Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“This is good,” she said, waving a hand to show that she was talking about the setting and not the Malteser she was working on. After another few moments, she said, “So, are you going to tell me what made you so sure it was Rudy? Were you and Mike working together?”

“No. I was surprised when Mike accused him. I still don’t know what his reasoning was.” He pulled his legs up under him and sat cross-legged. “But speaking for myself, I think the idea was in my head for a couple of days, although it didn’t really hit me until this afternoon.” He hunched his shoulders. “I guess I didn’t want to face it. Actually, it started with something you said after they found Joey’s body.”

“Something I said?”

“That’s right.” She had wondered, he reminded her, if it was possible that Joey might have known what had really happened to Edgar, but, for whatever reason, had kept his silence as long as no one else knew. But once it became evident that Gideon was on his way to identifying the bones as Edgar’s, Joey’s continued existence became a huge risk to the murderer. So-

“And you said?” said Julie.

“Excuse me?”

“When I came up with this brilliant idea, which eventually solved the case, apparently. You said…?”

Gideon chewed on a mouthful of chocolate and malt. “Well, I don’t know, the chances are, I said it was a little unlikely, because of course it was.”

She shook her head. “No, sir, you said it was impossible. ”

“Well-”

“You said, ‘uh-uh,’ plain and clear. Not ‘maybe,’ not ‘possibly, ’ not ‘unlikely,’ just plain ‘uh-uh.’ Period. And I quote.”

“Okay, maybe I was a little, um, emphatic,” Gideon admitted, “because-”

“A little!”

“-because at the time I thought: How could anyone possibly know I was going to identify the bones as Edgar’s, when I didn’t know myself? But it was a good idea, Julie, and it stuck with me, even if I didn’t have the brains to realize it. Then today it all came together.”

“What came together?” She had lain back on the flat rock and was watching the low, cottony clouds scud by. He lay back to join her, his hands folded on his abdomen.

“Okay, what it was that struck me today, while I was working with the remains at the station, was that there was one person who knew I was going to figure out it was Edgar before I knew it myself. And that was Rudy. He was the one guy with a background in physical anthro, and he was as familiar with that fruit-picker paper as I was, because our old major prof made it the centerpiece of one of the seminars.”

“All right, but I’m not following you,” Julie said. “How could he know who it was before you did? That is-”

“Because he already knew who it was-”

“Of course. Obviously, since he was the one who killed him. But what I meant was, how could he be so sure you were going to figure it out? How could he even know you had the right bones to do it?”

“That’s easy. I told him. I told everyone. At the museum reception, remember? I said Robb had come back with the scapulas, among other things, and I was going to be examining them the next day. Smart, huh?”

“Oh, well, how could you know?” She sighed and closed her eyes. She was getting sleepy.

“Anyway, to be on the safe side, Rudy had to assume that I wasn’t about to miss all those specialized characteristics, or fail to put them together with the supinator crest and the squatting facets, and come up with fruit picker, loud and clear. And from there it wasn’t exactly a giant step to determining it was Villarreal.”

“Okay, that make sense. But it doesn’t exactly prove he murdered Joey.”

“Not prove; suggest. But it was more than enough to start me on a different tack, following up on something else that’d been niggling away at me. So I went to the library to do some checking. You remember Mary Borba?”

Her eyes remained closed, but her brows drew together. “Mary Borba

… yes… weren’t we just talking about her? Oh, I remember, wasn’t she the girl eaten by the bear in Montana? She and her husband? You were the one who remembered their name.”

“That’s the one. But there was something else I thought I remembered about the name, so I got on the Web and looked up what I could find about the incident. And I was right. Her name was Mary Walker Borba.”

“Mary Walker Borba,” she repeated sleepily. Then her eyes popped open and she pushed herself onto her elbows. “Walker! Was she related to Rudy?”

“She-”

“Oh, my God!” Julie sat all the way up, her black eyes intent. “When you were asking him about his daughter… you said ‘Mary.’ Was she… was she…”

“Yes.”

“But are you sure? Mary Walker’s not exactly an unusual name. There must be-”

“No.” He sat up beside her, shaking his head. “First of all, the original article mentioned that her father was an ecologist, and then some of the later ones identified him by name, and by the school he was teaching at in Canada. No, that was her, the sweet little five-year-old I remembered from Wisconsin.”

“How terrible.”

“Obviously, it completely changed the way he thought about the world. Six months later was when that piece in the Atlantic came out, where he pretty much said the hell with the animals, the important thing is to make wilderness safe for human beings. And as for Villarreal, remember, he was the one who’d pushed them into bringing the grizzlies back in the first place. Rudy would have seen him as responsible for her death.”

“Well, he was, really. In a way.” She reached absently toward the Malteser bag, but changed her mind and brought her hand back. With her arms wrapped around her knees she stared out across St. Mary’s Sound, toward Tresco and Bryher, which were quickly turning golden as the evening came on. The windows of unseen houses, caught by the lowering sun, winked at them. “And then Edgar was so callous about the killings, even back then. What was it he said?”

“He said they were ‘unfortunate.’”

“‘Unfortunate,’” Julie echoed, shaking her head.

“And then, later, at the talk at Methodist Hall, according to what Liz and Joey told us, he said it was their own fault, that the Borbas were stupid people. He said-”

“He said the only thing he regretted was the killing of the bear. Oh, God, can you imagine the way Rudy felt? Gideon, do you think he came here planning to kill him?”

“I doubt it. I don’t think he would have made a public show of how much he disliked him if he was planning to do him in. No, I’m guessing that he’d been simmering for years, and those last remarks of Villarreal’s just sent him over the edge. It’s hard to blame him. For going over the edge, I mean.”

“But why would he have come back this year? Don’t you think he would have stayed as far away from St. Mary’s as he could?”

“Well, first of all, he thought he was completely safe. Even the police believed Villarreal had been eaten by a bear, months later. Second, there’s that $50,000.”

“Mm.” The glitter from the windows had died out now. The islands were wrapped in evening haze. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the bright blue water now had dull streaks of mauve spreading across it. “And you think Joey actually knew about it? Why wouldn’t he have said something before?”

“I have no idea. But whatever he knew, it got him killed, too. By Rudy.”

She nodded. “The Theory of Interconnected Monkey Business does not lie.”

“That’s pretty much it,” he said, smiling. “Not exactly courtroom-ready, but maybe Mike knows more about that end of it. At this point, I have no idea what he knows or doesn’t know. I don’t even have a clue as to what made him decide it was Rudy.”