Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 06 - Icy Clutches

by Icy Clutches

  "Did you know about his relationship with Jocelyn Yount?"

  "Since I came up here, I heard about it. Don't know as I believe everything I hear."

  "Would you say he had a bad temper?"

  "I wouldn't say diddley-squat,” Pratt said, not so much angrily as doggedly. “Now, look, mister, if you're trying to get me to say maybe my brother killed somebody way back then, you're gonna have a heck of a wait. Besides, he's the one who got killed, far as I can see."

  "What makes you say that?” Minor asked.

  "Those are his sunglasses they found, aren't they, all busted up? That ought to prove something.” What it proved he didn't say. “Hell, sure, he could get mad like anybody else, but he was a good-natured kid; bighearted. Blow steam off at you, and then five minutes later buy you a beer. Jimmy didn't kill anyone. No such thing."

  He jammed his chin down on his chest, and his hands into the pockets of his brown jumpsuit. “Didn't sell anybody any bum stocks either,” he finished in a mutter, but without rancor.

  "You loved him a lot, didn't you?” John asked.

  "Well, sure I loved him.” He began to say more but stopped. He pinched his long, lumpy nose between thumb and forefinger.

  Minor asked another question. “Do you think Dr. Henckel has a point when she says Professor Tremaine's to blame for taking your brother and the others out on the ice when there was danger of an avalanche?"

  "Didn't know she said it."

  "She had a Park Service report on it,” John said. “She was showing it to you and Dr. Judd a few nights ago. “I understand she gave it to you to read."

  "She did?” Pratt's eyebrows drew together. “In the bar? Is that what that was?"

  "You didn't read it?"

  "I looked at it. Didn't see much point in reading it. That was all over and done with a long time ago."

  "Do you still have it?” Minor asked.

  "No, I probably threw it away. Maybe it's in my room. Be glad to look for it, if you want."

  "Please do,” Minor said. “So you don't hold Tremaine responsible for the death of your brother?"

  The pipe had gone out. Pratt leaned over, using a small folding knife to scrape the sour-smelling Bottle into an ashtray, taking his time. “Now look,” he said reasonably, deliberately, keeping his eyes on his work. “I didn't kill Tremaine, and my brother didn't kill this Fisk or anybody else. I don't hold with grudges, and neither did Jimmy. There's more important things in life."

  "I'm glad to hear you say it,” Minor said pleasantly.

  Pratt nodded and gathered his long legs under him. “That it, then?"

  "One more thing,” John said. “Any objection to letting us into your room?"

  "Guess not,” Pratt said. Then a moment later: “What for?"

  "I just want to test for myself the kind of sounds that come through from Tremaine's room."

  "Sure.” He dug in a zippered leg pouch for his key and handed it to John. “There you go. You can leave it at the desk."

  "You can come with us. It'd probably be better if you did."

  "No, thanks. You boys go ahead and do your job. I'll go and be first in the chow line."

  * * * *

  John stood by Pratt's bed while Minor followed his instructions, working the shower next door in Tremaine's bathroom. As Pratt had told them, turning off the water produced a hollow double clank in the pipes, sufficient to awaken someone drowsing in Pratt's room. Neither the tap at the sink nor the toilet produced similar noises.

  He got up, went into Pratt's bathroom, and knocked on the wall.

  "Hello?” Minor said on the other side, his measured voice distinct.

  "Fine!” John yelled. “Now try it from the bedroom.” He heard the floor creak as Minor left the bathroom, but nothing more.

  A few seconds later the floor creaked again and Minor returned to Tremaine's bathroom. “Could you hear me?” he called through the wall.

  "Not a thing,” John called back.

  "Which seems to mean,” he told Minor a few moments later, as they clumped along the wooden walkway back to the main building, “that Tremaine'd just taken a shower when he heard a noise in his room—"

  "Or maybe heard it while he was still in the shower, and turned the water off."

  "No, because Pratt said four or five minutes went by after the shower got turned off."

  "Assuming Pratt's telling the truth."

