Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  “Good, I suppose I’m imagining it. Now, before anything else, get the camera and get some pictures—no, first better run up to the catwalk and do a preliminary; see if there’s anything like a cigar stub, or ash therefrom, before the wind blows it away. Wait, don’t run off yet. I’ll want everybody in the house kept available for interviews, starting with the housekeeper. Oh, but first seal the door to the catwalk and the passageway and have one of the boys make sure no one violates it. Oh, wait, before you do anything else…”

  SEVENTEEN

  LEFT alone with the bones, Gideon found his enthusiasm lagging. There was still plenty to be done—formally inventorying and describing them; looking for signs of injury, pathology, and cause of death; and, when the partial long-bone formulas came—whenever the fog let up enough to allow the ferry to bring the mail, that is—calculating a stature range. By now, of course he was virtually certain that it would match whatever Villarreal’s height had been.

  The work—after the earlier excitement of finding the knife cuts, and then of pulling Edgar Villarreal out of the hat, so to speak— seemed pedestrian, even a little boring, so he was glad to take a break and run over to the museum a few blocks away to get the calipers. When he returned, the rumbling coming from his stomach prompted him to look at his watch. He was astonished to see that it was after one. Past time to go and meet Julie for lunch.

  He yawned, stretched, and rotated his head to work the kinks out of his neck. Then he tidied the table, cleaned up in the tiny restroom, slipped into his jacket, and went out into the fog. He had gone half a block along Upper Garrison Lane when he stopped, turned on his heel, and retraced his steps back to the front of the police station.

  With painstaking care, he made sure the effing door was good and shut.

  THE first indication that something was wrong was the pack of vehicles in front of the castle entrance. The clunkers that Kozlov and Mr. Moreton used to get around town, along with the motorbike that Cheryl Pinckney had rented for the photographic expeditions on which she supposedly disappeared during the day, were stowed in a small lot at the back, usually leaving an open, vacant field of gravel in front. But today there were automobiles all over the place, parked every which way in the fog. Three of them Gideon didn’t recognize, but the fourth was the unmistakable, chartreuse-striped police van. And now, on looking up at the castle, he saw a young, uniformed policeman—not Robb—looking impassively at him from the top of the stone steps that led onto the entrance bridge. Something was very wrong, something serious.

  Gideon walked toward the constable. This is where the term “heart-sinking sensation” comes from, he thought, as something seemed to unplug in his chest, letting the contents spill down into his legs.

  “What’s going on, Constable?” he asked from the bottom of the steps.

  “Oh, just police business, sir. Routine,” the cop said. He was no more than twenty, with a long face pocked with acne. On his head was the ceremonial bucket helmet, not the more comfortable cap, and he looked extremely uneasy, or perhaps even distressed.

  Gideon, more worried by the second, started to climb the steps toward him.

  The policeman held up a hand. “Sorry, sir, no one’s permitted in.”

  Gideon stopped halfway up. “But I live here. That is, I’m staying here. For the week.”

  The officer frowned. “Are you? I thought everyone was—” He undid a flap on his tunic and took out a sheet of paper. “Your name, sir?”

  “Gideon Oliver.”

  He scanned the sheet. “Sorry, sir, you’re not—”

  “You’re looking at a list of consortium Fellows. I’m not a Fellow. I’m a… I’m a spouse.”

  The officer shook his head. “I’m afraid—”

  “Look,” Gideon said, “Julie… Julene Oliver, who is on your list, is my wife. Can you at least tell me if she’s all right?”

  “I’m fine, Gideon!” Julie called, emerging under the “ER 1593” from the entry passage. “I thought I heard your voice.”

  “Julie, what’s going on?”

  “Let’s take a walk. I’ll tell you about it.”

  But to this the young cop objected as well. No one was permitted to leave the premises. Julie told him that she had already been interrogated and had Sergeant Clapper’s authorization to go. This the officer checked by means of the two-way radio attached to his collar, after which permission to leave was granted and scrupulously recorded in his notebook.

