Make No Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  Which brought up an almost equally disturbing thought. Whoever had killed him was surely an old friend as well, or at least an old acquaintance. There couldn’t be much doubt that Harlow’s murder was connected with Jasper’s, and the list of suspects in Jasper’s death was a small and circumscribed one.

  And getting smaller. There was Callie, there was Leland, there was Les, there was Miranda, there was Nellie. That was it; all the people who had been at Whitebark Lodge when Jasper had been killed, and who were here now. Nobody else met both those all-important criteria. One of them, it would seem, had somehow been involved with Harlow in Jasper’s death and the subsequent cover-up, had realized Harlow was starting to come apart, and had killed him before he gave it all away. That, at least, was the best guess of the moment.

  Callie. Leland. Les. Miranda. Nellie.

  Some were better bets than others. Miranda, he was glad to think, was among the least probable. If it hadn’t been for her, they’d still all be under the illusion that the garroted man was Chuck Salish. And even if they’d eventually discovered that it wasn’t—which probably wouldn’t have taken long—the outlandish idea that it might be Jasper would never have crossed anyone’s mind. Without Miranda, the skeleton would have remained an unidentifiable John Doe, and that would have been the end of it. No uncomfortable old questions raised about Jasper or anything else.

  And Callie would seem to be off the hook too, assuming his guess at Harlow’s time of death was anywhere near correct. Despite what Julie saw or didn’t see during the trail ride, Callie had left for Nevada on Tuesday, a full day before he’d been killed. And she hadn’t returned until this morning, long after it had happened. Or could she have planned it all ahead of time, made an unannounced, unseen return visit on Wednesday, killed Harlow, flown back to Nevada, then returned here on Thursday morning…? No, that was getting too fanciful. People might do such things in books, but he’d never known an actual killer to try it.

  That left Les, Leland…and Nellie. Reluctantly, it was Nellie he kept coming back to. Nellie, who had pressed everyone to keep the disastrous roast a secret from the beginning; Nellie, who had headed the forensic team after the accident and signed off on the final report; Nellie, who had been so quick to suggest—to insist—that the skeleton was Salish’s and not Jasper’s; Nellie, who was even now maintaining that Jasper had been killed in the crash; Nellie—

  He jerked his head with irritation, angry at himself. Nellie Hobert garroting Albert Jasper? Bringing down that table leg on Harlow’s collapsing skull, not once but three times? No, he could hardly make himself imagine it. It simply wasn’t credible. Not for any of them, really, but especially not for Nellie. True, he’d been a little cranky lately, but who could blame him, with the formidable Frieda hovering protectively around him, straightening his collar for him, stuffing frayed Kleenex down into his pockets when they stuck out, holding her hand out for his keys or coins when he unthinkingly jingled them…

  Well, wait a minute. Combing his damp hair in front of the mirror, he paused. What about Frieda? She’d been there for the first meeting too, hadn’t she? According to John, Leland had come to him with a story about her having a thing with Salish. Was it possible that Jasper had found out about it, and she had killed him to keep him from telling Nellie? For a moment he managed to seriously consider it, but even if he could make himself believe it, how did Harlow figure into it? Why had he been killed? Why would he have engineered—as he surely had—the dental-chart fakery that had led to the misidentification of Jasper?

  “Hi, there,” Julie said. “Gorgeous, isn’t he?”

  Buried in thought, he hadn’t noticed her come into the cottage. She had found him in front of the bedroom mirror, stock-still, staring at himself.

  He turned to smile at her. As always when she came in from the outdoors, she had a way of bringing some of it in with her; some indefinable freshness of skin and hair and fragrance. His spirits lifted.

  “Did I ever tell you you’re extremely wholesome-looking?” he said.

  She laughed. “Just when you get carried away on the wings of passion.” She came up behind him, hugged him gingerly, avoiding the scrapes, and stretched to kiss him on the back of the neck. “Do you feel okay?”

  He reached around, drawing her head closer. “I love you.”

