Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 13 - Unnatural Selection

by Unnatural Selection

  “Like a dance, innit?” Clapper said, getting a cigarette going.

  “It’s beautiful, really,” said Robb. “The way she follows.”

  After about five minutes, the dog suddenly sat down and softly whined.

  “She’s located something,” Clapper told them. “That’s the alert he trains them to give. Now he’ll ask her to show the exact spot.”

  “She won’t actually dig it up, will she?” an anxious Gideon asked.

  “No, no, she knows better than that.”

  “Good girl,” Hicks said to the dog. “Now then. Touch.”

  Tess immediately jumped up, placed a graceful forefoot on the sand, and pawed gently and elegantly away, like a high-strung horse.

  Hicks knelt to plant a thin metal rod with an orange flag on it. “X marks the spot,” he said, pleased and smiling. “Who wants to do the honors?”

  Robb and Clapper deferred to Gideon, who knelt and began clearing sand with his hands, spreading rather than digging. It was as soft as he’d hoped, if a bit colder, and it took less than a minute to uncover a smooth, spiraling, sea snail-shaped knob of bone, as clean of flesh and ligament as a specimen from a biological supply house. “That,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “is the distal end of a human right humerus—the elbow. Thank you, Tess, well-done.”

  The dog, her face on a level with his own, grinned at him and yawned prodigiously, her bright pink tongue curling back on itself into an almost-complete circle.

  Robb immediately got out his pad, his camera, and a metal tape measure, and set about industriously drawing, photographing, and writing down the circumstances of the find.

  With his fingers and the paintbrush Gideon began clearing sand from the rest of the bone. “If we’re right about it being a dismemberment—”

  “So now we’re back to if we’re right?” Clapper growled predictably; not with any conviction, but from mere force of habit.

  “—the chances are we’ll only find three-quarters of it or so. The top few inches will probably be missing, the same way . . . Ah, there we are, see?”

  He ran his fingers down it. “Male,” he announced. “And adult, of course. As expected.”

  “How did you know that?” Clapper asked, looking down from what seemed a great height. He was wearing a voluminous, calf-length topcoat, which gave him even more of a looming quality than usual.

  “Male because of the robusticity,” Gideon began, “and as for age, as you can see, the distal symphysis is—”

  “No, how did you know the top part would be missing?”

  “Oh, I didn’t know, I was just going with the averages. Dismemberments have a pretty typical pattern: upper arms cut from the torso just about where this one was, hands cut off above the wrist, legs severed a few inches down from the hips, head chopped off at about here—” He tapped his own neck. “Feet separated—”

  It was all a little too graphic for the imaginative Robb. “A bone like this, it doesn’t look so bad, but when you think about someone actually doing it . . . what a horror it must be . . . a nightmare.” A shudder ran visibly down his back.

  “It is. They do it in a bathtub when they can, to contain the gore,” Gideon said, continuing to brush sand. How did a peaceable, laughably squeamish guy like me, whose primary academic interest was early Pleistocene hominid locomotion, get to the point where I could so easily and knowledgeably discuss the methods of choice of homicidal monsters whose terrible minds and motives I couldn’t begin to comprehend? It was far from the first time he’d had such a thought, and no doubt far from the last.

  “Actually, I’ve never dealt with a freshly dismembered body”—and let’s hope I never do—“but I’ve gone back to the scene of the crime a few days later—the bathroom where it was done, I mean. And gory is hardly the word for it. Blood everywhere—the walls, the ceiling . . .” At the memory, he couldn’t quite repress a shudder of his own.

  Clapper noticed. “Grisly work,” he said sympathetically.

  “Messy in the extreme. The bathtub makes it easier to clean up, but of course blood traces are almost impossible to get rid of. If we knew where this guy was sliced up into sections, there’d probably still be traces, even after all this time.”

  “At Bramshill,” Robb said with a frown, “they told us dead bodies don’t bleed.”

  “That’s not always the case, lad,” Clapper said.

