Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “Elsewhere?” Rafe’s face, which always looked a little surprised, looked more so. “Where? Abbott certainly wasn’t the sort of man who went about making enemies, not that kind of enemy.”

  “I don’t know, Rafe, but I can’t help thinking that we’ll find a thread of some kind between the deaths of Abbott and George Skinner.”

  “That’d be a pretty long thread,” Gideon said. “Fifty years long, Mike.”

  “I’m well aware of that, mate, but I can’t seem to get the idea out of my mind. Father murdered. Fifty years later, son murdered—in an island community that for decades has averaged less than three murders a year—less than one a year if you exclude the occasional berserker who wakes up one morning and decides to kill his entire family. And I’m supposed to believe that the relationship between George and Abbott Skinner is a mere coincidence? Maybe, but not bloody likely, not in my opinion.”

  “You just might have a point,” Gideon agreed. “What do you think, Rafe?”

  “I’m totally at a loss. I’m afraid I’m still a bit stunned at the news. I just learned about it myself an hour ago, from Mike.”

  “Oh, by the way, Rafe,” Clapper said, “we’ll need a formal identification of the body for the record. As far as I know, you’re as close to him as anyone is, so . . . are you up for the job?”

  Rafe made a face. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m chafing at the bit, but yes, of course. Would it be possible to do it now? I’d like to get it over with.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s still on the table. He hasn’t been altogether cleaned up yet. Blood and things, you know. It’d be better if you wait until tomorrow morning. It’ll be a good deal less unpleasant.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” Rafe said. “Oh, dear me.”

  “I suppose that’s it for his father’s exhumation, then,” said Gideon, to whom the thought had just occurred.

  “Ah, yes, that’s right, isn’t it?” said Rafe. “I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t really see how—”

  “No, it’s still in the works,” Clapper said. “Health was in touch with me last evening. It turns out that Abbott stopped in at Bonnard and Sons late in the afternoon and submitted the request, along with the papers you’d prepared for him.”

  Rafe blinked. “No! That’s astonishing. I can’t believe he actually convinced Miranda.” He smiled softly. “Either that, or he didn’t tell her about it—that’s the more likely supposition, now that I think about it. So the exhumation will move forward after all, Mike?”

  “With alacrity. Health has already granted the permit. It allows them to begin excavating anytime now. They’ll have the body at the mortuary and all ready for Gideon tomorrow morning, they say.”

  “Already? Unbelievable. Here I am, a feared and powerful senator, and I have never even once gotten them to put through anything—anything—in under a week. However did you do it?”

  Mike shrugged. “Usual way. Told ’em I’d have ’em killed if they didn’t cooperate.”

  “Now there’s an idea for you. I’ll have to try it myself next time. Gideon, the papers I prepared for Abbott give you permission to perform whatever procedures you deem necessary. Bonnard will, er, rearrange the remains in a tasteful fashion afterward.”

  “Good.”

  “They will simply deliver the casket to the Bonnard mortuary and open it for you. The body itself they will leave untouched. Whatever tools you need will be available to you there. As for cleaning up the body if necessary, and that sort of thing, don’t you know, I assumed they would best be done by yourself, someone who knows what he’s doing. If you prefer, though, we can have them—”

  “No, you’re right. Better if I do it. I think I’d better be there for the exhumation itself too.”

  “Certainly. I’ll find out when it’ll take place and let you know, and I’ll see that they expect you, but—out of curiosity—why would you want to be there for that?”

  “Well, Skinner went into the ground almost fifty years ago, and I imagine they weren’t preparing concrete vaults for coffins back then.”

  “I’m sure we weren’t.”

  “And I imagine it was a wooden coffin?”

  “I suppose it must have been.”

  “Then there’s a good chance that it’s rotted away by now and melded back with the earth. If so, they’ll just have to dig up the dirt where it’d been. You can see the casket outlines because the dirt will be a different color. But then getting the body free of the soil is a tricky proposition, easy to make a mistake and stick a spade through a pelvis or a skull, so it’d just be a good idea for me to be on hand to keep an eye on things.”

  “Really. I had no idea.”