  “Munn,” she said, nuzzled him a moment longer, gave him a final hug that made him grunt, then flopped into an armchair and kicked off her shoes.

  “So,” she said, “how’d it go this afternoon? Anything interesting happen around here?”

  CHAPTER 17

  “And that’s about it,” Gideon said, summing up. They were standing on the footbridge over the pond, their elbows on the railing. After three blistering days, the layer of streaky clouds in the west had risen to veil the late-afternoon sun, and with it had come a moist breeze. The temperature had dropped a few degrees to marginally tolerable. They had walked slowly around the grounds while he told her what had been going on, finally stopping on the bridge while he concluded.

  Julie had been quiet through the recital, asking few questions, making few exclamations; merely shaking her head occasionally. They began walking again. At the end of the footbridge was a weathered wooden sign that said, “Limit 3 Per Day.” Three what, Gideon wondered. The pond was all of four inches deep, and he had yet to see anything move in it.

  “So the skull was Jasper’s,” Julie said. She was chewing on a grass blade she’d picked up somewhere. “That explains a few things, doesn’t it?”

  He looked at her, surprised. All he seemed to have was questions, not explanations. “Not to me, it doesn’t.”

  “Well, it explains why those remains were taken out of the case and destroyed. Someone was afraid one of you would somehow spot that they weren’t Jasper’s.”

  “Yes, that’s probably true.” The fate of those burned shards of bone had plummeted to a lower priority this afternoon. He’d forgotten all about them.

  “And it gives us a reason for Callie to knock you off your horse.”

  “It does?”

  Now it was Julie who stopped to look at him. “Of course, don’t you see? It’s what I said—or at least it could be. She was trying to keep you from finishing the reconstruction. She was afraid you’d find out it was Jasper. Which you did. Gideon, I’m telling you—”

  “Julie, we’ve already been through this. If I didn’t finish it, somebody else would have, so—”

  “But they wouldn’t have; that’s what I’m getting at. You explained yourself—very publicly—why there wasn’t any real point in doing a reconstruction on that skull: If it was Salish, there were better ways of proving it; and if it wasn’t, then who was there to show it to? The only reason you were doing it was as a demonstration of the technique.”

  “Well, yes—”

  “So if you didn’t finish it, if she could put you out of commission just for this one afternoon, that would have been the end of it. It would have gone back to Nellie for analysis and wound up in a box somewhere, or wherever they keep unidentified skulls. There would have been no reason to reconstruct it, and certainly no reason to think it might be Jasper’s.”

  They had circled the pond a second time and begun to head back toward their cottage. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

  “Well—”

  “In fact,” she went on excitedly, “she would have had the same reason for getting rid of Harlow to keep him from telling whose skeleton that was. Both of them could have been involved in Jasper’s murder, and she could have seen that he was starting to crack. After all, you did.”

  “You know,” Gideon said, “you’re starting to make a certain amount of sense.”

  “Why, thank you. It’s about time.”

  “Except…”

  She sighed. “I knew it.”

  “Except that Callie couldn’t have had anything to do with Harlow’s murder. She was four hundred miles away.” “Oh.” The grass blade was nibbled and discarde
d. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Pretty much, unless I’m way off on the time Harlow was killed.”

  “Oh,” she said again. “You don’t suppose she only pretended to go away? Or that she snuck back, or—no, I guess not.”

  “I sincerely doubt it. It’d be awfully easy to check.”

  Julie shrugged and smiled. “Well, it was a pretty good theory anyway, don’t you think? I mean, except for that little detail?”

  “It’s a great theory, Julie.”

  At the porch of their cottage she stopped him. “Gideon, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “If that reconstruction you made was such a good one—”

  “Which it was, but the skull gets all the credit. The bony landmarks were all in the right places, for a change.” He smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything else from the skull of Albert Evan Jasper.”

  “And if all you people are trained professional anthropologists—”

  “Which we are, certifiably.”

  “Then how come none of you certified experts knew it was Jasper until Miranda revamped everything you did?”