  “That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “Oh, there aren’t any great gouts of blood if you cut or stab them, because the heart’s not pumping anymore, so there’s no pressure, but they certainly can bleed if the blood’s still in them and it’s still liquid. The way a garden hose would continue to leak if you cut into it, after you turn it off.”

  “Like a fresh piece of meat, you might say,” said Clapper helpfully. “Oozes, like, don’t it?”

  “And when you’re cutting up a corpse, and hefting the segments, and trying to get them into sacks,” Gideon added, “you’re juggling some pretty heavy, awkward pieces of meat—a male torso weighs eighty or a hundred pounds, a single leg weighs about thirty—so you’re bound to get quite a lot of blood all over everything.”

  “I see,” whispered a pallid Robb, and then, barely audibly, “thank you.”

  Gideon had had enough too. “Look, why don’t we just concentrate on what we have here in front of us?” he muttered roughly, his head down, continuing to scrabble in the sand with his fingers. Nice, clean, dry bones, not a sign of gore.

  “You’re expecting to find the forearm bones here with it, then?” Clapper asked. “If the body was cut up the way you said?”

  “I was hoping so, assuming he deposited the entire fleshed arm here, but anything could have happened to them by now, and it’s starting to look as if—no, no, here we go.” His fingers had found something, and with a few strokes of the brush he uncovered two smaller, thinner bones. “They’ve just shifted in the sand a bit, but here they are: radius and ulna.”

  “Cut off through the wrist,” said Robb, impressed, “exactly as you predicted.”

  “Seen one, seen them all, I suppose,” Clapper said. “You’d think the blighters would cut through the joints, wouldn’t you? Disjoint, as you might say.”

  “Disjoint!” said Hicks with a grimace. “Sounds like something you’d do to a chicken.”

  Gideon laughed. “‘Disarticulate,’ we like to say.”

  “Well, whatever you call it,” said Clapper, “it would be a lot easier than all this hacking and chopping and sawing of bones, and a good bit neater, too.”

  “But not a lot faster,” Gideon said. “This is the quickest way. Getting through the articulations is a slow, tricky process, and, anyway, you couldn’t do it without a pretty thorough knowledge of anatomy.”

  He placed the three bones in a sack that Robb provided and got to his feet, brushing off his knees. “That’s it for this cache, I think. The hands are probably elsewhere, possibly with the feet. They seem to do it that way a lot.”

  “Shall we have the old girl carry on, then?” asked Hicks. “See what else she might turn up?”

  “Lead away,” Clapper said. “Kyle, we’ll leave you to do the sifting here.”

  “I’ll get started right away, Sarge,” Robb said, setting down the bucket, unrolling the length of screening, and producing a trowel.

  “Search,” Hicks said to Tess.

  Any expectation that she would repeat the lightning-quick results of her first effort was soon dashed. A cursory exploration of the beach at her own rapid pace produced no pool of scent. Nor did the first hour and a half of a slower, more methodical search with her master doing the guiding, after which Hicks, citing “olfactory fatigue,” declared she needed food, water, a play break, and a rest. By that time Robb had rejoined them: his sifting had produced nothing.

  Looking at his watch—it was a well after 1:00 P.M.—Clapper suggested they could use a food and watering break themselves, but Hicks said it would be better if Tess wasn’t away from the scene
for too long, and Robb said he wasn’t hungry, and if it was all right, he’d like to stay on and assist Hicks.

  “That’s fine with me,” Gideon said. He was hungry, but he was more eager to get someplace where he could properly examine the bones; preferably somewhere indoors and out of the increasingly dank fog. “If anything else does turn up, I think you get the idea of how to unearth it, Kyle, so why don’t you go ahead and take care of it yourself?”

  His graduate students would have been justifiably outraged to hear him say this, considering how often he reminded them of the importance of being in on the exhumation whenever possible. But in this case, with the bones dismembered and scattered, there was little to be learned from their precise placement. Besides, the natural shifting of beach sands made it even less likely that their positional relationships would have any similarity to the way they were originally buried. Besides that, in order to maintain even their present positions in the unstable sand and keep them from getting covered over again by dislodged fill, he would have had to erect a set of retaining walls, which, in the present circumstances, wasn’t worth the doing.

