Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “For the very same reason Rafe killed Abbott fifty years later,” Julie said. “All right, so far so good.”

  “They wrestle,” Gideon continued, “as in the diagram I drew. George on top, Roddy on the bottom. Roddy shoots George, but George still has enough oomph to brain him, maybe with the gun, maybe with a rock. Roddy falls into the pond and dies, and George tries to get home, but he only makes it seventy or eighty feet, to the foot of the crags, before he collapses and dies. And that’s it. Roddy kills George, George kills Roddy. No other entities need apply.”

  The two of them were looking at him with virtually the same doubtful expression.

  “What?” he said. “Problem?”

  “Just a teeny, little one, Gideon, dear,” Julie said. “I think you haven’t been getting enough sleep. You’ve forgotten. George was shot through the heart. His heart was ‘shredded.’”

  “Yes, and so?”

  “So how could he run seventy or eighty feet?” John put in. “You can’t run two feet if your heart’s shredded. You’re dead.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Getting shot in the heart doesn’t kill you?”

  “That’s right, you can live without a heart—”

  “You can live without a heart—?”

  He wasn’t sure which one of them the high-pitched cry of disbelief came from, maybe both.

  “Right, you can,” he told them. “Not too long, I admit, and your quality of life isn’t going to be that great.”

  The thing is, he explained, it isn’t the destruction of your heart, per se, that kills you; it’s the death of your brain, due to the loss of the oxygenated blood that gets pumped up from your heart. Without a functioning heart, you’re still alive . . . for a while. Without a functioning brain, you’re dead right now. But even when the heart was “shredded,” the brain could continue to function for ten or fifteen seconds, and probably more, on the blood that was in it already and what had already been on its way in the carotid arteries.

  “But wouldn’t you lose consciousness?” Julie asked.

  “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” John said.

  “Usually, you do,” Gideon said, “but that’s not strictly because of the lack of blood to the brain. It has more to do with overall systemic shock and everything that follows from it. And some people are simply more resistant to that than other people are. They stay conscious, right up until the millisecond they die. People have run a lot more than seventy or eighty feet after taking a fatal gunshot to the heart.”

  Julie leaned back, thinking it over. “And you think that’s what actually happened.”

  “That or something close to it. It makes more sense to me than a second killer, Peltier or anyone else.”

  “Okay, Doc,” said John, “since it’s coming from you, I’ll buy it, but I don’t see how you’re gonna prove it.”

  Gideon grinned. “Happily, I don’t have to. All I have to do is tell Mike. It’s up to him what to do with it.”

  “He’ll buy it too,” John said. “It’ll let him clear the case, which every policeman loves more than anything else.”

  “To tell you the truth,” Julie said, “I never did have much faith it was going to get solved, not definitively, even with you working on it, Gideon. Too many uncertainties, too much water under the bridge. Did you honestly think you were going to get anywhere with it?”

  Gideon considered but not for long. “Not really,” he said.

  CHAPTER 33

  Gideon told Clapper about it that afternoon. The chief inspector was noncommittal, but a week later, when Julie and Gideon were home in Washington State and taking a breakfast hike along nearby Dungeness Spit, a wild, curling, six-mile-long finger of sand and driftwood, Clapper called from Jersey. Gideon took it on his iPhone and was gratified to hear that his hypothesis, while far from incontrovertible, was as good a solution as Clapper was likely to get (which was exactly the way Gideon saw it), and he was closing the file. Again.

  “But what I’ve really rung you about is to tell you that we’ve gotten some evidence against Rafe that is incontrovertible—”

  “Nothing’s incontrovertible when you’ve got a jury involved,” Gideon said.

  “You’re right enough about that, mate, but this comes close. We got a warrant and sent a couple of men out to his house, and they came back with a pair of boots, one of which had some very interesting material on the sole.”

  “Ah, limestone.”

  “Better. A clump of gray fibers at the toe that have now been identified as four-ply, medium-weight Aran yarn . . . identical to the ones in the cardigan that Abbott was wearing.”

  “He kicked him over?”

  Clapper shrugged. “So it would seem.”

  “Well, that’s it, then.”

  “That’s our opinion too, but of course there’ll be a trial, probably in July sometime, and we’ll need you to come and testify.”

  “Sure, that won’t be a problem.”

