Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “A friend wanted to know if it was human.”

  “Your friend, the policeman?” Adrian inquired after a short pause.

  “Yes, Chief Inspector Sotomayor.”

  “And where did he get it?”

  “He got it from Sheila Chan’s room at the Eliott Hotel.”

  This time there was plenty of eye bugging and jaw dropping, but, with the exception of Buck, who, as a nonarchaeologist wouldn’t be aware of the bone’s scientific importance, it was universal, so it provided no useful information. It did, however, produce an excited flurry of observations.

  “My God,” Adrian whispered, “she found another piece.”

  “Sure,” Pru said angrily, “remember how she was always down there, prowling around the site, even though she wasn’t supposed to? Now we know why. She had no right to keep this to herself. For all we know, she turned up more than this. There may be other bones.”

  “I’m sorry, I refuse to believe there was anything left to find,” said Corbin with a distinct edge to his voice. “As Adrian will confirm, we were extremely thorough. We left no stone un—”

  “I bet that’s what her paper was going to be on!” Pru said. “She wanted all the credit for herself.”

  “No, I think not,” Corbin replied. “The topics for the papers had to be in two months before the conference, so a bone that she found a day or two earlier couldn’t possibly have been the subject.”

  Gideon took advantage of the calming, damping effect of Corbin’s sensible, put-you-to-sleep delivery to raise a question. “What exactly was the topic of her paper, does anybody remember? Pru, you were the program chair.”

  “Yes, I was,” she said, thinking. “But you know, as I recall, it wasn’t anything that grabbed you. Europa Point Reevaluated, something along those lines. Nothing about a new find.”

  “The First Family: A Reevaluation, actually,” Audrey corrected. “I remember being quite curious about it.”

  Adrian was peering hard at Gideon. “I have the impression you know more about this than you’re saying. I suggest you let the rest of us in on it.”

  “No, I don’t, Adrian. You’ve come to the same conclusions I have. You have the same facts I do, and the same questions.” Which was pretty much the truth, if you didn’t count the fact that no one but Gideon (and Julie) was aware that Sheila’s death was now the subject of a murder investigation.

  “Why exactly would the police have had it?” Adrian asked, scowling at Gideon. “Perhaps you can tell us that.”

  Corbin answered for him. “From when she disappeared—when nobody knew what happened to her—the police were looking into it, remember? They would have searched her room. And afterward, inasmuch as she didn’t have any next of kin, there would have been nobody to send—”

  “Yes, yes,” an impatient Adrian said. “I understand all that. But why is it of interest to them now?” He turned again to Gideon. “Why should they care if she had some vertebrae in her room? She was an archaeologist. And why exactly would they care now? She’s been dead for two years.”

  “That’s a good question,” Pru said, also looking at Gideon. “Have they reopened her case? Do they think there was something suspicious about it?”

  “Well, um—” Gideon began.

  He was saved by a hearty knock-knock coming from the entrance to the dining room—Rowley’s cheerful greeting. “Your opulent transportation to the Society meetings awaits outside. All aboard that’s coming aboard.” His eyes did some bugging of their own. “I say, what are those?”

  While everybody tried to tell him at once, Gideon snared the vertebrae, which had been making their way around the table—under his extremely attentive scrutiny—and popped them safely back into the sack.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Corbin asked as his eyes greedily followed their progression.

  It was just the question Gideon wanted. “I have to return them to the police, of course. I’m off to do that right now.” This much was true. Just before coming down he’d received a call from police headquarters asking him to be in Fausto’s office at ten.

  “But will they return that tenth thoracic to us?” Corbin asked. “The cast doesn’t matter, but that tenth is a new find. It belongs in the British Museum with the rest of her.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’ll get back to the museum eventually,” Gideon said.

  But for the moment, at least, two important points in regard to his safety had been established. Everyone at that table understood that (a) the T10’s provenance was now common knowledge, and (b) it would no longer be in Gideon’s keeping.

  Very good, Julie’s satisfied nod told him. Mission accomplished.

