by Aaron Elkins
You heard about Jasper’s remains being dumped in the creek?”
“Yes,” Nellie said. “Horrible. Bizarre.”
John came close to laughing. Here was the guy who’d cheerfully worked out the plan to keep Jasper’s bones in a glass case for everybody in the world to gawk at for the next umpteen years, and now he was talking about bizarre because someone had taken them and put them into that nice, clean, peaceful river. These were weird people.
“Do you have any idea why anybody would do that?”
Nellie spread his hands helplessly. “It’s absolutely beyond me. That kind of thoughtless—”
“The idea’s come up that maybe Jasper was injured or already dead when he was put on that bus, and that someone wants to make sure no one takes a close look at him now.” At least he thought that was what Julie had been driving at.
Nellie laughed shortly. “Well, now, that’s a peculiar idea, I must say.”
“Did you actually see him get on the bus?”
“Well, no, it left at—I think it was 5:00 A.M.”
“When did you last see him alive?”
“The night before. We had dinner together. That is, all of us did.”
“What time did it break up?”
“I don’t know. Early. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock.” “You’re sure?”
“No, I’m not in the least sure. It was ten years ago. John, why all this hypothecating about Albert? I should think you’d have your hands full with Salish.”
“You don’t think there’s some connection?”
Nellie’s eyebrows went up. “Connection?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Between—? Forgive me, but I seem to have missed something in translation here.”
“That’s okay. We can talk about it later if we need to.” They would need to, he thought.
“Fine.” Nellie smacked his hands on his thighs and got up again, taking the file. “Quarter to four. I want to go back and check a few things before seeing what Gideon’s come up with. Unless you have anything else?”
John shook his head. “I’ll see you in there.”
Nellie had been gone no more than thirty seconds when Leland appeared.
“Somebody said I’d find you here,” he said, closing the door behind him. He looked, to John’s eyes, a little uneasy, a little squirrelly. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“If you’re trying to set up another poker game, forget it. I learned my lesson.”
Leland smiled woodenly. “Mr. Lau, there’s something you should know. Nobody else is going to volunteer it, so I might as well be the one.”
John had heard this opening a good many times in his career, and he had yet to have something useful come out of it. Most of the time, it muddied the waters instead of clearing them. He motioned to the chair Nellie had used, but Leland shook his head. He wanted, it seemed, to say his piece and get out.
“Go ahead,” John said.
Leland rearranged his mouth. His thick, old-fashioned glasses made his eyes look like the painted eyes in a doll’s head: round, flat, bland.
“Frieda and Chuck Salish were…carrying on.” “Who’s Frieda?” John said after a second.
“Frieda Hobert, Nellie’s wife.”
“Oh, yeah. What do you mean, carrying on? Could you be a little more specific?”
“I mean,” Leland said evenly, “carrying on. Loaded glances, odd disappearances together for twenty minutes at a time, whispered remarks no one else was supposed to notice. What else there was, I can only surmise.” His lips turned down. “The whole thing was pitiful. And repulsive.”
“Did Nellie know about it?”
Leland hesitated. “At the time, I thought he was the only one who didn’t.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know. That’s something for you to pursue if it seems appropriate. I’m not suggesting,” he added with care, “that it will turn out to have any pertinence to…to what we now know.”
“Tell me—why wouldn’t anyone else volunteer it?” “Mr. Lau, you have to understand. Nellie Hobert is God to these people. They adore him.”
“But you don’t?”
Leland colored; a round pink disk beneath each pale eye. “I resent your implication.”
“I wasn’t implying—”
“I have nothing against Nellie. His reputation may be a bit, shall we say, inflated, but that has nothing to do with anything. For ten years I’ve kept as quiet about this as anyone else. I would have continued to do so if Salish’s body hadn’t turned up. But, as it is, I thought it was information you should have.”
And so, John admitted to himself, it was. “Thanks, Dr. Roach, I’ll look into it. I may want to get some more information from you later.”
