Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

Gideon had had one more critical question: Why would he have lied to Dagmar, his own sister, claiming to be Magnus?

For that one, John had no ready answers. But both men knew that a complex case with no unanswered questions was a rare bird indeed. They all had inconsistencies, implausibilities that couldn’t be explained. That didn’t mean you couldn’t resolve the case. You went, as they kept telling each other, with the preponderance of the evidence, and all the evidence here told the same story: Torkel had fled Hawaii, and he had done it pretending to be his brother. His motive was less demonstrable, but ninety percent certain nonetheless: to escape what he believed to be his own imminent murder.

Ninety percent certain to John, in any case. Gideon would have put it at seventy. Those loose ends again.

When the rain had shredded away into trailing wisps and moved out to sea, and the first hint of bronze appeared on the upper slopes of Diamond Head, Gideon took a second cup of coffee out to the beach to think things through a little more. But as it had in the past, the combination of sparkling salt air, sea breeze, and irresistible, world-renewing freshness wiped his mind happily clean of murder, deception, and other nastinesses, turning it toward happier thoughts of Julie, who was now well on her way, only a few hours from Honolulu.

It wasn’t until he sat down for an early lunch/late breakfast with John at Cheeseburger in Paradise-“The best restaurant in Waikiki, bar none,” according to John-that they got to talking about the Torkelssons again.

“John, let me ask you something. You said that the murder was a classic professional-type hit, correct?”

John rolled his eyes. “You’re not gonna leave this alone, are you?”

“Well, what does that mean exactly-a classic gangland execution? A couple of shots to the back of the head, close-range?”

But the focus of John’s attention was elsewhere. His eyes glowed at the sight of his “Five-Napkin Special,” a monumental hamburger thickly lathered with two kinds of melted cheese and engulfed in glutinous Thousand Island dressing, which was reverentially placed before him by a waitress in a fake grass skirt worn over denim shorts. Beside the hamburger and its accompanying mound of french fries, Gideon’s order of three scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and the ever-present spear of fresh pineapple looked like the day’s diet plate.

Gideon let him get a few bites down and repeated the question.

“Sure, that’s one way,” John said, “but in this case he was shot in the chest. I don’t know about the range.” He bit into the burger.

“So what’s so classic about that?”

“First of all, there were two shooters involved.” John mopped his chin with the first of the stack of paper napkins that had come with his meal. “You don’t get that in your everyday run-of-the-mill amateur homicide.”

“That’s another thing. How do they know how many shooters there were?”

“They know because there were bullets from two different guns in him.”

“Ah.” Gideon ate scrambled eggs and toast for a while. “So why couldn’t it have been one guy with two guns?”

“One guy with… is that supposed to be a serious suggestion? This killer carries two different caliber handguns, like Wyatt Earp or somebody, and shoots him once with each one?”

“It’s possible. ”

“Yeah, it’s also possible that I’m going to leave the rest of this hamburger over.”

“But not likely.”

“No.”

“Well, okay, two hitmen. Anything else?”

“Yeah, the place was burned to the ground with everything in it-machinery, heavy equipment, supplies. That goes along with the retribution scenario, too.”

“So the police knew for sure it was arson?”

John nodded until he got a mouthful of food down and could speak again. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did. There was kerosene or gasoline or something splashed all over the place.” John put down the hamburger and wiped his grease-smeared fingers. The neat stack of clean napkins was becoming rapidly smaller, the pile of crumpled ones growing. “Doc, what’s up with you, why all the questions? If you got another one of your theories about what ‘really’ happened, I don’t think I want to hear it.”

“Just asking,” Gideon said thoughtfully. And for once it was true. More or less.

They met Julie’s flight from Seattle at Honolulu International, something she hadn’t expected, and her transparently delighted expression on seeing Gideon went to his heart like a shaft of sunlight. How lucky I am -the thought rolled through him, and not for the first time- how lucky I am that this terrific woman should be so happy to see ME.

Julie was Gideon’s second wife. His first, Nora, had been killed in an automobile accident nine years before, plunging him into a year of stonelike apathy. He had loved Nora with all his heart-although it was starting to seem like a long time ago now-and had thought himself incapable of ever feeling anything like it again. It was something he hadn’t even wanted. And then, when his guard was down, or rather non-existent, out of nowhere had come this pretty, black-haired park ranger, Julie Tendler, brimming with wit and sparkle and intelligence. She had brought him back to life; he had actually fallen in love again, deeply and totally. They had been married now for seven years (astonishing thought!), and when it occurred to him occasionally how accidental their coming together had been, how very easily they might have missed each other and never met, how improbable that they should both have been unattached at that moment, he would have knocked on the nearest wood, were he not a professor of anthropology and above such things.

“But what are you doing in Honolulu?” she asked when she’d gotten over her surprise and they’d finished embracing. “I thought you two were going to meet me in Kona.”

“That’s a long story,” said John.

They started their explanation on the bus to the inter-island terminal, but it wasn’t until they were ten minutes into the flight to Kona that they finished, with John having done most of the talking. When he was done, she sat there nodding her head and smiling in a manner that suggested some long-held theory had just been confirmed yet again.

“Amazing. This must be a record, Gideon. Not even two full days into a Hawaiian vacation and you’re already knee-deep in bone fragments and mistaken identities. Usually, you wait a little longer. I have no idea how you do it.”

“You want to know what I think?” John said from across the aisle. “I think he brings it on himself.”

“Hey, they asked me, remember?” Gideon said. “What was I supposed to say?”

“My guess is,” John went on, “that it’s his aura. Julie, did you know he had an aura? On the astral plane?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Julie said.

When the flight attendant brought the drink cart around, John and Gideon got coffee, Julie a bottle of water.

“John, do you happen to know what was in Torkel’s will?” she said, breaking the seal and unscrewing the cap. “That is, how he divided the ranch, or if he divided it at all?”

“Torkel? No idea,” said John. “These guys were kind of like two peas in a pod, so it was probably the same as Magnus’s…” He paused, frowning. “But I’m just guessing, I don’t really know. Why?”

“Well, if the person in the plane was really Torkel and not Magnus-am I getting the names straight?-and the one who was shot and buried back on Hawaii was really Magnus… whew… then that means that Magnus must have died first and Torkel must have died last.”

“That’d be true,” said Gideon, who saw where she was heading.