Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “I’m sorry, Julie, you’re right. Maybe what I really need is a captive audience—preferably one that depends on me for their grades.”

  “No, what you really need is a new case to remind you of what a dinosaur you’re not. They don’t call you the Skeleton Detective for nothing, pal. The FBI doesn’t ask for your services on its trickiest cases because you’re a dinosaur, you know.”

  “Thank you so much. Everyone needs a little patronizing once in a while.”

  “You’re entirely welcome.”

  “So, people, how’s it going?”

  They turned at the cheerful greeting.

  “Hi, John,” they both called, and Gideon added: “How was the hamburger?”

  “What makes you think I got a hamburger?”

  “You mean other than the fact that that’s what you always get when Marti’s not around? Not much, really.”

  “Only for lunch,” the aggrieved John pointed out, “and not every day.”

  Marti Lau, John’s wife, was a nutritionist at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, where, on behalf of her helpless patients, she waged a personal war on fats, refined carbohydrates, salt, sugar, and just about anything else that tasted good. “The Dragon Lady of the Food Charts,” they called her, and she loved it. She herself lived by dietary rules almost as stringent, but she knew better than to try to impose them on John. Still, he knew how she felt about it, and being a sensitive creature, despite his formidable presence—broad shouldered, hulking, and six foot two (only an inch taller than Gideon but seemingly taking up far more space)—he felt guilty indulging when she was around. But when she wasn’t, then nothing stood between him and just about every hamburger, steak, and pizza he could get his hands on.

  “You can get a hamburger in Málaga?” Julie asked.

  “Julie, you can get a hamburger anyplace, if you know how to look,” he said with pride. “You can trust me on that.”

  “You can trust him on that,” said Gideon, who had been with him in quite a few different places. “So how was it? The hamburger?”

  “Not too bad, Doc. Better when I scraped the hummus off it.”

  John Lau, a special agent with the FBI’s regional office in Seattle, was a close friend of the Olivers’, and especially of Gideon’s; the two of them had known each other a long time and very literally owed their lives to each other. Despite this, John had been calling Gideon “Doc” from the first day they’d met. He just didn’t like the name “Gideon,” and as the only other choice Gideon had been offered was “Gid,” Gideon opted for “Doc.” John was here to present a session on ballistics, a subject he taught twice a year at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and to take in whatever lectures in the criminalistics section seemed potentially useful.

  “Oh, by the way, Doc, you know Rafe Carlisle? Little guy, bald, natty dresser . . .”

  “Right. DNA expert, isn’t he?”

  “Well, no, it turns out he’s not. He’s just fascinated by it and rich enough to do something about it. So he’s gotten himself on the board of this DNA lab in England—in York, I think—and he’s given them a big endowment, so he gets to mess around in their projects when he wants. Anyway, he’s an interesting guy, and we got to talking, and he suggested why don’t we all go downtown for dinner tonight—including you, Julie.”

  “That sounds fine, John,” Julie said, “but there are two huge cruise ships in port. Something like six thousand day-trippers in town. It’ll be elbow to elbow, and the restaurants and tapas bars will be wall to wall. Why don’t you suggest we do it tomorrow?”

  “Well, according to Rafe, the cruise-ship days are the best time to experience the town. And dinner won’t be a problem, he promises. He seems to know Málaga pretty well; I’m game to take his word on it.”

  “If you will, then I will,” Julie said. “Count me in.”

  With a nod, Gideon agreed. He checked his watch, arose, and let go another desolate sigh. “Okay, John, it’s almost two. Time to gird our loins.”

  CHAPTER 7

  They sat on rough-hewn blocks at the foot of a Roman amphitheater built in twentieth century BC or thereabouts, looking up beyond the rows of stone seating to the crenellated towers of the eighth-century Moorish Alcazaba that loomed atop the sheer cliff above, while listening to the plangent, twentieth-century rasgueados of a flamenco guitarist on a nearby street corner and munching on mini tapas from a sidewalk vendor dispensing his tiny morsels from a pushcart equipped with a state-of-the-art, twenty-first-century warming oven.

