Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 13 - Unnatural Selection

by Unnatural Selection

  Gideon’s answer was quick. “No, thank you, not necessary.”

  Truth be told, he was having a hard time telling which end of the brain in the jar was the front and which was the back, let alone remembering what or where the anterior ascending ramus of the lateral cerebral fissure was. This, he thought, was a good lesson to him. All week he had been explaining away the ignorance of physicians in regard to bones, and although he had gone out of his way to be charitable, in his heart he’d been feeling mightily superior. Well, now he knew that what was true for them was true for him: even the most qualified experts knew only so much. They knew what they were familiar with, what interested them, what they worked with day to day. And to Gideon, who hadn’t held a human brain in his hands since graduate school, and who hoped never to do it again, that most definitely did not include the soft and squishy organs of the human interior.

  But if Merrill said the brain injuries were thus and so, and covered such and such a surface area, he was certainly willing to accept it. What he was not willing to accept was the pathologist’s conclusion.

  “I don’t think so, Wilson.”

  Merrill scowled. “Don’t think what?”

  “I don’t think that’s the way it happened.”

  There were a few—a very few—forensic pathologists who enjoyed having their minds boggled, and their hypotheses overturned, and Wilson Merrill was one of them. Apparently, Gideon had lived up to expectations, and he was delighted. “I knew you’d say that! I was hoping you’d say that! Rajiv, didn’t I tell you he’d say that? All right, tell me, what have I gotten wrong?”

  Gideon gestured at the skullcap, which he’d placed, still on its towel, exterior side up, on a corner of the instrument table. “There are two separate injuries here, not one.”

  “Two?” Intrigued, Merrill peered down at it. “Good Lord, with all that disruption, how can you possibly tell? It all looks like one big mess to me.”

  “No, if you look carefully, you can see two separate loci. There’s the depressed fracture, of course, here on the left parietal.”

  “Yes, naturally. I see that.”

  “And here, across the sagittal suture, on the right parietal, about three inches away, is another, separate point of impact with its own set of fracture lines. You see how the bone here broke up in a rough pattern of concentric circles: one, two, three rings”—he traced their shapes with his ballpoint—“in the center of which would be the impact point. And then there are all these linear fractures radiating every which way out of the rings, which is what complicates things.”

  “By George, yes, I do see,” Merrill said. He mused, frowning. “Two impact points. Two separate traumatic incidents. Well, then . . . well, then . . .” He looked up into the fluorescent lights for inspiration. “Might he not have somehow struck his head on that broken pipe on the way down—that would be the depressed fracture—and then struck it again when he hit the flat pavement below? Is that what happened, do you think?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Merrill echoed. “I didn’t think so. You believe, then, that he was struck and then fell. That this is a homicide after all. A murder.”

  “I believe it’s a murder, all right, but it was the other way around.”

  “The other way around,” Merrill repeated, enchanted. “Whatever can that mean, I wonder.”

  “First he fell,” Gideon said. “Then he was struck.”

  “And you know this . . . how?”

  “Look at the cracks,” Gideon said. “Look at the way they intersect.”

  Merrill looked, then jerked his head. “What about the cracks?” he asked, but a bit testily. He’d had his fill of befuddlement, Gideon thought, and was impatient to be enlightened.

  “The cracks from the injury on the right, the one with the concentric pattern, go every which way, until they peter out on their own.

  “Yes, yes, as you said before.”

  “But the cracks radiating from the depressed fracture . . .” He paused, wanting to give Merrill a chance to work it out himself, and the pathologist came through with flying colors.

  “—are arrested wherever they run into a crack coming from the other fracture!” he cried. “They never continue across them. Of course! A crack can’t cross another crack; the energy is dissipated. That means that the other fracture was there first. The depressed fracture came afterward!”

  Gideon nodded, as pleased as Merrill was. “Right. He fell from the catwalk—was pushed, would be a pretty good guess at this point—and whoever pushed him came down, found him still alive, or at least thought that he might be, and smashed him in the head again to make sure the job was done.”

