by Aaron Elkins
The boy regarded him suspiciously.
“I understand you said you couldn’t see anything through the window.”
“That’s right. You want a steak? I’m not supposed to be talking to the customers.”
Gideon held out his plate while Vinnie dropped a huge T-bone into it. “What did you mean when you said you couldn’t see anything? You must have been able to see something.”
“I already told him,” Vinnie said, indicating John. “I didn’t look. There wasn’t no point.”
“Why wasn’t there any point?”
“Because,” Vinnie said, showing a streak of adolescent impatience with slowminded adults, “the blinds were down. I already told him that.”
There was a moment of startled silence before John said, “Uh, actually, I think you missed that little detail.” “Well, they were,” Vinnie said sullenly.
“You’re absolutely positive?” Gideon said. “They were down?”
“Well, jeez, I know what blinds look like.”
“All the way down?” John asked.
“Yeah, all the way down. I gotta go back to work. There’s more people.”
“Why all the fuss?” Julie asked as the three of them moved away from the pit. “Why is it so important that the blinds were down?”
“Because,” John said, coming to a standstill, “they were up when we found him. And if he really was dead when Vinnie was there, that means somebody must have come back later—before we found him—and raised them. Is that the way you see it too, Doc?”
“Mm.”
“Oh,” Julie said, chewing gently at her lip. “But that doesn’t make any sense. You mean somebody wanted the body to be found?”
“Looks like it,” John said.
“But then why not take down the do-not-disturb sign too?”
“You got me.”
“And why would the killer want the body to be found anyway? Wouldn’t he want to put it off as long as possible? Don’t all those gruesome pathological clues get harder and harder to figure out as time goes on?”
“Yeah, they do,” John said thoughtfully. “Everything does. You know, maybe it wasn’t the killer. Maybe—maybe what?”
John and Julie looked at each other and shook their heads. “Gideon,” Julie said, “you’re being awfully quiet.”
Gideon was being quiet because his mind was racketing along another track entirely, one that hadn’t even vaguely occurred to him before.
“I was just thinking…” he murmured. “What if those blinds didn’t really have anything to do with keeping people from seeing in? What if…I don’t know; I don’t quite have it worked out…”
“Hey there, you three,” Miranda called from a few feet away, “we can squeeze you in here if you don’t mind consorting with known suspects.”
And indeed, there they all were, lined up at a single table: Miranda, Callie, Les, Leland, Nellie, and Frieda.
“Thanks,” John said, “but I’ve still gotta talk to my compadre about a couple of things. You guys go ahead.” He headed for the next table, where Farrell was sitting.
Callie slid over so Julie had room next to her. Gideon sat around the corner from Julie, on her right, next to Leland. Frieda and Nellie were across the square table from him, with Les and Miranda on the fourth side.
“We have been driven to band together,” Leland said, “by the unrelenting scrutiny of our peers.” He looked sourly across at Callie. “We are now hard at work providing each other with a caring, nurturing environment in which to initiate the mind-body healing process.” Something in his voice suggested that the glass of white wine at his elbow was not his first.
Callie glowered briefly at him. “Do you suppose we could get the potato salad started around, please?”
Julie began to cut into her steak, then stopped and touched the back of Gideon’s hand. “Everything all right?” she asked quietly.
“What? Yes, fine, I was just thinking.” He sliced a wedge from his steak and began chewing.
The blinds, the blinds. Down shortly after Harlow’s death, up twenty-four hours later when he and John had found the body. All the way up, letting the sun pour in…
Julie passed him the big blue bowl of potato salad. “Thanks,” Gideon said absently and put it down without spooning any onto his plate.
The blinds—yes, sure, the blinds could have fooled them all; especially with a little help from the air-conditioning. But what about those Calliphora eggs? Surely there was no way to fake them, no way to alter the—
“Hey, if you’re not going to have any of that stuff, cover it up, will you?” Les said to him from the other side of Leland. “The flies are having a field day.”
