by Aaron Elkins
“How positive are you about all this?” John asked. One of his more frequently employed questions.
“Let me put it this way. On a scale of one to ten, we’re up at about a forty, okay? I mean, maybe—maybe—I’m off by three or four hours at the far end, but that’s it. And I don’t think I am.”
John tilted the bottle for a thoughtful swig of beer. “Scratch Callie,” he said to Gideon.
“Unless she wasn’t really in Nevada,” Gideon said. He told them about his talk with Julie and raised the possibility of Callie’s trip being faked.
John was more receptive than he’d expected. “It’s possible,” he said reasonably. “She could have fudged it. Julian Minor’s going to give me a hand from up in Seattle. He loves to get into stuff like that. If there’s anything funny about it, he’ll dig it out.”
Gideon agreed. Julian Minor was another special agent who was often teamed with John. A reserved, methodical black man of fifty who spoke like a 1910 secretary’s handbook (“At the present time…” “At a later date…” “In regard to your request…”), he was a whiz at unearthing facts and pinpointing contradictions. And somehow, he did it best from his desk on the seventh floor of the Federal Building in downtown Seattle.
Tilton had followed the conversation restlessly. “Who’s Callie, one of your anthropologists?”
“That’s right,” Gideon said, “one of the few who was here for both murders.”
“Nape, uh-uh, forget it. If a forensic anthropologist did this, I’ll eat my hat. My fur-lined hat with earflaps, the one I wear when it snows.”
“What makes you say that?” Gideon asked.
“Well, the method,” he said, as if it were obvious. “I mean, really—simple blunt-force trauma?” His mouth curled contemptuously around the toothpick. “What kind of way is that for a forensic scientist to kill somebody?”
“Too unsubtle?” Gideon asked.
“Too physical, too risky, too much likelihood of getting caught. All that blood. Whoo.” He shook his head. “No, sir, these people are trained, just like you and me. They know things your everyday killer doesn’t.” He leaned forward, jiggling the gum between his front teeth. “Knowing what I know, I could come up with half-a-dozen ways to commit an absolutely perfect murder if I had to. Untraceable. Couldn’t you? And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“I haven’t,” Gideon said truthfully, “but I see what you’re getting at. If I wanted to get away with murder, I certainly wouldn’t bludgeon somebody with an old table leg and then just leave him sitting in his chair, waiting to be found. Along with the table leg.”
“You’re darn tootin’ you wouldn’t. And neither would any of the rest of them.” Tilton twirled his toothpick, brushed popcorn from his paunch, and got to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, I leave you to it. John, I’ll have a report to you by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Okay, thanks, Dr. Tilton. I’ll be in touch.”
John watched him go. “Doc, you buy this expert-murderer bit?”
“I think he’s got a point.”
“Well, I don’t.” He stood up and yawned, stretching. “Let me tell you, smart people do the goddamn dumbest things all the time.”
“You said a mouthful there,” Gideon said with a smile. “Great God-o-mighty.”
CHAPTER 18
“No, the last time I saw Harlow would have been…oh…” Callie jutted her long chin out and up, and whooshed a sizable lungful of smoke at the ceiling. “…a little after noon. Probably about twelve-fifteen.”
“This was Tuesday?” John asked.
“Tuesday. In his cottage.”
“Would you mind telling me what you were talking about?”
“No, why should I mind? We were discussing his reason for not flying back with me for the curriculum meeting.” “Which was?”
She looked at her hands, running her thumb over the tips of her polished fingernails. “He said he wasn’t feeling well.”
“What was the matter with him?”
“What was always the matter with him. His stomach.” The guy’s just been murdered, John thought, and she’s mad because he didn’t make it to a meeting.
“Did he seem pretty sick to you?”
“Do you mean generally speaking, or Tuesday afternoon in particular?”
“Both.”
“No and no.”
John didn’t like it when interviewees got cute. It led to misunderstandings. “You want to explain, please?”
“Frankly, I think the main thing wrong with his stomach was all the worrying he did about it. He didn’t have anything worse than an intermittent generalized gastritis.”
That sounded bad enough to John. “Are you saying he could have made the meeting if he wanted to?”
“If he wanted to,” she said.
“Why wouldn’t he want to?”
Her upper lip bulged as she scoured the inside of her mouth with her tongue. “I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead.”
“Uh-huh,” John said. He’d heard that a whole lot of times in his career. Nine times out of ten it was followed by a “but.”
“But I don’t think it’s any secret that Harlow was thoroughly burnt out. He was serving out his time; he didn’t give a damn. Frankly, his being on the curriculum committee was my idea. I hoped it might create some interest in the educative process—you know, as a synergistic function and as a source of personal renewal as well. But of course that kind of interest has to come from within.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” John said. “Were the tickets nonrefundable?”
“What?”
“The flight tickets to Nevada and back. Were they nonrefundable?”
“Well, I don’t—yes, I suppose they must have been.
Mine were, and the same secretary made the arrangements for both of us.”
“Who paid, the school?”
“Of course it did.” A glimmer of defensiveness. “It was university business, wasn’t it?”