  “Oh, it happens, believe me. But if the coffin’s still holding together, I’ll just leave them to it and wait till tomorrow morning to get started.”

  Clapper, who had been growing restless, ground out his cigarette and stood up. “It’s well past lunch hour, my friends. There’s a decent fish-and-chips shop a few blocks from here, near Cenotaph Square. A hole-in-the-wall sort of place, but the food’s good. Never gotten ptomaine poisoning there, any road. Yet.” He clapped his hands. “So—anyone else fancy a nosh?”

  Gideon, who’d been heading for lunch in Gorey when Constable Vickery had called an hour before, readily agreed to one. “Let me give Julie a call, though. What’s the name of this place? Maybe she can join us. I know she’d like the chance to see you, Mike.”

  “It’s Sully’s. And I’d love to see her too.”

  Gideon called her while they were on their way to the restaurant. She was back in Saint Helier when he reached her, having just gotten off the bus in Liberation Square, only a few minutes away. And no, she hadn’t yet had lunch. He told her about Sully’s and gave her a quick rundown on Abbott.

  Clapper and Rafe had moved a little ahead while he spoke with her, and when he caught up to them, Rafe was shaking his head. “I don’t know, a fish-and-chips shop. I haven’t been in one in years, decades, perhaps. I wouldn’t want my crowd to hear about it.”

  Clapper patted his paunch, which Gideon now noticed was somewhat more prominent than it had been a couple of years ago. “Well, I’ll promise not to tell anyone,” Clapper said, “if you’ll promise not to tell Millie.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Captain Sully’s Fish and Chips—Quality and Tradition. (Burgers, Chicken, and Kebabs Too! Just Try ’Em!)—was about as hole-in-the-wall as they came, a tiny, not overly clean place with a one-man counter where orders were placed. Behind the counter, and separated from it by the usual windowed partition, was a small kitchen, from which came the sounds of rap music and the sizzling and spattering of deep-frying. There was room for only four cramped booths, all of which were occupied. On the floor were discarded fish wrappers printed to look like old newspapers, a bent plastic fork, and a few gummy-looking spots that might have been anything before they were stepped on and ground into the linoleum.

  A despairing look came into Rafe’s eyes as he looked around. “Oh, dear,” he said softly.

  “Dine in or takeaway?” was the counterman’s greeting. A skinny, dark-skinned man with a pitted face, he wore a backward baseball cap and a waist-tied apron that had seen a lot of hand wiping since the last time it had been washed. His eyes had yet to rise from a receipt pad on which he was calculating sums with a pencil.

  “Dine in, if we can, please, Sully,” Clapper said.

  Sully looked up from his pad with mock alarm. “Cheese it, the coppers!” he cried. “I confess, Officer, it was me what done it. Please don’t hit me no more.” He spoke with an arresting combination of lilting Caribbean and authentic if overcooked Cockney.

  Clapper smiled tolerantly. “Sully does enjoy his little jokes,” he told the others. “Lucky for him, his chips can’t be beat. So, landlord, are we going to be able to find a table, or should we get takeaway and go to the park?”

  “No problem, guv. Oy! Baz!” he called to one of the booths, which had two
men and a woman in it chatting over three empty plastic hamburger baskets. “Time for you lot to clear out, wouldn’t you say?”

  The occupants kept talking, but one of them responded with a noncommittal, over-the-shoulder wave.

  “Does that mean they’ll be leaving?” Gideon asked Rafe.

  “I have no idea. It seemed rather dismissive to me. Do you think we might be in luck, though? That they’ll refuse to leave?”

  Sully, who heard the comment and took it as a joke, disabused him of his wishful thinking. “Not to worry, guv, they’ll be on their way. Now, what’ll it be?”

  Clapper recommended the deluxe cod and chips with mushy peas, and the others followed his suggestion, although Rafe hesitated over the mushy peas before going along with them. “In for a penny,” he said, and then, looking up at the sound of chairs scraping over gritty linoleum, his face fell. “Oh, dear, there they go.”