  It was just the kind of chronological and cultural mishmash that Gideon, in most ways an annoyingly orderly sort of person, loved, and he was basking in this one. “This was a brilliant idea, Rafe. Perfect.”

  “Well, you know,” Rafe said, “most Malagueňos stay away from the Old City on days when the cruise ships come in and those narrow little streets are clogged with gawking Brits or Germans or Americans, all of whom walk at a funereal pace that is just short of excruciating. But as for myself, I love it. With a flamenco guitarist playing on every corner and in every restaurant—which they don’t do on other days of the week—it sounds like old Espaňa, you know, more than at any other time. The trick is to find a quiet spot a little removed from the hordes but still within hearing range of the guitars, such as”—he spread his arms—“you see.”

  Actually, the Roman Theater was right in the busy center of the city and one of Málaga’s major attractions, with free entrance to it through the adjacent museum, so generally it was as full of tourists as the streets around it. But, today being Sunday, the museum had closed at two thirty. Rafe’s lab was currently doing the DNA work on Roman bone fragments found at the site when it had been unearthed in the 1950s; in so doing, he had been spending time with the museum people over the last several weeks, and he had charmed the curator into breaking his own rules and letting the four of them in.

  And a likable, altogether charming guy he was, upbeat, witty, and urbane, with enviable old-school—and distinctly old-fashioned—British manners and diction but without the meticulously civil but cool, condescending arrogance that too often went along with them. His few defects served to heighten his appeal by making him seem even more approachable: a slight tentativeness, almost but not quite a stammer, in his speech that suggested a beguiling uncertainty, as if he thought that anything he might say would be immediately (and justly) contradicted. His near-nonexistent eyebrows tilted slightly upward toward the middle, so that he looked as if he’d been caught off guard by—but also pleased with and interested in—the world he was in and the people he found himself in it with. Gideon guessed he was in his early fifties.

  Not what anyone would call good-looking, he had squinchy eyes, thin lips, and a tiny snub nose, all scrunched together at the center of a moon of a face and lacking distinct eyebrows to set them off. A double set of dimples at each side of his mouth were cute additions, but his face could have used more help than that. As for the rest of him, three words summed him up: short, bald, and roly-poly. Still, he did the best he could with what he had. His shoes always gleamed, and the fluffy, graying fringe of hair above his ears was always combed. A careful dresser, he was one of the few at the conference who was never seen in anything but a conservative, impeccably tailored suit—never a mere sport coat—and an equally conservative tie. So far, they had been different every day, and their unfailingly high quality attested both to his taste and to the affluence that made them affordable.

  “I like him,” Julie had said after she’d first met him. “There’s something about him that just makes me want to smile. He makes me think of the kind of guy you’d see in one of those old comedies—the puffy, stuffy old banker who gets his top hat knocked off by a snowball.”

  “Yep, that’d be Rafe all right. Except instead of getting mad and shaking his walking stick at them, he’d laugh and give the kids a nickel.”

  “Yes, or you could put the top hat back on, stick a walrus mustache on him, and you’d have the happy lit
tle guy in Monopoly, the one on the get-out-of-jail cards.”

  The four of them had been in the amphitheater for an hour this late afternoon, companionably chatting. The tapas had a mushy, prefrozen feel to them but had been quickly enough dealt with, and now they were relaxing, leaning back on the stone blocks of the row behind, sipping a flinty white Rioja from espresso-sized paper cups and feeling very privileged. This sense was heightened by Gideon’s informing them that they were sitting in what would have been the orchestra back when people were snickering at the latest farce from Plautus; that is, the section strictly reserved for VIPs of the highest order. The ordinary citizens, the hoi polloi, would have been restricted to the cavea, the semicircular rows nearer the top of the theater.

