scillies’ one and only official conveyance, a white Land Rover with bold, blue-checkerboard detailing, was parked alongside the quay. The word police was printed in giant block letters on a six-inch-wide horizontal band of eye-assaulting, Day-Glo chartreuse that encircled the entire van.

  “Hard to miss, innit?” Clapper said approvingly. “PC Robb will drive the two of you. I’ll follow along in my own motorcar.”

  Hicks, Gideon, and Tess climbed into the backseat, and Robb started the engine. Tess briefly explored those parts of Gideon that were of canine interest and went back to nestle down, close up against Hicks’s leg, her head between her paws.

  They drove north, out of town and past a couple of pleasant beaches that had picnickers and strollers on them despite the fog, then past a few scattered restaurants and guesthouses, a sprawling flower farm, and the nine-hole Isles of Scilly Golf Club. The paving ran out just beyond the golf course, and they continued north, bumping along on an otherwise empty and increasingly primitive dirt road bordering a rocky coast perforated by occasional isolated sandy coves.

  “Well, it’s got to be this one,” Robb said, stopping at the very limit of anything that could reasonably be called a road. “That’s Halangy Point up ahead, and there’s the Creeb right out there.” He pointed to a low, bare little island not far offshore. “And this is the only sandy stretch between them.”

  “Ah,” said Gideon. If nothing else came of the day, at least he now knew what a creeb was.

  Behind them, Clapper pulled up in a dusty, beat-up Vauxhall Astra. They were only a couple of miles from the center of Hugh Town, but a world away from the hurly-burly of bustling streets, souvenir shops, and day-trippers. The cove itself was a hundred-yard-wide curve of gravelly sand bordered by rocky outcroppings at either end, with more scattered rocks and a few meager patches of dune grass at the back. Not a particularly attractive beach, especially for this beach-blessed part of the world, and there were no signs of footprints, no litter. It looked as if nobody had been on it for months.

  “Good place for the dog to work,” Hicks said.

  Good place to bury a few sackfuls of body parts, Gideon thought.

  On the far side of the road the land swept away into a region of rolling green uplands sparsely dotted with stone farmhouses and occasionally patterned by hedgerows into squares and rectangles that ran up and down the hillsides. This, Gideon knew, was also the part of the island most richly populated with the ruins of the Stone Age villages and rock-cairn burial chambers that he still meant to get to, if there was time—if, that is, no interesting hoard of bones turned up today.

  “Not much beach this morning,” Clapper said more or less to himself as they got out of their vehicles at the side of the road above the sand. “Tide’s still up. Maybe thirty yards down to the water. We won’t be able to get below the high-tide line for some time.”

  “Not much point in looking there anyway,” Hicks said. “Anything buried there would have been washed away in the winter storms long ago, with new sand having been deposited to replace the old.”

  Gideon nodded his agreement as he held out his cardboard cup for some of the hot, sweetened tea that Robb had thoughtfully brought along in a metal carafe. With the increase in the fog, along with a stiff breeze, the temperature had dropped six or seven degrees, and he was regretting not having taken Julie’s advice to put on a fleece under his wind breaker. Clapper’s comb-over was standing straight up in the wind, but he seemed not to notice.

  While the men sipped their tea, Tess tugged impatiently at the end of her leash, her head turned up, her tongue lolling, and her strange, warm yellow eyes trained eagerly on Hicks.

  He laughed as he looked down at her. “Tell me she doesn’t know she’s going to have a chance to get some work in. Tell me she doesn’t love it.”

  He crumpled his cup and placed it in the litter sack in the van. “Well, let’s get started, shall we? I’ll have her begin over there, at the north end, so that she can work into the wind. More effective that way, you see.”

  As the four men trudged to the other end of the cove, Gideon used the time to study the dune grass. Burials had a way of changing the vegetation that grew above them, or rather a number of ways. Most obviously, and most often, they provided nutrients that made plant growth more luxuriant. On the other hand, they sometimes slowed growth by damaging or restricting roots. So one of the important things, when hunting a burial, was to look for an area of growth that was noticeably different from the surrounding area. But in this case, the grasses were so skimpy and scattered to begin with, that they gave no clue.

  Hicks hopped nimbly down the rocks to the sand, followed by the others, with Tess growing more excited by the second. They were a bit more protected from the wind here, and Gideon eased open the zipper of his Windbreaker.