  "True. Anyway, Tremaine calls out a hello and then—what?"

  "Presumably he doesn't get an answer, he comes out of the bathroom, and he's killed by the intruder he's discovered."

  "Doing what?"

  "Looking for the manuscript, I suppose."

  "Maybe,” John said.

  "What else?"

  "I'm not sure, Julian. I need to think about this some more.” They reached the lodge building and trotted up the short flight of steps. “Lunchtime."

  "Shall we stop by the Icebreaker Lounge first?"

  "Little early in the day, isn't it? Anyway, the bar doesn't open till five. I've got some vodka in my room if you can't make it till then."

  "Very amusing, John. As a matter of fact I had something else in mind."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 17

  * * * *

  But I don't know who those bones belonged to,” Professor Worriner said simply. “I never did, except for one of them."

  Gideon restrained his dismay. “But the article said you identified them as James Pratt's and Steven Fisk's. You mean the paper got it wrong?"

  "I'm afraid they slightly misrepresented what I said. Tell me, have you found the popular press particularly reliable in such matters?” He smiled, his gentle gray eyes suddenly lighting up. “Let me see, don't I recall a recent reference to some of your remarks in one of the national tabloids...?"

  Gideon winced. Six months earlier he had given an abstruse all-university lecture ("Human Evolution: A Non-teleological Perspective") in which his thesis had been that, while the “logic” of evolution was comprehensible looking backwards, you couldn't use it to look ahead. Evolution—that is, adaptation—didn't “advance” or “progress"; it responded to the pressures of the moment. If there were a biological or reproductive advantage to being large, for example, humans would get larger. If there were an advantage to being small, they would get smaller. Somebody in the audience had raised his hand and asked a question: You mean we could all evolve into midgets? Yes, Gideon had said. Well, how long would something like that take, somebody else had wanted to know. It would depend, Gideon had told him. lf, for some unimaginable reason, everyone over five feet tall stopped having children right now, today, six-footers could be biological oddities in a few generations; by 2050, say.

  Somehow, Inside Dope had gotten hold of it. “Scientist Says We're Becoming Midgets!” the headline had screamed from the checkout stands. “By A.D. 2050 Humans Will Be Four-Foot Freaks, Claims U. of Washington Professor.” With Gideon's picture. Copies were still making the rounds on campus. He'd be lucky if he lived it down by 2050.

  "No, not wholly reliable,” he said, laughing. “All right, just what did you say?"

  "I said that one of the fragments, which consisted of a third of a mandible, including two teeth, had been conclusively identified as coming from Steven Fisk—"

  "Identified from dental work?"

  "Of course. How else are we poor anthropologists to make conclusive identifications? We had a time tracking down the dentist, I can tell you that.” He broke a chocolate-chip cookie in half, then snapped one of the halves into two smaller pieces, placed one in his mouth, and chewed deliberately. The thin sheet of platysmal muscle at the front of his throat jumped. “There were several other fragments: the superior half of a right scapula, an almost complete left humerus, and a mid-shaft segment of a second left humerus. All were male."

  "Two left humeri? So you knew for sure you had at least two people."

  "Precisely. Two men, as I think you'll agree when you see
the fragments. And inasmuch as there were only two males lost in the avalanche, and we already knew from the teeth that one was Steven Fisk, the other had to be James Pratt. Nothing too esoteric there."

  "But, except for the mandible, you couldn't say which bones belonged to which man."

  "No, not with certainty. Well, not even with uncertainty, if it comes to that. That is exactly what I put in my report, but the press was a little carried away."

  "Only a little, really. You did determine that you had the remains of two people, and you knew who they were. You just couldn't apportion the fragments piece by piece.” He shrugged. “Same problem I'm having."

  "It's kind of you to put it that way, but it throws a monkey wrench in what you hoped to learn, doesn't it? Would you care for some more coffee? It's Viennese roast; decaffeinated, I'm afraid."