  “Your lab’s DNA analysis,” Gideon said when the small talk had run out. “Turning up anything interesting?”

  Rafe poured himself a little more wine. “Haven’t come up with the complete Roman genome yet, if that’s what you mean. We’ve found a genetic connection to a third-century AD population from Tivoli, but that’s hardly unexpected.”

  “Have they had an anthropologist look at the bones?”

  “Gideon, these aren’t what anybody would call bones. Or possibly you would. But they’re only these little gray, flaky fragments, many of them burned. For most of them, it was only the DNA work itself that confirmed that they were human.”

  “Still, you never know. Even with only a little to work with, I might be able . . . well, never mind.” He held out his cup, and John, closest to the bottle, refilled it for him.

  Rafe was looking at him curiously. “Gideon,” he said, with a bit more hesitation than usual, “is it possible that you’re looking for work?”

  “Funny you should say that,” Julie murmured to no one.

  “Because if you are,” said Rafe, “I have something that might interest you. Have you ever been to the Channel Islands?”

  A slight tilt of his head indicated that the question was addressed to Julie and John as well, and when all three said they hadn’t, he told them that he had access to some far newer skeletal material—dating back only to 1969—from a murder case that had never been resolved, and he himself had some questions about them that he would love to have answered. It wasn’t that the police had done a poor job, he explained, but that, as Gideon well knew, the forensic sciences were in a primitive state back then, and so he couldn’t help wondering what a modern forensic examination might reveal.

  “And so I was hoping, er, that you might be interested in, ah . . .”

  “In looking at them to see if I can turn up anything that might shine a little light?” Gideon asked. He willed his brain waves straight at Rafe: Say yes.

  “That’s it exactly,” Rafe said. “In coming on over to Jersey, having a look, and seeing what you might find, right. And?”

  “I might be able to do that,” Gideon said. “Tell me a little more about them.” This was to convey the impression that he’d have to think about it, but nobody was fooled, except maybe Rafe. Gideon was going, and John and Julie knew it. When had he been known ever to turn down a hands-on chance at skeletal analysis? Of course he was going.

  Rafe’s immediate, bright smile—maybe just a tad overbright—suggested that he was pleased but no more fooled than the others. Nothing new there, Gideon thought with a sigh. He had learned a long time ago that hiding what he was thinking wasn’t one of his long suits.

  “Well, they were found in a pitch pond on our main farm. They were—what’s the term for it? Amalgamated . . . conglomerated . . .”

  “Commingled? Two or more people?”

  “Yes, commingled. They were from two different people, both males, one twenty-six, I think it was, and the other, nineteen or twenty.”

  “Would you happen to know how that was determined?” Gideon asked. “The number of people? The sex?”

  Forensic anthropology had indeed been in its infancy in 1969, he was thinking, and still the province of a very limited cadre of experts. Krogman’s seminal textbook had come out only a few years earlier and was hardly likely to have been required reading in the Channel Islands. So what was the likelihood of a local Jersey doctor or police officer getting these things right, back then? Of course, if there were three tibias, say, or two mandibles, that would be a pretty good clue, even for a layman, that they were dealing with more than one person. But excepting something of that order, you had to wonder—

  “How it was determined? No, I have no idea. But I do know that’s what the postmortem reported: two men, one no older than twenty and the other no younger than twenty-six. Yes, that’s right. I remember there was a six-year age difference between them.”

  So they aged them too, Gideon thought, right down to the individual year. Now there you were on really shaky ground. Sexing skeletons was a comparatively simple matter. All you had to do was toss a coin and you’d be right half the time. But coming up with how many years a person had lived? No, that was a different matter. Between immaturity and senescence (both of which had relatively obvious skeletal markers), you were left with a good fifty different choices of age. Not a job for the unanointed. And the possibility of having a trained forensic anthropologist available in Jersey in 1969 was zero, because there were no such creatures at the time; the term itself had yet to be invented.

