Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

That had taken a few seconds to sink in, and then Carl had exploded. “They can’t get away with this,” he was yelling now. “I don’t give a… I don’t care about any goddamn statute of limitations, I’m not just going to let this lie. There has to be somebody else to talk to.”

But he didn’t look as if he really believed it and neither did anyone else. All the air seemed to go out of him and he flopped limply back down. Annie, sitting beside him, covered her father’s hand with her own. Others picked mutely at their food.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Jamie said quietly.

“I know somebody in the policia ministerial,” Preciosa offered in her smooth, queenly manner. She was wearing a flowing, loose, long-sleeved blouse of black silk that made the movements of her arms and veined, long-fingered hands more sinuous and elegant than ever.

Carl looked hopefully at her. “Who?”

Josefa snorted. “Always she knows ‘somebody,’ this one,” the old woman muttered to no one in particular.

“Somebody important,” Preciosa said with barely a contemptuous glance at Josefa. “Somebody with more power than this Marmolejo person, somebody with whom I can say I have a certain amount of influence.”

Tony looked at her admiringly. “She always knows somebody,” he said with a totally different implication than Josefa’s. “Who do you know, honey?”

“His name is Colonel Archuleta, a very old friend of my family, very high in the police, very powerful. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I will speak personally with him.”

Archuleta, Gideon remembered after a moment’s thought, was the corrupt, high-ranking cop Marmolejo had booted out. “I’m afraid your friend’s not there anymore,” he said. “Colonel Marmolejo has replaced him.”

“Ah.” Preciosa gave him a thin-lipped smile, but the look in her turquoise-shadowed eyes told him he had not made a friend of her. Looking at her, he realized with a kind of awe that her rings, and there were at least as many as she’d been wearing the other night, were not the same ones. Those had been set with amethysts to match her purple eye shadow. These were all jade and turquoise, to set off tonight’s blue-green eye shadow. Did the woman have a different set of jewelry for every shade of eye coloring? Did she actually take them with her when she traveled?

“Hey, maybe we could get a private eye to look into it,” Tony said. “Preciosa, honey, you know any investigadores privados?’

“As it happens, amorcito -”

“Ah no,” Tony interrupted with a sudden wave of his hand. “What are we doing? What could a private eye find out now? Where would he even start? Why do we want to shake everything up again, upset everybody? What would be the point?”

“The point?” Carl cried. “The point? How about justice?”

“Carl, if the police can’t act,” Jamie said reasonably, “how are you going to get justice? What are you going to do, take the law into your own hands?”

Carl glowered down at his plate. “How about finding out what really happened? Doesn’t anybody care about that?”

Annie, her hand still on his, said, “We all care, Pop, but they’re right. It’s too late, too much water under the bridge. Let it go.”

Carl jerked his head in frustration. “Just drop it? Never know who did this terrible thing, or why, or exactly what happened? I mean, sure, Blaze had problems, she wasn’t perfect, but you know, she was barely twenty years old, just a kid, really. She was your mother, Annie. To just let it lie without doing anything at all, as if it never happened…”

Gideon hadn’t yet mentioned his plans to look at the skull in the museum and was unsure whether or not he should. Identifying the skeleton as Blaze’s had wound up providing more hurt than help, as far as he could see, and he wasn’t sure how this would turn out. Still, he thought he owed them the information.

“Well, actually,” he said hesitantly, “I am looking into it a little more, or at least there might be a connection.”

Six pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction.

“There was an old Zapotec skull found in the same mine some years ago. Anybody familiar with that?”

Head shakes all around, except from Josefa, who was concentrating on picking her teeth.

“And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t really ancient, that maybe it was modern.” He told them about his conversation with Sandoval and how he’d learned it was now in the Museo de Curiosidades in Oaxaca. “I thought I’d go look at it tomorrow afternoon.”

“I don’t understand,” Annie said. “What does that have to do with my mother’s death?”

“I don’t know that it does. For all I know, it really is a thousand-year-old skull. But if it’s modern, then we have the skeletal remains of two people found in the same mine. If this one shows signs of violence too, the possibility increases that they were killed at the same time.”

“That’s true,” Tony said. “They don’t get that many murders around here. Hell, till you showed up, I thought they didn’t get any.”

“All right, let’s say this one does show that there was a second murder,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “Let’s say it even seems to have happened at the same time. What would that mean? Where could you take it from there?”

He didn’t really have a good answer. The truth of it was that he wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere. There was that statute of limitations to contend with, and besides that, he would be leaving in a couple of days. The truth of it was that he was doing it for no deeper reason than curiosity. But of course he couldn’t say that. And if he told them he was motivated at least in part by wondering if it might be Manolo, there would be a new round of incredulous questionsManolo! Why would it be Manolo? How could it be Manolo? -that he didn’t feel up to contending with. By now he was deeply sorry that he’d brought the subject up at all.

“Well, you never know, it might turn up something,” he said lamely.

It was as anticlimactic as it deserved to be, and he could sense the energy going out of the atmosphere again. After a few seconds Carl sighed and spoke quietly. “I want her… her remains back. I don’t want her lying in a box in some warehouse.”

“Gideon, couldn’t you arrange that?” Julie asked.

“Of course,” Gideon said. “I’ll talk to Javier.”“OHO,” Julie said when the others had left. “I gather you don’t think it was such a blind guess on my part after all, about Manolo’s getting killed too? That’s why you want to look at the skull, isn’t it?”

“Well-” Gideon began from the buffet table, where he was pouring coffee.

“ Isn’t it?”

“Well, on having given your idea some thought,” he said, “I’m willing to upgrade it from blind guess to unverified supposition. Or, what the hell, even reasonable supposition, how’s that?” He came back with two fresh mugs and sat down.

“Oh, that’s big of you.”

“I’m going to go to Oaxaca to look at it tomorrow afternoon. Think you’ll be free? The skull business shouldn’t take up that much time.”

“I think I will, yes. Jamie says another couple of hours should wrap things up, so I should be done by then. And I’d love to go into town. We can have lunch, and I can look for presents for people while you do your skull thing. Maybe we can stop in and say hello to Javier.”

The Oaxacan night had come on by now, warm and fragrant.

Only along the tops of the hills on the horizon was there any remaining red glow from the sunset. Pockets of lights shimmered on the distant hillsides across the valley; tiny communities that were unseen in the daylight. From the village below came waves of radio music and laughing conversation-dinnertime at Samburguesas?-and from the opposite direction, off somewhere in the barren hills that rose immediately behind the Hacienda, they could hear the predators of the night at their work: the hollow, periodic hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl, the screee of a nighthawk, the woofing howls of a band of coyotes.