  Merrill nodded, suddenly solemn. “Do you know, I’ve always hated blunt-force homicides,” he said thoughtfully. “A gun, a knife, will kill quickly, but blows—they usually take more than one, sometimes many, many more than one, demonstrating, to me, at least, a horrible, brutal tenacity in the human psyche that I don’t like thinking about.”

  “But in this case there was only the one blow.”

  “Yes, only one, but imagine what it was like. Young Joey Dillard, lying on the stone, helpless, terribly injured, his head already shattered, and the killer . . . the killer cold-bloodedly . . .”

  “I too hate these things,” Rajiv declared with feeling.

  “I’m not too crazy about them myself,” said Gideon, doing his best to block out the picture that Merrill had conjured up for him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  DESPITE Merrill’s promise, he did not arrive back by teatime. It was 5:50 P.M. by the time the helicopter set him down on Holgate’s Green, and he immediately telephoned Clapper’s private number to bring him up to date on the autopsy, but it was Anna at the answering service that picked up, and she had a message waiting for him.

  “Hello, love, the sergeant’s just gone out for dinner with his lady-friend, but he said if you get back by six or six-thirty, why don’t you come and join him, and bring your wife, if you like? They’ve gone to the Atlantic Inn. Do you know where it is, love, or do you require directions?”

  Gideon did not require directions. He had passed it several times on his way to his morning pasties and coffee at the Kavorna Café: a pleasant-looking old hotel and pub on the main street, right at the foot of the pier. He put in a call to Julie, who was at the nightly cocktail hour in the castle dungeon—it had been canceled the night before on account of Joey’s death, but Kozlov had now reinstituted it—and passed along the invitation.

  “I’d love to!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you dying to find out what Mike’s ‘lady-friend’ is like?”

  “What his lady-friend is like? Yes, sure. I suppose so. Sure.”

  “Men,” Julie grumbled.

  AS it turned out, however, Clapper’s choice of lady-friend surprised—and, on reflection, pleased—both of them. It was, of all people, the bangled, gabby Madeleine Goodfellow, director of the museum, and they heard her before they saw her. She and Clapper were at a table on a little, whitewashed terrace in back, looking out over a picture-postcard view of beached fishing boats resting all askew on the sand at low tide, and her jolly cackle of a laugh easily penetrated the buzz of conversation in the restaurant, the click of balls at the pool table, and the whirring of the slot machines.

  “It’s Madeleine!” Julie said, delighted. “How wonderful! She’s just what he needs. She’ll be so good for him.”

  “And I suspect he’ll be pretty good for her, too. He’s a pretty solid guy, Julie, underneath it all.”

  Over dinners of oxtail soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, Gideon explained what he and Merrill had come up with, keeping the more grisly autopsy details to himself in deference to Julie’s and Madeleine’s sensibilities. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to all: Joey had been thrown from the catwalk (probably) and then bludgeoned (certainly) while he lay on the ground. Murdered.

  Sobered, they talked about the two killings for a while, throwing around conjectures—obvio
usly, Clapper had been keeping Madeleine abreast—but by the time dinner was finished, and the men were into their second pints (ginger beer for Clapper) and the women into their second half-pints, they livened up and conversation turned to other matters. Clapper and Madeleine were to be married in the fall and would live, not above the police station, but in a nineteenth-century house on Tresco that had been in Madeleine’s family since the 1930s and was now being restored. They would have a view over the famous old Abbey Gardens and out across the Sound toward St. Mary’s, from which they would be a mere ten minutes by boat. Gideon and Julie were enthusiastically invited to the wedding and enthusiastically accepted. They clinked glasses—Madeleine’s bangles jingled—and talked on and on, until after eleven.

  All in all, it was a welcome break from the events of the last few days, and Julie and Gideon were utterly relaxed as they walked back up Garrison Hill to the castle, hand in hand.

  “Well, one mystery is solved anyway,” Julie said.

  “What would that be?”

  “Remember when you showed up at the museum reception the other night, straight from the police station, and you were surprised that Madeleine already knew about the bones from the beach?”

