Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

Other than Mrs. Bewley and Mr. Moreton, neither of whom had been in Kozlov’s employ at the time of the last consortium two years ago, that was pretty much everybody in the place; everybody who was still alive, anyway. The only one who hadn’t shown any ill feelings toward Villarreal-who had, in fact, declared his admiration and even affection for him-was Joey. And Joey, like Villarreal, was dead.

After a few more steps she shivered. “Let’s go back, I’m chilled through. ‘Fog season,’ brr. The people here must hate this time of year.”

“Everyone,” said Gideon with a smile, “except Mike Clapper.”

Dinner at the castle was a sober affair, and quiet as well, inasmuch as Clapper had asked them not to talk about Joey’s death for the time being. But it was clear, from the few comments that were made, and from the furtive, side-long glances shooting around the table, that they had all arrived at the same conclusions that Gideon and Julie had: Joey’s murderer, if indeed Joey had been murdered, was sitting right there among them. It was also clear, from their generally dazed demeanor, that learning that the bones from the beach were those of the very definitely murdered Edgar Villarreal (Clapper had informed them) had hit them hard; an appalling double whammy. Already upset about Joey, they were all thoroughly stunned by the news about Edgar.

All but one.

The next morning Kozlov, true to form, announced it was back to work for the consortium, starting with the usual working breakfast, so Gideon walked down the hill and into Hugh Town for something to eat. By now he looked forward to a couple of those D-shaped Cornish breakfast pasties to start the day and would miss them when he got back home. Egg McMuffins were fine, but nothing like these supremely dense, tasty things that sank to your stomach like so much lead and continued to warm you for hours.

Late the previous afternoon he had met with Clapper for the distasteful purpose of telling him about the numerous antipathies that Villarreal had aroused among the consortium Fellows. Clapper, tired and preoccupied, had seemed unimpressed, but that was his affair. Gideon was simply glad to have the task behind him. Today he would be pleased to get back to his own element: bones.

When he came out of the cafe and turned toward the station he noticed that the fog had abated a bit. Not thinned, but shredded here and there, like torn curtains, so that there were sporadic glimpses of the sound and even the outer islands between thick pillars of whitish-gray. It was like the occasional, shadowed sight of earth you got looking down from an airliner through heavy, broken clouds. He found that being able to see more than a few feet, even intermittently, raised his spirits, so that when he opened the door of the station he was whistling.

Clapper, sitting in Robb’s office, cradling a mug of coffee in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other, was looking happy, too, and much restored. “Constable, you made a damned mockery of the majesty and stateliness of Force!” he was bellowing at Robb, but he was laughing. Robb looked cheerfully mock-sheepish.

Clapper waved Gideon in cordially. “Ah, Gideon, a pleasure to see you. Now what do you suppose this fellow has done to so arouse my ire?” he asked, jerking a thumb at Robb. “Tell him, Constable.”

“I’m not really sure, sir,” Robb said to Gideon. “Near as I can tell, the sergeant is upset because I donned contaminant-restrictive headgear at the crime scene, as I was taught to do at-”

“Contaminant-restrictive headgear!” Clapper howled. “I’m sitting there minding my own business, interviewing Mrs. Bewley, and I turn around and glance out a window, and there in the passageway, I see a ’orrible sight-Constable Robb, this very Constable Robb, prowling about with a shower cap, a plastic bloody shower cap, on his head! Next thing, I expected to see him in a tatty bathrobe and bedroom slippers.”

“Sarge, they told us at school-”

“And he had the effrontery to offer one to me as well!”

“Sarge, the reason-”

Clapper shushed him affably. “I know, lad, I know. I’m just having you on. You go ahead and do it if that’s what they taught you. But please, not in my presence. Gideon, get yourself some coffee and come join us, why don’t you? I met Mrs. Oliver yesterday. Delightful woman.”

“She told me,” Gideon said from the other cubicle, pouring coffee into the same mug he’d used the day before and wishing he’d remembered to rinse it. “She thought you were delightful, too. ‘He was a lamb’ were her exact words.”

“A lamb,” Robb said to the ceiling, “I bet that’s a first.”

“Au contraire, mon ami,” Clapper said, leaning expansively back in his chair, one thick, hairy forearm hooked over it, then switching to an atrocious French accent: “Eet ees zat I hear zis constantlee.” For a guy with two death investigations on his plate-Joey Dillard’s and Edgar Villarreal’s-and a professional staff of exactly one, he was looking very much at his ease.

“I have something for you,” he said as Gideon returned with his coffee. He waved a few sheets of paper. “Yesterday I put in a call to my fellow copper in Talkeetna, Alaska, and asked if he’d be kind enough to send over what they had on the death of Edgar Villarreal, the gentleman supposedly eaten, and subsequently deposited, by a bear a couple of years ago. Here it is. Not very much of a case file. Police report, police surgeon’s report-both quite brief-and a photograph of the remains, none too clear. They scanned them into the computer and e-mailed them, and there they were, waiting for us this morning.”

“Ah.” Gideon dropped into the empty chair, put his mug on the desk, and took the printouts with considerable interest. The police report covered the same ground as the story in the International Herald Tribune: remains discovered in a bear den, identified as human by one Dr. Leslie Roach, consulting police surgeon, and assumed to be those of Edgar Villarreal, missing from his nearby base camp for the previous two years. The surgeon’s report added little: “Forty bone fragments were recovered, the largest measuring approximately four centimeters and most less than five millimeters. A virtually complete second phalanx of a human thumb, measuring three centimeters, was found, as was a five-centimeter rib fragment. Other fragments were too small and splintered to be conclusively identified.”

Gideon turned to the color photograph of the remains, which had been spread out on a table, first having apparently been cleaned. The picture was either fuzzy to begin with, or had been much degraded in the scanning process. But it was clear enough for his purposes. He placed his finger on one of the bones in the photo, the only complete one. “This thumb phalanx?” he said.

“Yes?” Clapper and Robb responded.

“It’s from a sheep, maybe a goat.”

“Goats have thumbs?” Robb asked.

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. The thing was, Robb was so earnest. “No, but they have breast bones-sternums-and this is the manubrium, the top segment of a sternum. And this…” He indicated another bone in the picture. “And this would be the rib fragment he talked about. He’s right enough about that, but it’s way too flattened to be a human rib. It’s from a quadruped too; probably the selfsame unfortunate sheep, would be my guess.” With a gesture, he took in the entire photograph. “There’s nothing else I can be sure of. This one might be part of a tail vertebra, but that’s about it. Definitely nothing to suggest anything other than a quadruped, a bovid. Well, maybe a couple of little mole or gopher bones, or something like that, mixed in there too. Ferret, maybe. More than one meal here, I’d say. No reason to think any of it’s human.”