“The reason I’m asking about them—”
“I understand the reason. And you’re right. Harlow wasn’t the kind of person who would throw away several hundred dollars—of his money or the school’s—because he wasn’t in the mood to attend a meeting.” She brushed her hair back with a tentative flick. “It’s conceivable I may have been wrong.”
“About what?”
“About his being ill. He may have been sicker than I thought.”
“But that wasn’t the impression you got?”
“To be perfectly candid, no,” she said, frowning, “but he did seem…”
John waited.
…worried…frightened…almost as if he sensed what was going to happen to him. But he didn’t say anything.” She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, staring through the window over John’s shoulder at the soft gray rain that had broken the heat wave during the night and had been drifting down all day onto the Whitebark Lodge lawn. “My God, maybe if I’d been more receptive, more empathetic, instead of being tuned in to where I was coming from, I could have done something to prevent it.”
Her dark eyes, earnest and glowing, settled on John’s face. “I cared about him, you know, John. We had our professional differences, but I cared about him as a human being.”
Lady, you’re a phony, he said to himself. Right down to your socks. Harlow was a pain in the butt to you, and you couldn’t be happier about the guy’s being out of your hair.
He leaned back, studying her. Happy about it or not, she hadn’t killed him. That was one of the things Julian Minor had already established from his Seattle desk. The man at the Budget car-rental counter in the Bend-Redmond Airport had verified by telephone that Callie had turned in her Dodge Colt at 2:10 P.M. on Tuesday, sat around the airport lounge drinking coffee and working on her laptop for half an hour, and boarded the commuter plane to Portland. He’d reserved another car for her and had it waiting when she got off the first plane from Portland at 6:00 A.M. Thursday. And yes, he rem
embered seeing her actually get off. It wasn’t what you’d call a real big airport.
On top of that, her presence in Carson City as late as 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday had been confirmed. Unless she’d taken a private plane, there was no way she could have gotten back to Whitebark Lodge inside of Tilton’s 9:00 P.M. time-of-death deadline. And Julian had found no such flight.
Whatever Julie had seen or not seen on the trail ride—and John’s own brief interviews with several people who’d been on it had turned up nothing to support her—Callie was several hundred miles away when Harlow had been murdered.
So, once again: scratch Callie.
“Would you have any idea where he was between the time you saw him and late Wednesday?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. What’s so important about late Wednesday? Is that when he was killed?”
John nodded. “Between four and nine o’clock.”
Callie shuddered suddenly. “Is it true that his skull was crushed?”
It was true, all right, John said. Did she have any idea what might be behind the murder?
She dragged hard on her cigarette. “It has to have something to do with this bizarre thing with Jasper—with Jasper’s murder.”
That was true too. “Tell me a little about Jasper.” “Jasper?” Her mouth thinned and set. “Jasper was a son of a bitch.”
Not just your everyday sonofabitch either, John noted, but a son of a bitch; three fat, separate words dripping with venom.
Well, CaIlie had good reason for hating him. According to Gideon, Jasper had made her life as a graduate student miserable. He had chipped away and chipped away at her doctoral dissertation, making her process big chunks of her data over and over, until she had quit in frustration after four years and transferred to Nevada State. Thereunder the less-demanding Harlow—she had her degree in a year and a half.
“Enough of a sonofabitch for one of his ex-students to want to kill him?” he asked Callie.
“Albert Jasper was awful,” she said. “Cynical, condescending, ruthless, uptight, paternalistic in the worst sense of the term…” John thought she had run out of words, but she was only pausing for breath. “Arrogant, inauthentic, self-centered…all in all, a horrible person. You don’t have to take my word for it either; the others will tell you exactly the same thing.”
So they had, so far. “And yet you put on a big party for him when he retired.”
“Nellie put it on. He did the organizing, and I think most of us came to please him, not Jasper. And, well, to tell the truth, in my case I was flattered to be invited. I wasn’t a very big fish at the time. And I was excited about the idea of a forensic anthropology conference. But the whole retirement-party bit was Nellie’s concoction; no one else’s.”
“And yet you all came.”
Callie laughed shortly. “A big mistake.”
Especially for Jasper, John thought.
Callie drew herself up. “Are we done? There’s a session I’d like to attend.”
“Just one more thing,” John said. “I’d like you to take a look at this.” He removed a sheet of paper from the folder at his elbow and passed it to her. On it was a copy of Albert Jasper’s telephone bill for June 1981—more of Julian Minor’s work, obtained by Telefax a couple of hours earlier.
“Look at the circled number, the call to Nevada.” She looked. “Yes?”
“Do you know that number?”
“Well, it’s the university’s prefix—”
“I know that, but the extension isn’t in use anymore, and so far no one’s been able to tell us what it was. You don’t recognize it?”
“No. Wait, yes. It’s the old anthropology department extension. We haven’t used it since 1989.”
“So it would have been a call to the department switchboard?”
“The department secretary. There were only six or seven faculty offices back then, and a secretary could handle it.”
“The call was made just two weeks before the meeting—two weeks before Jasper was killed. You wouldn’t happen to know what he was calling about?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t calling you?”