  He laughed. “You’ve put your finger on the problem with reconstruction. That’s what bothers people like Nellie so much. No matter how right you get the bony stuff, the rest of it involves a lot of guesswork, and that’s the most critical part.”

  “I’m not following you. What’s the most critical part?”

  “Look at it this way. Forget about reconstructions. Do you think you’d recognize me on the street if I changed just a few inconsequential, soft-tissue details on my face?”

  “What kind of details?”

  “Oh…different nose, different mouth, different hair, different eyebrows, different ears, different eyes—”

  “But those aren’t inconsequential details. They’re what make you you.”

  “Exactly. Well, I got most of them wrong, which is what usually happens—there’s no way to tell from the skull—but Miranda was sharp enough to pick up the similarity in the basic shape of the face. She just altered a few of those details and Albert Jasper jumped right out at us.”

  “Hm. Impressive, but I think I’m starting to come over to Nellie’s side.”

  Inside the cottage the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Julie said. “You’re being brave about it, but I can see you’re still stiff.” She took the three steps at a leap.

  “What a hot dog,” Gideon called after her. But she was right. He was glad to let her make the run for the telephone.

  The call was from John. The on-scene processing was done, the body was on its way to the morgue. Dr. Tilton, the deputy medical examiner, had come to his preliminary conclusions. Would Gideon like to join them for a drink in the bar to talk about them?

  “Hot enough for you?” Dr. Tilton asked. He pulled the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth, put it in the right corner, twirled it as if to set it in more firmly, and with a noisy sigh rearranged himself more deeply in the wooden lawn chair. “Great God-o-mighty.”

  Forensic pathologists, in Gideon’s experience, tended to be lively sorts, and Deschutes County Deputy Medical Examiner Floyd Tilton was no exception. A sweating, balding cabbage of a man with a hopelessly scroungy beard that failed to disguise the absence of discernible chin, he was a nonstop talker with the astonishing ability to gnaw on a toothpick, chew gum, and eat popcorn at the same time. All without missing a word.

  They had gotten their drinks in the bar—Scotch and soda for Gideon, beer for John, rum and Coke for Tilton—and taken them outside, to a shaded spot on the edge of the lawn, near a rust-mottled children’s play set that looked as if it hadn’t seen any use for a decade or two.

  “I tell you,” Tilton said, “when I heard we had ourselves a deceased in some out-of-the-way cabin in this heat, I expected the worst. You know, everybody gets used to looking at decomposing bodies after a while—”

  “Not this guy,” John said, directing a thumb at Gideon. “—but nobody ever gets used to the damned smell. God-o-mighty. So I came armed.”

  He lifted a small plastic bag halfway out of the pocket of his damp plaid shirt. Oil of wintergreen, Gideon saw, and a couple of gauze plugs to saturate and insert into the nostrils. A lot of people in the field did that. Others preferred Noxzema, or Vicks Vapo-Rub, or strong cigars. Most, like Gideon, found that nothing really helped.

  “As it was,” Tilton continued, reaching into the cardboard bucket of popcorn he’d carried from the bar—did he chew the popcorn and the gum on different sides of his mouth? Tuck one of them in a cheek while he worked on the other?—”the putrefaction process’d hardly gotten underway. Whoo. Thank the Lord for small favors. Well, what can I tell you gentlemen?” He raised his glass to Gideon. “Much obliged.”

  “Cause of death?” John asked.

  “Blunt-force trauma, it would appear, inflicted by the table leg. The blows were delivered from behind, the victim being seated at the time. Either three or four of them, any one of them sufficient to cause death.”

  John nodded. “Can you give us a TOD estimate?”

  “Ali, time of death; every policeman’s favorite question. Well, there’s lab work to be done, but I think you’d be on pretty safe ground assuming it happened sometime yesterday.”

  “You couldn’t make it any more specific?”

  Tilton closed one eye and squinted at John with the other. He fiddled with the toothpick, sliding it in and out between two teeth.

  “Maximum, twenty-four hours; minimum, eighteen hours. That’s counting back from four o’clock today.”