  “Chalky,” Sully yelled back to the kitchen, “give number three a wipe, will you? It’ll be ready in a minute,” he told Clapper and the others. “You can collect your drinks meantime.”

  They were at the cooler, choosing their bottled soft drinks, when Julie came in.

  Clapper lit up on seeing her, and the two of them hugged and expressed delight. “And how is Madeleine?” Julie asked.

  “Millie’s just fine. She’s back in Saint Mary’s right now. Her daughter’s had twins, and Millie’s there helping out until she’s back on her feet. She’ll feel terrible to have missed you.”

  Julie fixed him with a sternly raised eyebrow. “Michael, you better tell me you’ve made an honest woman of that lovely lady by now.”

  Clapper laughed. “As a matter of fact, I have. Proud to say she’s been the missus since January.”

  By the time Julie and Gideon offered congratulations and best wishes, their table was ready. They walked to it, drinks in hand, Rafe hanging back a bit, as if hoping for a last-minute reprieve.

  “What I keep wondering about,” Clapper said to Gideon as they sat down, “is this matter of his body having been moved.”

  But Gideon heard not a word. He was deep in his own thoughts, and they were not happy ones. Now that it was so near, the examination of George Skinner’s exhumed corpse, the analysis he’d so cavalierly volunteered to undertake, was preying on his mind. For, in truth, the celebrated Skeleton Detective was about as squeamish as they came. He had fallen into forensics more or less accidentally, as a result of his expertise in osteology. But he remained at heart a researcher. It was early man and the even earlier hominids that had been, and remained, his chief research interests, and things like maggots or oozing bodily fluids or torn and mutilated flesh or stomach-churning smells or any smells at all weren’t things you ran into when dealing with a two-and-a-half-million-year-old Paranthropus aethiopicus skull.

  Naturally, in his work with law enforcement he had seen, handled, and smelled his fair share of these nastinesses, but unlike most of his forensic colleagues, he’d never grown used to them. Essentially, he was the same wuss he’d been the first time he’d been called into the morgue at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice for his views on a fresh body with a truly massive head wound. He’d promptly turned from the autopsy table and thrown up into the nearest stainless steel sink. The episode had made him mildly famous in the field even before his remarkable abilities had made him a true celebrity.

  He no longer threw up at massive head wounds or the like, but that was about all the progress he could claim. Things that other forensic anthropologists and pathologists wouldn’t bat an eye at still turned his stomach, and among them were exhumed corpses. George Skinner had been there for almost fifty years, so (thank God) at least he’d be well past the horrific early stages of decomposition, but neither would he be anything to look forward to, not to someone like Gideon. Most likely, what was left at this point would be a shrunken, discolored almost-skeleton in a stained, moldy suit. Decayed, dried-out skin and tendons would be stretched across an eyeless, noseless, lipless “face.” Bony fingers would protrude from filthy, grave-brown sleeves. Rotting—

  He became aware that someone had asked him something. Clapper, had it been?

  “Sorry, Mike, did you say something? I was a million miles away.”

  “At least. What I said was that I’m having a hard time making sense of his body having been moved. Something wonky there.”

  “His body was moved?”

  “According to you, it was.”

  “According to me?” Gideon was still a million miles away. Once focused on something, it could be hard to shake him loose. Was Clapper still talking about Abbott Skinner? “How would I even—”

  “Time out, gentlemen,” Julie said. “Gideon, I think there’s been a slight miscommunication here. Mike’s talking about your report on Roddy Carlisle.”

  “Roddy Carlisle?” Gideon said thickly. He’d forgotten that more or less as an afterthought prompted by John, he had e-mailed a copy of his report to Clapper the previous evening.

  “Pater,” Rafe supplied somewhat absently. He was busy with something else, having wadded up a couple of the paper towels that served as napkins, and now, tongue between his teeth, going after some of the greasier spots that Chalky had missed. “Move your elbow, Mike, there’s a good fellow.”

  Clapper moved his elbow. “Right,” he said to Gideon, “Rafe’s father. Now, when you declare that the body was moved—”

  “Hold it, I didn’t declare the body was moved, I said it was the only explanation I could think of.”