She laughed. “Jasper wouldn’t call me.”
“All right, who would he call?”
“Well, Harlow, probably. I mean, I don’t think he knew any of the others. They were all cultural, or linguistics, or archaeology. But I’m just guessing.”
“What would he be calling Harlow about?”
“I have no idea. They weren’t exactly in close contact, so it’s a bit of a surprise, actually.”
John looked up as a head poked through the open doorway of the lounge.
“Manager said you wanted to see me.” It was one of the lodge staff, a sleepy-looking teenager with a bad complexion and long, stringy blond hair under a turned-around baseball cap. He took an unwilling step into the room.
“Thanks, be with you in a second.”
“I can come back later.”
“No, I’m just leaving,” Callie called to him. She ground out her cigarette and stood up. “I really think I would have heard about that phone call if it were anything significant,” she said to John. “I can’t imagine it was anything important.”
Maybe not, John thought, but it was the only call listed on Jasper’s bill to any of the people John was now concerned with. And they had talked for thirty-nine minutes. That was a long time for a long-distance call. Especially for people who weren’t exactly in close contact.
John pulled out his small notebook as the kid eased warily into Callie’s chair. “What’s your name?”
“Vinnie.”
John looked up.
“Stoller.”
John wrote it down. “And you’re the one who changed the sheets and towels Wednesday?”
“Not all of ‘em. I did Cottage 18.”
Harlow’s cottage. “Do you remember what time that was?”
“About 4:57.”
John put down the pad. “About 4:57?”
“I remember because it was the last one in the row, and I was like back for my dinner break at 5:00.”
John wrote down 4:57p. “Tell me exactly what you saw at the cottage, exactly what you did.”
The boy shrugged. “I didn’t do nothing. There was a do-not-disturb sign on the door, so I left everything on the wood box, under the eaves.” His hands were circling one another. They were already the hands of a man; square, work-scarred, thick-jointed.
“You didn’t have a passkey?”
“Sure I did, but we’re not supposed to go in if there’s a sign. So I left it, that’s all.”
“You didn’t knock?”
“Well, yeah, I think I did.”
“And?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
“You didn’t look through the window?”
“There wasn’t no point. I’m telling you, you couldn’t see nothing. Can I go now? I gotta get back to work.”
“Sure. Thanks for your help, Vinnie.”
Vinnie ran his tongue over his lips as he got up. “Was the, uh, guy already, like, dead when I was there?” “Looks like it,” John said.
And that was about the only concrete thing he’d learned in over four hours of interviews: The do-not-disturb sign had been put out by 4:57 P.M. Wednesday. Assuming that the killer had hung it there to put off the discovery of the murder, that had to mean Harlow was already dead by then. And with 4:00 being the earliest possible time of death—Tilton was awfully damn sure of that—the murder had to have happened after 4:00 and before 5:00.
He picked up a molded-glass paperweight that sat on the table as a decoration. Inside was a miniature desert scene with cactuses, a tiny bleached steer skull, and a rail fence. He shook it, and instead of the usual snowstorm effect, there was a swirl of brown particles; a sandstorm. Very Western.
He held the weight in his palm and watched the particles settle. One thing he had no shortage of was motives for wanting to see Jasper dead. Callie wasn’t the
only one. As Gideon had told him, they all had similar stories. Jasper had told Les Zenkovich flat out—after three years of graduate work—that he didn’t have the brains to make it as an anthropologist and he’d do better looking for a field that made less stringent intellectual demands on its practitioners. Like Callie, Les had transferred too, and wound up getting his Ph.D. at Indiana with little difficulty.
Miranda Glass had been told much the same thing, also after three or four years under his thumb, but she had lost heart and thrown in the towel on her doctorate. She’d become a big name in museum work, but in this crowd, with only an M.A. to her credit, she was one of the undereducated.
Leland Roach had a different kind of grievance. Although he’d suffered the usual hard time under Jasper, he’d stuck it out and managed to get his degree without having to go elsewhere, and to do it relatively quickly. All the same, he had been unable to get a satisfactory academic appointment for five years. Then he had learned that it was because Jasper had been blackballing him behind his back, smilingly agreeing to serve as a reference whenever Leland had asked, then denouncing his competence, his resourcefulness, his personality, and, at least in one case, his sense of humor. When Leland had dropped Jasper from his list of references, he had quickly landed an assistant professorship at San Diego State, then moved on to the prestigious Colorado Institute of Technology.
All these accounts, Gideon had reminded John, had to be taken with a grain of salt. The sources, after all, were the aggrieved parties themselves, and the tales had been told during various late-night rounds of war stories at one conference or another through the years. But whether accurate in their specifics or not, they left no doubt that there hadn’t been much love lost on Albert Evan Jasper in this group.
Only Nellie Hobert, Jasper’s first student, had gotten through his apprenticeship with his admiration for the old anthropologist intact. Maybe it was because Jasper had been kinder in those days, or maybe it was because Nellie had been the best as well as the first. Either way, Nellie had never, in Gideon’s hearing at least, expressed the hard feelings the others had.