  WHILE Julie went off to make a prearranged courtesy call on the head naturalist of the Upper Rock Nature Preserve, Gideon walked down to police headquarters at New Mole House. He found the DCI waiting for him, seated behind his desk in his usual office uniform—an immaculate silk dress shirt (plum colored this time) with the cuffs neatly folded over his forearms, and a tie (blue-gray) that must have been carefully chosen to match. A few forms were spread out before him.

  “You know an archaeologist named de la Garza?” he asked without looking up.

  “Good morning to you too,” Gideon said, sitting down across the desk. “Estéban de la Garza? Yes, I do. A prof at the University of Cádiz.”

  “Correct. Well, he’s not up there at the Cádiz campus, though. They’ve got a branch down here at Algeciras, right across the bay—la Escuela Politécnica Superior—which is where their archaeology department is.”

  “Is that so? That’s very interesting. And why are you telling me all this?”

  Fausto slid one of the forms across the desk to him. “Check out the last two lines.”

  The form was from the Eliott Hotel, a list of Sheila Chan’s outgoing phone calls. Gideon scanned down to the bottom of the page.

  21/08/05 08:37 AM 34 95 663 05 72 Algcrs Sp 01 minutes 21/08/05 09:50 AM 34 95 663 05 72 Algcrs Sp 11 minutes

  “Uh-huh. And this tells me . . . ?”

  “This tells you that what we believe were the last two phone calls Chan ever made were to your pal de la Garza. I was hoping you might have some idea why.”

  “Nope, not a clue.”

  “Do you know what his connection to Chan was? Was she ever a student of his or something?”

  “Not that I know of. She was at Cal. But maybe she was, I don’t know. Look, why ask me about it? Why don’t you just give him a call?”

  “Ooh, hey, what a great idea. Duh. I did call him, but it’s his office number, and the school wouldn’t give us his home number, and he doesn’t get in today till eleven thirty. He’s supposed to call then. I just thought it’d be helpful if there was something you knew about it.”

  “Sorry, there isn’t. Well, I do know her dissertation was on Iberian Paleolithic skeletal anomalies. I was helping her. Maybe he was working on it with her too.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He took the sheet back and stared at it for a moment, receding into his own thoughts, then yawned and looked back up at Gideon. “So what are you doing here, anyway?”

  “We had a meeting at ten. One of your people called.”

  “A meeting about what?”

  “Good question. He said be here, and here I am. I always do what the police tell me.”

  “Yeah, right,” Fausto said. “Well, it beats me.” He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back with another yawn, his swivel chair creaking. “What the hell, what’s new?”

  “Actually, there’s been another development you probably ought to know about. Somebody broke into my room last night.”

  Fausto’s hands unclasped. The chair snapped forward. “I probably ought to know about?” He raised his eyes heavenward. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe this. Somebody breaks into your room and you don’t run for the phone and call the cops first thing? After all that’s been happening?”

  “Well, it was almost two in the morning by the time we
found out, and nothing was taken, and everybody’s fingerprints were already in the room, and their DNA for that matter, so—”

  “Okay.” He sighed. “Save it, tell me later. What were they after, do you know?”

  “Oh, yes, this.” He placed the bag on Fausto’s desk. “The little vase that Rosie made out of those ‘plaster’ vertebrae. She dropped it off at the hotel last night.”

  “Why would anyone be interested enough in a couple of plaster—”

  “Turns out they weren’t plaster, Fausto. The top one was, but the bottom one was real.”

  Fausto stared at him. “The bottom one was . . . ?”

  Fifteen minutes later, as Gideon was winding up his explanation, the phone buzzed. Fausto picked it up and listened. “Okay, tell him I’m on my way. Now I remember why I wanted you to be here,” he said to Gideon as he hung up. “It’s Orton, the dynamite guy. He said he’d have something for us by ten, and I figured you’d want to hear it from the horse’s mouth. He was supposed to come here, but now he says he wants us out at the Point. He wants to show us something.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are we talking about here? What dynamite guy?”

  “Didn’t I mention it?” Fausto was inserting his cuff links. “Ted Orton is from FSS—the Forensic Service Lab in London. He’s checking over the Europa Point site for signs of dynamiting.”