“Oh—sure,” Gideon said. Mechanically, he began to tug at the plastic wrap that still covered half the bowl, pulling it down over the rim.
And then, suddenly, he was on his feet, almost upsetting the bench and Leland with it. “Plastic wrap!” he blurted.
Faces at nearby tables as well at their own turned toward him with varying expressions of astonishment.
“What did he say?” Frieda asked.
“I believe,” Miranda replied drily, “that he said ‘plastic wrap.’ I may be mistaken, however.”
But it was Callie that Gideon was looking at, and Callie who stared rigidly back at him, her long face frozen and waxy, her nostrils pinched. For a second their eyes locked, and then she was up too.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”
Even while rising she had been groping in her shoulder bag, and when her hand came out, it was clutching a squarish, compact handgun of dully gleaming black metal.
“This won’t do,” she said wildly, but not so wildly that she forgot to slide back the safety. “I can’t have this.”
The pistol’s muzzle swept the table erratically. A wave of flinches followed in its wake. Leland made a peeping noise, either of outrage or fright.
Callie said something unintelligible. The pistol came up a few inches, sleek and wavering, like the head of a snake homing in on its prey.
My God, Gideon thought, she’s going to kill herself. Right now.
“Callie, this is a bad idea,” he said calmly. He didn’t feel calm. His pulse was thumping in his temples. “This can be worked out, believe me. Just put—”
“Goddamn you, shut up!” she screamed. The pistol jerked spasmodically at him. Gideon, who hadn’t flinched before, flinched now.
Christ, it’s me she’s going to shoot, he thought, dry-mouthed. From five feet away the muzzle’s trembling aim fluttered from his throat to his chest. His mind groped sluggishly for action, for words.
“Callie, look—”
“Oh, you bastard,” she said. Her arm extended the gun closer to him, quivering but aiming directly at his left eye. He tensed himself to make a grab for her hand. It had to be now. The gun was four feet from him. He coiled, his stomach muscles tightening. Now—
Without warning, Julie, sitting on Callie’s right, brought her hand sharply down on Callie’s forearm in a concise, chopping movement. Callie’s fingers flew open. Her hand hit the table with a thump and bounced up, the pistol dangling by its trigger guard from her forefinger. With a grunt she tried to force it into her hand again, but Gideon had already launched himself over the table, arms extended, scattering plates and glasses.
His hand swooped down on the pistol, snaring it on the fly, like a brass ring on a merry-go-round, and flinging it away in the same motion. The other hand caught Callie at the base of the rib cage, and down she went like a bowling pin, hooked behind one knee by the bench. John, with one of those bursts of speed with which he sometimes amazed Gideon, was behind her the moment she hit the grass, hauling her roughly to her feet, practically on the rebound.
“What the hell is going on here?” His grip solidly encircled her upper arm. Somehow he’d picked up the pistol too, holding it not like a gun but like a parcel or a book, in his other hand.
Callie glared back at h
im, ashen-faced and twitchy, her lipstick askew. She said nothing.
An anxious Honeywell had appeared at the table, somewhat twitchy himself. “What is it? What’s going on? What’s happened now, for God’s sake?”
“Lieutenant, you’ll want to put Dr. Duffer here under arrest,” John said brusquely.
“Why?” the agitated Honeyman demanded. “What charge do I use? What the hell happened?”
“Hell, carrying a concealed weapon, ADW, intent to commit bodily harm, I don’t know; you come up with something.” He held the gun out to Honeyman, who looked as if it were the last thing in the world he wanted anything to do with, but took it anyway.
“And check her bag,” John said. “She might have another one stowed away.”
“But what the hell happened?” Honeyman asked. “What was this all about? All I saw was—I don’t know what I saw. What did I see?”
“Just do it, okay, Farrell? Trust me, I’ll explain later.” He glanced sideways at Gideon. “When I know what the hell happened,” he said under his breath.