  Julie held off speaking until they had walked a few yards and turned left onto a path that was known as the Garrison Walk, a two-hour circular ramble that ran along the extensive coastal breastworks that had protected the castle from seaward attack during the Civil War. The walk was said to provide spectacular views of the neighboring islands, and they had intended to take it at some point during the week, but today they could barely see down to the rocky shoreline forty or fifty feet below.

  “Joey’s dead,” she told him.

  “Oh, is he?”

  She threw him a quizzical look. “You don’t seem very upset.”

  “No, of course I am. But, you know, I’d figured somebody had to be dead, with all this going on, especially after the way Clapper took off from the station. All I didn’t know was who.” What he didn’t tell her was that his strongest feeling at the moment, almost his only emotion, unworthy though he knew it was, was a draining, overwhelming sense of relief. He was just glad it hadn’t been Julie, that’s all. His heart was still finding its way back up from his ankles.

  Joey had been found that morning by Mrs. Bewley, the housekeeper, Julie explained. It looked as if he’d fallen into the passageway from the catwalk that ran around the building just under the eaves, where he liked to smoke a bedtime cigar and commune with the night skies.

  According to Kyle Robb, with whom she’d chatted briefly, it had happened quite late last night. The catwalk and the passageway were under police seal. Like everyone else, Julie had been interviewed by Clapper: When had she last seen Joey? Where was she between—

  “Clapper interrogated you himself? That must have been fun, considering the mood he’s in. My hand still stings from getting whacked with the ruler.”

  “No, he was a lamb. He couldn’t have been more considerate. We’re now old friends. I’m on a first-name basis with him, too.”

  At Gideon’s surprised expression, she smiled and explained. “Kyle told me what was going on. When Mr. Moreton called the police station to report what had happened—the first possible homicide in St. Mary’s in decades, or maybe ever—Mike just assumed that headquarters would take it away from him and hand it to a detective team that would helicopter in from the mainland. That’s the way the process is supposed to work. But when Kyle called Exeter—”

  “They told him it was too foggy to get a helicopter out here, so Mike gets to run a possible murder investigation after all?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Which sent the ogre into remission and brought back the genial, amiable Sergeant Mike,” Gideon said, nodding. “I see. Julie, it’s after one. Would you rather go back into town and get some lunch somewhere? A pot of tea, maybe?”

  “No!” She wrinkled her nose, a behavior he found annoying in everybody but his wife, in whom it was adorable. “I couldn’t eat anything. Can we just keep walking?”

  “You bet. I can’t say I have much appetite either.”

  They walked without talking for a while, the unseen waters of St. Mary’s Sound on their right, the barely seen outer walls of Star Castle disappearing into the fog behind them on their left. Jackets were zipped up against the moisture-laden breeze. Gideon lightly kneaded the back of Julie’s neck until he felt the tense muscles relax and heard a small, grateful sigh, after which they continued hand-in-hand on the path.

  “Gideon, I’ve been thinking. If it was murder, it pretty much had to be done by someone at the castle, right? One of us.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. Likely, yes, but hardly certain. This
happened late, you said, when people would have been in their rooms for the night. I can easily imagine an outsider getting into the castle, up to the third floor, and out again without being seen.”

  Julie shook her head. “No. Mr. Moreton locked up after we all got in from the museum, which was about ten. He locks up every night. And Mrs. Bewley left after that, but the doors—the entry to the building, and the one in the outer walls—automatically lock after her when she leaves. There would have been no way in. I specifically asked about that.”

  “I didn’t realize that,” Gideon said. “You have been thinking, haven’t you? I assume you mentioned this to Mike.”

  “Mike’s the one who told me about it.”

  “ ‘One of us,”“ Gideon echoed, thinking. ”I didn’t know Joey very well, but he seemed like a nice enough kid. Some pretty strong views, yes, and maybe too fond of the sauce, but basically harmless. It’s hard to imagine any of these people wanting to do him in.“

  “Well, he did get on Donald’s nerves quite a bit.”

