Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

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 irritate 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.

Well, he’d put an end to that line of thinking right now.

Some of the bones were still in their sacks. He got them all out onto the table, and then by way of penance, started with the ones that gave him the most trouble when it came to distinguishing between them and determining right from left: the thirty-five hand and foot bones. Without a text or a comparative skeleton it wasn’t easy. There was a public library just down the street, and chances were they had an atlas of anatomy he could have used, but what kind of penance would that have been? Sorting the maddening little bones was frustrating, but because it didn’t require anything like coherent thought-it was basically a matter of comparing bone to bone, nodule to nodule, foramen to foramen-it untethered and relaxed his mind, allowing it to float off on its own.