When the dubious but eventually cooperative Honeyman began to read Callie her rights, before a subdued, growing crowd, John gestured with his chin toward the open lawn, away from the others. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. My cottage.”
Gideon and Julie followed him there, Gideon wiping potato salad from the sleeve of his shirt. He caught Julie’s hand. She turned to look at him.
“Thanks,” he said.
She laughed, her face flushed and excited. “I’ll never complain again about having to take a forcible-restraint class. Oh, boy, my heart’s still in my mouth.”
John smiled at her. “You did good, Julie.”
“We all did pretty good,” she said, laughing.
Nobody said anything else until they got to the cottage. Then John closed the door behind them and studied Gideon for several seconds, his hands on his hips, head cocked.
“Plastic wrap?” he said.
CHAPTER 21
“The plastic wrap, Gideon explained, was what had made it all come together. But it was the blinds, those up-and-down blinds, that had been the key. Those, and that twenty-four-hour period during which Harlow had dropped from sight. And of course that faint smell of insecticide in Harlow’s cottage.
“What smell of insecticide?” John asked.
“Well, I didn’t bother to mention it,” Gideon said. “I didn’t think it was important.”
John leaned forward. “You didn’t—!” He fell back in his chair with a wave of his hand. “Ah, what the hell, it wouldn’t have told me anything anyway. It still doesn’t tell me anything. What does insecticide have to do with anything?”
“The blowflies,” Gideon said. “She had to get rid of that first infestation.”
John made a visible effort to process this. “Doc, just what are you telling us, that Tilton had it wrong—that you had it wrong—that Harlow wasn’t killed when you said he was, when Callie was in Utah?”
“Nevada,” Gideon said. “And, yes, that’s right. She killed him before she ever got on the plane. He was murdered on Tuesday, not Wednesday. The time of death was faked. Brilliantly, I might add.”
“The time of death was faked,” John echoed woodenly. “Brilliantly, he might add.” He sighed. “I can’t wait for Applewhite to read my report.”
“Well, it was brilliant. Let me tell you just what I think happened, just how I think she did it, and see if it makes sense to the two of you.”
“This involves blowfly infestations?” Julie asked. “Yes, it does.”
She reached for her sandwich. “I think I’d better finish this. I have a strong suspicion my appetite is about to disappear.”
They were sitting around the table in John’s tiny dining area, an exact duplicate of Julie’s and Gideon’s. Spread out in front of them were the meager but welcome results of foraging in both their refrigerators: Cheerios, milk, baloney, Wonder bread, a six-pack of ginger ale. They had thought briefly of retrieving their barely touched steaks from the cookout area, where the picnic now continued in even higher spirits than before, but had decided that it would be better for them to keep to themselves for the time being. Besides, John had the impression that Gideon’s headlong dive across the table might have knocked their plates to the ground, a possibility also suggested by the condition of Gideon’s shirt.
“First of all,” Gideon said, “I think Callie decided Harlow had to go as soon as she saw how shook up he was when we found the burial—and we know Harlow had good reason to be shook up; he was the one who fudged the dental charts to cover up Jasper’s murder. I think it’s pretty safe to assume Callie was involved too, and that she got rid of Harlow before he cracked completely and gave everything away.”
“Ahem,” said Julie.
They looked at her.
“I believe I expressed this very hypothesis only yesterday, and was told by a certain eminent authority that it was out of the question.”
“Well, it was. Yesterday it made no sense at all. Today it does.”
“Yesterday it was my idea. Today it’s your idea.”
He laughed. “All right, credit where due. For the record: It was Julie who first fingered Callie, within hours after Harlow was found.”
“It was Julie who fingered Callie before Harlow was found,” she pointed out. “I knew right away there was something fishy about that horse thing, didn’t I? Even if the aforementioned authority took pains to point out the impossibility of that too.”
“That’s right, I’d forgotten. You sure did, Julie. We should have paid more attention.”