  “Yes, sure, but… murder? Do you really think—”

  “No. Well, I don’t think so, who knows?” She hesitated. “But I do have a theory. I’ve been giving it some thought.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “Now you’re not going to laugh at me, are you? And you won’t interrupt me and start arguing before I’ve finished?”

  “Have you ever known me to?”

  She laughed. “That doesn’t even deserve an answer. And you’re not going to tell me it’s not a theory at all, that it’s a hypothesis, or a speculation, or a—”

  “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to tell you anything unless you get around sometime to letting me know what it is.”

  All right, then. Now I know this sounds a little convoluted, so just let me—“

  “Julie-”

  “Well, what if it wasn’t Edgar that killed Pete Williams? No, don’t interrupt. What if it was someone else? And what if Joey knew who that person was? Gideon, please, you promised. Just let me finish for once. And what if that person was afraid Joey might tell? Wouldn’t that person—” She threw up her hands. “Okay, okay, I should have known you wouldn’t be able to let me finish. What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s wrong is that the bones aren’t Pete Williams’s, they’re Villarreal’s.”

  At that she stopped in mid-stride to stare at him. “Edgar! But how can that be? Edgar was eaten by a bear! In Alaska!”

  “Julie, I’m not sure how it can be, but it is. I’m ninety-nine percent positive. He wasn’t eaten by a bear, he was stabbed to death— pretty viciously, too—and right now he’s lying—what there is of him is lying—on a desk at the police station right here on St. Mary’s. And I can guarantee that the remains haven’t been through the innards of a bear or of anything else.”

  “You’re saying the newspaper got it wrong?”

  “I believe such things have been known to happen.”

  “You don’t sound very surprised.”

  “I’m surprised that the bones on the beach are Villarreal’s, yes; but, no, I’m not surprised that the people in Alaska got it wrong. When you’re looking at tiny bits of bone that have been chewed up by a bear, gone through its digestive process, and come out the other end, it’s easy to let your imagination run away with you and conclude they’re human—especially if you have an unaccounted-for human being on your missing persons list. And the paper made it clear there was no physical anthropologist involved; just the local police surgeon, who almost certainly wouldn’t have been trained to distinguish human from nonhuman.” He shrugged. “So, yes, I had my doubts.”

  She nodded slowly, with a faint smile. “That’s what that ‘Hm’ was, when I read you the story back in Penzance, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what it was,” he said, smiling back. They began walking again.

  “But why in the world would Edgar have come back to Saint Mary’s?” she wondered. “When would he have come back?”

  “Never. I don’t think he ever left.”

  They had come to one of the several batteries along the path—a grouping of three black, well-preserved, seventeenth-century cannons, glistening with moisture and arranged in an arc to aim out to sea. Julie leaned against one of them, shaking her head. “But he resigned from the consortium after he left, remember? He sent Vasily a letter, a fax. From the States.”

  “No, somebody sent Vasily a fax from the States.”

  “That’s so, I suppose. It could have been someone else.”

  “For that matter, do we really know that anybody sent Vasily a fax, or do we know only that he says someone sent one?”

  “Well… I suppose…”

  “As far as I know, no one’s seen it, isn’t that right?”

  Julie frowned. “Gideon are you suggesting… you’re not suggesting…”

  “That Vasily’s a murderer and faked the fax to cover himself? No, of course not. I’m only pointing out—”

  “I mean, for all we know, Vasily still has the fax. In fact, he probably does.”

  “Which still wouldn’t prove that Villarreal sent it. Look, all I’m saying is that the evidence for Villarreal’s ever having left and gone back to the States, let alone getting chomped on by a bear, is not exactly overwhelming.”

  “That’s so, yes.” She gazed out into the fog. Below, unseen wavelets lapped at the rocky shore. “I’m trying to think of whether I actually saw him get on the ferry or not, at the end of the consortium.

  I know we all left the same day. We caught the ferry. I was on it with… well, let’s see… Liz, and Rudy, and… come to think of it, that’s all. Edgar and the others were going to catch the early morning plane, or the afternoon ferry, or something.“

  “Did you see him at all that day?”