  Gideon nodded.

  “I think I can make a pretty good guess who she heard it from.”

  “You just might be on to something,” Gideon said.

  WHEN he awakened the next morning, Gideon was sorely in need of a break. The session at the morgue had taken more out of him than he’d realized, and he wondered once again at Merrill’s ability to seemingly draw strength from his gruesome work. He’d suggested to Julie that she might want to play hooky for just one morning and join him, but while she’d obviously been drawn to the idea, she felt that she owed it to Kozlov and the others to be there.

  “What’s the morning’s topic?” Gideon had asked.

  “Victor’s presenting his paper on . . .” She’d looked at her copy of the program, open on the bed. “‘. . . a three-tiered social-constructivist ecological paradigm derived from monistic-subjectivist epistemology, relativist ontology, and genuinely hermeneutic methodology.’ God help me.”

  Gideon stared open-mouthed at her for a moment. “Oh, well, you sure wouldn’t want to miss that. Damn, sure wish I could be there.”

  So he was on his own, which suited him on this particular morning. After breakfast at the Kavorna Café (he’d been coming long enough for the waitress to ask if he wanted “the usual,” which he did), he decided to take advantage of the pleasant weather and see some of the island’s Neolithic sites.

  On a whim he’d inquired about bicycles at the Kavorna and been directed to Buccabu Bike Hire on the Strand. Once there he’d somewhat shamefacedly asked for the least-complicated, easiest-to-operate bicycle they had (it had been a while since he’d been on one).

  The clerk smiled knowledgeably. “Know just what you want, mate, got it right here,” he’d said, rolling out a one-speed, heavy-bodied Hampton Cruiser with wide tires, coaster brakes, and upright handlebars.

  “Will that do you, mate? Just like you had when you were a kid, eh?”

  Indeed, it was closer to his old Schwinn than he’d believed possible. “Just what I wanted.”

  Armed with directions from the shop, he had cycled, only a little unevenly, up Telegraph Road, stopping at the Porthmellon store to pick up a picnic lunch, and then onto a dirt road until he found Bant’s Carn and Innisidgen Graves, two well-preserved Bronze Age entrance graves—open, rectangular, half-buried chambers situated at the tops of impossibly green hills, constructed of giant granite slabs, and roofed by huge capstones. With no other visitors at either place, he enjoyed pottering around for a while, but once he’d gone in and out of the chambers, and marveled at the size of the building stones, and wondered at how they’d gotten the massive capstones up there, there wasn’t much to do. The graves were empty, of course, having long ago been excavated, and the explanatory plaques, while informative, quickly wore thin in entertainment value. (“. . . a substantial mound revetted by a kerb of coursed walling and a partially infilled central chamber of trapezoidal form . . .”)

  Still, the outing renewed him, body and spirit, and it was in a relaxed and contented frame of mind that he had his lunch of Stilton cheese, hard salami, and French bread sitting atop the Bant’s Carn capstone and looking out over the moor toward the islands of Tresco and Bryher.

  Half an hour later, having returned the bike, he stopped in at the police station, where he found Clapper and Robb eating sandwiches at Robb’s desk, and about to return to Star Castle to continue their poking about.

  “There you are, Gideon. Sit down, just the man I wanted to see,” Clapper said genially, chewing away on an archetypal English sandwich of soft white bread (crustless and thin as a dime), cucumber, and egg salad, his feet up on the desk and his ankles crossed. “Just how sure are you that those bones in the next room are really Edgar Villarreal’s?”

  Gideon shrugged. “Pretty sure. Everything points to him. Of course, I’ve been wrong before—”

  “No, not since yesterday, when you were pretty sure it was Pete Williams. Let’s not have any false modesty.”

  “Now wait a minute, Mike, that’s not fair. You know I—”

  “Easy, easy,” Clapper said, laughing, “just having you on a bit, no harm intended. But what do you make of this?” He wiped his fingers and scrabbled unsuccessfully among the papers on the desk until Robb came up with the one he wanted. “You read it to him, lad, it’s your work, after all.” He went back to his sandwich, talking around the bites. “And very well done, too.”