  “—because the little fishies’d been chewing on it—”

  “No, I didn’t say fishes, I—”

  “Well, what the hell did you say? D’you mind telling me that?” The bottle of nonalcoholic ginger beer he’d been drinking from was set down on the table with a thump, prompting Rafe to apply the paper toweling to the resulting spatter.

  “All right, gents, missus, here we are,” said Sully, showing up with a tray of “newspaper”-lined red plastic baskets containing their lunches and setting it down in the center of the table, first shoving aside a collection of salt, pepper, and malt-vinegar bottles. “Enjoy.”

  “Thank you, looks delicious,” Julie told him. The others murmured their agreement, poured on the condiments, and got down to eating, mostly with their fingers. All except Rafe, who was using the tines of his fork to gingerly probe the glistening mound of mushy peas (essentially, a thick purée of mashed peas) as if making sure it wasn’t alive. “Damned stuff looks radioactive,” he mumbled, referring to its characteristic and, indeed, slightly alarming glaucous-green color.

  “What I said,” Gideon said tersely in response to Clapper’s earlier question, “first of all, was that it was crustaceans, not fish, that—”

  “Oh, pardon me. Well, now, that changes everything, don’t it?”

  As Gideon now recalled, Clapper’s irritation was not hard to provoke. But then neither was Gideon’s.

  “I declared,” he declared, “that the nicks and scratches on the bones were made by crustaceans, and crustaceans aren’t known to live in tar. Therefore, I conjectured that the body must have been elsewhere for some time before it wound up in the tar pits, in water somewhere, maybe a river—”

  “No rivers in Jersey,” Rafe pointed out.

  “All right, a stream—”

  “No streams.”

  Gideon rolled his eyes, then hung his head. “Will you guys give me a break, please? You have any ponds, maybe? How about puddles, Rafe? I’ll settle for puddles.”

  “We do. Some of both. Not many of the former.”

  “Fine. Thank you. A pond then. But whatever it was, it was there long enough for the crabs to get down to the bones and start chewing on the damn things.” He winced. “Rafe, I’m sorry—”

  “And what conceivable reason,” Clapper said, “do you conjecture anyone could possibly have for taking a bloody pile of old bones—sorry, Rafe, dammit—and dumping them into a tar pit? A body, I could understand, but
bones? I can think of a hundred better, easier ways of getting rid of that kind of evidence. Me, I’d pound them to dust and flush them down the loo.”

  Gideon smiled. “Me too, the old crush-and-flush, that’s what I’d do too. But the fact is, they were found in the pitch pond, and all I was trying to do was come up with a theory, a hypothesis, rather, of what could account for their showing signs of crustacean predation. If you have a better one, I’m all ears. But until then—Julie, are you trying to say something?”

  “Only for the last five minutes,” she said. “Honestly, when you two get going . . . well, never mind. What I’m trying to tell you is that I do have another theory, well, a possibility.”

  Both men turned their attention to her, as did Rafe.

  “Now, don’t laugh. I admit, it’s a little, um, far out, but then so is the whole idea of someone’s dumping bones into a tar pit.”

  “I’ll stipulate to that,” Gideon said.

  “Okay, then.” She cleared her throat. “It occurred to me, Rafe, that maybe your father’s remains were never moved at all, that they’d been right there all along, right from the moment he was killed.”

  “But that crab-scavenging—” Gideon began at the same time that Rafe said, “No, that’s not—”

  “Now give me a chance,” Julie said. “At least let me get it out before you start tearing it apart. Just go ahead and eat your lunch and listen for a minute. The thing is, I’ve been spending some time on the web, researching pitch ponds, and I learned a few interesting things.”

  The great tar pits of the world, she informed them—La Brea, Carpinteria, one in Venezuela, one in Azerbaijan, a couple in Iran—had been there for millennia and had changed little since they were first discovered. Lesser pitch deposits, like the Carlisle pits, were more common but far more inconsistent. Much like small freshwater ponds, they came and they went. The flow could last decades, or it could peter out a month after first bubbling up from its underground deposit. It could suddenly double or triple in volume one week and go right down to its former level, or dry up altogether, the next.