  When Hicks bent to unhook Tess’s leash, Gideon expected her to bound immediately down the beach, but, trembling with excitement though she was, she waited without moving for her master’s command. Hicks took his time, stuffing and lighting his pipe, which took three matches in the breeze.

  “All right, Tess,” he said conversationally when he’d finally gotten it lit, “search.” And off she went, trotting diagonally toward the southern end of the cove. She hadn’t gone more than twenty yards before she came to an abrupt stop. Her nose, which had been an inch or two off the sand, now went right down to it.

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” Hicks observed with quiet satisfaction. “The old girl hasn’t lost her touch.”

  “Do you mean she’s found something already?” asked a delighted Robb. “As quickly as that?”

  “She’s located a scent pool,” Hicks said, as they moved in a group toward her, “but don’t get your hopes up just yet. In sand, because of the porosity, the pool can be enormous. Moreover, it can linger after the object is no longer there. For years, sometimes. So right now, all we can say for certain is that somebody’s remains have lain somewhere near here… at some time, present or past.”

  “Might even be no more than a few old seal bones, or what’s left of a shrew, lad,” Clapper said, trying to keep Robb from getting carried away.

  “Well, no, Mike, that it wouldn’t be,” Hicks said. “Remember, Tess is trained to respond only to human remains. She’d take no notice of a shrew, or a seal, or anything else. Only a dead human being.”

  “Amazing,” Gideon said on cue.

  By the time they reached Tess, she was moving rapidly and seemingly randomly over the beach, back and forth, head down, snuffling away noisily, so intent and focused that she took no notice even of Hicks. Gideon had the impression that if a meteor had crashed into the beach beside her at that moment, she wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Sounds like a hoover, doesn’t she? Robb said admiringly.

  “Certainly does,” Clapper said, and then for Gideon’s benefit: “A vacuum cleaner.”

  Hicks stood there, chewing on his pipe, keenly watching her. “All right, then,” he said, “seems to me she’s defined the limits of the pool. Appears to run from this rock over here, halfway down to the water, and then over to those low dunes over there.” With the stem of the pipe he had outlined an area of about twenty by thirty yards. “Time now to get specific.”

  The pipe was jammed back in his mouth. “Tess!” he said, more sharply than he’d spoken to her before. Reluctantly, she surfaced, coming to a stop and raising her head a little from a clump of dune grass. “Slow down, girl, calm down.” He tapped his thigh. “Come”

  She lifted her head a little more and looked doubtfully at him, obviously beset by warring instincts, and for a second it looked as if she might disobey, but with a soft whimper she came to his side, nuzzling his hand with her sandy nose to make amends.

  “Now we’ll get a bit more businesslike,” he said to the others. “We’ll search
the area in a grid pattern to make sure we cover every inch, instead of this frantic to-ing and fro-ing. If there’s something here, she should be able to pinpoint it.”

  “Should be able to,” Clapper muttered.

  “They’re not infallible, Mike, you know that. No more than you or I. Well, you, anyway.”

  Without benefit of a leash to connect them, dog and handler began to move slowly and systematically over the defined area. When it was time to shift directions, Hicks would murmur “Turn” or “This way” and the dog would turn with him, while Clapper, Robb, and Gideon watched from the perimeter.

  “Like a dance, innit?” Clapper said, getting a cigarette going.

  “It’s beautiful, really,” said Robb. “The way she follows.”

  After about five minutes, the dog suddenly sat down and softly whined.

  “She’s located something,” Clapper told them. “That’s the alert he trains them to give. Now he’ll ask her to show the exact spot.”

  “She won’t actually dig it up, will she?” an anxious Gideon asked.

  “No, no, she knows better than that.”

  “Good girl,” Hicks said to the dog. “Now then. Touch.”

  Tess immediately jumped up, placed a graceful forefoot on the sand, and pawed gently and elegantly away, like a high-strung horse.

  Hicks knelt to plant a thin metal rod with an orange flag on it. “X marks the spot,” he said, pleased and smiling. “Who wants to do the honors?”

  Robb and Clapper deferred to Gideon, who knelt and began clearing sand with his hands, spreading rather than digging. It was as soft as he’d hoped, if a bit colder, and it took less than a minute to uncover a smooth, spiraling, sea snail-shaped knob of bone, as clean of flesh and ligament as a specimen from a biological supply house. “That,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “is the distal end of a human right humerus—the elbow. Thank you, Tess, well-done.”

  The dog, her face on a level with his own, grinned at him and yawned prodigiously, her bright pink tongue curling back on itself into an almost-complete circle.