  Kenneth Worriner was a tall, thin man of eighty-five; elegant and fragile, with skin like rice paper and hair as glossy and white as lamb's wool. With his courtly bearing, his prow of a nose, and his sunken cheeks he reminded Gideon of the pictures of Ramses II; or, more accurately, of the pictures of Ramses’ mummy. His clothes were more up-to-date than the Nineteenth Dynasty, but not by that much: a full, droopy bow tie, white flannel trousers and vest (with chain), and a dark-blue flannel blazer with a carefully folded handkerchief in the breast pocket.

  Here in the land of tractor caps and red suspenders, he seemed like an alien from another planet. In fact, as he had explained to Gideon, he was a Beacon Hill Bostonian who'd been educated at Harvard. He'd been in his twenty-eighth year of teaching at Wellesley—he was a teacher, he said emphatically, not a researcher—when a two-year appointment had opened up at the University of Alaska. Worriner, then sixty, had taken it for a change of scene and he had been the man on the spot in 1964 when Tirku had disgorged its first load of bones. He had also fallen in love with Alaska, and it was in this rugged country he'd settled when he retired from teaching.

  But in his own living room—jacketed, cravated, delicately poised at a marquetry table—he might have been pouring coffee at his old eighteenth-century bay window overlooking Louisburg Square.

  "That's fine, thanks,” Gideon said when his cup was half full. Decaffeinated or not, Worriner liked his coffee strong to the point of bitterness. “That mandible fragment, Kenneth—which side was it, right or left?"

  "The right. Just about the entire ascending ramus, and as far forward as the second bicuspid."

  "Was the condyle broken off?"

  "No, it was in good condition."

  Gideon smacked his hands together. “Ah, great, we're finally going to find out a few things."

  What they were going to find out was who had been murdered on Tirku Glacier in June 1960. The right ramus of the mandible was the right rear segment, the part that rises from the back corner of the jaw to the underside of the skull. It was precisely the part missing from the newly found mandible, the absence of which made it impossible to say whether the jaw and skull fragment came from the same person.

  But now, with this ramus having been identified as Steven's, they would be able to say that and more. They would start by seeing whether the condyle on Worriner's piece fit positively into the mandibular fossa on the telltale skull fragment that Gideon had brought with him. Then they would match the broken front edge of Worriner's piece against the broken rear edge of the mutilated jaw fragment Gideon had also brought along.

  If they got a fit at both ends—if all three pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle—then the man who'd had an ice ax driven into his head was Steven Fisk. With absolutely no possibility of doubt.

  And if they didn't, then just as surely that man was not Steven Fisk, which meant he was James Pratt. Period.

  He explained all this with growing excitement as Worrier led the way back to his study. The ex-professor left his aluminum walker in the living room and moved slowly, stoop-shouldered but straight-backed, pushing against the walls of the narrow hallway for support.

  "Well, yes, your logic is reasonable enough,” he said, but he sounded oddly subdued. “Go ahead and put your material on the table."

  The old man's study was like any other academic's study: nondescript, mismatched file cabinets, some wooden, some metal; book-filled shelves wherever there was wall space; a couple of dusty, elderly typewriters; books and papers everywhere, even on the chair seats. And even, on a table of its own, the essential late-twentieth-century touch: a covered Compaq computer. Over everything hung the fusty, scholarly, stimulating smell of the printed page.

  Gideon put his case on the scarred library table that had probably been cleared especially for his visit. He took out two irregularly shaped packages, thickly wrapped in newspaper, and used a pair of Worriner's scissors to cut the tape around them.

  As he snipped he kept talking. There was the possibility that Worriner's ramus would fit the jaw but not the skull, or vice versa. That would be an interesting twist, because it would mean that the man with the broken jaw and the man with the broken head were two different people. Still, they would know who was who, which was a long way ahead of where they were now.

  When he'd gotten the package open he laid out the two pieces of bone, brown and shiny with their new coats of preservative. “All right,” he said enthusiastically, “let's have a look at that ramus of yours."

  Worriner cleared his throat. “Well, er, Gideon...I'm afraid I don't exactly have it."