  And besides, he was freezing.

  “Really, would that be all right?” Robb was thrilled.

  “Doesn’t seem as if there’s all that much to it,” Clapper rumbled. “Brush ’em off, pick ’em up, and put ’em in a bag. It’s the dog that does the work, innit?”

  “If the hand or foot bones turn up, make sure you do a thorough search for the small ones,” Gideon said. “Some of the carpals and tarsals are pretty funny-looking, like irregular little stones, so pick up anything along those lines. Oh, and be sure and sift really thoroughly around any hand bones, Kyle; he might have neglected to pry off a ring, or even a watch, and it might still be around.”

  “Can you handle that all right, lad?” Clapper asked.

  “Oh, I think I can just about cope,” said Robb, but with so sunny a smile that Clapper couldn’t have taken offense if he’d wanted to.

  “And if you have a problem,” Clapper said, “you know how to reach me.”

  “I’ll do that, sir. And have no fear, Professor, I’ll document and photograph everything exactly as it lies in situ.”

  “In situ,” Clapper repeated, shaking his head. “My, my.” And then with a sigh, “I’m sure you will, lad, I’m sure you will.”

  ELEVEN

  “PETE Williams?” Clapper echoed distantly, chewing determinedly away at his double-portion haddock-and-chips lunch, periodically washing it down with a swallow of non-alcoholic ginger beer.

  “He’s a writer who got into a hassle with Edgar Villarreal the last time the consortium met, two years ago.”

  “And who’s Edgar Villarreal?” Clapper asked without much interest, using his knife to plaster the last of the “mushy peas” onto his fork.

  Sergeant Clapper ate in what Gideon thought of as the classic English manner, holding his knife like a scalpel to cut things (so elegant), and then employing it to lather stuff on the back of his fork, which was then stuck in his mouth upside down (so inelegant). And since the English rarely put down either implement during a meal, when they chewed it was impossible not to think of Oliver Twist sitting over his paltry meal in the workhouse, holding knife and fork upright on the table. On the other hand, Gideon was ready to admit, Americans wasted a lot of motion changing hands twice every time they had to cut a piece of meat.

  Gideon explained about Villarreal as he continued to work on his ploughman’s lunch of Cheddar cheese, half a baguette, relish—“pickle,” as they called it—pickled onion, and a bit of lettuce-and-tomato salad. He was a relatively fast eater, always finishing before Julie, but Clapper put him to shame.

  “And he actually threatened to kill him?” Clapper asked as Gideon finished the story. “With witnesses?”

  “No, I wouldn’t call it a threat, and he didn’t say it to the guy’s face. He was with some of the other members right here at the Bishop and Wolf and muttering in his beer—” Gideon lifted his own half-pint of bitter and sipped. “—and he said he’d like to kill him, which, I agree, wouldn’t ordinarily mean much of anything, but Williams seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth since then, so I thought it was worth mentioning to you. You might want to see what you can find out about him.”

  Clapper laughed. “Oh, right, give me fifteen minutes and I’ll have it done.”

  “I gather there’s a problem? I mean, I know it must be a fairly common name—”

  “Fairly common? Gideon, ‘Williams’ is the third most common name in Great Britain, following closely on the heels of ‘Smith’ and ‘Jones.’ And if I’m not mistaken, ‘Peter’ comes right after ‘William’ and ‘John’ as a Christian name.”

  “Still, I thought you’d want—”

  “I do, of course I do. But I’d have appreciated it if you could have come up with a more unusual name.” He hauled out a notepad. “Where is he supposed to live?”

  “I think somebody said London.”

  “Naturally,” Clapper said wryly. “And he’s a writer, you say?”

  “Well, not really. I gather this was his first book.” He snapped his fingers as the previous night’s conversation at the Bishop and Wolf came back to him. “He was an auto mechanic, he worked in a garage. That should make it easier, shouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s excellent,” Clapper said, yawning. He entered a final scribble in his notepad, reached for a menu, and pulled it to him. “Now then. Fancy a spot of pudding? Let me recommend—bloody hell, that’s mine.”