  She chewed on her lip, trying to remember. “I don’t know. I don’t think I did. I’m not sure.”

  “What about the day before?”

  “The night before was when he gave that speech in town, where he got into the shouting match with Pete Williams, so he was definitely there then. After that, I don’t remember.” She pushed herself from the wet cannon, wiped her hands on a couple of Kleenexes to dry them, and stuffed the sodden clump in a pocket. They resumed walking.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s say you’re right. Somebody here on St. Mary’s killed Edgar. Two years later, somebody kills Joey. It’s got to be the same somebody, wouldn’t you think?”

  “I’d say so. Unless we have two murderers running around the place, which is really low on the probability continuum.”

  “And the two murders—they just about have to be related.”

  Gideon nodded. “The Law of Interconnected Monkey Business.”

  This was a “law” posited only partly in jest by Gideon’s old professor and all-around mentor, Abe Goldstein: When too many extraordinary things—too much monkey business—started happening to the same people, in the same context, you could count on there being some connection between them. And while “two” might not be very high on the “too many” scale, murders were off the charts on the “extraordinary” scale.

  “Okay, then,” Julie said, “what if you took what I said before and switched the names?”

  “What you said before?”

  “About why somebody would kill Joey. What if Joey knew who killed Edgar? And maybe he was keeping quiet these last two years, but now that the news was going to come out that the bones weren’t Pete’s after all—they were Edgar’s—that changed things. And the person who killed him—killed Edgar, I mean—couldn’t trust Joey to keep quiet, so he—”

  “Uh-uh,” Gideon said.

  Julie, swept away with her reasoning, didn’t hear him. “No, wait a minute, what about this as an idea? Maybe it wasn’t murder at all, in Joey’s case. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe Joey killed Edgar, and now that he knew it was going to come out, he killed himself.”

  “Uh-uh,” Gideon said again.


  “Uh-uh? Just plain uh-uh? Not even a ‘maybe’? Not even a ‘possibly’? At least an ‘improbably’?”

  “Nope, just plain uh-uh. Julie, maybe it was murder, maybe it was suicide, maybe it was an accident, but it couldn’t have been because Edgar’s murder was going to come out. Neither Joey nor anyone else could know that, because I didn’t know it myself until this morning. And you, Mike, Kyle, and I are still the only people who do know. Last night, when Joey was killed, everybody—including me, including Joey—still thought the bones were probably Williams’s.”

  “Oh,” she said, deflated, “that’s so, isn’t it?”

  “Not only that, but even if he did know, which he couldn’t have, there was nothing to tie Joey—or anyone, for that matter—to Villarreal’s murder, so why should he have been worried? I hadn’t even come up with a cause of death yet. The only reason we knew it was foul play was the fact that the body was dismembered.”

  “That’s true,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, for all we know it wasn’t a murder at all—I’m talking about Joey now, not Edgar.

  Maybe he fell off the catwalk while he was trying to light one of those awful cigars or something. He was pretty well sloshed, after all, and the railing isn’t much above your knees. Maybe there’s no big mystery here at all.“

  “I agree. That could very well be. But it still leaves Edgar. And that was no accident.”

  “No.” She nodded soberly. “And unlike Joey, there’s no shortage of people who had it in for him.”

  “No.”

  They walked on in gloomy silence for a while, and Gideon had no doubt that their thoughts were running along the same lines: compiling the long list of Star Castle residents whom Edgar Villarreal had antagonized—a list that would most assuredly have to be given to Clapper. There was, first and foremost, the sexual-predator angle. Liz Petra and Victor Waldo had had good reason to detest him, and maybe Donald did as well. He appeared not to care about Cheryl’s blatant peccadilloes, but you never knew about something like that, especially with a seemingly bland guy like Donald. And what about Cheryl? Had she dumped Villarreal, or was it the other way around? And then there was Rudy, whose wilderness convictions had made an enemy of Villarreal and vice versa. And Kozlov. Hadn’t Julie mentioned that he and Villarreal had grated upon one another?