  “You look doubtful, Gideon,” Rafe said. “The age determinations—you think they’re a bit more specific than the evidence might warrant?”

  “Could be, yes.”

  “A pitch pond,” John was saying. “What is that, like the La Brea Tar Pits?”

  “Much the same, I imagine,” Rafe said. “Although, alas, we have yet to turn up a dinosaur. In fact, its official designation, in the parish land record books, is the rather grandiose ‘Carlisle Tar Pits.’ You can imagine the extent to which that has embellished the family name. But it’s simply an area into which a slow, steady stream of oily gunk seeps and bubbles up from crevices in the underlying rock and sits there stewing in the sun until the oily elements eventually sink to the bottom and you’re left with a great sticky, blobby puddle of pitch, or asphaltum, or tar, or bitumen—all one and the same.”

  “Sounds messy,” Julie said.

  “It is that. Nasty stuff. Smelly too. But commercially viable, very much so. In fact, the bones were discovered by workers in the process of extracting the pitch, you see, and as you might expect, the police came up with a dozen theories about how they’d come to be there. Naturally enough, foul play was assumed, with good reason, I might say, although there were no indications of it on the bones. But then, there wasn’t much left in the way of bones. Only fragments, and not too many of those.”

  “Tar pits?” Gideon said. “More than one, then?”

  “Not really, no, but the pond is shaped something like a pair of spectacles, only with one lens larger than the other, and with the two of them connected by a small stream that runs from the larger to the smaller—the nosepiece of the spectacles, you might say. As I understand it, they were commercially worked at different times, so people have always thought of them as two separate ponds. But they’re not.”

  He paused to offer more wine all around but got no takers—everyone had already had two cups—so the little that was left remained in the bottle. “And so, Gideon, if you would deign to give it a try, I’d be glad to put you up—to put all of you up—for a few days at a nice Saint Helier hotel in which I keep a suite for just such a purpose: sitting room, small kitchen, and two bedrooms, both en suite. And even a valet’s room, should anyone want to iron a tuxedo. Please. Do come and have an island holiday on me. I think you’d enjoy it. There’s plenty to see.”

  “Oh, I think I just might deign,” Gideon said, “as long as there’s a valet’s room.” Julie and John readily nodded. They were game too.

  “Wonderful!” Rafe’s round face was alight. “In fact, if it’s convenient, I would love to have you all there as early as tomorrow.”

  Their exchanged glances,
followed by nods, indicated that it was convenient. “Excellent. You’ll want to book an early flight. They’re not terribly frequent, you know, and all of them require a stopover somewhere—Gatwick, Paris, Exeter—which can add quite a bit of time. I’m catching one later tonight, at three fifteen. Oh, I say, why don’t you join me on it? I believe there are still seats available.”

  “No kidding, I wonder why that is,” John said. “Three fifteen in the morning? Are you nuts?”

  Gideon and Julie expressed similar if less blunt opinions, and Rafe laughed. “Ghastly hour, I know, but unfortunately for me there’s States Assembly business that has to be attended to tomorrow.”

  “States Assembly?” Julie said. “Is that the Channel Islands’ legislature?”

  “No, the two bailiwicks, as we call them in our ever-so-quaint and colorful dialect, are quite separate. Guernsey has its own government. This is Jersey’s. I’m a senator, one of twelve.”

  “I’m impressed,” Julie said.

  “Please, don’t be. My grandfather cut quite a figure in Jersey politics in his day, you see—he was president pro tempore of the legislature at one point—and it was expected that I would run for election simply on the strength of the name. I did, and I won . . . simply on the strength of the name, I’m afraid. The job is nothing very important, I assure you; nothing at all like being a US senator. I’m never on the telly, and people don’t run up to me on the street to ask for my autograph. I doubt if one out of a hundred people even knows I am a senator. And all it requires is attendance at three or four extraordinarily dull meetings a month, for which the endurance of tedium is the primary requisite.”