  His cell phone had signaled. It was stowed in the pocket of his topcoat, which hung from a coatrack, its hem trailing on the floor, so he had to unwedge himself from behind the table and get up to answer it. “Is that so? Well, I’ll let you tell him yourself.” He handed the phone to Gideon. “Kyle.”

  “Dr. Oliver?” Robb piped happily. “I don’t like to interrupt your lunch, but we’ve found some more. Only about a foot down. Appear to be hand or foot bones, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Those little finger bones—”

  “Phalanges.”

  “And then some of the funny-shaped little ones you mentioned. And also the bottoms—I mean the distal ends—of the tibias, or maybe it’s the, er, ulnas, depending—”

  “That’s great, Kyle. Okay, we’ll be right there.”

  Clapper took back his phone, clicked it shut, and cast a last wistful look at the menu. “So much for pudding,” he said.

  THE new hoard that Tess had uncovered, now resting on the length of screening, did indeed consist of a mix of left and right hand and foot bones, plus the distal ends of both tibias, one fibula, and one ulna.

  “I count thirty-five hand and foot bones altogether,” Gideon said, kneeling over them. Are you pretty sure you got them all? Could any of them have migrated a few feet one way or the other, beyond where you looked?”

  “Not according to Tess,” said Hicks. He was sitting on the sand, elbows around drawn-up knees, smoking his pipe. Tess sat beside him, watching with polite interest.

  “I dug up a pretty big area,” Robb said uncertainly. “How many should there be?”

  “Twenty-seven in the hand, twenty-six in the foot. And parts of both hands and feet are here, so that would be a total of, ah—”

  “One hundred six,” Clapper promptly supplied.

  “The rest have probably been washed away,” Hicks offered, “or possibly the shrews got them, or the crabs.”

  “Or the seals,” said Gideon, “or the crows, or the gulls. Or other people’s pet dogs. Well, it’s not a bad haul, considering.” He got to his feet and brushed off the knees of his trousers. “If Tess is finished, then, I’d like to have a chance to look it all over in detail. Mike, you said you had someplace for me to work?”

  “Actually, the final quadrant hasn’t been searched,” Hicks said, unwrapping one arm from his knees to point to the rock-littered upslope at the far end of the beach.

  Gideon followed his gesture. “Tha
t’s pretty unlikely to turn up anything, Mr. Hicks. Too many rocks, too much brush. People digging holes for dead bodies prefer easier terrain.”

  “Yes, that was my thinking. That’s why I left if for last, in case we couldn’t get to it. Poor Tess is thoroughly knackered at the moment, I’m afraid.” He massaged the ruff of her neck. “And I’m feeling my age as well. I think we’ll pack it in. Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Clapper shook his head. “That’s doubtful, Trus. If the fog gets much worse, which I don’t doubt it will, even Ron won’t be able to get you here tomorrow.”

  Hicks got creakily to his feet. “Well, we’ll see, shall we?” He paused. “I don’t suppose the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary would have it in them to buy a hungry old man his pottage, now would they?”

  “Absolutely,” Clapper said. “I apologize, Trus, I wasn’t thinking. You must be starving. You too, Kyle. Kyle, I want you to take Mr. Hicks to any dining establishment of his choice, courtesy of the department, and give him a truly memorable lunch. Anything he wants. And remember: expense is not a consideration.”

  “Why, thank you, Michael,” Hicks said. “I’m quite touched.”

  “Anything up to and including a pound,” Clapper said grandly.

  “WILL this give you enough room, then?” Clapper asked. They had just finished arranging the unoccupied cubicle opposite Robb’s office, clearing the desk of storage files and assorted debris and shoving the stacks that were on the floor up against the walls to provide more room around the desk.

  “It’ll do fine,” Gideon said, placing the sacks of bones on the desk.

  “We can put the coffeemaker elsewhere, if you want.”

  “No, leave it on the desk, it won’t bother me.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend drinking any, however, at least not in the afternoon after it’s been out a while. Takes a bit of getting used to.”