She nodded gravely. “Thank you.”
“But you have to admit that at the time it really didn’t stand to reason.”
“Oh, sure, that’s easy to say—”
“Look, folks,” John said, “can we straighten out who gets credit for what later? I’ve got to get over to Bend and tell Farrell what the hell is going on, and at this point I still don’t have a clue.” He looked pleadingly at Gideon. “Doc? Please?”
Gideon slowly chewed thick-sliced baloney and soft white bread while he got his thoughts together. “All right. Understand, I don’t know whether she had all of this planned ahead of time, or came up with it after she killed him, but I think I know how she pulled it off.”
Not, he explained, that he had everything straight yet himself. She really had been extraordinarily clever, coming up with a plan that had missed being foolproof by a hair. First, she’d realized that her best bet for getting away with it was to make it seem absolutely certain that she’d been hundreds of miles away, at her prearranged meeting, when Harlow had been killed.
“My guess is that she made sure a whole lot of people saw her in Nevada, and on the airplanes,” Gideon said, “and probably at the airports too.”
“Yeah,” John allowed, “a lot of people saw her. Look, Doc, I need to know how she did it. How could she fool a pro like Tilton? I mean, you’re saying he was off by over twenty-four hours. How could that be?”
“She fooled me too, John.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to mention that.”
Gideon got up to wrench some ice from the freezer tray for his ginger ale. “Let’s go back to basics for a minute,” he said.
And the most basic axiom of forensic pathology was that the processes of decay began at the instant of death and advanced through time in a reasonably regular and predictable progression until decomposition was finished. The second most basic axiom was that this progression could be altered by—
“When did you learn all this stuff about forensic pathology?” John said irritably. “Every time you get near a fresh corpse, all I hear is how it’s not your field.”
“He’s just making up that business about axioms,” Julie said matter-of-factly. “He thinks that’s how professors are supposed to talk. Admit it, Gideon.”
“Okay,” Gideon said, smiling, “but what I was about to say is true anyway. Decomposition can be affected by
a lot of things, with temperature being number one. The hotter it is, the faster it goes; the colder it is, the slower it goes.
Which is why refrigeration keeps things fresh, of course.”
It was this principle that Callie had applied. The blinds had been lowered not just to keep out prying eyes, but, more important, to keep out that blazing sun. She had lowered them as soon as she had killed him. No doubt, she had also turned the air conditioner on full-blast. Then she had hung out the do-not-disturb sign to keep unwanted visitors away. Then she’d left for Nevada.
“And when she got back on Thursday morning she went to his cottage, raised the blinds, and turned off the air conditioning. Then she went horseback riding.”
John rolled up a slice of baloney and bit off half of it, “So in came the heat, in came the sun, shining right on him. Tilton naturally went on the basis that it’d been like that all along, that the body’d been sitting there in that heat since the murder.”
“Right, we all were. But it was only that way for about ten hours. The rest of the time, another forty hours or so, it’d been under refrigeration, so to speak. All those changes Tilton talked about—bloating, discoloration, everything else—were slowed way down during that time.”
He leaned against the sink, sipping ginger ale, wrinkling his nose at the bubbles. “So naturally Tilton’s estimate of the TOD was quite a bit more than ten hours, but a whole lot less than the fifty that it really was. Nineteen to twenty-four hours, remember? Between four and ten P.M. Wednesday.”
“During which time Callie was provably off doing her thing in Carson City,” Julie said pensively. She fingered her can of ginger ale. “But where does the plastic wrap come into it?”
“Oh, that was even trickier. You can slow the internal bodily changes way down by lowering the heat, but there isn’t much you can do—not with just an air conditioner about the fly larvae. And there was no question the flies were going to find Harlow in a hurry.”
“In about five minutes, according to Tilton,” John said.
“That’s right. And finding fly larvae at the two or three-day stage of their development, instead of the one-day egg stage, would have given it away. So she—”