  Robb swallowed what he had in his mouth, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and read: “According to Skybus records, Mr. Edgar Villarreal, who had previously booked his ticket to Bristol, did indeed fly from St. Mary’s to Bristol on Flight 400, at 8:00 A.M., on 7 June 2003, the final day of the last consortium. It is uncertain how or exactly when he returned to the United States, but on 8 June, at 3:22 P.M., he paid the parking fee for his car, a four-wheel-drive Toyota SUV, at the South Terminal Long-Term Lot at Anchorage International Airport, and exited. It was understood by an estranged sister, Maria Beasley, that he was going straight to his base camp ninety miles east of Anchorage, but she did not personally speak with him. When he failed to return home to Willow, Alaska, at the beginning of August, police were notified. On 4 August, local police visiting his camp found it deserted. The vehicle was not located. Further investigation produced no—”

  “All right, Constable, that’ll do. What do you think about all this, Gideon?”

  “I think it doesn’t prove anything at all. Anyone could have taken that flight in Villarreal’s name, or picked up his SUV and dumped it somewhere. Why wasn’t it found at the camp? Did the bear eat that, too?”

  “A good question,” Clapper said, nodding.

  “But the one place where he’d had to have been who he said he was, would have been the flight from England to the States, where he’d need to show a passport. And apparently there’s no record of his having done that.”

  “There isn’t,” Robb said. “I was able to computer-search the manifests of every flight from the UK to the United States from 5:00 P.M. on the seventh of June to noon on the eighth. The name of every person who was at the consortium shows up—except Villarreal’s”

  Gideon spread his hands. “Well, there you go. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build a paper trail that ‘proved’ he was alive. But the one thing he couldn’t do was to get Villarreal’s name on an international flight.” He gestured at the scatter of bones on the table in the cubicle across the hall. “So I’m still betting that’s him right there.”

  Clapper finished his sandwich and stood up. “And I’m agreeing with you,” he said. “That’s the way I see it, too.”

  “I’d like to do some more work on the bones this afternoon. Maybe I can come up with something else for you.”

  “Very good. Kyle and I are off to the castle to irrit
ate the residents a bit more. You can have the station to yourself if you want it.”

  He did; he had plenty to do. There was a formal inventory and description of the bones to be prepared, and then a careful, bone-by-bone analysis (the tables he’d been waiting for had arrived), with the results written up into a report that Clapper could use later on. And he needed to prepare something for Merrill as well, setting out on paper his autopsy-room conclusions and a rationale to accompany them. Accepting Clapper’s invitation to use his office and computer, he first wrote and printed up his findings for Merrill, then took some coffee, prepared earlier by Robb, into the cubicle where the bones were and prepared to get to work on them.

  He did so with an unaccustomed sense of guilt, one that had been nagging at him for a couple of days, but which he’d managed to keep more or less at bay. The fact was, in almost every way, his handling of the skeletal analysis so far had been far short of the professionalism he demanded of his students. He’d acted like a raw grad student himself, running off in whatever new direction grabbed his interest. First he’d rushed to find evidence of dismembering; then he’d tried to see if the bones could have been Pete Williams’s. Then he’d gotten all caught up in the fruit-picker syndrome and the admittedly thrilling identification of the remains as Villarreal’s. And then . . . then he’d lost interest and dropped it; the exciting part was over, and what remained was a lot of measuring, counting, and describing.

  Understandable enough in a first-year student, but that just wasn’t the way it was done. This was a science, not some magic act in which you went around pulling one rabbit after another out of the hat to the amazement and stupefaction of all concerned. There was a methodology, an order to be followed, and the very first, most elementary steps—laying out all the bones, not just the interesting ones, in their anatomical position and inventorying them—had yet to be taken. He had made no record of the number of fragments he had or exactly what they were, because he didn’t yet know himself—after three days with them right there in front of him on the table. I’m getting careless, he thought gloomily. No, not careless, cavalier. Rules were for lesser people, students and such, and not for him.