Wordlessly, Leland looked at him for a few moments. “If you like. It’s nothing to me one way or the other.” He turned and walked out. John picked up his untouched Three Musketeers and bit in.
Well, it was something to tuck away, assuming it was true. Could it be what Nellie was hiding? Maybe so. And if it was, where did that lead? To Nellie as Salish’s killer? John had trouble making himself take the idea seriously. Aside from Nellie’s being a nationally known forensic scientist (but then weren’t they all?), it was hard to picture the gnomelike little guy murdering someone in a fit of jealous rage. You never knew about those things, of course, but if Nellie had killed Salish, why would he tell Honeyman the skeleton was Salish’s in the first place? Why not just let it go, and let everyone keep thinking he’d died in the bus?
On the other hand (just to be fair), was it possible Nellie was trying to be clever? That he felt the skeleton’s identity was bound to come out anyway, and he could remove suspicion from himself by being the first person who called attention to it? Possible, yes, but—
“Still here, John?” It was Nellie again, head stuck through the doorway. “What say we join the others and go see what the estimable Dr. Oliver hath wrought?”
With a sigh of satisfaction Gideon finished shaping the soft swelling that formed the middle of the lower lip. The effort was going well; it was going to be one of his better jobs. At what he thought was mid-afternoon he wiped his fingers, stretched cramped shoulders, and looked up to suggest a break. To his surprise the room was filling with conference attendees.
“You weren’t due till four o’clock,” he said.
“It’s four-ten,” somebody answered. “The moment of truth.”
Gideon put down the modeling tool. “But it’s not done. I haven’t made a neck, there’s no back to the head, the color’s off, the—”
“Trying to weasel out, eh?” Nellie said happily. “Come, come, Gideon, time to face the music.”
Miranda thought it was, especially around the angles of the jaw; Leland, Frieda Hobert, and Nellie said it wasn’t even remotely similar; and Les was undecided. John, who had the photographs from the file, couldn’t make up his mind either—maybe yes, maybe no.
“Well, it’s not finished,” Gideon said testily. He had a right to be defensive. He’d put in nine straight hours on the thing. He’d worked painstakingly, and he’d done a damn good job, but the head simply wasn’t ready to be viewed, and he told them so again.
The students who had stuck it out with him through the long day—there were six of them left—jumped to his support. A reconstruction wasn’t like a photograph, they explained to their elders. It was unrealistic to expect an exact likeness. And, anyway, hadn’t Dr. Oliver said last night that there wasn’t enough time to do a finished job? Couldn’t they see it wasn’t complete? Couldn’t they let him have a little more time?
“Now, now,” Nellie said. “The necromancers have had their chance. I think we’d better let science take over tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute, Nellie,” Miranda said, “I think Gideon’s done a wonderful job so far. It’s sure starting to look familiar to me, and I think it’d be a pity not to finish it. How long would it take, Gideon?”
“Not long. A couple of hours, mayb
e. The hard part’s done.”
Miranda appealed to Nellie. “Two more hours.” The students applauded.
“Why don’t you finish up this evening, then?” someone asked.
The students groaned. They’d put in a long day too, and they were as tired of looking at the thing as Gideon was. Ordinarily, working in his lab, he spread this kind of work over a week or more, a few hours at a time.
“No,” he said, “I think we’re all bushed. If we do it at all, it’d be better to wait until tomorrow.”
Nellie used a finger to scratch the side of his beard. “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I’m sure John here would like a final report as soon as possible.”
“Another few hours isn’t going to hurt,” John said. He gestured at the skull. “This is interesting. I’d like to see the finished job.”
Nellie bowed his head. “I submit. All right, Gideon, it’s all yours. Finish it up tomorrow.”
“Good,” Gideon said. “We’ll get a good, early start—”
Julie, who had come in with the others, dug an elbow into his side. “Horseback ride,” she said under her breath. “Chuck-wagon breakfast. You are going.”
“—ah, immediately after the chuck-wagon breakfast. No later than ten.”