  “Good. Would you be able to bring Julie? I know Millie would love to see her, and July is a very fine month here. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to pay her passage—”

  “Just a minute, Mike, let me ask her.”

  Julie had stepped down to the shoreline while he was speaking and was up to her bare ankles in the gentle surf.

  “I’m going to have to go back to Jersey in July for a few days, Julie. Care to come along?”

  “Love to.”

  “Great. Mike, she says—”

  “Gideon,” said Julie, “why don’t you put it on speakerphone? Then I can talk to him myself.”

  “An iPhone has a speakerphone?”

  She laughed. “Gimme.” He handed it to her, and she tapped in a few mysterious commands and gave it back to him. “Mike?” she said from three feet away. “Hi, I would love to come back to Jersey in July.”

  Mike’s voice floated tinnily from the speaker that Gideon hadn’t known was there. “Well, that’s wonderful, luv. The missus will be delighted. Did you two enjoy your stay at the Revere? If you like, the department can have you put up there again—now, it won’t be in the lavish suite that the senator provided, but—”

  “That’s fine,” she said, checking with Gideon, who nodded. “I’m dying to go back to the Revere. It’s been preying on my mind.”

  “Good. Oh, I wanted to tell you two . . . we’ve found the coffin van and its contents, thanks to my excellent associate PC Vickery. On a hunch, the young man looked through local French papers from the three regions to which car ferries run back and forth from Jersey. And in one of them he found an item—yes, he reads French—about an unmarked black van, license plates removed, with a coffin inside—an inhabited coffin—that was found at the Saint-Malo ferry car park, paid for ten days.”

  “He took it to France?” Gideon said. “But he was back in Jersey, having dinner with us, that same day. Is that possible?”

  “The ferry journey takes an hour and twenty minutes. Assuming he drove the van on, drove it off, left it in the car park, and came back on the turnaround ferry, we’re talking about less than three hours in total. So yes, it could have been done. It was done, I have no doubt.”

  “Sonofagun,” Gideon said. “He’s really smooth. He couldn’t have been more relaxed that night.”

  There was a little more chitchat between the three of them, and Clapper rang off. They continued on their walk, heading for a giant driftwood tree trunk that they liked to have their breakfast on (today, bacon and egg sandwiches from home) because there always seemed to be seals or otters playing just offshore.

  “Julie?” Gideon said as they walked. “Why are you ‘dying’ to go back to the Revere? Why’s it been ‘preying’ on your mind?”

  She looked up at him, smiling. “Because I never did get to sit in that chair that Ringo sat in. Obviously.”

  AFTERWORD

  The first few chapters of Switcheroo are set in the Channel Islands during the five years that they were occupied by German m
ilitary forces. While the main characters in the book and the story it tells are fictional, the background details are not. The evacuations, the Churchill speeches, the return of evacuees at the end of the war—all are from the historical record.

  For those who would like to know more about this unusual chapter in English history (these islands were the only British territory that suffered occupation in World War II), an Internet search will provide plenty of factual material and excellent references. But for those who prefer a more intimate perspective, let me recommend a couple of fictional treatments: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel/memoir by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer that is every bit as charming as its title, and Island at War, a Masterpiece Theatre TV miniseries.

  In writing this book I was greatly helped by PC Chris Ingham of the States of Jersey Police, who was most cordial when I showed up, unannounced, at police headquarters with a notebook full of questions on local police procedure and who then patiently and amicably continued to answer additional ones by e-mail over the months that followed. Thank you, Chris!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Bob Lampert

  Former forensic anthropology professor and Edgar Award–winner Aaron Elkins can’t seem to let go of the past—he has written his eighteenth book featuring the globetrotting Skeleton Detective, Gideon Oliver. Often credited with launching the forensic mystery genre in the early 1980s with Fellowship of Fear, Elkins has written nonfiction articles for the New York Times travel magazine, Smithsonian magazine, and Writer’s Digest. His books have been made into a major ABC television series and have been published in over a dozen languages. In addition to the Edgar, which he won for Old Bones, his fourth Gideon Oliver book, he has also won a Nero Award and shared an Agatha Award with his wife and coauthor, Charlotte Elkins. Elkins lives in a small town on the Washington coast, where (when he’s not writing) he serves as the forensic anthropologist for the Olympic Peninsula Cold Case Task Force.