  “And he’s already here? He already has a report to make?”

  “Yeah, sure, I called him yesterday, right after you told me about the maggots.”

  “Did you, really? I wasn’t sure how seriously you took me. I wasn’t sure if you believed me.”

  “Hey, man, you wound me. I always believe what you say. Anyway, he was here by four o’clock; it’s less than a three-hour flight. He spent maybe two hours at the Point yesterday, till it started getting dark, and eight o’clock this morning he calls to say he got some interesting results.” He shrugged into his jacket and shot his cuffs. “So? You coming or not?”

  “I’m coming,” Gideon said.

  TED Orton was a gangling, horse-faced man in his late forties, wearing crisply ironed jeans, blindingly white tennis shoes, and a new “Rock of Gibraltar” sweatshirt with a picture of a Barbary ape mother and infant on it. Having led them down to a sunlit, windy spot atop the ridge of earth that had buried the Europa Point cave—in fact, no more than a dozen feet directly above the hole from which Sheila’s body had been dug out—he knelt down and yanked on a foot-long length of thin, orange tubing, made of plastic or rubber, that disappeared into the earth at his feet. “Anybody have any idea what it is?”

  Fausto and Gideon, hunkered down beside him, shook their heads. “Nope,” Fausto said. “What is it?”

  “It’s just what I’ve been hunting for,” Orton told them. “If it’s proof of an explosion you’re looking for, you couldn’t ask for anything better than this.” He was practically bursting with pride at having discovered something important, a feeling Gideon understood very well.

  “So you’re saying somebody did trigger the landslide?” Gideon asked. “You’re positive?”

  “Completely.”

  Fausto fingered the tubing doubtfully. “What’s it supposed to be, some kind of fuse? No, wait, it can’t be a fuse. If it was a fuse, it’d be burned away. It wouldn’t be there anymore.”

  “Correct, Chief Inspector, it would not. But the fact of the matter is, fuses are not much in use nowadays. Too unpredictable, too inconsistent. This—” He gave it another tug. “—is a piece of what is called a ‘shock tube.’ Made of plastic. It serves the same function as a fuse, but is far more reliable and infinitely faster. The inside of it, you see, is generally coated with a thin layer of HMX explosive mixed with something along the order of ten percent powdered aluminum. This makes a highly sensitive but low-power detonating medium. It would likely have been set off with some small, handheld device—a percussion primer, an electric match—by a person standing somewhere nearby, but well out of danger—unless of course, he was somewhat lacking in intellect. Once it was set off, the detonation would have raced along this tubing for a hundred, two hundred feet, perhaps even more, at the end of which it would have detonated a blasting cap, which would in turn have set off the terminal high-explosive charge—oh, dynamite, gelignite, ammonium nitrate, something along those lines—the result being—”

  “So if it acted like a fuse, how come it didn’t burn up?” Fausto interrupted. “Like a fuse.”

  “Oh, the layer of powder on the inside is extremely thin, and the detonation, as I said, literally races along the inside of the tube—at over a mile a second—so the powder is consumed, while the tube is unharmed.”

  “Uh-huh. So where’s the rest of it supposed to be?”

  “Down there,” Ted said, gesturing at the dirt, “however much was left of it after the explosion. I hope you didn’t expect me to dig it out. That’s not part of my contract. I just do the brain work, not the muscle work.”

  “No, I mean where’s the rest of it up here?” What, the bomber took it with him? That’s what you’re assuming?”

  “That would be my assumption, yes,” Orton said. If his feelings were hurt because he’d expected congratulations from Fausto, not skepticism, he wasn’t showing it. But then, maybe he already knew Fausto.

  Gideon, now down on his knees, had been peering at the end of the tube while they’d been talking. “Ted, it looks to me as if the end here has been cleanly cut, not torn apart by an explosion. Why would that be?”

  “Yes, you’re quite right. Would you like to hear my scenario?”

  “We’d love to hear your scenario,” Fausto said.

  The three men stood up, to the accompaniment of a creaking of middle-aged knees. A gust of wind off the Strait brought an unexpected whiff of fragrance—a spice of some kind, coriander, caraway—perhaps from the freighter off in the distance, perhaps all the way from Morocco.