CHAPTER 11
For the first part of the way back they followed the trail they’d come on, a broad, shaded track of loamy soil that allowed them to go two by two. Gideon rode quietly alongside Julie, relaxed and content, his stomach full, enjoying the creak of the saddle under him, the pungent, gamy smell of horseflesh, the lolling, swaying, gentle gait. They rode slowly alongside Lupine Creek, through a forest of cinnamon-barked pines varied by occasional stands of western larch and aspen, with clumps of manzanita and buckbrush at ground level. (Julie told him the names, which he appreciated learning and promptly forgot.)
He had already admitted to her that the chuck-wagon breakfast had been a wonderful break. Cooked over open fires, the eggs, bacon, burned toast (Leland claimed they burned it on purpose, for atmosphere), and gritty coffee had been served up by authentic-looking wranglers in a shaded clearing, with the morning sunlight illuminating the highest branches of the trees. Tethered horses had pawed and snuffled twenty feet away, and everybody had smelled like wood smoke. It had made Chuck Salish seem like something from an unpleasant dream.
Gideon had expected to see few of the older attendees, but almost all of them were there. Leland, he was surprised to learn, was an expert rider who had requested and gotten an English saddle instead of one of the Western ones—with their big, comforting pommels and horns—which all the others had been glad to accept. Nellie was there too (“Give me the slowest, oldest nag you’ve got. And the biggest, softest saddle”), along with Les and Miranda. Even Callie, who had arrived back at the lodge at 6:30 A.M. after a red-eye flight from Nevada, had shown up, although the less-resilient Harlow was yet to be seen.
The only problem had been a confusion over time. The head wrangler, a twenty-year-old named Tracy, with the short hair, fresh, boyish face, and narrow, athletic hips of a youngster who lived for horses, had thought they were due back at the lodge at eleven. When she was told that the sessions began at ten, she had proposed a shortcut.
After twenty minutes of easy riding they came to it. On the way out to breakfast they had turned away from the bank of the stream in a wide arc to avoid this brief stretch of poorly maintained trail that climbed and skirted the flank of a rocky grade at the edge of the water. That was for more advanced riders, Tracy had told them, but now they would save half an hour by taking it.
She called a halt before they started up the grade. “It’s not really dangerous,” she told them from horseback. “It just looks that way if you’re not used to it. Just give your horse its head. They know they’re going home, and they know how to get there. Let’s go. Oh,” she said as she started up again, “and don’t let them know you’re nervous.”
“It’s a little late for that,” Gideon said half aloud. Earlier, on the ride out, his horse, a placid, good-natured brown mare named Rosebud, had stopped to nibble at the trailside grasses whenever the fancy took her. Twice she’d stopped to doze, ignoring his coaxing. Julie, a competent, confident rider, had had to dismount to help him get her going again. “She’s just a thousand pounds of muscle trying to figure out what you want,” she had told him. “You have to let her know who’s boss, that’s all.”
“Don’t worry,” Gideon had said, “she already knows.”
Loose rocks now made the footing going up the grade unstable, and several times the horses slipped, bringing a few sudden intakes of breath from the less self-possessed riders, Gideon included. But only Callie’s horse gave anything like trouble, skittering abruptly sidewise at one point so that Callie’s leg barely missed scraping heavily against a tree trunk. Callie, who hadn’t looked very comfortable on a horse to begin with, laughed it off, but seemed shakier and more tentative than ever in the saddle.
At the top of the grade Tracy called for their attention again.
“All right, everybody, now comes the tricky part.”
“I thought that was the tricky part,” Gideon said.
Julie laughed. “Relax, you’re doing fine.”
“What we’ve got here,” Tracy continued from her saddle, “is a spot where the trail is sort of, uh, washed away for a few yards, so it’s only a couple, three feet wide, and not too level, right along the edge, with a rock wall on the other side that sort of, uh, crowds you a little—”
“Wonderful,” Gideon muttered.
“Don’t worry so much,” Julie said. “You really are getting the hang of it, I can tell.”