  "You don't...” This time he couldn't quite hide his disappointment. “But you said—"

  "Yes, “I know. “I do have the bones...All but that one."

  He explained. Because the ramus had been positively identified, it had been sent to the next of kin: Steven Fisk's brother in Idaho. Surely Gideon saw the propriety of this? (The best Gideon could do was grunt, which Worriner accepted as affirmation.) But the rest of the remains, impossible to attribute definitely to either Pratt or Fisk, had been kept. Things being what they were in Alaska at the time, they had wound up in the physical anthropology laboratory collection and had been kindly delivered to Worriner's house that morning.

  "I do have some pictures of the ramus,” Worriner ventured timorously. “I think they're rather good."

  They were. Ten clear black-and-white photographs taken from all the conventional angles and then some. The two men got down to work. What would have taken thirty seconds with the ramus itself took thirty minutes of measurement, comparison, and discussion, but when they were finished they had their answer. The ramus in the photographs, the perforated skull fragment, and the broken mandible all came from the same person. Steven Fisk. The jealous boyfriend was victim, not murderer.

  Gideon sat back with a feeling of completion. With Worriner's considerable help he had done all that could reasonably be expected of an anthropologist. He had identified the remains. The rest was up to John Lau and the FBI. As John frequently and succinctly told him.

  Still, he was naturally interested in seeing the other fragments that had come from the glacier in 1964, and Worriner was interested in showing him. Worriner opened a set of numbered, clasped envelopes and laid the pieces out in a row on the table.

  There was a beaten-up piece of a right scapula that Worriner had identified as male, age twenty to twenty-five.

  "That's just what I would have said,” Gideon told him. “Really?” Worriner said. “Well.” He was unreservedly pleased.

  Next was an almost complete left humerus, broken off just above the epicondyles so that only the elbow process was missing. Worriner had identified it as coming from a male, in the same age range, with medium to medium-heavy musculature. “A mesomorph,” he said, using the archaic terminology.

  Gideon nodded. Clear enough.

  Next to this was a columnar segment about five inches long; a piece of another left humerus, from the middle of the shaft.

  "As you remarked, this was quite crucial to the analysis,” Worriner told him, “because it meant that there were at least two individuals represented, and bo
th of them were adult males. As you see.” He rolled the bone over, showing a well-defined, lumpy crest that ran almost the length of the piece.

  Again Gideon nodded. The crest was the deltoid tuberosity, so named because it was the insertion point of the deltoid, the big muscle that formed the beefy mass of the shoulder. As with any other tendon-bone connection, the larger and more powerful the muscle, the rougher and more pronounced the bony insertion point. And the rougher and more pronounced the insertion point, the greater the likelihood that it was male.

  Of course it was chancy to assign sex or anything else on the basis of a single criterion, but on this otherwise smooth piece of bone there wasn't anything else to go on. Except for the tuberosity, everything about it was borderline, just the kind of fragment an anthropologist hates: maybe male, maybe female. Fortunately, it was one heck of a deltoid tuberosity; nothing borderline about it.

  As he told Worriner, he would have drawn the same conclusion. Adult male; there was nothing else to say about it.

  Worriner looked highly gratified. He lowered himself into a disreputable old wooden swivel chair. “Well then. I hope coming here hasn't been a complete waste of time?"

  No, Gideon told him, he'd learned just what he'd hoped to learn. When he arrived in Juneau he hadn't had a victim.

  Now he had Steven Fisk.

  * * * *

  Gideon walked from Worriner's hillside house to downtown Juneau by way of three flights of wooden street stairs and then took the elevator to the top floor of the federal building, a white, nine-story cube of concrete aggregate pierced by windows shaped like coffins. The FBI resident agency was in Room 957, and there, with a sense of relief, he delivered the bone fragments into the hands of the agent, receiving an itemized receipt in return. He then used the telephone in the office to call Glacier Bay and waited while Mr. Granle went to find John.

  "Doc! How's it going?"