  “Between 4:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. yesterday,” John said.

  It was what Gideon had guessed, but narrowed down to a degree that surprised him. Time-of-death estimation was tricky work, especially when it came to establishing the early part of the range, and most pathologists would have been leery of pinning themselves down to a six-hour span.

  “That’s cutting it pretty close, isn’t it?” he asked.

  He could see that Tilton was happy to get the question. “Most of the time it would be, yes,” he said spiritedly, “but we’ve got a few things going for us here, and what they add up to is eighteen to twenty-four hours.” He chuckled. “Between us, nineteen to twenty-four, but I hate to sound cocky.”

  First of all, Tilton explained, there was the rigor mortis to be considered, or rather the passing of it. A notably unreliable indicator, but it was surely safe enough to conclude that Harlow had been dead a good twelve hours or more, putting the latest possible time of the murder at four that morning. The other extreme was established by the general lack of putrefaction; there had been no bloating yet, no overall discoloration of the abdomen; merely some blue-green marbling of the lower-left quarter. Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean that the death had occurred less than thirty-six hours ago. Given the heat, it was reasonable to make that thirty hours in this case. Would they agree with that?

  They agreed.

  “So,” Tilton said, “that puts it somewhere between twelve and thirty hours, are you with me? This is supported by the ocular changes—advanced corneal cloudiness, but nothing like opacity yet. Now, let’s see if we can narrow it some more. Let us consider…” He paused.

  …carrion insect activity.”

  That was another thing about forensic pathologists. To a one, they loved to lecture when they got a willing audience. Possibly that came from the infrequency with which they got hold of willing audiences. Julie, for example, although invited to this conversation, had known enough to beg off and have her predinner glass of wine with some of the others.

  “You noticed the arthropodal deposits in the nostrils, the mouth, the wound?” Tilton asked.

  Gideon nodded, fighting off a shudder. He was beginning to think he should have gone with Julie.

  “Sure,” John said, “all over the place.” He helped himself to a fistful of Tilton’s popcorn.

  “Well,” Tilton went on, “I’m sure yo
u observed the stage of development of the deposits—”

  “Eggs,” John said knowledgeably. “Not larval stage yet.”

  “Right, yes, true. Bluebottle fly, Calliphora vicina. And I think we can take it for granted they were laid about the time he died, because in this kind of weather, with those kinds of nice, juicy wounds, the flies would have found him and started laying in about five minutes. Kapish?”

  John and Gideon both nodded.

  Tilton nodded back at them. “So what does that tell us, hm?” Bright-eyed, chipper, in his element, he looked at them, twirling the toothpick, his jaw muscles working vigorously. He chewed the gum in the front of his mouth, Gideon noticed, like a hamster, repositioning it with quick, twiddly movements of his lips. Was that his secret? Popcorn on the molars, chewing gum on the incisors?

  “It tells us,” he continued, as Gideon had no doubt he would, “that those li’l suckers were laid sometime in the last twenty-four hours because that’s how long the egg stage lasts, and even that’s pushing it. Well, now; we can knock twelve hours off that straight out, because we already know your man was killed more than twelve hours ago, that is, before four this morning—”

  “We do?” John said.

  “Rigor, rigor,” Tilton said. “It’s already had time to loosen up.”

  “Right, I forgot.”

  “And, likewise, we can rule out any possibility of those eggs being laid after, oh, mm, nine o’clock last night—” “We can?” said Gideon.

  “Sure, because the lights in the cottage were off, and that’s about the time it gets dark, and flies don’t lay eggs in the dark. They don’t do anything in the dark.”

  “They don’t?” Gideon said.

  Tilton laughed. “You ever hear a fly buzzing around in a dark room?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I know not,” Tilton said. “So there you have it, my friends. Death occurred no earlier than four yesterday afternoon, no later than nine yesterday evening. Nineteen to twenty-four hours.” He grinned happily at them and mopped his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. “Whoo. God-o-mighty. Ain’t science wonderful?”