  “I envision your bomber in a safe place—up there somewhere, or maybe a little off to the side,” said Orton a little dreamily, “setting off his bomb from his end of the shock tube. He assumes that after the explosion, it’ll be a simple matter for him to reel it in and take the evidence away with him. But ten or twenty feet at this end get caught in the huge mud slide he’s created and he’s unable to pull it out. So, in something of an understandable hurry, he cuts the tube at the point where it enters the mud, thinks no one will ever find the rest of it in any case, and makes good his escape. Two years go by, during which a certain amount of erosion takes place, revealing a foot or two of the tubing lying on the newly exposed surface, at which point I enter the picture and discover it. End of scenario. How does that strike you?”

  “Pretty good,” Fausto allowed. “Not bad.”

  “One thing bothers me,” Gideon said. “This ‘thinks no one will ever find the rest of it’ part. Ted, all of our suspects are pretty bright people. They’d take something like erosion into account. It’s hard to imagine they’d just assume nobody would ever find it, and let it go at that. You found it, after all.”

  “That’s so, but only because suspicions had already been raised. I was searching for it, and I knew what I was looking for. But finding it is very different from merely seeing it. Let’s take you, for example. You’re an intelligent person, a famous paleontologist, as I understand it—”

  Gideon was used to this and let it pass.

  “—and let’s say you were prowling around the slide area hunting for some old bones or whatever, and you came upon this, sticking out of the ground. What would you make of it?”

  Gideon looked at the dirty orange tube. “I’d think it was a piece of old plastic tubing, just some miscellaneous trash.”

  “And there you have it,” Orton said.

  “Wait a minute, Ted,” Fausto said, doubtful again. “Didn’t you say the powder inside it would have been consumed?”

  “I did. Totally.”

  “And the tubing itself wouldn’t have been affected?”
/>   “Not a bit.”

  “So how do you know it’s shock tube? How do you know it isn’t just a piece of miscellaneous trash?”

  “I know because my experience of a dozen years tells me that it is not,” Orton said stiffly.

  “Oh,” said Fausto.

  Oh, thought Gideon.

  “That,” Orton said with his first smile of the morning, “and a subtle but telling clue on the exterior of the tubing itself.”

  He produced a folding, rectangular magnifying glass from somewhere and offered it to Fausto, who knelt and studied the tubing through it.

  “Huh,” said Fausto, handing the lens to Gideon. “That’s subtle, all right.”

  Gideon took his turn. “Let’s see . . . there’s some kind of tiny lettering . . .”

  With the aid of the glass, it jumped into focus.

  VOLOX LOW DENSITY POLYETHYLENE SHOCK TUBING.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AT eleven thirty they got back to Fausto’s office. At 11:31 the phone buzzed. Fausto snatched up the receiver, and listened. “Okay, thanks.” He reached for another button, then paused. “It’s de la Garza. How well do you know this guy?”

  “A little. We run into each other at meetings.”

  He remembered Estéban de la Garza as a courtly, elderly archaeologist with a lean, pockmarked, deeply lined face. Like Ivan Gunderson, he struck Gideon as a throwback, but Gunderson had been late nineteenth century; de la Garza was more early eighteenth. He would have looked right at home in a wig and knee breeches, serving as royal schoolmaster to the court of Philip VI. His patrician manner put off some of the freer spirits who attended the anthropology conferences, but Gideon had always liked him. (But then, Gideon liked just about everybody, a personality flaw that he couldn’t seem to overcome, despite its having backfired on him many times more than once.)

  "How’s his English?”

  “Fine, perfect, better than mine. Prettier, anyway.” It was true. Estéban spoke English as if he were translating directly from the Spanish. He eschewed such rude English shortcuts as contractions and apostrophized possessives. For him there were no it’s, or wouldn’ts, or don’ts; and the fossil’s bones and Dr. X’s hypothesis came out as the bones of the fossil and the hypothesis of Dr. X. His ornate, measured speech was a pleasure to listen to, Gideon thought, always assuming one had the time to spare.