“—but take my word for it, it just looks hard because you’re not a horse. I’ve seen five-year-old kids do it with no problem. If we just take the ledge one by one—”
“Ledge?” somebody exclaimed.
“Well, path,” Tracy said. “If we take it one by one, and you just let your mounts do all the work, we’ll do just fine—close your eyes if it bothers you—and I’ll have you back at the lodge in less than ten minutes.”
Tracy went first, presumably to show that it could be done, and then the others began, one at a time. The trail, about fifty feet above the stream, was not so much a ledge as an ill-defined shelf in a curving wall of loose, purplish volcanic gravel. Again the hooves slipped on the loose stones, but the slope itself wasn’t steep enough to frighten any but the most timid riders, and the first dozen or so crossed easily. Then there was a lull.
“Come on, people, let’s get it on,” Tracy called from the other side. She pointed at Callie. “Next, please, ma’am.”
“Oh!” Callie shook her head. “I’m not…I don’t think I’m ready yet. My horse is still a little jumpy.”
Tracy shrugged and pointed to Gideon. “You, please.”
“Come on, Rosebud,” he said, and nudged her gingerly with his heels. Deep in his heart he assumed she would ignore this irresolute request, but with something like a sigh she abandoned the shrub she’d been chewing and started obediently forward. Pleased, he straightened his back and settled more solidly, more commandingly into the saddle. Julie was right. Controlling a horse wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as people made it out to be. It was, after all, just a question of letting it know who was boss.
“Atta girl,” he said with masterful approval as they moved out from under the trees into the sun and Rosebud began to pick her slow way along the gravel. He leaned forward to pat the moist, muscular neck, wanting to keep her in motion. He didn’t want to have to start her up again if he could help it, not being sure of just how long he was going to be in charge.
There was a commotion behind him, from the group still waiting to cross. A horse snorted; another whinnied. Someone yelled “Shit!” Hooves scraped agitatedly. There were shouts of warning. Gideon turned in the saddle to see Callie’s horse lurching toward him, its big brown head twisting and heaving. Callie was standing rigidly in the stirrups, her
face white and strained, twisting the reins. “Stop! Stop!” she was screaming at it.
“Callie—” he said.
There wasn’t time for anything else. She had managed to drag her horse away from the outer edge of the trail, so that when it bucketed wildly into Gideon’s, it was on the inside, against the rock wall. Rosebud, forced to the outside, whinnied and kicked at the other animal, at the same time frantically trying to keep her footing on the loose rocks. Gideon, his feet jarred out of the stirrups by the impact, was already beginning to tip helplessly forward out of the saddle and over her left side. He managed somehow to grab the saddle horn with one hand, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from tipping further, in what seemed weirdly like slow motion. Her mane whipped his mouth. He had a vivid impression of one wild, chestnut-colored eye a few inches from his face, rolling and showing white, and then he was turning over in the air, wondering immaterially if he still had the reins in his other hand.
He hit on his left side and shoulder, in the dusty purple gravel of the slope, and tumbled downhill, literally heels over head, seeing his legs and feet—one shoe was gone—whipping over him against a hot blue sky. On his back again he continued sliding headfirst down the slope, grabbing at the dry soil with his fingers. To his horror, Rosebud was slipping down the hillside after him in an immense fall of purple gravel. She was sliding on her rear end in a posture straight out of a kids’ Saturday-morning cartoon, down on her hindquarters like a sitting dog, her forelegs propped stiffly in front of her in a frantic effort to stop the slide. But down she came anyway, showering him with pebbles and dust, gaining rapidly on him, blocking out the sun.
All thousand pounds of her.
“Where am I?”
“Now wouldn’t you think they only said that in books?” a cheery male voice wondered. “But, no, they always do it.”
Gideon pressed his eyes more tightly shut. The sun was sharp against his lids. There was sweat on his forehead. He was lying on his back, on an uncomfortably rough surface. Somebody was pressing on his ribs.
“What happened?” he said. There was dust in his mouth.